Joni Mitchell has had her fair share of bad gigs over her decades-long career, some of which inspired her most enduring songs, including one perfect for the autumnal transition that she wrote after a lousy set at the Newport Folk Festival in 1967. Her appearance at the summer festival was one of many difficult experiences she had at that time as she learned to balance playing what she wanted to play with what her audience wanted to hear. Most of the time, Mitchell forged on in support of the former, which led to crowds heckling, booing, and sometimes running her off the stage.
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Although some reports paint a more positive picture, Mitchell’s recollection of her Newport set was largely negative. “That was a very bad year,” she said in a 1968 interview with Broadside. “I suppose Newport had a bad year. One where it was full of drunks and people where they’re looking for action rather [than] music. So, I was pretty unprepared. I wanted to do all my own material; I didn’t have much variety. I wasn’t very good. But I had a lot of trouble with the audience booing and hissing and saying, ‘Take your clothes off, sweetheart.’ Things like that really shook me up.”
“I didn’t know how to counter or how to act,” Mitchell said. “I thought I’d bombed. On the way back in the car, I wrote a line that said, “it’s like running for a train that left the station hours ago / I’ve got the urge for going but there’s no place left to go.”
Joni Mitchell Turned Her Newport Set Into This Enduring Autumnal Song
To Joni Mitchell, the audience’s reaction at the Newport Folk Festival seemed to confirm one of her biggest fears. The folk music she had come to know and love was falling out of style. The final years of the 1960s were ushering in a new musical movement that prioritized feeling, groove, and raucousness over pensive, introspective acoustic songwriting. Her bread and butter, Mitchell feared, was no longer palatable. “The music I loved had no audience left,” she said. “It was futile and silly, and I may as well quit.”
There was her “urge for going” with “no place left to go.” That’s where the song stayed for weeks—on a scrap of paper among many others in Mitchell’s guitar case. The autumn after the Newport Folk Festival, she was going through the bits of paper in her case. “Every once in a while, I clean it out and read them over, and suddenly I find something,” she told Broadside. “That’s what happened with ‘Urge for Going’. I wrote that in August, and the next thing I knew it was September and then October. It was really cold, and I was saying, ‘I hate winter, and I really have the urge for going someplace warm.’ So, I wrote ‘Urge for Going’ as it now stands from that.”
Mitchell released “Urge for Going” years later as a B-side to “You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio” and later included it on her 1996 compilation Hits. The track is an endearing part of her catalogue, perfect for when the first hint of cold sharpens the air in autumn. “I awoke today and found the frost perched on the town / It hovered in a frozen sky, then it gobbled summer down.”
Photo by Dick Darrell/Toronto Star via Getty Images
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