Joni Mitchell ruined my life

Robert Bush
Aug 31, 2018 · 4 min read
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Robert Bush

Londoner, age is just a number, a very high number…

Aug 31

Joni Mitchell ruined my life

Back in my youth, in the hazy days of the music revolution amid the blossoming of guitar based singer songwriters, I was in love with Joni Mitchell. But then so was half the world.

One day I found myself in a record shop in Los Angeles and standing next to me, thumbing through the albums, was Joni Mitchell herself. I had travelled from England to have a look at America, this new world of Haight Ashbury, The Fillmore East, and a shop in Los Angeles called Snow. From my home in Essex it all seemed magical and new and it just had to be explored.

She was wearing jeans and sandals and a free-flowing flowery blouse and she looked stunning, clever, intelligent and arty, and I just knew there was yet another wonderful poem breeding in her brain as she stood there radiating wonderfulness.

I went up and introduced myself and she seemed happy to be meeting an English guy fresh off the plane. We chatted for a while and I made her smile a couple of times and she invited me for breakfast. At Art’s Deli on Ventura Boulevard she was well known and I, as a friend of hers, was made to feel very welcome. We had a lovely breakfast and seemed to be getting on so well she invited me back to her house.

As we strolled up to Laurel Canyon she caught sight of a vase in an antique shop window and she fell in love with it and she went in and bought it. When we arrived at her beautiful wooden house on Lookout Mountain Avenue she put the vase in the window and went out into the garden to pick some flowers to put in it.

It was a cold grey morning as you sometimes get in Los Angeles and I sat down at the piano and began to make up a song, I’ll light the fire, you place the flowers in the vase that you bought today, and then the chorus, Our House, is a very, very fine house, with two cats in the yard, life used to be so hard, now everything is easy ’cause of you.

I know what you’re thinking, surely that was Graham Nash who did all that.

And you’re right of course, of the above only the first bit is true and the rest is bollocks. I was certainly in the record shop and I did see her but I didn’t actually talk to her, someone came up to her and they chatted and then left together. I had missed my chance. It was in fact Graham Nash who went out for breakfast with her and did all the vase stuff.

I admit that I wasn’t a fresh-faced, floppy-haired member of The Hollies who had sung about bus stops and some bird called Carrie Ann, and who was just about to leave the band to join with Stephen Stills and David Crosby to form the most successful 3 part harmony vocal group the world had ever seen. I may have been somewhat lacking in the charisma of a long-term rock star, brought up with adulation and hero-worship.

Also, to be brutally frank, I couldn’t play the piano. And I wasn’t exactly renowned for writing songs, but that’s as a feather in the wind really; what we’re talking about here is commitment.

If she had only spoken to me.

If Joni, a lifelong smoker, had taken up with me I would have been happy to start smoking, I would have smoked all day and all night if that was what it took to please her and keep me with her in her house, and I would have been happy to spend the days just staring at her vase.

And now she’s in her 70’s, she’s spent a long time in hospital with a brain aneurism and she has another ghastly disease called Morgellan’s syndrome where she feels her skin is being eaten by some sort of creeping virus.

I’d have looked after her.

When Joni and Nash finished he was soon off with some other floozy. He’s doing it again now; at the age of 74 he’s left the woman he’s been married to for 38 years and run off with a woman half his age, a photographer. I wouldn’t have done that, I mean I don’t even like photography.

Poor Joni, poor me, and what a life we could have had.

Londoner, hat lover, pals with a Jack Russell. Writing stuff, always trying to improve. Writer in Publishous, Weekly Knob, Junction, The Haven & Picklefork.

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