Sad as it is that the aging McConaughy Hall is now set to be demolished, I am glad that I have had many opportunities to show my two teenage sons the place where I heard Buckminster Fuller, Norman Mailer and James Brown--among so many others--and where I personally opened the door to the dining hall to the young and upcoming star, Joni Mitchell, in 1969. She had driven up from New York City to the entrance of McConaughy Hall in a shiny black limo, accompanied only by two musicians, not sure exactly where to go, and just at that moment I happened to be walking by there alone. She graciously allowed me inside after her. Standing at the top of the stairs. overlooking her rehearse on the grand piano below in preparation for that Sunday afternoon's show, I can recall that there were no acoustic problems at all, only heaven-sent chords from the fingers of a Canadian angel.

[blog entry by "luminousmuse"]
Into my muddy life, for a few hours, came an angel..

On a cloudless, unseasonably warm Sunday morning at the end of April I sat cross-legged with the rest of the crowd, in the front row before a low riser. I already knew, and loved, a few of Joni Mitchell's songs, and liked her first album. Still, I didn't know quite what to expect.

She glided onstage in a long dress, hair gleaming gold in the sun streaming "like butterscotch" through the tall windows behind her, smiling bright as that sun. I didn't know that the woman before me stood on the cusp of genius, her creative star about to burst from shining to incandescence.

The songs she sang were all about love. Her music was love itself, as with lips and strums on a wealth of strange tunings she poured out the contents of her big heart. And that voice - her range had grown by a couple of octaves, as if a normal range couldn't contain the abundance of her feelings. After a time she put down the guitar and sat at a grand piano. Six strings could no longer contain what was inside and it needed eighty-eighty. The new piano-based songs were revelations.

I was not ten feet from her, so close that I felt something of her come into me.
  [ed.]