How one bass player's love for Joni Mitchell led to a once-in-a-lifetime adventure
The influential writer/musician Greg Tate, who joined the ancestors just before we went to press, once joked that the only people he knew who liked Joni Mitchell were Black folks, “like ourselves and Prince and Seal and Cassandra Wilson.” A rogue scholar and singularly gifted cultural critic, Tate understood Joni’s circuitous path through Black music — and the similarly circuitous paths some of us took to get to her.
Like many seekers of Joni’s generation, my parents turned to the East in the 1970s, which meant that I grew up immersed in Sanskrit mantras and folk percussion at communes in the U.S. and a boarding school in North India. I was forbidden to engage with anything that did not pertain to spiritual matters, which was quite a challenge for a hyperactive young drummer coming of age in Miami Beach in the 1980s.
The author in 1988 (left) and today
My duties as a novice Hare Krishna priest kept me busy, but when I could, I visited the nearby public library