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In April 1970, the Canadian singer Joni Mitchell released her third album, Ladies of the Canyon. The cover featured a linear black and white self-portrait of Mitchell hovering over a colorful inset of Laurel Canyon, the Los Angeles neighborhood where the artist and songwriter lived with her boyfriend Graham Nash. Her face and body, incomplete, merge with the white background. Ladies of the Canyon included "Woodstock," Mitchell's response to the August 1969 festival in upstate New York. "Woodstock" would become one of her most famous songs, often recorded and twice anthologized in print (Forbes r8q-85; Paglia 225-26). It is her most mis- understood song, too. Like Mitchell in the self-portrait, it is remote and pensive, hardly the anthem it is made out to be.
"Woodstock" is a skeptical lyric, troubled by putatively countercultural models of masculinity. Its author was a questioning and increasingly gender-savvy woman among boyish men and a genuine non- con- formist in a period comically ignorant of its own attraction to conformity. Beginning with Ladies of the Canyon, Mitchell assessed the threat to individualism lurking in the collectivist enthusiasms of a generation of men whom she regarded as dissolute, often destructive, and increasingly violent, if not therefore charmless. Mitchell would later say, "I wasn't really a hippie at all. I was always looking at it for its upsides and its downsides, balancing it and thinking, here's the beauty of it and here's the exploitative quality of it and here's the silliness of it. I could never buy into it totally as an ortho- doxy" ("Our Lady" r67). "Woodstock" is a focused expression of this equilibrium, a habit of mind previewed more generally in "Both Sides, Now." Like much of Mitchell's contemporaneous oeuvre, "Woodstock" criticizes hippiedom for failing to accom- modate independently minded women.
One needn't look far to see what Mitchell was up against. Several weeks before the release of Ladies of the Canyon, her friends Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young (CSN&Y) issued their undeniably anthemic ver- sion of "Woodstock" on Déjà Vu. Unlike Ladies of the Canyon, Déjà Vu is comfort- ably enmeshed in the sordor of its period, down to the cover photograph of six bleary men surrounded by a mélange of guns and guitars. The cultural nexus of the...