Both Sides

Where two tales converge...

In 1963 the current Michigan State Champion, 37 year old Morrie Widenbaum (or Wiedenbaum or Weidenbaum), along with his 30 year old wife Esther who taught at various Jewish schools (she emigrated from Israel where she had taught elementary school in 1960) opened a chess cafe in Detroit, naming it Chess Mate. 

In his book, A Legend on the Road, tracing the famous Fischer simul tour in 1964, IM Donaldson tells us that one of Fischer's stops was the nascent Chess Mate Cafe and cites this passage from Chess Review:

On tour, Bobby Fischer put on a simultaneous display at the Chess-Mate Gallery in Detroit against 51 players, including several masters and numerous experts.
He won 47 games, drew two and lost only two. That he would make a showing of this sort was no doubt expected, but the outstanding feature of the exhibition was the extraordinary rapidity of his play, insofar as he is reported to have consumed no more than an average of six minutes per game!

Fischer at the Chess Mate Gallery

from the Detroit Free Press, Feb. 10, 1964:
"...[Fischer] flew into Detroit Sunday and took on 51 of Michigan's strongest players in a simultaneous exhibition at the Chess Mate Gallery, 17126 Livernois.
. . .
Morrie Widenbaum,  1963-64 Michigan state champion, and proprietor of the gallery, paid Fischer $255 and his plane fare for the exhibition. If Fischer didn't thank Widenbaum, those who saw the show certainly did.
. . .
Approximately five hours after the competition began, the matches ended with Fischer scoring 47 wins, two losses and two draws. Fischer is not a gracious winner. His attitude towards defeat is ever less gracious.  'I hate to lose,” he sneered, “to anybody.'”

However, according to Dr. Howard Gaba, a fixture in the Detroit chess scene who met Fischer at this event (again from IM Donaldson's book, this time quoting The Chess Correspondent, July, 1964):

“Robert Fischer at twenty years,” Dr. Gaba writes, “is six feet, two inches tall, lanky but well-proportioned and well-muscled. He is pleasant in appearance with a quiet, even-tempered manner."
Gaba's letter coninues:

"Early in February, Robert Fischer staged a tremendous chess exhibition in Detroit. Over Sunday and Monday of that weekend we had him as our house guest.
My wife, my son Arthur, my daughter Joanne, and I felt honored to have him with us for so many pleasant hours.
Fischer is not, as reports have it and many people seem to think, completely wrapped up in chess. He took a great interest in Arthur’s demonstration of some old Edison cylinder phonographs. This led to a conversation on antiquities and relics which ended in a visit to Greenfield Village, the well-known Museum display near Detroit with its world-wide collection of historical objects.
The rest of the time at our home we watched TV, listened to the radio and recordings, including the Edison cylinders, talked a little, ate a little, and relaxed.
Away from the exhibition he played no chess but we did talk about the game.
Robert learned chess quite early in life but did not take it up seriously until he began to visit the chess clubs. From then on his progress was rapid.
He has a photographic mind and can play a long game through from the score mentally, holding the main position in his mind while making side excursions into the footnotes. He can play one game blindfolded easily but has not pushed the development of playing multiple games sans voir though he felt it within his power.
His development against experts and masters is well recorded and his growth, mentally, has actually only started. At present he reads the major chess publications from all over the world and is in complete command of current master theory.
Fischer feels that he has no control over articles written about him and seems to be becoming philosophical about the situation. The pieces in the local press seemed, in the main, to be by writers who had not taken too much time to interview Fischer.
Fischer faced one of the strongest gatherings in Detroit in the last fifteen years. In spite of the strong opposition and the numerous consultation games Fischer lost only two games during the evening. He played fast and at the end of the exhibition the 200 people present seemed to realize that they had seen a great show by a great chess player.
One incident attracted favorable attention from the spectators. A player resigned in a position that could have been drawn, as Fischer pointed out. He then refused the win, credited the player with the draw and signed his score sheet to that effect.

One of the strongest Michigan players is Morrie Wiedenbaum, a rated USCF master. When I’m lucky I win from him perhaps ten percent of the time. Among his victims at one time or another are masters Bisguier, Popel, Poschel, Burgar, Finegold and Dreibergs.
Fischer played seven games of five-minute speed chess with Wiedenbaum, at which the latter is very good. Fischer made a clean sweep of the games, seeming to win them in systematic style, a pawn or so falling to him about every five moves. In nearly every game Morrie ended up a full queen down or its equivalent.

Of his visit with us I will say only that I enjoyed it and I hope Robert did, too. We were left with a feeling that he was an unusually alert and intelligent young man.
He is quietly but deeply religious, carrying a Bible with him on his travels and reading it regularly.
From his speech and action you can see that he is strongly competitive in his chess and brilliant. As his career has already been it should be more so in the future."

Unable to support his enterprise on chess alone, in 1964 Widenbaum started booking folk musicians a la Greenwich Village, eventually evolving into blues, jazz and rock.

This leads to a parallel tale, the story of a pretty young pregnant Canadian girl named Roberta Joan Anderson who left her home in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan with the baby's father to try to make it as a folk singer in Toronto.  Her boyfriend took off for California leaving Ms. Anderson, whose stage name was Joni Anderson, to fend for herself. After giving birth she felt the overwhelming difficulty of raising a child in her rather destitute conditions. While playing in a Victorian-style coffee house called The Penny Farthing in the Yorkville neighborhood of Toronto in 1965 she met Chuck Mitchell of Michigan, another folk performer. A few months later, they married.  Anderson, now going by the name Joni Mitchell, had hoped what she later called, a "marriage of convenience," would provide a means to support her child but that wasn't in the cards and she put her daughter Kelly up for adoption.

The Penny Farthing, back in the day.
Joni played in the basement, fondly referred to as "the Dungeon"

According to the Detroit Free Press Feb. 6, 1966:

"In the spring of 1965, Joni met Detroit folk singer Chuck Mitchell at the Penny Farthing
coffeehouse in Toronto. On June 19 they were married in the backyard of his parents’ house in the Detroit suburb of Rochester, as a string quartet played. The couple moved into Chuck’s apartment on the top floor of the Verona, a once grand nineteenth-century
apartment building on the edge of Detroit’s seedy Cass Corridor. The Verona was the
“tenement castle” of Joni’s song “I Had a King,” and Chuck, of course, the king who “carried me off to his country for marriage too soon” (and changed the locks on her later)."
. . .
Chuck grew up in the Rochester area. Joni was used to Canadian customs. She had wanted to be an artist and had gone to school to study art. The girl who bears a striking resemblance to Mia Farrow, of TV’s “Peyton Place,” explained it:

'I got interested in a ukulele, and from there I turned to the guitar and folk singing. Thirty-six hours after I met Chuck, he asked me to marry him. But we waited two months.'

Now their marriage and careers are on firmer ground. They recently finished an engagement together at the Chess Mate, and hope to get a tryout at the Playboy Club in Detroit.
Occasionally, they break up the act for separate engagements. This weekend, Joni backed up blues singer Jesse Fuller at the Chess Mate and Chuck sang at the Alcove on Woodward.
On Feb. 15 they join forces again for a week’s stand at the Chess Mate, and on Feb. 22 they appear together at the Living End, a nightclub.
Chuck said, 'Joni and I have developed our act. We are not just folk singers now. We do comedy, sing some ragtime and do folk-rock. We’re ready for the big clubs now.'
Joni nodded her approval, as any dutiful wife would do."

The pair, who sometimes referred to themselves as the Joni and Chuck Show, had no formal name. At the Chess Mate where they performed a total of 14 times, they usually opened with 2 duets and ended with 2 duets, filling the middle with individual performances.  It was during this era that Joni wrote two of her early masterpieces, "The Circle Game" and "Both Sides Now."  

Joni Mitchell performing The Circle Game in1966

Chuck Mitchell performing The Circle Game

One lesser known song from that time, though this is a later recoding is Urge For Going

In 1967 two things occurred. Joni and Chuck split up to pursue individual lives and careers while Morrie and Esther opened a second music venue called the Inn Mate.

Billboard Nov. 19, 1967

The following year (1968) Esther Widenbaum died at age 34 and Joni Mitchell famously moved to Laurel Canyon in Hollywood Hills West, Los Angeles.

Morrie continued to be active in Michigan chess. 

Chess Life Nov. 1972

Morrie died on Dec. 26, 1972.

Chuck continued his musical pursuits at least as late as 2020. 

                           Chuck Mitchell webpage           Joni Mitchell webpage

Enjoyed the article.  Thanks for posting.

Fascinating chess/folk music history!  Thanks.

"Both Sides Now" is my favorite Joni song.

Her voice is full of feeling, and her guitar playing is superb also!

As Rolling Stone editor, Ben Fong-Torres, wrote: 
"Not bad for a girl who had no voice training, hated to read in school, and learned guitar from a Pete Seeger instruction record."

For my money, Joni was the greatest musical wordsmith of the 20th century, better even than Dylan.  Her guitar playing is based on alternate tuning, something she learned from Eric Anderson, a singer-songwriter who was becoming a denizen of the Village during the early-mid 60s.

Thank you for telling me.

Holy Sleuth, Batgirl, your stories never cease to amaze!  The tie-in with Joni Mitchell is spectacular.  

I've always considered Both Sides Now to be the perfect song. The imagery and the words depicting those images fit and flow and meld so naturally with the music.  I first heard the Judy Collins version and had trouble reconciling Joni's unique voice with the song... but watching her sing it in her unassuming, unaffected style, now I can't imagine anyone else performing it.  

Joni started out to be an artist and like many musicians, went to art school for a while. She had to drop out to earn money for tuition --modelling, waitressing, working retail and finally performing.  I think she created most, or all, of her album covers. Her music became her art and she paints work pictures with all the passion of her beloved Van Gogh. 

Fischer, hopefully, was the added spice in this stew.

Author David Yaffee, in his book on Joni, "Reckless Daughter," claims Joni Anderson wrote this song while pregnant and he considers it her first "real" song.  It has a feel one finds in Child's Ballads.

This amazing song has all the complexities of a master level chess game, and on two levels: musically and lyrically.  Joni's open tuned guitar gives the song the haunting aura of mystery that the singer claims she will eventually dispel.  Music and lyrics interwoven like tactics and strategy. 

Wonderful article, thank you!  You are quite the gifted writer.  This piece is very evocative of another era, for both chess and music.  I was not even aware of this early stage of Joni Mitchell's career.  It's probably considered heresy to say so, but I would agree with you on Mitchell being the better wordsmith...not to take anything away from Dylan. 

Thanks for reading and commenting.  This was an opus amoris for me.

Wow, to combine two of my favorite subjects into the same post and do it so well is just outstanding. This was one of your best yet, I read every word :-)

Thanks for this wonderful post.

Thank you very much, Sarah! Great research, great presentation, great tales. Endgame, the Frank Brady book, contains more incredible travel stories from a young Bobby on the simul car trip around the States. A plethora of idiosyncratic characters gives the reader a beat literature hitch-hike.

Wonderful story!

Wow!!. Sounds like our kind of place!!! A real joy to wake up to, so a huge thank you from me. Side note - I also loved the Dave Von Rink version of both sides now, but don't recall where I heard it. Best go wake up!. Have a great day!!.😁👍

Tanks