Sometimes things that feel like a missed opportunity can often be a blessing in disguise. I like to think that’s kind of how it was when Joni Mitchell wrote “Woodstock” in 1969.
For a few days in August that year, everyone, from The Grateful Dead to Creedence Clearwater Revival, was scheduled to play Woodstock. The event hosted a crowd that would end up being about 25,000 people. Mitchell was also supposed to play, but her manager wanted her to appear on The Dick Cavett Show. This would have been her first major television performance. So, she sat alone in a hotel room in New York City and watched the festival from afar on TV.
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According to the songstress, it was her lack of being able to attend the festival that gave birth to “Woodstock” in the first place.
“The deprivation of not being able to go provided me with an intense angle on Woodstock,” she said in a 1995 interview for Goldmine. “I was put in the position of being a kid who couldn’t make it. So I was glued to the media.”
Joni Mitchell Saw Woodstock as a “Modern Miracle”
In “Woodstock”, Mitchell describes a journey to the festival, calling one of the characters a “Child of God.” Her use of religious language was on purpose, even though Mitchell herself was not particularly religious.
“I was a little ‘God-mad’ at the time, for lack of a better term,” she shared with Goldmine. “And I had been saying to myself, ‘Where are the modern miracles? Where are the modern miracles?’. Woodstock, for some reason, impressed me as being a modern miracle, like a modern-day fishes-and-loaves story…”
According to her, it was the fact that so many people came together to curate this environment of peace and positivity that impressed her.
Crosby, Stills, Nash And Young performed their second-ever show at that 1969 festival. They later recorded a version of the song themselves.
Graham Nash, who was romantically involved with Mitchell when she wrote “Woodstock”, would later say in a live interview:
“She wrote that incredible song that pins the very essence of what was going on there and she never even went.”
Photo by: Jack Robinson/Getty Images
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