Woodstock

Joni Mitchell wasn’t at Woodstock. Her manager told her to skip it for a TV appearance on Dick Cavett, so she sat in a New York hotel room and watched the festival on the news.

She wrote the song there. Half a million people in a field upstate, and the words that ended up describing what it meant came from a woman watching it through a screen.

She wasn’t guessing. She had the news coverage. She had phone calls with Graham Nash. She had the images flickering on the television. From those secondhand reports she pieced together what the thing was, and she landed on something the people standing in the mud might have missed.

We are stardust, we are golden. It reads like a cliché now. In 1970 it was a claim — that a half-million people gathering for music wasn’t just a concert but a reclamation of something essential about being human. Mitchell wasn’t being sentimental. She meant it literally.

CSNY took her folk ballad and made it heavier. The electric guitars push against the idealism, and that push is the whole thing. By the time they recorded it the sixties were technically over. The dream was already turning into a memory.

That’s what makes it work. It isn’t a celebration. It’s an elegy wearing the clothes of an anthem. Mitchell wrote it from distance. CSNY recorded it from distance. Both of them were looking back at something they could feel slipping out of reach.

We are still, somehow, trying to get back to the garden. We probably always will be. She wrote that line from a hotel room, watching, and it has held up better than the festival did.