In the Manner of the Ancients
THE SPRING OF 1970 WAS A LITTLE LATE FOR Joni Mitchell to be dropping in on Matala. In 1968, Life magazine had printed a lavishly illustrated seven-page cover story on the town's flourishing expatriate hippie culture. In a rocky beach cove just outside the village of about seventy-five people, Life reported, America's disaffected youth was taking up residence in a merry beehive of cliff caves. The freckled and wholesome Rick Heckler and Cathy Goldman, a kind of countercultural Adam and Eve, adorned the cover: "Young American nomads abroad, two Californians at home in a cave in Matala, Crete." Some of the kids were "merely off on a lark, doing what the young have done for generations," sympathized Life writer Thomas Thompson. But there were "too many others caught up in some sort of aimless journey toward an unknown destination." Even Ulysses, who was fabled to have stopped off at Matala, had been trying to get home. This self-indulgent generation, the writer's tone suggested, was rejecting everything his re ... read full excerpt from: Will You Take Me As I Am: Joni Mitchell's Blue Period ebook
