I was 11 years old when I bought my first record with my own money.
A 45 rpm black vinyl single in a paper sleeve with a hole in it to display the label, it was “Big Yellow Taxi” by Joni Mitchell, released the previous year.
I’d heard the song many times on the radio (it charted higher in Australia than any other territory) and I loved it, so I caught the bus from Claremont to Allan’s music store in Hobart’s Elizabeth Street and handed over my pocket money.
It made me feel very grown up as I played my disc at home, watching the tan coloured Reprise label with the steamboat and the cool lower case “r” with its nestled colon (meaning “repeat” in musical notation – don’t mind if I do) spin around as I sang along to Joni’s lyrics about the follies of replacing the natural world with the built world.
They paved paradise and put a parking lot.
In 1971 I’d started high school and was becoming conscious of social issues and this was an easy one to latch on to.
There was a verse that puzzled me, though.
Late last night, I heard the screen door slam.
And a big yellow taxi took away my old man.
At the time, I used the phrase “my old man” to refer to my father. Why was Joni’s father being taken away? And what did that have to do with environmental activism?
It wasn’t until I heard Joni’s song “My Old Man” from the Blue album that came out later that same year that I realised she was referring to her lover, not her father.
I also pondered why a taxi “took away” her old man. To my knowledge, you ordered or hailed a taxi willingly, it’s a choice you make.
It wasn’t until many years later that I heard that “yellow taxi” could also be a reference to the nickname for some yellow Canadian police cars.
So, in that verse, Joni was talking either about her lover being arrested, or his willing departure from her in an actual taxi.
In both cases, he was taken away from her, and that’s what the song is really, or at least equally, about. After all, she did choose to call it “Big Yellow Taxi” rather than, say, “Paved Paradise”.
And now, some 55 years later and a year and a half after Hazel died, the full weight and truth of her words about that relationship, of her lover being taken away from her, as much as about protecting the environment, hit home to me.
You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.
2018 animated video by Paul Gardner.