Joni Mitchell
Intro To Night In The City (Live at The 2nd Fret, Philadelphia, PA, 11/1966)
I close this set now with my current favourite song... Which is about a place in Toronto called Yorkville Avenue. It's kind of a small scale Greenwich Village or Chicago Oldtown, or a large scale Detroit Plum Street. There's a village there, but it's only a block long
The people in Toronto are kinda funny about their village though because although it is one of their main tourist attractions, and quite a lovely place to go, except on weekends when you can't walk down the street, erm, people tend to criticize it a lot, and еvery time I've gonе up there the newspapers have been running some dreadful article like "True Confessions Of A Yorkville Hippie" or something like that. It's always very blasphemous, and says something like "I wouldn't let my children go down there", and all that kind of thing. But Torontonians when they get away from Toronto are very, very proud of their village, and being an ex-Toronotonian, I decided to go back to it and look at it as much through tourist eyes as I possibly could, and so I spent a night walking up and down the street and sampling the music as it came spilling out of the doorways of the clubs, and erm, then I went back to the place where I was staying and climbed the stairs and took out my pad of yellow paper with the blue lines, and my black felt pen, and I wrote this song, called "Night In The City"