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As someone who majored in Leonard Cohen studies, I’ve always savored the idyllic Cohen creation myth, set on the Greek island of Hydra. In his mid-twenties, the unfledged Montreal poet found himself on a sun-baked isle in the Aegean Sea, competing for the favors of the most beautiful woman alive, Marianne Ihlen.He won! Ihlen’s husband, a Norwegian novelist hiding from the Oslo taxman, wandered off with an American artist, leaving her with a six-month old child, and a dark-haired suitor living hand-to-mouth on a Canada Council grant.The rest is history. Now we learn from the Wall Street Journal that another Canadian hippie vagabond, Joni Mitchell, was gallivanting around what Lord Byron called “the isles of Greece/Where burning Sappho loved and sung.” On the rebound from a painful breakup with rocker Graham Nash, Mitchell headed for Crete, and spent a couple of months sleeping in a Minoan seaside cave — on a bed of pebbles and straw — with one Cary Raditz.
When Joni Mitchell met Cary Raditz in early 1970, he was living in a cave in Matala, Crete.In July 1969, I quit my job as a copywriter at an ad agency in Winston-Salem, N.C., flew to Luxembourg and hitchhiked to Munich to visit my girlfriend, who was interning for a chemical company. By October, the weather was getting colder and we decided to head to a warmer place, leaving the destination to fate. We stood in the fork of a southbound road in Munich and stuck out our thumbs. If our ride went right, we’d go to Spain. If the ride went left, we’d go to Greece, and that’s how we wound up in Matala on Halloween of 1969. Two months later, I went to Afghanistan in a VW bus to buy jewels for a leather-sandal business I had started with a friend. When I returned to Matala in February, my girlfriend had gone home to the States.I think Joni arrived in Matala in late February. We met either while I was watching a sunset or when I was blown through the door of Delfini’s, a taverna where I cooked.