(The spelling mistake was hers.)Īs a child – and I can’t be the only one – I assumed “Carey” was some kind of ancient lover, a sort of sugar daddy, albeit one too tight to buy the drinks. In Matala she was free, but not invulnerable. This was the moment that Cary Raditz entered her life. When she’d arrived in Crete in 1970, with a female friend, she was on the cusp of fame, trying to figure out whether celebrity and art could exist side by side. In fact, during the writing of Blue, Mitchell was having what she later referred to as a shamanic experience – and what others might just have called a nervous breakdown.
He didn’t just have a love affair with the woman all men would have loved to have had a love affair with: he lived the life they all dreamed of too.” We all tried to have as much fun, and be as original and wildly poetic and romantic as Joni Mitchell and him. “To think that here she was, gloriously rootless and drifting through Europe was intoxicating,” he told me. Mark Ellen, former editor of Q, Smash Hits and the Word, hitchhiked to Matala in 1974 with his girlfriend with the express purpose of recreating “Carey”. Most ordinary people listening to Blue on its release hadn’t been to Greece or Amsterdam or Paris, or anywhere much, as no one could afford the flights. Like “Woodstock”, which Mitchell wrote without having been to the festival, it epitomised a hippie dream that lay out of reach for most, and which everyone thought – still thinks – sounded like paradise. Today, the beach at Matala is still raked over in travel blogs by tourists smitten with the romance of the song. And, unlike the lovers who bookended his time in Mitchell’s affections (Nash and James Taylor), we know almost nothing about him. Mitchell’s description of her muse is impressionistic, dispatched in two or three lines – “Oh Carey get out your cane” “Oh, you’re a mean old daddy/But I like you” – yet he remains one of the most charismatic figures ever to appear in song. It was during this period that she wrote songs for her 1971 album Blue, and here that she first performed one of her best-loved songs, “Carey”, dedicated to the man with whom she shared that cave. Joni Mitchell, fresh from Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles and newly separated from the singer-songwriter Graham Nash, lived in one of these caves for two months between March and May 1970. In Roman times the caves were used as burial crypts, but when the hippies arrived in the late 1960s, they became free bunkhouses. The wall of limestone caves along the cliff in the Cretan fishing village of Matala is now a protected site.
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