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Kitchen Table Kibitzing 2/14/2023: The Sound of the Woman That Loves You [1]
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Date: 2023-02-14
Crosby, Stills & Nash is an excellent nexus from which to begin an inquiry of this kind. I’ll start with Stephen Stills and his 1967-69 relationship with Judy Collins. She ultimately dumped him for Stacy Keach, and in the course of that breakup, he wrote Suite: Judy Blue Eyes. This is from CSN’s 1969 performance at Woodstock. [9:02]
Well, now we get to Joni Mitchell. David Crosby found her playing in a club in Coconut Grove, Florida in 1967, brought her back to Los Angeles with him, introduced her to the people that could launch her career, and then personally shielded her first album, Song to a Seagull, from being overproduced as many “folk” records were then. Alas, he also acted like a schmuck to her, and so she broke up with him by writing That Song About the Midway about him, coming to a party that he and everyone they knew would be at (at Peter Tork’s house!), and playing the song at him. Twice.
This is from a 1970 performance on the Isle of Wight. [4:30]
By 1968, Joni Mitchell had taken up with Graham Nash. He wrote Our House for her, describing the events at their home one morning after going out to breakfast.
There are more-musical performances out there, but I couldn’t resist Nash’s performance at Mitchell’s 75th-birthday concert in 2018. [3:45]
The two were together until 1970, when Mitchell had had enough of Nash’s behavior, left him, and notified him she had done so by telegram. She felt bad about it, though, and wrote River to describe her feelings.
This is audio only from a live 1970 performance in the Royal Albert Hall. [3:36]
Mitchell next took up with James Taylor for about a year in 1970. He wrote You Can Close Your Eyes for her while he watched her sleep in their hotel room in New Mexico. While they were a couple, the two appeared together onstage a number of times. This performance of the song as a duet is from their 1970 appearance at the Paris Theatre in London, recorded for the BBC’s program In Concert. [3:38]
Well, that didn’t go great either. Taylor had persistent drug issues (one senses a theme). Mitchell’s song Blue is widely considered to have been written for him. In the end he left her, though, for Carly Simon. Her 1974 performance here is at an unspecified venue. [2:58]
We could meander through this particular group of people for a long time. (For two months in 1970, between Nash and Taylor, Joni Mitchell lived in a cave on the beach in Greece with a guy named Cary Raditz, but since he’s only famous for that, you can read about it here, and you are already humming his song, sung live here. He figures in California, too, and he would like you to know she GAVE him that camera, he didn’t just KEEP it.)
Instead, let’s make a brief stop at Fleetwood Mac, another group with a considerable amount of interpersonal drama going on back then. In 1976, at the time the band was making their most successful album, Rumours, Christine and John McVie had just gotten divorced, and were not speaking other than about music. Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, who had known each other since high school, were approaching the end of their own relationship and fighting constantly. Mick Fleetwood’s wife wasn’t in the band, but she contributed to the general atmosphere by having an affair with his best friend. And a substantial amount of cocaine was apparently powering the whole thing.
I’ve picked out only two Fleetwood Mac songs in the theme of this diary, and it was a difficult choice even just from Rumours. This is something of a matching set, though. Lindsey Buckingham’s breakup song, Go Your Own Way, was the band’s first US top ten hit. In this 1977 concert, at an unspecified venue in Asia, he plays the hell out of it. Video quality’s not great, but it’s totally worth watching. [6:09]
Stevie Nicks’ song, Silver Springs, on the other hand, was cut from the original album for being too long and too slow. (It appears on the 2004 remastered edition of Rumours.) She was furious, and to make it worse, it was instead released only as the B side of the single of: Go Your Own Way. This video is from the 1997 reunion concert that accompanied Fleetwood Mac’s reunion album The Dance. It’s 20 years after the events surrounding Rumours, but by the end of the song, those two people have turned around and are singing directly at one another, pretty vehemently. [5:33]
This is all a little depressing, isn’t it? Too sad for Valentine’s Day! So I will close with a love song from a man to his wife of ten years, to whom he is still married. John Legend wrote his song All of Me for his wife, Chrissy Teigen. Chrissy Teigen may have her flaws, but we can admire her ability to identify tfg as a “pussy ass bitch” and her willingness to let him know about it. [5:07]
Got others? Post away!
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