Joni Mitchell Says She and Chaka Khan Once Dine-and-Dashed After Drinking a 'Lot of Wine'

Even icons like Chaka Khan and Joni Mitchell get into a little debauchery every once in a while.

In a new conversation for Interview magazine published on Friday, Khan and Mitchell recalled a hilarious story about a time they dine-and-dashed at a restaurant in Los Angeles together — until guilt led the "Blue" singer-songwriter to return and pay the bill.

"So, Chaka and I are in this Italian restaurant on Melrose, in the basement. It was early in the evening, like five o’clock or something like that," Mitchell told the outlet.

Noting that they were both "drinking," she continued, "I ordered some food, and Chaka was talking German to the waiter. So, they were conversing away in German."

Mitchell remembered Khan "suddenly" telling her to "get up" from the table: "I said, 'What for?' 'Get up,' she says. So, I get up and she’s running for the door. So, I’m following her."

"There were no customers but us, really," added the "Big Yellow Taxi" performer. "So we run to the door, run across the street, and the waiter that spoke German comes out on the street and he’s waving at us, like we’ve run out on the bill."

Khan replied with a laugh, "It was a big bill, because we drank a lot of wine."

Mitchell confirmed they indeed "drank a lot of wine" and explained, "So, I said, 'Chaka, I'm going to go back and pay the bill.'"

The moment illustrated the "clash" of how the two musicians were raised, said Khan, who grew up with a Catholic mother and beatnik father in a "progressive, bohemian, racially mixed" Chicago neighborhood where it was "hard to get to the friggin' arts if you're Black," according to The Guardian.

“My sister and I used to go on his nocturnal excursions by the lake in the park. The weed was thick in the air, the wine bottles were flowing, music was playing – as tight as it was, I had a pretty magical life," the "Ain't Nobody" performer told the outlet in 2019.

On the other hand, Mitchell was raised in Alberta, Canada by a grocer father and schoolteacher mother. She wanted to pursue arts from a young age but contracted polio as a child and "developed an artistic sensitivity" before eventually recovering — "thanks mostly to her mother's loving attention," reads a biography on her website.

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"My background was very restrained and proper," Mitchell told Khan in the Interview conversation. "But we did a lot of partying together."

"Yeah, but we don’t want to go too deep into that," quipped the Queen of Funk. "We want to hold those memories dear to our hearts."