“I Immediately Began to Weep.” How “Both Sides Now” Made Joni Mitchell a Superstar

“The first time I heard ‘Both Sides Now’ was on the phone in 1967 during the middle of the night. I got a call from [singer-songwriter] Tom Rush, who was very excited. Tom, a great fan of Joni’s, had earlier introduced me to her and to her fine song ‘The Circle Game.’

“‘Joni has a new song, and I want you to hear it. I think you’ll love it.’ He put Joni on the phone, and she sang ‘Both Sides Now.’ “I immediately fell in love with the song and knew it was a classic. I had to sing it. On September 28, 1967, I recorded ‘Both Sides Now’ at Columbia Studios in New York.”

–Trust Your Heart: An Autobiography, by Judy Collins, 1987

“I had begun to hear of Joni Mitchell by then. She had a good following in the Village and in Canada and many cities in the States. She didn’t have a recording contract at the time, and one night one of her ardent fans (I remember it being Tom Rush, but he always denies it) called me at 3 a.m. and had Joni play me ‘Both Sides Now.’ I immediately began to weep. I said I had to record it, she said she wanted me to, as she didn’t have a contract at that time, and was eager for her songs to get out to the public.”

–Singing Lessons: A Memoir of Love, Loss, Hope, and Healing, by Judy Collins, 1998

“One night, in the spring of 1967, I was fast asleep when the phone rang at three in the morning. Al [Kooper, the founder of the group Blood, Sweat & Tears, known for their hits “Spinning Wheel” and “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy”] said a few words about being sorry to be calling so late and then told me he had met a great songwriter and wanted me to hear her sing an amazing song. He put Joni Mitchell on the phone.

“He and Joni had met up at the show he was doing (I think she had a crush on one of the band members). Al said he went home with her when she told him she was a songwriter and had some songs he might like.

I had never heard a song that I felt was so beautiful, and it would change both our lives.

“‘I thought, well, if she can’t write songs, she’s pretty good-looking! I figured I could only lose a night’s sleep out of the deal,’ he told me later.

“My good luck is that when they got to Joni’s place, instead of jumping into bed with him, she sang him ‘Both Sides Now.’ Al had already been in the music business a long time, and he knew a lot of singers. It was my luck that instead of calling Janis [Ian] or Buffy [Sainte-Marie] or Carolyn [Hester] or the other Judy [Henske], he called me.

“After Joni sang me ‘Both Sides Now,’ I put the phone down and wept. I had never heard a song that I felt was so beautiful, and it would change both our lives.

“The next day, this time with [Elektra Records honcho] Jac [Holzman], I heard Joni play the song again. I wept once more, as I would when I heard many of her songs.”

–Sweet Judy Blue Eyes: My Life in Music, by Judy Collins, 2011

“And then, of course, Joni Mitchell, whose music found its way to me through the good turn of a friend named Al Kooper, who called me at four in the morning—I thought it was three, but he reminded me recently that it was four—you know how your memory is about the sixties—and he called me and put her on the line, and she played ‘Both Sides Now’ for me on the phone.”

–Judy Collins on Talk of the Nation, July 22, 2009

“Somebody called me and put me on the phone with her, and she sang me ‘Both Sides Now.’”

–Judy Collins interviewed on NoDepression.com, 2014

“[Al Kooper] called me up and said, ‘I know you’re looking for songs for your next album, and you have to hear this.’ He put Joni on the phone, and she played ‘Both Sides Now.’ It was—and still is—one of the most singable, the most memorable songs I’ve ever heard. I got dressed and went right over. She had a little apartment on the Lower East Side [ed: Mitchell lived, rather, in Chelsea, as referenced in her song “Chelsea Morning”], full of cut glass and candles, very Joni. The three of us stayed up all night playing songs.”

–Judy Collins interview in American Songwriter, October 26, 2020

“The first time that I heard the song I was in bed, it was three o’clock in the morning. I was absolutely slam-dunk drunk, I can tell you that. Why I woke up, I don’t know. The guy who started Blood, Sweat & Tears called me. He and I were very good friends, Al Kooper. It was three in the morning and the phone rang and it was Al. I said, ‘What’s the matter? Are you in trouble? Can I help you?’ And he said, ‘No, you’re in trouble.’ He said, ‘I met this girl at the club, and her name is Joni Mitchell. She came there because she was in love with the drummer and then she told me that she writes songs and I said, ‘Woah, you’re a very good-looking girl—woman—what else do you do?’ And she said, ‘I write songs, that’s about it.’ He said—it was now about two in the morning probably—he said, ‘What shall we do, how can I hear them?’ She said, ‘Why don’t you come to my place?’ So he went to her place and she started playing songs and he went out of his mind. He said, ‘I’ve got somebody I have to call, and you have to sing her some of the songs.’ So he put Joni Mitchell on the phone and woke me up at three in the morning. And she sang me ‘Both Sides Now.’ And I said, ‘Oh my God, I’ll be right over.’”

–Judy Collins on Andy Cohen’s Sirius Radio podcast, August 8, 2022

“It was the middle of the night when she called. I was probably drunk. I was definitely passed out.”

–Judy Collins in New York magazine, February 23, 2022

“One night I was sitting in my favorite bar in the Village, the Dugout It was the best place to kill a summer night, and I always ran into a few friends I would miss while I was on the road. I was living platonically at folk singer Judy Collins’s apartment on the Upper West Side…Judy, the number two female folk singer behind Joan Baez, was a wonderful, generous woman. Her apartment was the folk music salon of the mid-sixties. People like Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Phil Ochs, and others would make the pilgrimage to her digs and enjoy her hospitality and earth mothering. This particular night in the Village I was sitting with a new girl in town. She had a crush on Roy Blumenfeld, the drummer from The Blues Project. Unfortunately for her, Roy had a girlfriend who was on to her and extremely jealous. So, this gal is crying in my beer for about three hours, and I don’t mind ’cause she’s kinda easy on the eyes and nothing else is going on anyway. So they’re closing the bar and throwing us out and I offer to walk her home. Since I was covered in the ashes of my failed marriage, this was a pleasant diversion.

“When we got to her door, she invited me in to hear some of her new songs. She was a folk singer. Canadian. Half of a duet with her recently divorced husband, they had achieved a mild popularity and a cult following in various American border cities. She, being real pretty, had me bounding up the stairs like a hound dog, figuring if the songs were lousy, maybe I could salvage the evening some other way. In a few minutes that became the furthest thing from my mind.

“Her songs were incredible and totally original. And she had enough to keep going for hours, most of them brilliant. One song especially killed me, and I thought it would be great for Judy Collins—that a nice way to pay for her hospitality would be to turn her on to it I called Judy up. It was 5:30 a.m. by now, and Judy was pretty pissed off.

“‘I have to get up soon and drive all the way to the Newport Folk Festival…I can hear this song when I get back,’ she said diplomatically.

“Bang! A great idea hits me. ‘Judy, why don’t you, room permitting, take this girl with you to the festival. Then, being that you’re on the board of directors, you could see if maybe they could fit her in the schedule somewhere?’ Silence at the other end.

‘Judy?’

Her songs were incredible and totally original. And she had enough to keep going for hours, most of them brilliant.

“‘Kooper, you bastard. Yeah. I’ll do it. Gimme her number. Bye.’ Just to make sure, I gave the woman Judy’s number and told her to call Collins in a couple of hours. I split immediately ’cause I was exhausted and never made it to Judy’s place, preferring to crash on a bench in Washington Square Park in the steamy, summer morning rather than get hell for waking her at 5:30 a.m.

“Well, as the saying goes, the rest is history. The girl (Joni Mitchell, of course) played at the 1967 festival, thanks to the last-minute urgings of Judy, and stole the whole show. Judy eventually recorded the song I thought she would like, ‘Michael from Mountains.’”

–From Al Kooper’s memoir, Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards, 1998

“‘Both Sides Now’ was inspired by a passage from Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King: ‘I dreamed down at the clouds, and thought that when I was a kid I had dreamed up at them, and having dreamed at the clouds from both sides as no other generation of men has done, one should be able to accept his death very easily.’…

“[T]he song’s lovely melody made it instantly attractive to a diverse range of predatory, hit-hungry artists.”

—Financial Times, January 20, 2019

[Note: The song has been recorded some 1,573 times, by musicians ranging from Doris Day to Bing Crosby to Pete Seeger to Willie Nelson to Frank Sinatra to Courtney Love to Kiri Te Kanawa to Hugh Masekela to Neil Diamond to Leonard Nimoy to Laurie Anderson to Carly Rae Jepsen, and has been widely heard in films and TV shows, serving as a plot point in 2003’s Love Actually and 2021’s Best Picture, CODA. Joni herself can be heard singing it on sixteen of her records.]

“When [Joni Mitchell] recorded an orchestral version of ‘Both Sides Now’ two years ago, several people asked her how she got Judy Collins to let her have the song.”

–Globe and Mail (Toronto), October 27, 2001

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