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They moved into an apartment near Detroit's Wayne State University campus. During the day Joni read Bertolt Brecht and Saul Bellow. At night, after completing their cabaret act, the Mitchells were hosts for boisterous all-night poker games often attended by Gordon Lightfoot, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Ramblin' Jack Elliott. But after one year the marriage began to crumble. Joni demanded more independence from her husband, who accuses her of deliberate scene stealing.
Six months later, Joni left Chuck. "She always had a strong visceral sense of what to do," Mitchell remembers. "She knew she was beginning to happen and needed out."
In I Had a King, a song written soon after her separation, Joni describes the frustration that led her to divorce: lean'tgo back there any more You know my keys won 'tfit the door You know my thoughts don't fit the man They never can they never can "She was into her Magic Princess trip," Mitchell explains.
"Her first hits were for people who were frustrated, unhappy and also living in a fantasy world."
Fantasy did play an important role during Joni's first months in New York City. She covered one bedroom wall in tin foil, festooned the doorjambs with crepe paper. She toyed with writing a children's book about mythical kingdoms and later celebrated her new freedom in Chelsea Morning: ... the sun poured in like butterscotch and
Stuck to all my senses
Oh, won't you stay
We 'II put on the day
And we 'II talk in present tenses
Joni's tune in New York is captured in her first album, Song to a Seagull. It features a complete cast: rude cabby, disillusioned divorcee, lonely transient and demanding lover—all of whom rise above stereotype to complement the leather-and-lace personality of 24-year-old Joni Mitchell. In Cactus Tree, a song Joni describes as a "grocery list of men I've liked, or loved, or left behind," she weighs her freedom against the merit of several suitors before dismissing them all.
Now she rallies her defences For she fears that one will ask her For eternity And she's so busy being free
To discover more about herself, she began wandering round at night, talking to Automat eccentrics and street-corner sages. She still does it. "In a pure anonymous encounter you find a world alive and full of character," says Joni.
Not all of the people she encountered remained anonymous.
During one period of $15-a-night performances at Manhattan's Café Au Go Go, she met David Geffen and Elliott Roberts, two show biz agents, who with unemployed Guitarist David Crosby later became her record-company president, personal manager and music tutor. "She was a jumble of creative clutter with a guitar case full of napkins, road maps and scraps of paper all covered with lyrics," recalls Roberts. Friendships with performers quickly multiplied. Soon Judy Collins, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Boston Singer-Guitarist Tom Rush were recording songs written by Joni. With Crosby she worked on the intricate system of guitar tunings that now makes her music difficult to duplicate.