Joni Mitchell: Her Life With Graham Nash, David Crosby, James Taylor, Warren Beatty & Everyone Else
Joni Mitchell is the unquestioned godmother of modern singer-songwriter music; her ground-breaking albums, like 1971’s Blue and 1974’s Court and Spark, have influenced artists from Prince to Suzanne Vega to Taylor Swift. Part of Mitchell’s appeal has always been her searching, emotional lyrics, which often draw from her complex personal life — one which has included legendary romances with James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Warren Beatty, and David Crosby and Graham Nash. Her early romantic exploits were of such interest Rolling Stone drew a chart to help readers keep things straight, and dubbed her “Old Lady of the Year” in 1972. Mitchell was understandably outraged — as she told Details Magazine in 1996, “I mean, I can’t date? Am I a sinner for dating? That was kind of shocking.”
Here’s what Mitchell had to say (and sing) about her many loves, and what they thought of their time together.
Chuck Mitchell (1965-67)
Born Roberta Joan Anderson in 1943, Mitchell had a difficult youth in Canada, enduring a serious childhood bout with polio and giving up a daughter for adoption due to financial struggles. In 1965, she met American folk singer Chuck Mitchell; they quickly married and headed to Detroit, Michigan. The couple performed together for a time, but divorced in 1967. In a 2017 biography, Mitchell referred to her first husband as her “first major exploiter.” In 1969’s “I Had a King,” which details the dissolution of their marriage, she sings that Mitchell “lives in another time.”
Leonard Cohen (1967)
Isolde Films/courtesy Everett Collection
Mitchell met Cohen at the Newport Folk Festival, which led to a brief relationship, including a month when Cohen stayed at her home in Los Angeles. Though their romance ended quickly, it’s immortalized in the 1970 song “Rainy Night House.” The two remained friends until Cohen’s death in 2016, and according to some, her famous tune “A Case of You” is about Cohen (though others claim it’s about James Taylor).
David Crosby (1967-68)
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Mitchell met Crosby in 1967, while she was performing in Florida. In 2016, he told The Tampa Bay Times, “I walked into a coffeehouse in Coconut Grove, and she was standing there singing those songs, and I just was gobsmacked. I fell for her.”
Crosby soon helped her move to Los Angeles, put her in touch with record company executives, and produced her first album, 1968’s Songs to a Seagull.
While their relationship was creatively productive for both, it soon soured due to Crosby’s infidelity. Mitchell allegedly ended their relationship at a party at Peter Tork’s house, by playing a new song called “That Song About a Midway.”
As Crosby said in a 2021 The Howard Stern Show interview on Sirius XM, “She’s like, ‘I’ve got a new song,’ and we were all there, and we all said, ‘Oh, fantastic, a new Joni song! Yay.’ And she starts to sing it, and it’s plainly a goodbye to me. And then she sang it again … in case I didn’t get it the first time. Everybody in the room was going, ‘Oh.’”
“I don’t get along with her that well anymore, but I do love her, with my whole heart, for what she gave us,” he told Stern.
Mitchell coolly told her biographer David Yaffe of her relationship with Crosby: “It was a summer affair.”
Graham Nash (1968-1970)
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Nash and Mitchell met twice in 1968. After first getting acquainted after a Hollies concert in Canada (Nash described the experience in his 2013 autobiography Wild Tales as “magical on so many different levels”), the pair connected later in the year in Los Angeles, at a party at Crosby’s house. The two soon moved in and even considered marriage; the signature Crosby Stills and Nash hit “Our House” describes the home that he and Mitchell shared.
However, the idea of a conventional family life felt stifling for Mitchell. As Sheila Weller reports in her book Girls Like Us, Mitchell said “Graham was a sweetheart” but “needed a more traditional female. He loved me dearly … but he wanted a stay-at-home wife to raise his children” (an assertion that Nash has disputed).
That problem was further compounded by Nash’s increasing drug use — he describes himself during that period as increasingly “tormented, miserable, all coked out of our minds.” This led to frequent conflicts, like one that occurred during a long boat trip Nash, Crosby and Mitchell took in 1970: “A row broke out, Joan yelling that I hated all women. Things had turned ugly between us. She decided to leave us and fly back to LA. I was somewhat relieved.”
That relief was short-lived. “When I got home, Joni decided she needed a break. I was laying a floor in her kitchen when a telegram arrived from her. It said: ‘If you hold sand too tightly in your hand, it will run through your fingers. Love, Joan.’ I knew at that point it was truly over between us.”
Mitchell immortalized their relationship in her 1970 song “Willy,” which reflected on its good and bad sides with lyrics like, “Willy is my child, he is my father / I would be his lady all my life.” Nash later said of the song, “Every word is true. It’s a heartbreaking song for me. To be in love with Joni Mitchell and have that love come back at you, even to the point of marriage — to lose that was devastating for me. I’m old enough now to realize it was a long, long time ago, and I can admit that I was heartbroken.”
James Taylor (1970-71)
Jim McCrary/Redferns
Taylor and Mitchell were not just lovers but collaborators. By 1970, Mitchell’s profile was rising, with her hit album Ladies of the Canyon and the single “Big Yellow Taxi;” Taylor had just released his landmark Sweet Baby James. The folk power couple recorded background vocals for Carol King’s Tapestry, performed together for the BBC, and worked together on Joni’s forthcoming album, Blue, which is reputed to largely be about Taylor.
Her mixed feelings after their breakup — which was allegedly fueled by Taylor’s increasing fame and his desire to date Carly Simon — are documented in the 1972 song “See You Sometime.” “Joni and I had our year together back when a year lasted three times longer than it does today. Inflation,” Taylor told the LA Times in a 2021 interview. While he can’t confirm that the songs on Blue are about him, “I hear a personal message in several of them, her gift to me: the lucky one.”
Jackson Browne (1972)
Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns
While Mitchell’s relationships with Nash and Taylor seemed warm and uplifting (she’s remained in touch with both men her whole life), her time with Browne was an altogether darker affair. As Mitchell biographer Sheila Weller noted, “Jackson Browne was the one guy who really seriously got to [Mitchell] in a very painful way. They met and she fell in love with him at her near-nadir, depression-wise.” Mitchell fought often with the up-and-coming singer, who cheated on her with his future wife, model Phyllis Majors. “Joni then staged what she has called a ‘suicide attempt,'” said Weller, “David Geffen rescued her and, having hit bottom, her healing then began.” The bleak 1974 “Car on the Hill,” which describes being stood up by a cad, is said to be about Browne.
Warren Beatty (1972-73)
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Well, who didn’t date Warren Beatty in the ’70s? The unlikely pair got together shortly after Mitchell’s relationship with Browne ended, and also shortly after Carly Simon released the mega-hit “You’re So Vain,” a song he probably thought was about him.
1974’s “Same Situation” is thought to be about Beatty. Though Mitchell wouldn’t name names, she said in 1996 that “basically it is a portrait of a Hollywood bachelor and the parade of women through his life … how he toys with yet another one… So many women have been in this position … being vulnerable at a time when you need affection or are searching for love, and you fall into the company of a Don Juan.”
>> Where Has Warren Beatty Been?
Glenn Frey (1973)
Mitchell and Frey dated briefly shortly before the release of the Eagle’s On The Border album. Her 1974 song “Help Me,” reputedly about Frey, was her only top 10 hit.
Sam Shephard (1975)
Universal/courtesy Everett Collection
Mitchell met actor/writer Shephard on Bob Dylan‘s debaucherous Rolling Thunder Tour. Like most of the tour members, Mitchell was heavily using cocaine, which might explain some of the alleged wacky behavior that went on, such as the time she hid in the bathroom when Shephard’s girlfriend (with whom he was cheating on his wife) showed up.
As Mitchell said in the 2017 biography Reckless Daughter: “Sam [Shepard] and I had a flirtation. He got scared of me. What panicked him was we were sitting in a bar and we were talking and all of a sudden he said, ‘You’re really smart.’ Often when people would say that, they would lean away from me like I had a disease … And then we talked a little bit more, and I was saying things and he’d go, ‘How do you know that?’ It was like we were twins … For me, on coke, I found him very attractive. He reminded me of the people where I come from, from the region that I come from.”
Her 1976 song “Coyote” is about Shephard.
Larry Klein (1982-1994)
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Mitchell began dating bass player Larry Klein when he worked on her 1982 album Wild Things Run Fast. In a 1988 joint interview in Musician Magazine, Mitchell described herself as “very happily married,” and Klein noted that “I can’t imagine anything she would write about that I would feel bothered by.” They divorced in 1994, and in her 2017 biography, she referred to him as a “puffed up… dwarf,” which one had to assume bothered him at least a little.
Remind 
1972
January 2022
1972 was a year packed with everything from “American Pie” to Ziggy Stardust What’s not to love?
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