joni & graham - part one
beginning at the end of Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash's relationship
Hi,
I want to give you something weird and long that started with this song, Simple Man by Graham Nash.
I’ve been talking about this to anyone who will listen for the past six months — over the phone, in bars, cross-legged on my roommate’s bed, I keep coming to these conclusions over and over again and I wanted to write it all down and share it with you.
At first, I wanted to send you this longwinded, sort of journalistic account so you could know me better, as someone who sneaks into your inbox a few times a year and is obsessed with stories like these. Then I thought it could be useful for whoever is reading this to know yourself better, as someone who I trust is interested in love and power and control. Because we all are! But really, I don’t need to afford a reason to share this with you. I just don’t want to keep it to myself anymore. It’s about Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash.
PART ONE
Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash’s story began at a Hollies show in Canada. They spent one impossible night together and moved on with their lives. They met a few more times casually until at a party months later when Joni supposedly went up to Graham and said, “Come to my house and I’ll take care of you.” He couldn’t refuse, and then they were together for good.
The two dated while they were both becoming who we know them to be now. “Our House” is inspired by their time as lovers in Joni’s house in Laurel Canyon. In the demo of the song, you can hear Joni laugh when Graham misses a note on the piano.
It took two years together for Joni to stop laughing at his mistakes and start counting them instead. In 1970, from her travels in Europe, she sent him the breakup telegraph heard around the world — postmarked to his door in a frenzy of clarity that burns through the screen, reblogged decades later on Tumblr by teenagers burning in a more confused way. The magnitude of the infamous breakup letter still stands:
If you hold sand too tightly in your hand it will run through your fingers. Love, Joan.
On the day he received the message, Graham wrote Simple Man, which is on his 1971 album Songs for Beginners. He’s since admitted that most of the sad songs on that album are about Joni. Because of course they are!
Matching its name, Simple Man is an uncomplicated ballad with two verses and two choruses. The song’s context is more interesting than the tune itself. There’s some fiddle, harmonica, and backing vocals in most versions, and the live recording from 1977 is the superior one because of how he wails in the second verse.
In the plain production, you can almost hear him apologizing as he explains himself in the way only a desperate man can. Like a promise exploding in an empty hall, the chorus is pleading and kind:
I just want to hold you
I don’t want to hold you down
I hear what you’re saying
And you’re spinning my head around
And I can’t make it alone
Graham said in his autobiography that he wrote the chorus first upon realizing that he couldn’t match Joni — he calls her Joan like her god-given name, like he knew her better, like she signed the breakup letter — in complexity.
“I came up with those lines first and put them together using the idea that my approach to love – and life, in general – is a simple one,” he wrote.
“I wasn’t the same kind of deep thinker that Joan was. Even though I’d spent years educating myself about photography, politics, beat poetry, art in general, and, well, the world at large, when you scratch the surface I’m a pretty simple man. It’s most obvious in my music.”
Even put as gently as that, the chorus of this song still spells out a terribly sad sentiment to me, to think that he couldn’t wrap his head around her and it made him reach to pull her closer. To want someone plainly and still know it’s not right.
Loving starts so easily, before the nuance and expectation and fiddle play along. Water rushing in, verse leading to chorus, there’s a natural sense to falling in love that seeks to override the things you know you can’t outrun forever. You can’t escape your own manner — but you want to! So you hold her anyway.
Remember when I told you that Graham wrote Simple Man on the day they broke up? When he later finished the song, he performed it for the first time on the opening night of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s five-night stand at the Fillmore East in the East Village (Which is an Apple Bank now. What happened to landmarks?)
Graham didn’t know it until he took the stage, but Joni was in the audience.
“I decided to sing it even though I’d just written it,” He recalled the show to People in 2018.
“I look up and there’s Joni sitting in the third row. I got through it and managed to sing the song, but it was weird because we’d just broken up and that’s always a weird time.”
I can’t help but think of how she felt, hearing the chorus for the first time in the music hall. I wonder if she kept it cool. I imagine her stomach dropped. I wonder if she felt vindicated in her decision, to hear him confess that he wants to hold her even after she told him that she felt like sand running through his fingers.
When I first sent a draft of this email to my friend in the spring, with too much eagerness and a silo already full of footnotes, she kindly responded with surprise that I hadn’t directly related this story to my own breakup.
Which one? I wanted to joke but didn’t. I felt buzzed by the feedback like I had hit my funny bone. Where did you get that idea? While reading this, was it so impossible to believe this story could ensnare me without ever being mine? Does my own heartbreak fit between each line or do I have to spell out the way I recognize the verse? Can you not hear me laughing in the piano demo?
Backward and around again, we know both endings by heart. I’ve been the lover who holds too tight and I’ve been the sand. I’ve clung to people who were never meant for me and carried things I could only dream of understanding. I am a broken hourglass filling up the hallway and running down the stairs. Sometimes you walk away only to end up in the third row at his show.
I am a simple man
So I sing a simple song
Never been so much in love
And never hurt so bad at the same time
There’s even more to say here, a story bigger than heartbreak and sand that’s insistent on patterns and age and discipline. Running into yourself and the things you deserve. But I wanted to tell you about the breakup first, so you know how the story was set for me. The song and the note caught on to me like a stray nail on a staircase and everything since then has really unraveled me down to ribbons or guts, to know that I can see myself more clearly because of these things that happened 50 years ago. It’s still happening now. Isn’t that what art is for? Undoing you, snagging your own experience and tune, outside of memory and time? I’ll see you soon for part two!
THINGS I’VE CONSUMED LATELY
This banana split with Emily at Three Decker Diner in Greenpoint
I devoured Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik, felt gross after, and immediately administered a reread of On Self-Respect
Wicked :) in 3D which was jarring
Last week, I saw Sun Dogs at BAM, which paired filmmakers and composers to create short films that played while a live orchestra performed. My favorite of the three films was Josephine Decker’s (I loved Shirley in 2020) called Rise, Again, composed by Daniel Wohl and Arooj Aftab (whose album from earlier this year I really liked)
The How Long Gone episode with Father John Misty made me laugh out loud on the train multiple times
Loved this piece “do we ever get over things?” by Ava Huang (I really recommend subscribing to Bookbear Express)
Here is my patchwork winter playlist
Thanks for reading! Love you!
C
need the other parts immediately.