IN March 1976, Joni Mitchell packed up her car – a big boxy Mercedes 280SE she called Bluebird, bought with her first royalty cheque in 1969 – and headed out onto I-15, on her way to Damariscotta, Maine, about as far from Los Angeles as you could get while remaining in the continental USA. She didn’t have a driving licence, but that wasn’t about to stop her. She should have been promoting The Hissing Of Summer Lawns in Europe. Instead she was off on a wild goose chase across the country with an old lover and her latest flame, plus several trailers worth of emotional, psychological and pharmaceutical baggage.
She returned to LA a couple of months later, having clocked over 10,000 miles. She’d driven solo the length and breadth of the country, around the Gulf of Mexico, through the, her eighth and finest studio album.
