"Mermaid Cafe"    Come on down to the Mermaid Cafe and I will Buy you a bottle of wine And we'll laugh and toast to nothing and smash our empty glasses down From the song "Carey"

There's been a bit of speculation whether the "Mermaid Cafe" actually existed under that name, or if Joni was simply flexing her poetic license. According to at least three people who were there during that period, it did in fact exist. Their stories are below.

The following was submitted by Yvonne Whiteman

The Mermaid Café did exist back in 1969, when I was in Matala. It was at the far left of the bay as you faced out to sea. There were two cafes: Delfini’s, which played that ‘scratchy rock and roll’, and the Mermaid Café, which as far as I can remember had traditional Cretan instrumentalists playing, and in the mornings served the nearest to an English breakfast you could get in that place at that time: bread, marmalade and instant coffee, with a fabulous view of the bay and out to the little island where St Paul was shipwrecked.

The Matala caves in 1969

I believe that Joni Mitchell stayed in Matala in 1967 or 1968. She probably would have stayed in one of the Minoan burial caves, just as I did a year later, and would have scrambled up and down the cliffs alongside the ‘freaks’ who formed the troglodyte community there. It was the days of the Greek colonels and there were soldiers coming and going in that area. The people who lived in the caves had often sold their passports, were dope-dealers, or were passing through. While I was there, Julian Beck and the Living Theatre were rehearsing ‘Medea’ up on the cliffs. To get to the Mermaid Café you had to scramble down the striated rocks and cliff to the bottom, then walk along the street to the end of the bay – hence ‘maybe it’s been too long a time since I was scramblin’ down in the street’ - you could stay up in the caves for days - even weeks - without coming down.

When the wind was in from Africa it was difficult to sleep because of the sandstorms. But when the night was clear, the sky was a starry dome with shooting stars and the most incredible starry firmament and Milky Way I’ve ever seen. I wrote down my impressions just after I came back from Crete that year, and it’s going to go into the book of holiday memoirs I’m writing (One Long Holiday). Matala in the Sixties had that kind of effect on people.

I’ve never been back, but I gather that Matala is now ringed from end to end with hotels - so thank god for mythology.

The following is an excerpt from an essay about a visit to Matala during 1969, written by Richard Titlebaum. It's a great read, check out the rest

The Matala caves in 2001

Late at night the bus arrived at Matala which was dark and drenched in rain. A poor beginning, I said to myself, glancing at Matala's sole unlighted street. A splinter of the moon had just broken through the clouds when I saw a haze of light. "That's the Mermaid [Cafe]," muttered the Swede. Matala boasted several seedy cafes, the most popular being the Mermaid. Its verandah spread out fan-wise towards the beach, the Mermaid was the central hang-out of the cave dwellers. Their corrugated faces hunched over kerosene lamps and candles, they huddled together, samples of all the migratory hordes gone A.W.O.L. from the anthills of the world: campus Guevarists in Fidelista fatigues, sexual Leftists and sanyasins in long-flowing robes, minstrels of sunburnt bohemianism, aspiring earringed gurus, the Eminences and Prometheus-poseurs of Hip-- all fixated in the dim waxen light like mannequins from Madame Tussaud's. But the specialty of the house consisted of dogs, a dozen starving canary-yellow mastodons in half-sitting position who would go berserk whenever one of the cave dwellers at the tables threw them a morsel. With the hounds zooming by, ravenous and snapping, the Mermaid resembled a loony-bin, intoxicating, like the rezina I kept guzzling in the corner.

In giving his permission to use the excerpt, Richard also added the following:

I can add a little tidbit. Shortly before I left Matala at the end of 1969 the Mermaid Cafe wanted me to paint a mural on its wall. I had been spending most mornings on its outdoor veranda painting or drawing and always attracted a small crowd. But I didn't want to do it either because I had no experience painting large wall items or I was about to leave. The guy who agreed to do it was a crazy aristocratic Brit whose name I forget. A friend of mine & wife were in Matalla 2 years ago and reported that it now boasted a dozen or more hotels. Alas!

The following was submitted by Jack Bechtold

I met my first wife in Nov. 1971 in Matala, Crete when it was still a small unknown out-of-the-way fishing village with no hotels, no tourists to speak of, with a bakery at the entrance to the village run by an elderly lady who randomly baked bread and made sandwiches for us visitors. If you brought your own bottle you could fill it full of wine from a large jug plugged with a straw ( no cork). There were three restaurants in the village. One was run by a sour old man who opened only at night serving beans and

Inside one of the caves

The last remaining restaurant was on the beach. You could sit outside during the day but at night we were always inside for some reason. The owner had only one meal on his menu but it varied from day to day. We would drop in during the day to vote on or suggest a selection. I loved that place. I might even have a photo around here somewhere. Outside on the wall facing the beach was a slightly faded painting of a mermaid. I'll let you guess what the name of the restaurant was.

The following is from an interview with Joni Mitchell by Rolling Stone in early 1971

"It was a very small bay with cliffs on two sides. And between the two cliffs, on the beach, there were about four or five small buildings. There were also a few fishermen huts.

"The caves were on high sedimentary cliffs, sandstone, a lot of seashells in it. The caves were carved out by the Minoans hundreds of years ago. Then they were used later on for leper caves. Then after that the Romans came, and they used them for burial crypts. Then some of them were filled in and sealed up for a long time. People began living there, beatniks, in the fifties. Kids gradually dug out more rooms. There were some people there who were wearing human teeth necklaces around their necks," she said with a slight frown.

"We all put on a lot of weight. We were eating a lot of apple pies, good bacon. We were eating really well, good wholesome food.

"The village pretty well survived from the tourist trade, which was the kids that lived in the caves. I don't know what their business was before people came. There were a couple of fishing boats that went out, that got enough fish to supply the two restaurants there.

"The bakery lady who had the grocery store there had fresh bread, fresh rice pudding, made nice yogurt every day, did a thriving business; and ended up just before I left, she installed a refrigerator. She had the only cold drinks in town. It was all chrome and glass. It was a symbol of her success.

"Then the cops came and kicked everyone out of the caves, but it was getting a little crazy there. Everybody was getting a little crazy there. Everybody was getting more and more into open nudity. They were really going back to the caveman. They were wearing little loincloths. The Greeks couldn't understand what was happening."

During a performance at The Troubadour, Joni introduced the song "Carey" with the following story (transcribed from the tape by Kakki).

"I went to Greece a couple years ago and over there I met a very unforgettable character. I have a hard time remembering people's names like so I have to remember things by association, even unforgettable characters, I have to remember by association, so his name was "Carrot" Raditz, Carey Raditz, and oh, he's a great character. He's got sort of a flaming red personality, and flaming red hair and a flaming red appetite for red wine and he fancied himself to be a gourmet cook, you know, if he could be a gourmet cook in a cave in Matala. And he announced to my girlfriend and I the day that we met him that he was the best cook in the area and he actually was working at the time I met him - he was working at this place called the Delphini restaurant - until it exploded, singed half of the hair off of his beard and his legs, and scorched his turban, melted down his golden earrings.

Anyway, one day he decided he was going to cook up a feast, you know, so we had to go to market because like in the village of Matala there was one woman who kind of had a monopoly - well actually there were three grocery stores but she really had a monopoly and because of her success and her affluence she had the only cold storage in the village, too, so she had all the fresh vegetables and all the cold soft drinks and she could make the yogurt last a longer than anyone else, and we didn't feel like giving her any business that day. Rather than giving her our business we decided to walk ten miles to the nearest market.

So I had ruined the pair of boots that I'd brought with me from the city because they were really "citified" kind of slick city boots that were meant to walk on flat surfaces. The first night there we drank some Raqui and I tried to climb the mountain and that was the end of those shoes. So he lent me these boots of his which were like Li'l Abner boots - like those big lace-up walking boots and a pair of Afghani socks which made my feet all purple at the end of the day and I laced them up around my ankles and I couldn't touch any - the only place my foot touched was on the bottom, you know, there was nothing rubbing in the back or the sides - they were huge and he wasn't very tall, either, come to think of it was kind of strange - I guess he had sort of webbed feet or something but we started off on this long trek to the village, I forget the name of it now, between Matala and the Racqlian -and started off in the cool of the morning and by the time we got halfway there we were just sweltering me in these thick Afghani socks and heavy woolens and everything, so we went into the ruins of King Phestos's palace to sit down and have a little bit of a rest and while we were there these two tourist buses pulled up and everybody got off the buses in kind of an unusual symmetry, you know, they all sort of walked alike and talked alike and they all kind of looked alike and they all filed over to a series of rubblely rocks- a wall that was beginning to crumble - lined themselves up in a row and took out their viewing glasses, overgrown opera glasses, and they started looking at the sky and suddenly this little speck appeared on the horizon that came closer and closer, this little black speck.

Cary was standing behind all of this leaning on his cane and as it came into view he suddenly broke the silence of this big crowd and he yells out "it's ah MAAGPIE" in his best North Carolina drawl. And suddenly all the glasses went down in symmetry and everybody's heads turned around to reveal that they were all very birdlike looking people. They had long skinny noses - really - they had been watching birds so long that they looked like them, you know - and this one woman turned around and she says to him (in British accent) "it's NOT a magpie - it's a crooked crow." Then she very slowly and distinctly turned her head back, picked up her glasses and so did everybody else and we kept on walking. Bought two kilos of fish which would have rotted in the cave hadn't it been for the cats.

When we got back from that walk Stelios, who was the guy who ran the Mermaid Cafe, had decided to put an addition on his kitchen which turned out to be really illegal and it was so illegal, as a matter of fact, that the Junta dragged him off to jail and torture was legal over there - they burnt his hands and his feet with cigarette butts mainly because they hated, you know, all of the Canadians and Americans and wandering Germans living in the caves but they couldn't get them out of there because it was controlled by the same archaeologist that controlled the ruins of King Phestos's palace and he didn't mind you living there as long as you didn't Day-Glo all of the caves and everyone was like putting all of their psychedelia over all this ancient writing. So they carted him off to jail..." (End of tape)

More information on "Mermaid Cafe"

 Pictoral Essay by Grisel Gonzalez