Urge For Going To London - 1967

Excerpt from 'River of Words: Joni at the BBC'

by Tom Hagler
Welbeck
September 24, 2026

Thanks to author Tom Hagler for allowing JoniMitchell.com to provide this exclusive excerpt of the first chapter from his book 'River of Words: Joni at the BBC'

Joni Mitchell is at a crossroads. It's 1967. Folk music is on the wane. Folk rock has arrived. Dylan has gone electric and The Byrds have landed. Joni never considered herself a folk singer, but armed with nothing more than an acoustic guitar and thoughtful lyrics, that's how she's seen. The songs are flowing, the gigs are non-stop. She's known, respected - revered even - especially within music circles. Her songs are covered by recording stars but it is they who are having the hits with them and making the money. Something needs to change. Wunderkind entrepreneur and producer Joe Boyd has an idea. It's called England.

'I met Joni at the 1967 Newport Folk Festival,' Joe explained. 'Try to imagine hearing her for the first time without having heard any of the 20,000 singer-songwriters who subsequently copied Joni Mitchell. She was just unbelievably impressive. After the evening concert, Mike Heron and Robin Williamson from The Incredible String Band and I spent a couple of hours with her, swapping songs under a tree in a garden at a reception at a big house. She loved them, they loved her.'

Boyd would go on to become one of the most important and influential music producers of the era. He worked with Pink Floyd, Fairport Convention, Nick Drake and launched the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, who backed Dylan at the Newport festival when he went electric. Boyd had gone to London to oversee the

British arm of Elektra records and while there founded, along with John 'Hoppy' Hopkins, the legendary UFO Club, whose avant-garde blend of experimental and folk music, psychedelic light shows and multimedia performances captured the spirit of London's 'Summer of Love'.

'Back in New York, Joni mentioned she didn't have a record contract,' Joe continued. 'She was just a young singer who was making waves, but nobody had signed her up. She mentioned one of her songs was being played on BBC radio, I think it was "Urge for Going" by George Hamilton IV - anyway, someone very unlikely and very square.'

Joe filled Joni in on the London scene and explained that a folk revival was underway, partly led by Boyd himself. The next step beckoned.

'When I got back to England, I got a letter from Joni saying that she'd like to come over and find a publisher. She needed someone to organise and collect her royalties in Britain if her songs were being played there. She gave me a tape of her songs, which included "Eastern Rain".'

Boyd played the tape to Fairport Convention, who were so smitten that they would record 'Eastern Rain' for their own album. The band would cover at least four of Joni's songs in this period, giving her wider recognition within the British folk community. Just as significantly, Boyd gave a copy of 'Eastern Rain' to David Platz and Graham Churchill at Essex Music. They would eventually become her British publishers.

Money was a big issue at this point. Joni's renown in musical circles was established, but she was struggling financially. She was justifiably wary of jumping in too quickly to sign a contract. One folk music label had offered her a deal, but it was to record three LPs in one year, and all for a pittance. But even that was a step up from the contract her friend Buffy Sainte-Marie had signed, which was akin, she said, to slavery. 'I was broke most of the time,' Joni said. 'I didn't have a record deal, so I was living on maybe fifteen dollars a week. I was just trying to get by and write.'

THE MARQUEE CLUB

Once she arrived in London, the next step was to play live. Just a few minutes from Boyd's UFO Club on Tottenham Court Road was The Marquee in Wardour Street, Soho, another cornerstone of London's music scene. The club had a tradition of allowing anyone in the crowd who had an instrument to get up on stage and join in the encore. According to Marquee legend, one such instance happened in 1964, when an unknown teenager, yet to switch his surname to Bowie, jumped up from the crowd with alto sax in hand to join The Who.

On 23 August 1967, The Picadilly Line had just finished the first of two sets that day as part of their Marquee residency. Their keyboardist and singer was Rod Edwards.

ROD EDWARDS: We were still in college at this point. We'd started to do more folk clubs than actual academic work and got lucky and landed a residency at The Marquee. It was a Wednesday and Joni Mitchell came in on one of our nights. She was introduced to us by a Canadian trumpeter called Mike Rosen, who said to us, 'Oh, I've got this girl singer with me.'

MIKE ROSEN: If you tell me that I was her agent for her first ever gig in London, then great! [Laughs] It's hard to remember it was so long ago. But we hung out a lot together.

The burgeoning music scene in London was one reason for Canadians and Americans to head across the Atlantic. Another was the draft.

Rosen was studying in the US at a university in Akron, Ohio, and was about to be called up to fight in Vietnam. When he received a letter from the draft board saying that because he was missing so many classes he faced being drafted, he decided he needed a change of scene - and a change of country.

MR: I was playing at folk clubs in Cleveland and met Tom Paxton there, and he called me up on stage one night to do a few songs. He said, why don't you go to England? There's a folk club in every pub on every corner in the whole British Isles. He gave me a couple of names and, you know, I was full of adventure. In those days, you think you're infallible. I got on the last New York sailing of the Queen Mary from New

York to Southampton with 500 bucks, a trumpet and a guitar. London is such a small place physically, but with respect to its importance in the music scene it was filling up something

like 80 per cent of the Billboard charts during that period. The amount of talent that was coming out was . . . phew! I thought I'd last six months and I came home seven years later.

Wanting to start performing immediately, Mike headed from the boat straight to The Marquee.

MR: I did a set and got hired straight away by a woman who ran a series of folk clubs in the Midlands. We'd get £10, or ten guineas, a night to perform and I was earning more in two nights than an average wage earner would get in a week. I met Trevor Lucas and Georg Hultgreen and we put a band together. And that's the one Joni named. I said, 'What the hell are we going to call this band?' And she asked who was in it. I

told her two Aussies, an Englishman, a Norwegian and myself. And she said, well it's a very eclectic collection, call the band 'Eclection'.

RE: Mike asked, 'Can she go up and sing?' I said, 'Of course.' Why not? Because in those days there was a lot of open-mic stuff happening in the intervals. For instance, one night we had Van Morrison come in and he borrowed a guitar and sang something, Jimi Hendrix came in with Chas Chandler on one of our nights and played. Paul Simon came in . . . that was crazy because we were actually doing one of his songs at the time. We saw him, said hello. That was a bit intimidating. But they were innocent days in an exciting way. It was very different from now because it was all 'live, live, live'. It was a small world and there was a lot of interaction. We had two sets. Half an hour in between. So, Joni went up and played and we went to the bar and watched. She was a very nice girl, very prepossessing. I wish I could give more detailed information, but we didn't realise until 'Big Yellow Taxi' and all the rest, how big she was going to be.

As happened to so many bands at that time, The Picadilly Line flirted with fame before finding obscurity. But that's not to say they didn't have their moments. Beatles' producer George Martin so loved their brand of whimsical psychedelic folk as Edwards Hand, the band's later incarnation, that he produced several of their albums. They toured America and played at one of Joni's home-from-homes, The Troubadour.

As Rod said, it was a small world where everyone seemed to know everyone. Their first producer was John Cameron, whose jazz ensemble would be Joni's backing band for her first BBC session the following year; while one of their singles, 'Yellow Rainbow', was written by none other than Graham Nash.

MARCIE

MIKE ROSEN: I had first met Joni at the Riverboat, in Toronto, run by Bernie Fiedler. It was a folk club in Yorkville, which is now a very posh area but in those days it's where all the hippies used to go. He gave her my number and she called when she arrived and she would hang out with Marcy, who was my partner, and me.

BERNIE FIEDLER: I went to see Joni at a club in Toronto and introduced myself and, of course, she pursued me and wanted to play my club. But I said, look, I'm sorry, I've got fairly famous people there and if I put your name on the marquee nobody's going to come. But she kept going and we had this running joke that said I'd actually offered her a job as a dish washer. One time she came to play at my club, I'm not exactly sure which time this was, but I picked her up from the airport. She said, 'I want to play you this new song I've just finished.' It was about clouds. That was the first time I heard the song and it might have been the first time anybody heard it. We became very good, close friends. The club ran till 11, so at night we'd go out to a Chinese restaurant and talk to four or five. She was one of the brightest people I've ever known. Still is, believe me. She always knew where she was going, trust me.

MR: Marcy and I were staying in a loft flat in Bayswater, near Hyde Park. The ceilings were pointed because we were on the top floor in the roof. We had this black cat and I remember Joni being very fond of that cat. And her laugh - she had this girlish giggle that was infectious. We spent most of our time talking, going to galleries, drinking coffee and smoking - I used to have to go to the American army base to get my carton of Camels for five bucks a time. The three of us were good friends.

Marcy would subsequently enter Joni folklore as 'Marcie'.

MR: Joni said to us that she needed a two-syllable woman's name, and so Marcy said, 'Well, Marcy's a two-syllable name.' Joni said, 'Great, I'll use it!' But Joni spelt it differently - Marcy spelt it with a 'y' - and that became a laughing point for the two of them because obviously once the album was out, it was too late to do anything about it. The two of them had a very close bond but the song wasn't to do with Marcy herself. Joni's songs were about herself and her own life.

Joni remembers that moment, too, and how inspiration struck during a game of Monopoly with Mike and Marcy, although she says the song was very much about the real Marcy. Here she is introducing the song to an audience at the Second Fret in Philadelphia in October 1967, just a couple of months later:

'I went to Hyde Park and I soaked up all sorts of speeches. Black Power speeches and White Power speeches and Flower Power speeches and Irish Power speeches, Catholic speeches and Protestant speeches. Nannies and prams and lorries. And Wimpys . . . that's sort of a hamburger. They don't think it's funny, but Americans do. One night I took all the information that I had compiled on London, all of the atmosphere that I had compiled, and I sat down to write a song when a friend said, "Let's play Monopoly," and so we started to play Monopoly and suddenly I found that I had moved by drawing a Chance card to Mayfair Place. I was not to pass Go or collect my 200 pounds and there I was sitting and there was a big, grand hotel on it and bankrupted me. So, Mayfair Place, that's English Boardwalk. It's that little blue one on the corner. Yeah. So I had to sit and wait till the game was over so I could join it again, and while I was sitting and waiting I remembered all my British culture that I had been soaking up and I said, "I'll write a song about England and my friend Marcy," and it was her flat that we were playing Monopoly in, and Marcy said to me "Where did you live in New York?" And I said, "41 West 16th Street." She said, "I lived at 37 West 16th Street." And I said, "No kidding, when did you live there?" And she said, "Well I left in April, no I left in May, June. I left in June." I said, "I moved in in April." So, we were neigh- bours there for two whole months, right smack up against each other and never met until we went to England. This is a song about most girls who've come to New York City.'

Joe Boyd booked Joni for her next gig a few weeks later at London's Speakeasy, supporting The Incredible String Band, whose brand of psychedelic prog mysticism seemed to predict one possible future for folk. Meanwhile, Joni, Marcy and Mike continued to survive on the vitamin Cs: coffee, cigarettes and Cadbury's chocolate.

MR: Joni and Marcy loved British chocolate, especially Cadbury's nut bars because they make them over here in Canada with pasteurised milk, unlike the ones over in England, and the difference in taste is obvious. I always remembered that, so about 20 years ago, when Joni came to Toronto to do a TV interview, I went down to see her without her knowing. I walked up behind her and dangled a Cadbury's over her shoulder and she said, without even turning around, 'Oh, my God . . . Michael!'