"I didn't want anyone to know it was me": on being Joni Mitchell's "Carey" [View all]

[KG]

For 50 years, the “mean old daddy” immortalised in one of Mitchell’s best-loved songs has been an enigma. Now he tells his side of the story.

By Kate Mossman


https://www.newstatesman.com/katemossmaninterview/2021/12/joni-mitchell-carey-california-blue-lyrics-cary-raditz-interview



The wall of limestone caves along the cliff in the Cretan fishing village of Matala is now a protected site. In Roman times the caves were used as burial crypts, but when the hippies arrived in the late 1960s, they became free bunkhouses. 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. 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.

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. And, unlike the lovers who bookended his time in Mitchell’s affections (Nash and James Taylor), we know almost nothing about him.