On This Day in 1969, Joni Mitchell Faced Festival Nightmare (One Year Before Facing It Again)

Soft and cerebral folk music certainly has its proper space in the live music realm, but as Joni Mitchell experienced multiple times throughout her career, that space isn’t always a large festival. The Canadian singer-songwriter was one of many stars performing at the Atlantic City Pop Festival during the first week of August 1969. Other performers included Jefferson Airplane, Santana, The Mothers of Invention, Procol Harum, and Little Richard, among others.

But when it was Mitchell’s time to take the stage, things didn’t go as she planned, causing her to leave after only a few songs during what the festival had scheduled to be a 40-minute-long set.

Joni Mitchell Faced Two Subsequent Festival Nightmares

While Joni Mitchell certainly had some high-energy hits early in her career (“Big Yellow Taxi,” for example), her flavor of music was much more subdued than some of her contemporaries. Part of what makes Mitchell’s music so alluring is that it pulls you in and forces you to listen, think, and feel. But in a massive festival setting where people are looking for little else but to party and dance, Mitchell’s introspective songwriting fell on deaf ears—literally speaking, in the case of the Atlantic City Pop Festival.

Mitchell opened the festival on Friday, August 1, 1969. As she began her set in front of 25,000 people, she began to notice the crowd wasn’t really paying attention. First, she played “Chelsea Morning,” a fairly upbeat number, albeit not a raucous one. Then, she transitioned to “Cactus Flower.” Midsong, she told the audience, “I sang that verse twice and nobody noticed.” According to Jack Lloyd’s reporting for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Mitchell performed two more songs and then abruptly left. Some accounts state she sang even fewer, leaving after just two.

In a thread on Joni Mitchell’s official website, a user named Luke claimed to be one of the reasons for Mitchell’s departure. “To my great regrets, I was the one…that was trying to tell Joni to turn the system up. No one could hear her. She looked right at me and said, ‘If you don’t get that guy to stop yelling and being loud, I am walking off.’ Well, off she went. Joni, once again, I am sorry.” Though the anecdote is unverified, it’s not hard to imagine that sequence of events at a festival trying to amplify a solo acoustic guitar for tens of thousands of people to hear.

The Isle Of Wight Wasn’t Much Kinder

Just over one year later, Joni Mitchell found herself at another festival with a difficult audience. This festival took place at the end of August 1970 at the Isle of Wight in England. Even more people were there, around 600,000 total, and the crowd was even harder to win over than the aloof attendees at Atlantic City. Mitchell struggled to connect with the audience (and her music), stopping songs halfway and receiving lukewarm responses from the ones she did finish. Eventually, she addressed the crowd. 

“Listen a minute, will you?” She scolded the concertgoers, per NPR. “Will you listen a minute? Now, listen, a lot of people who get up here and sing, I know it’s fun, you know. It’s a lot of fun. It’s fun for me. I get my feelings off through my music. But listen. You got your life wrapped up in it, and it’s very difficult to come out here and lay something down. It’s like last Sunday, I went to a Hopi ceremonial dance in the desert, and there were a lot of people there, and there were tourists. And there were tourists who were getting into it like Indians and Indians who were getting into it like tourists. And I think that you’re acting like tourists, man. Give us some respect!”

Blame it on their English manners or Mitchell’s commanding way of addressing the audience, but they listened. She finished her set, receiving greater applause for hits like “California,” “Both Sides Now, and “Big Yellow Taxi.” Indeed, Mitchell stood her ground this time, and the crowd had no choice but to respect the artist they were lucky enough to witness in person that fateful afternoon.

Photo by Chris Walter/WireImage