Word: joni
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...discover more about herself, she began wandering round at night, talking to Automat eccentrics and street-corner sages. She still does it. "In a pure anonymous encounter you find a world alive and full of character," says Joni...
...tutor. "She was a jumble of creative clutter with a guitar case full of napkins, road maps and scraps of paper all covered with lyrics," recalls Roberts. Friendships with performers quickly multiplied. Soon Judy Collins, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Boston Singer-Guitarist Tom Rush were recording songs written by Joni. With Crosby she worked on the intricate system of guitar tunings that now makes her music difficult to duplicate...
...Joni's first experiment with different tunings came when she encountered the F chord, a nemesis of guitar novices. It is normally made by placing the index finger across all six strings while three other fingers spastically contort to positions lower on the neck of the guitar. Joni discovered that by retuning five of the six strings several half steps, she could strum an open F chord that had a deeper, richer sound. New, unique chords were possible, and because they could be formed simply by moving one finger between different frets, intricate eight-note-to-the-bar finger...
With the decline of the heavy metal San Francisco sound, the creative center of rock shifted to Los Angeles. By 1968 Joni had moved west, settling into a funky Laurel Canyon cottage. It was a time of unrest on campuses and growing resistance to Viet Nam. Musically, the canyon was an exciting place to be. Los Angeles bands like the Byrds and the Buffalo Springfield played a softer music crafted for the ear instead of the viscera. A new generation was "getting it together," and Joni Mitchell wrote its anthem, Woodstock...
Woodstock made Joni a celebrity. Her discerning intelligence had special appeal for men bored by the dull polarity of beach bunnies and hard-line feminists. A record industry Who's Who, including James Taylor, Leonard Cohen, David Crosby and Jackson Browne, came calling, and most fell hopelessly in love. "When you fall for Joan, you fall all the way," says Graham Nash, of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. "She means a lot to a great number of people...