Over the years, Mitchell would introduce live versions of “Carey” with stories to enhance the rogue she had created. And yes, Carey carried a cane: a shepherd’s crook in fact, hooked at the top but smashed off half-mast. If we have an unusually strong impression of him, it’s because he also appears in the other single released from Blue – “California”:īut my heart cried out for you, California.” In many ways the song is surprisingly literal. Yes, there was a Mermaid Café, five minutes’ walk across the bay, run by Stelios Xagorarakis, who was in the cave when Mitchell played “Carey” for the first time (it was Raditz’s birthday). He was wrong, but wouldn’t believe any other story. For those of us who heard Mitchell’s songs via our parents in the Eighties and Nineties, their love story was part of an emerging sense of the sparks that occur between the sexes: “Let’s go down to the Mermaid Café/And I will buy you a bottle of wine/And we’ll laugh and toast to nothing/And smash our empty glasses down.” For men of Carey’s own generation, he was a handy archetype for the age of Aquarius: at the 40th birthday of a friend a few months back, the celebrant’s father – a saucy raconteur who’d done the Ibiza circuit in the Sixties – told me the real Carey was a guy he’d known in Formentera. (The spelling mistake was hers.)Īs a child – and I can’t be the only one – I assumed “Carey” was some kind of ancient lover, a sort of sugar daddy, albeit one too tight to buy the drinks. In Matala she was free, but not invulnerable. This was the moment that Cary Raditz entered her life. When she’d arrived in Crete in 1970, with a female friend, she was on the cusp of fame, trying to figure out whether celebrity and art could exist side by side. In fact, during the writing of Blue, Mitchell was having what she later referred to as a shamanic experience – and what others might just have called a nervous breakdown. He didn’t just have a love affair with the woman all men would have loved to have had a love affair with: he lived the life they all dreamed of too.” We all tried to have as much fun, and be as original and wildly poetic and romantic as Joni Mitchell and him. “To think that here she was, gloriously rootless and drifting through Europe was intoxicating,” he told me. Mark Ellen, former editor of Q, Smash Hits and the Word, hitchhiked to Matala in 1974 with his girlfriend with the express purpose of recreating “Carey”. Most ordinary people listening to Blue on its release hadn’t been to Greece or Amsterdam or Paris, or anywhere much, as no one could afford the flights. Like “Woodstock”, which Mitchell wrote without having been to the festival, it epitomised a hippie dream that lay out of reach for most, and which everyone thought – still thinks – sounded like paradise. Today, the beach at Matala is still raked over in travel blogs by tourists smitten with the romance of the song. And, unlike the lovers who bookended his time in Mitchell’s affections (Nash and James Taylor), we know almost nothing about him. Mitchell’s description of her muse is impressionistic, dispatched in two or three lines – “Oh Carey get out your cane” “Oh, you’re a mean old daddy/But I like you” – yet he remains one of the most charismatic figures ever to appear in song. It was during this period that she wrote songs for her 1971 album Blue, and here that she first performed one of her best-loved songs, “Carey”, dedicated to the man with whom she shared that cave. Joni Mitchell, fresh from Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles and newly separated from the singer-songwriter Graham Nash, lived in one of these caves for two months between March and May 1970. In Roman times the caves were used as burial crypts, but when the hippies arrived in the late 1960s, they became free bunkhouses. The wall of limestone caves along the cliff in the Cretan fishing village of Matala is now a protected site. This article was originally published on 17 December 2021, it is being repromoted today (7 November 2023) as Joni Mitchell celebrates her 80th birthday.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |