The Lady On Lookout Mountain
In the spring of 1970, Joni Mitchell was on top of the world. Her song Both Sides, Now, a hit for Judy Collins, was fast becoming a standard, with the release of cover versions by Frank Sinatra, Neil Diamond, Glen Campbell and others. Another of her songs, The Circle Game, a hit for Tom Rush and Buffy Saint-Marie, was on its heels. She’d guested on US TV’s The Johnny Cash Show alongside Bob Dylan. She’d just won her first Grammy, for her second album Clouds. Now she was about to release Ladies Of The Canyon, the record that would crystallise her sound and catapult her to stardom.
Appropriately, Mitchell’s redwood cottage on Lookout Mountain Avenue in Laurel Canyon was a place that felt on top of the world. Or at least on top of Los Angeles. When she moved to the city in 1968, at a flea market she’d found a book that stated: “Ask anyone in Los Angeles where the craziest people live and they’ll tell you Hollywood. Ask anyone in Hollywood where the craziest people live and they’ll say Laurel Canyon. And ask anyone in Laurel Canyon where the craziest people live and they’ll say Lookout Mountain.”
“So I bought a house on Lookout Mountain,” Mitchell said.
The house – depicted in a beautiful watercolor by her own hand on the cover of – was filled with guitars, a piano, antiques and stained Tiffany windows. There were lots of books, including the, Van Gogh’s letters to his brother, and Nietzsche’s . Out front was her Mercedes 280 SE, which she nicknamed ‘Bluebird’, purchased with her first big royalty check. The Laurel Canyon air smelled of eucalyptus and wildflowers. Mitchell lived there with her boyfriend Graham Nash and a tomcat called Hunter. The house was also, as her manager Elliott Roberts said, “the center of the scene”. On any given night, you’d find her musician friends there, among them David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Judee Sill, Richie Furay, Glenn Frey and Cass Elliot, laughing, talking, passing guitars – and joints – around, and there were always lots of new songs wafting through the air, along with the smell of the aromatic pies that Mitchell loved to bake.
