At the end of my first year of University, I turned 21, and within weeks my life started to unravel.
A massive problem in the triangle of me, my girlfriend’s mother and my English-rose-like girlfriend Amanda occurred. During that last term of my 1st year, life seemed impossible as I felt the huge pressure of wrecked relationships all around me. So finding Joni Mitchell at that moment was probably not great timing.
Unwittingly, I had heard a song of hers 2 years before, at a London theatre. The main theme of the play - a midlife crisis - was built around a song with these lines;
Richard got married to a figure skater
And he bought her a dishwasher and a coffee percolator
And he drinks at home now most nights with the TV on
And all the house lights left up bright
The main character played it again and again at key moments in the play, and it hit me with a deep kind of impending sadness, which I had no reason to feel at the age of 19. But songs do that sometimes, don’t they? As I wrote recently, are you sad because of the sad song, or is the song sad because you are sad? It’s a worrying thought that music could play its part in Fate, prepare you for tragedy, even bring on tragedy’s possibility. This song, with its reaching voice of whoever sang, caught me irrevocably.
In the days before Internet, a fragment of a song was almost impossible to track down, which meant that the joy at finding the source was so much higher then due to that impossibility. Imagine my happiness, amid the misery of my collapsing life, when a couple of weeks into the University summer term of 1988, I heard the same voice reaching out of a cheap cassette player while visiting a friend. Her moody flatmate was sitting together with us in the run-down kitchen, intently listening to music as we talked. The song began, and hearing it for the first time in two years, I recognised it instantly.
“Who is that singing?” A noise close to a snort came from the friend, followed by a clipped “Joni”. These two syllables were obviously enough for the rest of the world, but not for me.
“Joni who?” I asked, no stranger to credibility loss.
After further uncomfortable revelations – I had never heard of the album Blue, never heard “Woodstock” (wasn’t that some concert?) and did not even know that Joni had gone through a “Jazz phase”… - I was instructed about the source of the song I knew as “that one about the figure skater.” Its full title was “The last Time I saw Richard”, and my emotional fate was wrapped up, sealed, and posted into the future, along with the figure skater and the coffee-maker.
“Richard” is still one of my favourites, despite my conviction that the opening imagery and later sections of the song have powerfully influenced my life. And not positively.
All Romantics meet the same fate, someday,
Cynical and drunken and boring someone in some dark café
Soon after my discovery, I bought the record "Blue"and played it to destruction. As the term went on, I got drunk, bored people with my cynicism, left the lights up or down, I didn’t care. And after much romantic agonising, in my real and imagined pain, finally I pushed away the first true love of my life.
Am I really saying that hearing Joni Mitchell, buying the album Blue, and listening to it again and again during those awful weeks was one of the nails in the coffin of our relationship? Can a piece of music and a set of words really make that much difference? Yes, I am saying exactly that. The influence on my life of the final soaring lines of the song only became apparent after I had left Amanda, but in the last days before I finished our relationship, they played in my head like a record with the needle stuck.
Only a dark cocoon before I get my gorgeous wings and fly away, only a phase, these dark café days
The result is I own 16 Joni albums, mostly populated by misery, and I have no idea where Amanda is or what she is doing now, despite our repeated claims that “we will always be friends”. Easily said at 18.
Would I swap Amanda for “Joni”? Difficult to say.
Amanda and I tried again but we never got over my weakness. Who knows, maybe we would have got our gorgeous wings together without Joni’s melancholy intervention. Then again, Joni’s mum never made me feel guiltily responsible for breaking two lives, and Amanda’s mum did.
The answer to the question, sadly, is “no”. Joni will always be a part of my life, and for better or for worse, Amanda never will be again.
