Rock 'n' Roll's Leading Lady

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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 picking seemed easy. Only two of her 45 recorded guitar songs are played in standard concert tuning, and some songs, like I Don't Know Where I Stand and The Dawntreader, are impossible to play on a normally tuned guitar.

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:

Well maybe it is just the time of year

Or maybe it's the time of man

I don't know who lam

But life is for learning

We are Stardust

We are golden

And we 've got to get ourselves

Back to the garden

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."

As in the past, Joni's experiences produced sensitive songs.

Willy recounts her close relationship with Graham Nash. Free Man in Paris describes the frenetic "starmaker machinery" she and Elektra-Asylum Chairman David Geffen escaped during a European vacation.

Her songs measured the despair of a woman torn between traditional domesticity and unfettered feminism. In Woman of Heart and Mind she wrote:

I'm looking for affection and respect A little passion And you want stimulation—nothing more That's what I think But you know I'll try to be there for you When your spirits start to sink But rock-'n'-roll publications seldom discussed the substance of her songs. Record reviews often became forays into her private life. At first the publicity had little effect on Joni's writing. She said, "If I express a truthful emotion that is pure and honest, then I consider the poem a success." But when Rolling Stone published a chart of the rock scene showing her suspected lovers, the spotlight became too bright. Joni fled temporarily to Europe. Even now she calls herself a "media dropout" who seldom reads newspapers and never looks at television.