All good dreamers pass this way someday.
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I've recently been in touch with my oldest friend, whom I met in the summer of '71 at a bungalow colony in Rockland County. When we've reminisced over the years about that summer, the music that's been the reference point has been Tapestry. That was the background music. There was a girl we were friendly with who played it over and over, and we'd sit outside her bungalow during those warm evenings.When I thought about that time recently, I realized that many people still think of it as The Summer of Tapestry, but the album that I played over and over was Joni Mitchell's Blue. I can't emphasize strongly enough what Joni was to moody-broody-poetic teen girls back then. Just take a look at the high school literary magazines at the time. Carole had her followers, and rightly so, and being a frizzy-haired New York girl gave her a little more grit. But Joni was a lady of the canyon, and wore gorgeous hippie clothes, and had affairs with all those songwriter boys ("my old man," "I would be his lady all my life," etc.). Very romantic stuff. Imagine heated discussions about who was better: Carole or Joni. We Bronx girls were so rough.Anyway, Blue was powerful. So powerful that Cameron Crowe placed his own copy in that lovely scene in Almost Famous, his need to have it there overcoming his knowledge that it was anachronistic. And I'll bet my copy is tattier than his.I haven't listened to it in years, I admit. Have any of you revisited things that you haven't played for a long time, that were from a specific moment? A couple of years ago I watched Scenes From a Marriage for the first time since it came out in '74, and I can tell you that it looked startlingly different in my 8-year-married living room than it did when I was an utterly innocent college girl. I mean, I turned out smartypants papers for film class about Bergman's symbolism, but what could I possibly know about anything? How could I have I understood it at all?Likewise, Blue. I loved the language: "dark café days," "a river I could skate away on," "There'll be icicles and birthday clothes and sometimes there'll be sorrow." I loved the conversational, loose linguistics of "Constancy in the darkness, where's that at? If you want me I'll be in the bar" and "Richard, you haven't really changed, I said, except that now you're romanticizing some pain that's in your head." But what did I know about it? About "roses and kisses and pretty men to tell you all those pretty lies"? And the rue and rogues and the heartache?Nonetheless. It was dazzling then, and it is dazzling now.But speaking of an earlier time, here's a very young, prim Joan Anderson, along with the late, great Dave van Ronk, and a group of young men who are said to be the Chapins but sure sound like The Folksmen to me.
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