Joni Mitchell Doing “Coyote” with The Band at “The Last Waltz” in San Francisco, 1976

I didn’t know much about Joni back in the day. My loss.

I was knocked out by her “Coyote” in what is one of my most favorite movies of all time. Just playing it now and want to “share.”

Get lyrics on screen alongside video if you can. Sheesh! jonimitchell.com/music/song.cfm?id=100

I played the above after stumbling on to the one below performed a year earlier. (You know, YouTube algorithms are fine by me, they’ve turned me on to a lot of things tailored to what I’ve watched.

See below this second video for interesting story on the “Coyote” lyrics:

Coyote, the first song on the album, describes her brief relationship with Sam Shepard, whom she met at the Rolling Thunder Revue, the concert tour that Bob Dylan assembled with a traveling caravan of musicians. Shepard was hired by Dylan to write a script for a movie based on the events in the Rolling Thunder Revue. That did not materialize, but Shepard did write a tour log that was later released as a book. Joni Mitchell joined the tour for a number of shows in late 1975 and it remained with her as a lingering memory of ego clashes infused by pharmaceuticals and cocaine. Not only as a spectator, mind you, for she started a cocaine habit during that tour.

The road trip that gave birth to the songs on Hejira also led to an acquaintance with Chögyam Trungpa, a teacher of Tibetan Buddhism. He snapped her out of her cocaine habit and she wrote the song Refugee of the Roads about him. In Coyote she references her memory of the sex, drugs and folk ‘n’ roll experience that was the Rolling Thunder Revue…

musicaficionado.blog/2016/05/30/coyote-by-joni-mitchell