The Gospel According to Joni

My love of Joni Mitchell goes back to my days when I spent most of my time hanging out in a pool hall in Silver City, New Mexico run by a guy named Jim who went AWOL during Viet Nam and his wife Christine from Canada. I just remember sitting on the stools day after day with Christine and listening to Joni Mitchell on vinyl, just feeling really shitty, scared and eighteen. We would just sit and listen to this voice in deep meditation, trying to understand what the fates put into the music


I guess all of us who hung out at the pool hall were all searching for something, a family, acceptance, answers, or really just a place to be. This pool hall in the middle of the Mimbres Mountains was a hermitage for us who had nowhere else. We shot pool, ate peanut butter sandwiches, and drank Dr. Pepper out of glass bottles. We cried, fought, fell in love, said goodbye, had one night stands we regretted and watched as friends went off to fight Dubbyas stupid war. We got stoned on really good sticky weed, and on Sonic at two in the morning. While all of the trappings of our new found adulthood, were being narrated, punctuated, and explained by these Joni Mitchell albums on an old one speaker record player, that was picked out of a school dumpster.


The pool hall lasted as long as I did at my first attempt at college. It closed about two weeks after I moved to Santa Fe, I cried harder when I had to leave that place than I did when I left home. I did not know how I was going to get by without this place. Even now more than a half a decade later, just thinking about it still makes me want to cry. I have lost touch with the people who ran the hall, the boys that taught me how to roll a joint, the Vietnam vet who cried when I joined the Army, and the WWII vet who bought me a coke when I did.

But, what I have not lost touch with is the meditations that Joni placed in my heart about myself, about God, and the other big things. So to end this blog posting, I would like to leave you with a list of Joni Mitchell songs to find whatever it is you are supposed to find in them.

The Gospel According to Joni

Britt