"The Circle Game" by Joni Mitchell

I took this shot of my daughter on the beach in LA

 

In 1967, when I was still in jr high school, I attended my first anti-war rally in NYC, protesting the Vietnam war. 1968 brought the My Lai Massacre, as well as the murders of both Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, and riots in the streets. I had been too young to understand what it meant when President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, other than a day off from school. But the murders of our leaders in 1968 hit me and my generation hard. I was in utter despair that we would ever stop the killing, or find the leaders who could inspire us to do so again. I did not give up and I continued to protest. What else could I do? My friends and neighbors were dying. The final blow was Nixon's narrow election in 1968 with his so-called "secret plan" to end the Vietnam War. None of us in the anti-war movement believed him, and it took years of protest and action to eventually end that war. And we did.

In 1968, I saw Joni Mitchell live for the first time. She was playing at Hunter College auditorium in November of 1968. I was a Tom Rush fan, and I noticed she wrote a few songs on his Circle Game album. So I went and bought her first album, and I was entranced by her guitar, her voice and her songs. The night I saw Joni Mitchell, I was front row center for her so I could carefully watch what she was doing on the guitar. She helped me to put aside the trauma of that year for a while.  I learned how to tune to her turnings that night, and the chord formations for many of her early songs, including Circle Game in G tuning.

The clip of me singing Circle Game is from 1994 at a folk festival in the Santa Cruz mountains, where I was living at the time. Singing this song brings me back to those years long before I turned 20.  I will never forget.