In mid-August 1969, hundreds of thousands of people swarmed Max Yasgur’s Farm in upstate New York to attend the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, but Joni Mitchell sadly wasn’t one of them. Despite being a notable figure in the musical, spiritual, and attitudinal trends of the 1960s the festival celebrated, Mitchell watched miles away on a television screen while her colleagues and peers performed and partied in the rain and mud.
Her outsider’s experience of Woodstock would later inspire her haunting ballad of the same name, a silver lining in an otherwise largely disappointing moment in her still-green career.
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Why Joni Mitchell Wasn’t At Woodstock
Woodstock 1969 featured a stunning lineup of iconic acts, including Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, and Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Canadian folk singer Joni Mitchell was also on the lineup for Sunday, August 17, 1969. However, she watched her opportunity to perform at the decade-defining event amidst the hustle and bustle of a chaotic airport.
“That was the place every kid wanted to be,” Mitchell said in a CBC interview. “I got to the airport with CSN, our agent, David Geffen, and our manager, Elliot [Roberts], on a Sunday night when I was supposed to play. It was a catastrophe. I had to do the Dick Cavett Show the following day, and it was Geffen that decided, ‘Oh, we can’t get Joni in, and we can’t get her out in time.’ He took me back to where he lived. We watched it on TV.”
Geffen felt that because Mitchell’s career was less established than Crosby, Stills, and Nash, it would be wiser for Mitchell to stay behind and not risk missing her national television debut. Ironically, both CSN and Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane managed to make the festival and the Dick Cavett interview, of which an at-times noticeably sullen Mitchell was a part.
Why Her Absence Proved To Be a Blessing in Disguise
Although it almost seems sacrilegious that Joni Mitchell, now an inarguable fixture of that musical era, would miss out on one of the 1960s’ most significant and historical events, the songwriter would later say that it was a blessing in disguise. Her experience watching the festival footage on a TV set with David Geffen inspired her track, “Woodstock,” which she included on her album Ladies of the Canyon the following year.
Without that memory, she argued, she might not have written “Woodstock” at all. “I was the deprived kid who couldn’t go,” Mitchell remembered in her CBC interview. “I wrote it from the point of view of a kid going there. If I’d been there in the backroom with all the cutthroat, egomaniacal crap that goes on backstage, I would not have had that perspective.”
With no dark celebrity image to mar Mitchell’s perspective of the festival, Woodstock remained an almost biblical event in the singer-songwriter’s mind. “Woodstock, for some reason, impressed me as being like a modern-day fishes-and-loaves story. For a herd of people that large to cooperate so well, it was pretty remarkable. There was tremendous optimism. So, I wrote the song out of these feelings” (via Louder Sound).
In the end, Mitchell managed to capture the essence of the festival without attending it. In the documentary Joni Mitchell: Woman of Heart and Mind, Woodstock attendee and colleague David Crosby said, “She contributed more to people’s understanding of that event than anybody else there.”
Photo by Brian Moody/Shutterstock
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