Joni Mitchell and Judy Collins gave each other's careers a significant boost in 1967 with the song “Both Sides, Now.” But in a new interview with The Guardian, Collins says Mitchell, the song's writer, wasn't happy that she scored a major hit with it before Mitchell had a chance to record it herself.
Collins says she first heard the song — and met its writer — thanks to an early-morning phone call from Al Kooper, the musician and producer who played the signature organ lines on Bob Dylan's ”Like a Rolling Stone” and founded Blood, Sweat & Tears.
“I’m 48 years sober, but in the old days I drank,” Collins says. “One night in 1967, I was passed out and the phone rang at about 3 a.m. It was my friend Al Kooper. He said he’d been at a club and had run into this woman, Joni, who wrote songs. He put her on the phone and she sang ‘Both Sides, Now’ over the phone. It was brilliant. I said: ‘I’ll be right over.’ I recorded it the next day and it became a huge hit.”
Collins included her recording on her 1967 album Wildflowers. Released as a single in October 1968, it climbed to number eight on the Billboard Hot 100 by December and reached number six in Canada. The following year, it won a Grammy for Best Folk Performance. The recording also peaked at number three on Billboard’s Easy Listening chart and has since become one of Collins' signature songs.
“I don’t think Joni was too happy that I was the first to record it, but she was very generous and I’ve since recorded many of her songs. She was unknown then, so I’m proud that I was able to help introduce her to the world. She’s one of the great writers of all time.”
Mitchell has credited a passage in Saul Bellow's 1959 novel Henderson the Rain King with inspiring the song. In the book, the protagonist looks down at the clouds from an airplane while traveling to Africa. Mitchell happened to be reading the passage on a flight of her own when the idea for the song struck.
“I was reading ... Henderson the Rain King on a plane and early in the book Henderson ... is also up in a plane. He's on his way to Africa and he looks down and sees these clouds. I put down the book, looked out the window and saw clouds too, and I immediately started writing the song. I had no idea that the song would become as popular as it did.”
As with much of Mitchell's music, “Both Sides, Now” makes use of an alternate tuning. The song is played in open D (D-A-D-F#-A-D). In early live performances, Mitchell played it in G, using a capo at the fifth fret. For her 1969 studio recording, she placed the capo at the fourth fret of her 1956 Martin D-28, putting the song in F# major.
Mitchell recorded her own version for her second album, 1969's Clouds, before revisiting the song in a lush orchestral arrangement for her 2000 album Both Sides Now. But the success of Collins' recording had already created a curious situation: Because Collins released it first and took it into the Top 10 before Mitchell had secured a recording contract, many listeners assumed it was Collins' song.
The confusion persisted even after Mitchell released her own orchestral version. According to a 2001 report in the Globe and Mail, archived on Mitchell's official website, several people actually asked the songwriter how she had managed to get Judy Collins to let her have the song.
![Joni Mitchell - Both Sides Now (2021 Remaster) [Official Audio] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/yXr2EFomFkU/maxresdefault.jpg)
