If you were to ask Jefferson Airplane frontwoman Grace Slick about the tale of Woodstock Joni Mitchell wove in her 1970 track of the same name, the “White Rabbit” singer would likely suggest that Mitchell got a few things wrong about the mammoth three-day event. But to be fair, Mitchell would likely agree.
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After all, Mitchell wasn’t at Woodstock. Slick was. And indeed, if either situation had been different, musical history might’ve changed forever.
What Grace Slick Says Joni Mitchell Got Wrong About Woodstock
Under different circumstances, Joni Mitchell probably would’ve been at Woodstock. However, as fate would have it, the rising Canadian star was making her Dick Cavett Show debut right after the festival ended. Her manager, David Geffen, didn’t want to risk Mitchell getting stuck on the farm and missing her TV appearance, especially since she was still trying to gain her footing beyond the West Coast scene of which she had become part. So, Geffen decided to have Mitchell sit out the pivotal cultural moment of 1969.
After watching footage of the event on television, Mitchell wrote the song “Woodstock.” The haunting, ethereal tune talks about a lone wanderer meandering to Yasgur’s farm and joining a crowd half a million strong. Everywhere there was song and celebration, and I dreamed I saw the bombers riding shotgun in the sky. They were turning into butterflies above our nation. We are stardust, billion year old carbon, we are golden.
According to Grace Slick, it was hardly as poetic as Mitchell suggested. “Joni Mitchell got all, you know, sugary about it and said we got to get ourselves back to the garden, and we’re stardust, and we’re golden and all that kind of stuff, which is a little bit over the top,” she said in a 2019 interview with CBC Radio. Slick added that Mitchell was a Scorpio, like her, and because of that, “I’m surprised that her take on it was so sweet.”
For Slick, who was in the thick of the logistical nightmare and rainy mud of the actual Woodstock Music & Art Fair, the event was hardly a dreamy hippie paradise. “My idea of fun is not having to watch out for a white dress and no bathrooms and playing at six o’clock in the morning.”
The Singer-Songwriter Ultimately Agreed With The Psych-Rock Singer
During a 2013 interview with CBC News, Joni Mitchell discussed what it was like having to miss out on one of the biggest musical and cultural events of the decade while all of her friends were there. (Friends like David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Jefferson Airplane, who all managed to make both the festival and the same Dick Cavett Show appearance as Mitchell, we’re sure much to the “Case of You” singer’s annoyance.)
When she wrote her 1970 track “Woodstock,” which CSN famously covered with a faster, more upbeat groove. “I was the deprived kid who couldn’t go,” Mitchell said. “I wrote it from the point of view of a kid going there. If I’d been there in the backroom with all the cutthroat, egomaniacal crap that goes on backstage, I would not have had that perspective.”
Indeed, if either singer hadn’t been where they were that day, their musical legacies could have changed irrevocably. Grace Slick cemented her place as a psychedelic rock icon by performing at Woodstock (true to the part, she and the rest of the band were on LSD). The haphazard production of Woodstock might have turned an already tentative Mitchell off from the seedier sides of show biz, or maybe she would’ve actually missed her TV debut like her manager, David Geffen, feared. As it were, it seems that everything that happened that August weekend in 1969 happened for a reason.
Photo by ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images
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