Bob, This is a nice find. Last night I was going through the Crosby bio, the CSNY bio and the Jimmy Webb songwriting book to try to see where I might have read the reference to Crosby and Trouble Child. Unfortunately none of those books have subject indexes so I had to search and read through quite a bit of the Joni parts. Gave up trying to find the reference but I was really marveling at how some of Joni's best autobiographical material is found in these books but not found in the bios written of her. She was interviewed at good length for all the books mentioned above and there are details I have seen nowhere else, unlike some of her interviews where she does tend to repeat some of the same yarns (I don't mean that as a criticism - think she just wants to be consistent in her stories. The book on Jackson you cite is another good example of great Joni background and insight. I especially like this part:
> In "Lesson in Survival," on her For the Roses LP released in the fall of 1972, she tells her "sweet tumbleweed" how the >close scrutiny from his friends crimps her free-spirited style, how she yearns for quiet, flowing times together with him. Her >anxiety over their relationship, meanwhile, reveals itself during a visit with a friend, when she turns, suddenly, into "heavy >company." When he heard the song guitarist Albert Lee couldn't help but flash back to the time he'd used that particular >term with them...and Joni Mitchell's reaction: "She giggled and said, 'Oh, that's a good line!"' Further, Lee comments, "I just >got the impression from that song that she was writing about their visit to my house...[and that] she was talking about her >relationship with him." Another Joni song that said just exactly what I've felt at times in relationships. The first time I heard it - it went straight through my heart. Interesting that it Albert Lee inspired some of the lyrics! He has played with just about everyone and was on hand at the Walecki benefit here a couple years ago, backing up Emmylou Harris and a few others. In the early days he played with the Everly Brothers and when he moved on was replaced by the up and coming Lindsay Buckingham ;-) As for Crosby and Trouble Child, I seem to recall we did talk about it here awhile ago and that there was other input on it. Maybe I'll find the reference eventually. For years, I thought she was talking about herself. However, learning about his experiences from around that time in the various bios, the lyrics really do correlate. Crosby's life was turbulent for many years after the tragic death of his girlfriend Christine Hinton. The drugs got to be full time and there were the usual groups of parasitic hanger-ons around him partaking of his "largesse" and helping to enable his slow destruction. I imagine Joni trying to talk some tough love to him, like an old friend, in these lines: "They open and close you, then they talk like they know you, they don't know you, they're friends and they're foes, too" "So why does it come as such a shock to know you really have no one, only a river of changing faces, looking for an ocean." "It's really hard to talk sense to you - Trouble child - Breaking like the waves at Malibu." Thanks for the choice find! ;-) Kakki
