Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell are both making high-profile appearances in Toronto this week. It won't, alas, be a case of "together again at last," but still, I doubt whether any other coincidence could prompt as strong an outpouring of happy memories for those who recall the mid-1960s as the golden age of pop culture.

That was an era when Yorkville was about artists, coffee houses, guitars and sandals rather than exclusive boutiques, condos and five-star hotels.

Among the outstanding performers was a girl from Saskatoon who grew up as Roberta Joan Anderson, but became Joni Mitchell when she married her performing partner, Chuck Mitchell. She was a composer as well as a singer, and the marriage ended as it became clear audiences were more keen on her than him.

Leonard Cohen was then a talented young Montreal poet and novelist - until in 1967 he changed his career path by recording his first album, in which he sang his own material, including several songs that the great movie director Robert Altman chose to set the tone for his 1971 masterpiece, McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

For Cohen as well as Mitchell, Toronto played a pivotal career-making role. It was the base of Jack McClelland, czar of McClelland & Stewart, who almost single-handedly created CanLit, and turned Cohen into a literary star by publishing his work.

Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen were both blazingly original talents on the verge of breaking into American mainstream culture. Indeed, both would eventually settle in Los Angeles and remain there for decades.

They got together around the time they were emerging as two of the world's greatest living songwriters. The fascinating story of their brief romance is told in Sheila Weller's current bestseller Girls Like Us.

Judy Collins, an established singer, had heard from a mutual friend that she should hear the songs Joni was writing. Collins, getting ready to drive from New York to the 1967 Newport Folk Festival, invited Mitchell along for the ride.

That trip led to the breakthrough Collins recordings of "Both Sides Now" and other songs written by Joni Mitchell. And in Newport Collins introduced Mitchell to Cohen, then acclaimed for his poetry collection The Spice-Box of the Earth and his novel Beautiful Losers.

These two brilliant young Canadian writer-performers began a love affair that lasted only weeks but had consequences way beyond the personal. "No other brief relationship in her life would produce as many fine songs," Weller writes.

The evidence: In "Rainy Night House," Mitchell portrays herself as a naive girl in a church choir smitten with a cultural guru, referring to Cohen in the lyric: "You are a holy man/On the FM radio." And one of her signature songs, "A Case of You," has the great line: "I could drink a case of you and still be on my feet." By Weller's reckoning, that refers half to Cohen and half to James Taylor, another discarded lover.

Tonight Cohen gives the last of his four concerts at the Sony Centre. Mitchell will arrive Thursday for two Luminato events - her visual art show called Green Flag Song (at CTV Queen Street) and the Toronto premiere of Albert Ballet's The Fiddle and the Drum, inspired by Mitchell's 1985 album Dog Eat Dog.

These two are ships in the night, but I dream about a joint concert in which Cohen and Mitchell would appear as a duo, singing one another's songs, especially the ones in which one of them was inspired by the other.

It would be the perfect way to look at both sides now.