From Sundays Montreal Gazette - TV and Radio section:
By Peggy Curran
THE SAD SIDE OF BEING JONI MITCHELL
On the weekend when a generation gathered on a New York farm for
three days of peace, love and rock
music, a disappointed young singer named Joni mitchell was stranded in a
Manhattan hotel.
The willowy blonde from Saskatoon was scheduled to make her first
television appearance on the
Dick Cavett Show (remember him?) that Monday.Her musical mentors-chief
among them, a couple
of guys named David Crosby and Graham Nash-feared she'd never make it
out of the traffic and
back to the city for her break-through gig.
"The daddies wouldn't let me go," she recalls, with a wry nod to the
obedient girl she once was.
So Mitchell stayed behind, watched the news reports on television, and
wrote Woodstock, the song
that became an anthem for the music festival and the era's hippie ethic.
Joni Mitchell, Both Sides Now and Then, which airs in two parts on
CBC's Life & Times beginning
this Tuesday, is a revealing portrait of the artist who became one of
the most accomplished
singer/songwriters and musical stylists of her time.
Unlike so many TV biographies with the subject's seal-of-approval,
the two-hour film does not gloss
over the dark patches in Mitchell's life. Instead, it explores the
impact of lonely Prairie winters and
childhood illness, an unplanned pregnancy and a disastrous early
marriage on Mitchell's evolution as
a writer, vocalist and musician.
Produced and directed by Stephanie Bennett for Delilah Films, the
documentary unveils a woman
shaped by her times: the polio scare of the 1950's, the social
strictures of the 1960s and the feminist
consciousness-raising of the 1970s.
Candid conversation with Mitchell is backed up by interviews with
many of the people who helped
shape her still-soaring career - Crosby, Nash, Tom Rush and Judy
Collins, music-industry executive
David Geffen and Cameron Crowe, the rock-music critic turned film director.
Archival footage traces Mitchell's musical roots from Edith Piaf and
juke-box jive to the coffee
houses of Toronto, Detroit and Greenwich Village, where she fist began
to get noticed, to recognition
- as recent as this month's Grammy Awards - for her haunting lyrics and
innovative musical techniques.
Performances of several of her biggest hits, including Both Sides Now,
The Circle Game, Chelsea
Morning and Big Yellow Taxi complement Mitchell's reflections on her
life and the difficult choices she
made, including her reluctant and regretted decision to give up her only
daughter for adoption.
Joni Mitchell, Both Sides Now and Then airs in two parts, Tuesday, March
26 and April 2 on Life & Times
(CBMT-6 at 7).
