Keeps me searchin' for a heart of gold
Well gee, when I've got nothing to say myself, I may as well just listen to all my live tapes of Joni Mitchell, and type out my favourite little anecdotes of hers. There's nothing like an anecdote before listening to a song, or looking at some art or whatever. I don't know why I'm calling them anecdotes, they're more than that, I just don't have the word - I mean they're sentiments, woven memories, and I love the way she speaks, in fact I kind of speak a bit like her. Anyway you may have no interest in these whatsoever but I dun care, if ya don't love Joni you're not gonna fit in very well around these parts.
"In 1965 I was up in Canada and there was a friend of mine up there who had just left a rock n roll band in Winnipeg, Manitoba near where I come from on the ferrys to become a folk singer a-la Bob Dylan who was his hero at the time and ah at the same time that there were breaks in his life and he was going in a new and exciting direction he had just newly turned 21 and that meant that in Winnipeg he was no longer allowed into his favourite haunt which was kind of a teeny bopper club and once you were over 21 you couldn't get back in there anymore so he was really feeling terrible because his girlfriends everybody that he really wanted to hang out with his band could still go there you know that's one of the things that drove him to become a folk singer was that he couldn't play in this club anymore you know cos he was over the hill. That was about the same time that Esquire magazine was doing pictures of girls in trash bins like once you were over 21 you'd had it and everything, you know there was strange philosophy going around at that time so he wrote this song it was called 'Oh To Live On Sugar Mountain' and it was a lament to his lost youth and it went "Oh to live on sugar mountain with the barkers and the coloured balloons you can't be 20 on sugar mountain though you're thinking that you're leaving there too soon you're leaving there too soon" and I thought God you know if we get to 21 and there's nothing after that then that's a pretty bleak future so I wrote a song for him, it's called 'The Circle Game.'"
"Wait a minute I wanna tell you about this person that I met. We walked inside the door and there was this guy standing there and he had a big turban on his head you know it was all white kind of dirty whites wrapped round and round and round in a big knot at the top and he had really wild red hair sticking our from underneath and he had little heart earring in one ear and a little gold loop in the other and he had real fierce looking blue eyes and you know the mark of cain on his brow you know from thinking really a lot and he was real intense looking and I said to him listen you know what should we do with this garbage and he took it out of my hand real abruptly and he looked me straight in the eyes and threw it over his shoulder all over the floor. He was the cook there and uh, came his birthday, I decided to get him something so I bought him 10 Mickey Mouse chocolate bars which were a really big deal there because everybody was collecting the cards you know and they had Snow White in Greek, you know, and uh, the Seven Dwarfs. He was really pleased because outta the 10 I gave him he had 8 new cards you know huh, ha ha. They went up to 159 and I think they were like really odd ones that nobody seemed to have and all of a sudden this batch came in and he was the first one to have these anyway it may not impress you but he was very impressed. This is a song I gave him for his birthday, I said "Oh Carey you're a mean ol' Daddy, but I like you"
Now I wanna get a little heart earring in one ear and a little gold hoop in the other. Below are some photos of stuff from the past few treacherous days, ha.
