Girls Like Us the Music - a musical audio tour through the pages of Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and the Journey of a Generation by Sheila Weller.
In the spring of 1956, Carole King's parents had recently divorced - a virtual first in the neighborhood. Carole alone would change her name (from Klein to King), just as Carole alone was allowed to attend those magical Alan Freed shows (Camille's parents disapproved of "that jungle music"), often making the pilgrimage to the Paramount both weekend nights to soak up the plaintive doo-wop of The Platters, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, The Cleftones and Jerry Lee Lewis.
Page 6 - Female singers' influences in 1956
This was 1956. Mr. and Mrs. Ricky Ricardo had separate beds on I Love Lucy. Dissemination of information about birth control to married women was a crime in some states. Every word of Seventeen magazine was vetted by a pastor. In garment factories, union inspectors checked skirt lengths before job lots were shipped to department stores. Elvis may have been singing, Jack Kerouac writing, and James Dean's movies still being shown even after his fatal car accident, but there were few female analogues. Doris Day pluckily kept wolves at bay; the Chordettes crooned like estrogened Perry Comos.
The song clip of Doris Day's - Que Sera Sera which went to # 2 on the Billboard charts in 1956 ( The song was introduced in Alfred Hitchcock's film The Man Who Knew Too Much. Doris Day and James Stewart starred in the movie).
The song clip of the Chordettes Born To Be With You went to # 5 on the Billboard charts in 1956.
Page 10 - Joni Mitchell's favorite song in high school
Joni had loved pop music before it had gotten so bubblegum. One of her favorite songs from high school - indeed, for decades to come, (she would call it her favorite song of all time) was the Shirelles hit of four years before, Will You Love Me Tomorrow. It was written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin, a married couple who were among a group of barely-out-of-their-teens New York songwriters who mixed a deep infatuation with Negro church music and R&B with a Broadway songwriting style, and turned the results into Top 40 radio.
Will You Love Me Tomorrowhad been the first pop song to address the risks of sex in a woman's life - which was now, as she stood in the wings of the Half Beat, precisely Joni Anderson's dilemma. She was dealing with her pregnancy in a brand-new way: unmarried and alone.
According to the Shirelle's Wikipedia site - they were the first American girl group to have a number # 1 single on the Billboard Hot 100 - the year was 1961.
Page 12 - Joni Anderson performs at the Half Beat in 1964
"The first song I'd like to do is a song about when a man becomes so involved in almighty liquour that he begins to think of it as a woman," she said, with a smile in her voice. "And he calls his bottle "Nancy Whiskey." Her real name was Roberta Joan Anderson, and her family hailed most recently from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. She had come to Toronto several months earlier, taking the train across the prairie with her art school boyfriend. Then he'd split, leaving her a painting of a moon as a goodbye-and-sorry-I-got-you-pregnant gift.
"In 1961 a man named Ewan MacColl wrote a song and entered it into a contest in England. It wasn't much of a surprise to anybody when it won." What's significant is that she would choose - of all songs, this violent faux-Child Ballad about the anticipation, birth, and loss of a baby. "It has very, very dramatic lyrics," she warned as she began singing the song.
Note: I couldn't find any recordings of Joni singing these songs on later albums, but found some other artists from that period in time.
Page 17 - Carly Simon promotes her first single
April 6, 1971 - When Steve Harris knocked on the door of Carly Simon's room, he wasn't surprised at the fear he saw in her face. Harris, an A&R man at Elektra Records, had spent two months cajoling Carly, an unknown who had extreme stage fright, into consenting to a live concert, so necessary to promote the single, That's The Way I Always Heard Is Should Be, from her debut self-titled album. The record had sold only 2,000 copies, but it had ignited water-cooler talk among the special group of record company secretaries and receptionists that Elektra president Jac Holzman had sent it to: word-of-mouth had started, and Holzman was determined to maximize it.
NOTE: The video below is not from the Troubador, but it's in the same time frame.
Page 20 - Joni sings like a jazz instrument
Carole King and Joni Mitchell were in many ways opposites. Carole was Every-woman; Joni, the Bohemian. Carole's songs celebrated easy-to-grasp feelings in an optimistic spirit by way of clear, infectiously rhythmic expression. Joni's songs described complex needs and emotional states; they did not skirt pessimism; and - like the astonishingly original Laura Nyro, the only other female singer-songwriter Joni respected - she had began to use her voice like a jazz instrument, with abrupt shifts of tempo, octave, mood and volume.
"A mystic once said, 'You have two eyes; one says yes to the world, the other says no. You need to see with both of them.' Carly sees more with the eye that says yes, and that makes her so vulnerable. She belongs in another century, the era of grand feelings and penned love letters. Carly would be perfect in a Tolstoy novel."
Stuck in New York (eight months pregnant) on the night of Carly's Troubadour opening, Ellen mentally replayed a defining moment from their teen years. "Carly's sitting on the school steps with her guitar, playing When I Fall In Love, and she's singing the "....it will be for-ev-er...." with such passion." Neither Carly nor Ellen could know that, through an introduction tonight, the prophecy of that lyric - the inability to stop loving someone even after one can and wants to - would be set in motion in Carly Simon's life.
Everyone thought that Joni and James had split up. But here they were, gliding into the Troubadour together. After the show, James was invited to come up and say hello to Carly. When Steve left the room, Carly was seated on the couch; James, at her feet on the floor with his legs crossed. "They were deep in conversation," Steve recalls. "I could see the intensity between them."
Carole King began taking piano lessons the year that Tenderly, Come Rain or Come Shine and Zip-a-Dee Doo-Dah were playing on the radio. The mainstay of her piano education were the Broadway songbooks of Rodgers and Hart, Rodgers and Hammerstein and Richard Rodgers.
Page 34 - Brooklyn Girls Slow Dancing
Carole King gave parties in her family's basement - "and they were packed," remembers Barbara, especially during rounds of Spin the Bottle. Eventually, these parties that Carole and other kids gave had lots of touchy-feely going on, to get 'felt up' in the ninth grade was a first step to three or four years of fending off the pull of sex, a tension made all the more fraught by the new sleeper hit Earth Angel by the Penguins, to which everyone was slow-dancing. The sensual, pleading song - so different from those genially corny white hit parade staples - sounded like nothing those Brooklyn girls had heard before.
Page 34 - Overnight Shift in Popular Music
"On Monday there was this other music; on Tuesday there was rock 'n' roll." That's how The Band's Robbie Robertson once described the seemingly overnight shift in popular music in mid-1954. One day middle-aged white writers were cranking out saccharine pop songs like How Much Is That Doggie In The Window, Mr. Sandman, and the trusty Shrimp Boats, which were presented, by was of live skits, on TV's Lucky Strikes-sponsored Your Hit Parade...and the next day the world changed. White teens started listening to, and demanding, an alternative: black music. (This overnight change can also be illustrated by the fact that in January 1954 an unknown Elvis Presley was recording Joni James covers: just a few months later, his raw, plaintive That's All Right Mama was making good on his producer Sam Phillip's dream of finding "a white man who had the Negro sound and Negro feel.")
Page 35 - Soul Starved White Kids
Starting in 1954, DJ's and Record companies began serving up R&B for the soul starved white kids. In the culture-jolting synthesis that emerged, blacks did the innovating while whites got the credit. Though Bill Haley and the Comets' 1955 Rock Around The Clock officially put the new genre on the map, that jitterbug-paced hit by the white rockabilly performer had none of the fluidity of Jackie Brenston's 1951 Rocket 88, which most scholars date as the first real rock 'n' roll song.
Rock 'n' roll in 1954 and early 1955 consisted of white singers trying to sound black (Elvis on That's All Right, Mama) and black singers trying to whiten their sounds (Chuck Berry's hillbilly Maybellene, Johnny B. Goode, and Sweet Little Sixteen; Little Richard's and Tutti Frutti), but most of those songs - while highly danceable - were not emotionally affecting. Instead, being frenetic, they were safely un-sensual.
Page 35-36 - Doo Wop hits the airwaves on WINS
When Alan Freed moved from Cleveland to New York in 1954 and started broadcasting on WINS and presenting his concerts at the Brooklyn Paramount, he featured these songs - variously called street-corner, a cappella, or doo-wop - by the Penguins, the Willows, the Spaniels, the Flamingos, the Platters (Twilight Time and The Great Pretender), the Moonglows (Sincerely), the Cleftones (You Baby You).
Page 38 - Carole forms a female doo-wop group
Carole King didn't think twice about asserting herself over boys, not in sports but in that part of her life that mattered to her, pop music. In her junior year of high school, she formed a doo-wop group specializing in her own compositions and covers of popular white doo-wop hits, like Danny and the Juniors "At the Hop" and the Del Vikings' "Come Go With Me".
They named their group the Co-Sines for their advanced math class at Shellbank, and they played local Sweet Sixteen parties and USO halls in the New York area.
Page 41 - The influence of Broadway scores
For a nineteen-year old would-be rebel, Gerry Goffin possessed surprisingly conventional taste in music. He didn't listen to folk, rock 'n' roll, or R&B, or even jazz. Rather, after his father had taken him as a young teenager to a Rodgers and Hammerstein play, he used those literate scores - Carousel, Oklahoma!, South Pacific - as his standard. These, of course, were also the foundation of Carole's musical curriculum. Gerry loved these songs - he could hum them and feel them, but he could not play them. When Laurents, Bernstein, and Sondheim's West Side Story opened in September 1957, a startlingly high new bar was set - musical theater could now romanticize issues (intergroup love affairs; the anger of disenfranchised populations) so fresh they were almost more incipient than current.
Page 43 - Don Kirshner gets Aldon Music on the map
Don Kirshner signs Bobby Darin and Connie Francis to Aldon Music and promotes their songs Who's Sorry Now? and Splish Splash into hits. Kirshner then met Carole King's friend Neil Sedaka and his songwriting partner, Howie Greenfield. Kirshner sat Neil and Howie down at Aldon's piano and got an infectious earful. Later, Kirshner took the upbeat little ditty called Stupid Cupid to his friend Connie Francis, who promptly made a Top Ten hit of it.
Page 45 - The Kid Brother
In Carole's Rosedale living room one day after classes, Carole King and Gerry Goffin wrote their first song together - Gerry recalls it as "a so-so song called The Kid Brother." After they polished the song, they drove into Manhattan and presented it Jerry Wexler. Wexler had always been a fan of the charmingly confident and intimidated "saddle-shoed" girl, and now, with this new boy, the effect was doubled. Wexler thought Carole and Gerry were "very earnest," and he gave them a $25 advance for the song. As they left, Wexler remembers musing, "These terrific kids are going to come up with great songs - songs that are most adaptable to black voices."
Page 48 - Carole responds with "Oh! Neil"
Right after Carole King and Gerry Goffin got married on August 30th, they signed up the Aldon Records. Neil Sedaka had had a hit with a song Oh! Carol (Carole and Joel concluded it had to have been about Carole), and, with Gerry's help, Carole had written a novelty "answer" song, Oh! Neil, bringing Donny Kirshner into her and Gerry's lives. The young couple's workaholism was just what Kirshner was looking for. He paid them $1,000 for the coming year. They started to write, but "one song after another, Donny couldn't do anything with them," Gerry says.
Page 50 - There Goes My Baby
In 1959 a new "Earth Angel" had risen to the top of the pop charts. If you were a suburban girl of thirteen or fourteen and heard the Drifters', There Goes My Baby , you stopped in your tracks, drew a breath, and realized: "This is a song I could go 'all the way' to." The urgent ballad with its booming doo-wop intro and its sexual narrator, desperately wailing "There goes my baaa-by / Movin' o-on down the line...." was enveloped in a classical string section that made virginal middle-class girls imagine sex in big-R romantic terms.
Page 50 - Leiber and Stoller songwriting team
The writing / production team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller (who gave us There Goes My Baby) cut their teeth in songwriting with Charles Brown's Hard Times (later recorded by David "Fathead" Newman for Ray Charles) and adapting Hound Dog for Elvis Presley. They also did Yakety Yak, Charlie Brown, Poison and Searchin for the Coasters.
Page 51 - Black females come forth in popular music
Black a cappella-based popular music had finally gained some female voices . In 1957 four schoolgirls at St. Anthony of Padua High School in the Bronx - girls who'd harmonized together on Gregorian chants in chapel for years and improvised secular music in the gym and halls - named themselves The Chantels and recorded a song called Maybe. In early 1958 (when black male groups didn't score as often as white male groups, and black female groups almost never charted), Maybe became a pop hit.
Across the river in Passaic, New Jersey, four teenage girls had taken heart at the Chantels' earned fortune. They were Shirley Owens, Addie Harris, Beverly Lee, and Doris Coley, a foursome who called themselves the Poquellos, which they eventually changed to The Shirelles, and released I Met HIm On Sunday and Tonight's The Night.
Page 54 - Carole King & Gerry Goffin write "Tomorrow"
Kirshner knew he could get to Florence Greenberg, so he told Carole to think of the Shirelles as she wrote. Carole stretched her hands over the keys. She produced an elegant semiclassical ballad, its third bar containing an emotional chord that George Gershwin might have used but that was never heard in current pop songs. She had trouble finding a melody for the bridge, so she left that incomplete. After finishing the song as best she could, she pushed the "on" button on the big Norelco tape recorder and she da-dah-dah'd her wordless melody while she played it on the piano. As she grabbed her coat to go meet Genie, she wrote a note to Gerry: "Donny needs a song for the Shirelles tomorrow. Please write" and propped the note against the tape recorder.
When Gerry came home to the empty apartment and listened to the tape, he was euphoric. "I had never heard a melody like that from Carole before! It was melodic!",he recalls. "I put myself in the place of a woman - what would a girl sing to a guy if they made love that night?" It wasn't a great lyric, but it was very simple: Will you love me in the morning, after we've made love? He'd begun the song with decorous metaphors for lovemaking, arranged in a tight, alliterative, conversational two bars "Tonight you're mine completely / You give your love so sweetly".....
Donny brought the demo of Tomorrow to Guy Mitchell but he told Kirshner that while he loved the song, he was committed to composers of Johnny Mathis' Wonderful, Wonderful and Chances Are. Luther Dixon brought it to the Shirelles to record and he played it for them. "We looked at each other like, 'Is this a joke?' It sounded like a country-western song, real twangy." The girls consensus: it was too white. But Dixon said, 'You're gonna record this song," Beverly says. The Shirelles begrudgingly agreed to show up at the studio.
Page 55 - Carole King writes her first strings arrangement
Carole and Gerry knew their song Tomorrow had to be bathed in violins and cellos. Gerry was "dying to steal from the Drifters," as he puts it - he loved the cellos is in This Magic Moment and Dance With Me. Carole was determined to write the string arrangement, undaunted by her igonorance of the instruments. "I came over to Carole's house and she was sitting at the kitchen table, writing the score," Camille remembers, "using a book she checked out of the library, How to Write for Strings. She taught herself from a library book!"
In early 1961, Carole King was a nineteen year old wife and mother, and she had written the # 1 pop song (Tomorrow). She was now working on refining the chord changes of what would be her and Gerry's second # 1 hit, the bouncy and catchy (if significantly less weighty) Take Good Care Of My Baby.
Page 104 - The Halls of Aldon
On any given day in the early 1960's, a tour through the halls of Aldon Music would yield Carole and Gerry (perhaps working up One Fine Day or Oh No Not My Baby) mere yards away from Neil Sedaka and Howie Greenfield (maybe knocking out Calendar Girl or Breaking Up Is Hard To Do), close by Cynthia Weil and her husband Barry Mann (who might be composing On Broadway or You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'.
Rounding out the songwriting teams at Aldon were Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman (A Teenager In Love, Save The Last Dance For Me and This Magic Moment) along with Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry (Be MyBaby and Da Doo Ron Ron).
Page 107 - The struggles of the people
At a time when Martin Luther King, Jr. was emerging as America's Gandhi, helping to lead and endure the violent struggles comprising the civil rights movement and elite colleges still listed "Religion:_____" on application forms and enforced anti-Jewish quotas, Carole and Gerry were pounding out songs at the piano in their cubicle at Aldon's.
A string of hits the Aldon writers produced - Carole and Gerry's Up On The Roof, sung by the Drifters; Mann and Weil's Uptown, sung by the Crystals; and Jerry Leiber and Phil Spector's Spanish Harlem, sung by the Drifters' Ben E. King as a solo artist - presented the struggles of people of color, not in the South, but in the place the writers knew and loved, New York.
Page 109 - Two Against The World
Carole and Cynthia's bond, much more than Gerry and Barry's, had a two-against-the-world quality. It was embarrassingly un-feminine in 1961 to be a piano-banging, moon/June rhyming, argumentative workaholic.
Still, if you jumped from the peer to the historical context, Carole and Cynthia were actually filling large-if little remembered-shoes. The 1920s and 1930s had been a kind of unacknowledged Golden Age of women tunesmiths. There was Dorothy Fields (I Can't Give You Anything But Love, On The Sunny Side of the Street, A Fine Romance and The Way You Look Tonight); Dana Suesse (The Night Is Young and You're So Beautiful,You Oughta Be In Pictures) and Ann Ronell (Willow, Weep For Me, Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?).
Page 110 - The Drifters record Goffin/King songs
Co-workers at Aldon saw that Carole was madly in love with Gerry. But to Gerry, Carole was the girl he got pregnant. Kasha also noticed something else: "Gerry seemed to venerate black women. If you look at the titles of the songs he wrote - What a Sweet Thing That Was, Don't Say Nothin' Bad (About My Baby! - they were black titles; they were a black woman speaking."
While Will You Love Me Tomorrow was still riding the charts, in Feb. 1961, Carole and Gerry got their first song recorded by the Drifters, Some Kind of Wonderful. Followed by When My Little Girl Is Smiling.
Page 112 - The Twist
Rhythmic, infectious songs that also invented new dances were deemed to have instant hit potential, thanks to the success of the dance craze known as the Twist. Based on a song of that name, the Twist was conceived in an Atlanta roadhouse in 1958, courtesy of Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, but popularized by Chubby Checker. By early 1962, it has become the symbol of the "with-it" style of the young upper middle class.
Page 113 - The Loco-Motion
Hot on the heels of the Twist came namesake dance songs like Dee Dee Sharp's Mashed Potato Time, which landed on the charts in 1962. At Aldon, the race was on to create the next dance craze. Carole and Gerry came up with The Loco-Motion.
To record The Loco-Motion, they looked around for a black girl singer who had a voice that sounded as much like Dee Dee Sharp's as possible. They found her - she was their babysitter - Eva Boyd. In weeks, the song reach # 1 in August of 1962.
Page 114 - The Cookies
Eva Boyd was introduced to Carole and Gerry by Jeanie McCrea Reavis - the newest member of the Cookies - a black girl group that did a lot of Aldon session work. On the Atlantic label, Jeanie's older sister, Darlene McCrea, and Margie Hendrix and Pat Lyles had a top R&B hit (In Paradise).
When Ray Charles saw them, he transformed the Cookies into the Raelettes, with Margie Hendrix belting out "What kind of man are you?" "Bay-beee, oh bay-beeee", and "Hit that road, Jack, and don't you come back no more".
Page 116 - Chains
Carole and Gerry wrote a song for the Cookies, Chains. Between Jeanie's resonant alto, Carole's gospel-plus-Tin-Pan-Alley melody, and Gerry's lyrics combining, as they did, Broadway and black talk ("Chains....My baby's got me locked up in chains / But they ain't the kind that you can see"), the song was not only a hit but was seized upon by a then-unknown singer-guitarist in England named John Lennon. {The Beatles later recorded it).
Page 116 - No More Records.
Carole's desire to please Gerry was evident to their friends. A demo she'd made of a song she and Gerry originally wrote for Bobby Vee, It Might As Well Rain Until September, was released as a single. It was Carole's own, solo vocal, and it rose to #22 on the charts. But having his wife as a recording artist displeased Gerry. According to Jack Keller, "Gerry told her, 'That's it - no more records.'"
Page 117 - My Secret Place
One of the most beautiful songs that Gerry and Carole ever wrote - and for the Drifters, to boot, needed a title. Carole had chosen "My Secret Place", signifying an elusive privacy; but Gerry, as homage to his beloved West Side Story, renamed it Up On The Roof.
Up On The Roof reached #5 in February of 1963; Sherry Goffin was born a month later. Carole's next hit with Gerry, One Fine Day, for the Chiffons, reached #5 three months after she delivered. The melody of the song-like that of a hit she would write a year later, Oh No Not My Baby, for Maxine Brown-is plaintive and rapturous, a cut above standard pop fare. Also, soon after Sherry's birth, Carole and Gerry wrote would be the Cookies' biggest hit, Don't Say Nothin' Bad (About My Baby).
Page 119 - Goffin fathers a love child
Carole, Gerry and the Cookies were all back in New York, recording one afternoon toward the end of November. "We were in the middle of the session-and somebody ran in and said, 'President Kennedy has been shot!' We all went into a state of shock. There was such sadness. We loved him!", says Jeanie.
Further complicating the intense emotions in the recording studio that fateful day was this fact: Jeanie was newly pregnant with Gerry's baby. There was no way that Gerry Goffin was not going to claim paternity of this love child, born to this beautiful black singer. Gerry loved West Side Story; now he and Jeanie were, symbolically, a version of the musical's forbidden lovers Tony and Maria, singing Somewhere.
Into her already eventful twenty-two years (2 daughters, 8 top hits including-Steve Lawrence's saccharine rendition of Go Away Little Girl and 4 #1 hits) was thrown this stunner: The husband she was madly in love with was proudly having a baby with another woman.
Page 120 - Carole King keeps it together
Carole kept her young marriage intact, she even sat by while Gerry-with another composer, Russ Titelman-wrote a beautiful love song, I Never Dreamed, for the Cookie's - geared to Jeanie's voice. She would stay with Gerry and write songs with him, even songs for Jeanie as a solo artist: I'm Into Something Good (which Jeanie recorded and which only achieved hit status when Herman's Hermits released it).
The Beatles arrival in the States in February 1964 looks like the match that lit the youth revolution - the moment when popular music shifted from a commercial diversion to a conduit for social change, in one great lovefest punctuated by Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! But those early Beatles were actually somewhat frostily received by young self-defined sophisticates. The peers of Carole, Joni and Carly had already staked out a "higher" musical loyalty - to Dylan and Baez - to Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles.
Page 175 - The Beatles meet their idols: Goffin & King
Carole and Gerry were the objects of the Beatles' fascination. "In England, Goffin and King were huge - they were legends," says Peter Asher. "We were crazy about them. We didn't know who they were, just the names. But they wrote all the song we loved - 'Crying In The Rain'; we were huge Everly Brothers fans.
Well before their stardom, the Beatles had covered Carole and Gerry's songs; Will You Love Me Tomorrow, Take Good Care Of My Baby and they had just recorded Chains on their debut album. Peter Asher recalls: "When the Beatles first came to America, that's who they wanted to meet: Goffin and King."
Al Aronowitz ferried Carole and Gerry to the Beatles' suite at the Warwick Hotel. "John made come-ons to Carole,' Gerry later said, 'but in a kidding way." While the media and teenyboppers lusted for John and Paul, it was Carole King from Sheepshead Bay upon whom their idols showered awe.
Page 176 - Aronowitz coaches Gerry
Al Aronowitz had a knack for befriending musical legends. Bob Dylan wrote Mr. Tambourine Man at Aronowitz's house: "sitting with my portable typewriter at my white Formica breakfast bar in a swirl of chain-lit Camels cigarrette smoke, his bony, long-nailed fingers tapping the words out and playing Marvin Gaye's Can I Get A Witness over and over for inspiration." the journalist recalls in his memoirs.
Aronowitz's friendship with Dylan and his keys to the kingdom of "deep" songcraft made him a kind of life coach for Gerry. Aronowitz used drugs to help push Gerry out of his three-minute wonders to the Other Side.
Page 179 - Tomorrow Records meets The Myddle Class
Carole, Gerry and Al Aronowitz formed a partnership, Tomorrow Records, to try and write and produce Beatles and Dylan-sounding music from talent that Aronowitz would scout for them. He found a young group that high school and CYO dances called The Myddle Class. It featured a brilliant guitarist, Rick Phillip, a gifted singer and writer, Dave Palmer, and a handsome but moderately talented bass player, Charlie Larkey.
Page 184 - The music of San Francisco
The movement started in San Francisco. Its psychedelic culture seemed to have popped out of the oven fully baked one magical day, with the same suddenness as the Beatles-borne British invasion. With the graphic designs of the suddenly flowering posters for the Fillmore and Avalon Ballroom rock concerts, for Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, the Sopwith Camel, Big Brother and the Holding Company and assorted musicians who had mystically synergized a sensual, LSD-heightened hard rock, the style was baroquely feminine in the extreme - everything swirled or sinewed.
Page 188-89 - Monterey Pop Festival 1967
At the Monterey Pop Festival the Mamas and the Papas were passing the baton to Big Brother and the Holding Company's Janis Joplin. The festival which featured Jimi Hendrix's first filmed guitar immolation, drew a glamorous young elite that seemed to have just materialized one day.
Laura Nyro performed, while the exact setlist for her is unclear, her Stoned Soul Picnic was hailed by Steve Katz with "That should be the National Anthem", while Stephen Sondheim declared: "In ecomony, lyricism and melody, it is a masterpiece." Joni considered Laura Nyro her only female peer, and Carole's hits had influenced Laura, just as Carole would be influenced by Laura's first album.
In the spring of 1967, if you walked down the street as the Young Rascals' Groovin' drifted from one of the brand new head shops, you had to agree with that dreamy song: there wasn't "anything that's bet-ter" than this golden moment.
Page 190 - Natural Woman
Though Carole and Gerry's marriage was crumbling, they would be awarded entrance into the new Dylan and Beatles led form of music by way of their Wasn't Born To Follow, a folk-rock-like melody with airly poetic lyrics. It attracted the hipness-gatekeeping Byrds, who eventually chose to record it.
Gerry had run into Jerry Wexler one day, and from his limousine window Wexler had shouted: "You and Carole should write a song called 'You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman.'" A few weeks later the pair showed up at Wexler's Atlantic office, he recalls, "they said, "Here's 'Natural Woman.' You told us to write it.'" Carole sat down at the piano and played it. Wexler recalls, "I thought - Oh, my God, is this wonderful or what?! It was a hit, I knew it."
Wexler wanted to get it to Aretha Franklin. She had been dubbed the Queen of Soul, largely as a result of her biggest hit to date, Chain Of Fools. which was tweaked by a Brill Building touch: Ellie Greenwich, who with her husband, Jeff Barry, had written Da Doo Ron Ron and Leader Of The Pack - she added the irresistible "chain, chai-ain, chaiiins in the background.
The Queen not only recorded and released it, but the song has become part of Aretha's persona, a product of her soul. For young women in the fall of 1967, Natural Woman was a watershed - a hymn to female sexuality right after the summer of love.
Page 195 - Carole King moves to Laurel Canyon
Living in California, and especially in Laurel Canyon, Carole said, around that time, "enabled me to take things as they come a lot more, without going into the type of thing that many New Yorkers will do, and as I used to do: intellectualizing everything saying, 'Why did I do this?' and 'I wonder what he meant by that?' You just don't get into that out here." "But I was so much older then; I'm younger than that now," the Byrds had sung, interpreting Dylan's My Back Pages. Like the song's narrator, Carole was dusting off the premature responsibility she'd rolled into at seventeen.
Page 201 - Carole records new album as "The City"
The four of them - Charlie Larkey on bass, Danny "Kootch" Kortchmar on guitar, Carole pumping the piano, Jim Gordon on drums - put a sophisticated gloss on a raft of new Carole-Gerry songs, three Carole-Toni songs, and two songs Carole wrote with Dave Palmer.
During the sessions that led to The City's album, Now That Everything's Been Said, "Carole would sing or play parts to Charlie and me", Danny has said, "and once we got it right, we could hear how great this record was going to be."
Page 202 - A Man Without A Dream
The album's most compelling cut was A Man Without A Dream, with Danny singing Gerry's lyrics ("It was such a good song," Danny says, "even my singing couldn't diminish its power") and with Carole's melody echoing the infectious plaintiveness of Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions.
Now That Everything's Been Said was the first album Danny had ever played on, so it seemed like a big accomplishment. But meanwhile, over in England, Danny's friend James Taylor was one-upping him.
Page 203 - James Taylor meets Peter Asher
Once in London, James dug into his jeans pockets and pulled out an address that Danny (Kortchmar) had given him: that of singer and Beatles intimate Peter Asher. Danny had met Peter several years earlier, when Danny's King Bees were touring with Peter and Gordon, Peter's duo with Gordon Waller.
Peter beheld, at the front door of his London maisonette, not Kootch, but Kootch's friend - a handsome, rangy young man bearing a demo tape. James Taylor would be the first non-Beatle produced on Apple Records.
Page 205 - Fire and Rain
Now, in the summer of 1968, in London, James and Margaret welcomed house-guests - Joel and Connie O'Brien and Richard Corey - bearing unhappy news. There was a girl, Susan Oona Schnerr, from Long Island, whom they all knew. James had had a brief romance with her when both were psychiatric patients at McLean: James and Joel had hung out with her in the Village during their Flying Machine and scag-shooting days.
The severe depression that had landed her in McLean had over the years gone unabated. Susie Schnerr had killed herself, by overdose. Joel, Connie and Richard had known this for a while, but had not told James because they thought it would dampen his spirit at a critical moment: the acquistion of his record contract.
James absorbed the shock of the news. Then, in a brooding, reflective mood, he used the unsettling fact that they'd delayed telling him to craft the opening bars (changing "Susan" to "Suzanne" for rhythm) - "Just yesterday morning they let me know you were gone.....". He called the song Fire and Rain.
The idea of Carole King casting herself as a "singer-songwriter" may have been sparked in earnest a year earlier, in the summer of 1968, when Carole first met with Lou Adler. Lou had remembered how, in the early 1960's, people in the industry loved Carole's demos so much, "I'd loan them out - and never get them back," he says. "One of the first things Lou did was give us a copy of Laura Nyro's first album, More Than A Discovery", says Charlie, "and we took it home and listened to it a lot."
Like Carole, Nyro was a young outer-borough woman writing her own Broadway - and pop-soul-influenced songs and singing them, accompanying herself on the piano rather than on the now fashionable guitar. As a teenager, Nyro's a capella group had sung the hits of the Chantels and the Shirelles, including Will You Love Me Tomorrow, which she would eventually cover; and songs on Nyro's first album, like Wedding Bell Blues and Sweet Blindness hint at Carole's influence on her.
Page 309 - Carole King plays for James Taylor
The news in Carole's crew was that Kootch's friend James Taylor had arrived in L.A. to record his second album, Sweet Baby James. Peter Asher asked Carole if she would play piano on James's new album, since James had loved the great Carole-and-Gerry hits. Carole hardly had to be persuaded; she'd heard James's Apple album and she was a "huge James fan", says Peter. After three rehearsals, she and James formed, as Charlie puts it, a "musical mutual admiration society."
James didn't just want Carole to play on his album, which she did; he wanted her to tour with him. "Carole had terrible stage fright; she was very insecure onstage," says Danny. She would have said no to others, but she couldn't refuse James.
Page 311 - Carole King performs on stage
Carole got a taste of performing on the road with James Taylor. She played piano for him, an anonymous band member. "Then James would bring her on stage and introduce her as the 'legend' who wrote Loco-Motion and Natural Woman," says Danny, "and you could see his fans going: 'She wrote that? No way!". The skepticism-turned-excitement spurred her on. "Yeah, they're my songs!' She had no problem after that."
But sometimes those performances became a humiliating trial by fire. As spring 1970 turned to summer and James became more of a phenomenon and a heartthrob (Fire and Rainwould reach #3 in August), his fans were not in the mood to put up with any interloper. "They'd boo Carole; they want to hear James," says writer Susan Braudy, who was along for many of the concerts. "But Carole would sing and play - Up On The Roof and Natural Woman - over the booing." As Joni had found with Crosby, Still and Nash, it was hard - so far, at least - to beat the power of a male superstar.
Note: Unable to locate a video of Carole singing with James in 1970 - this is one year later.
Page 311 - James Taylor superstar
By mid 1970, James Taylor was becoming a superstar. Touted a "new troubadour," he was a hauntingly romantic figure with stringy, uncombed hair, penetrating eyes under thick, straight brows, and handsome, patrician features - the whole look calling more to mind an anguished Civil War deserter than a contemporary rocker.
The effect was compounded by his brooding, tender, somehow classically American songs (his inclusion of Oh, Susannah on Sweet Baby James seemed natural, as if it extended a lineage, some of which - Rainy Day Man, Sweet Baby James; eventually You Can Close Your Eyes; later, Walking Man, Shed A Little Light, and Shower The People - contained a piercing, life-affirming sweetness. For all his shambling disaffection, there was a rock-ribbed dignity to him - a whiff of the modern-day Gary Cooper.
Page 313 - Joni Mitchell and James in New Mexico
In August - Joni flew to Tucumcari, New Mexico, where James Taylor was filming Two-Lane Blacktop. He'd been calling Toni Stern "Mama" when he'd gotten the role; now Joni was his old lady. On the set Joni knitted him a sweater vest, which he took to wearing constantly. He clearly seemed in love with Joni, Susan Braudy says, but later Joni would tell three confidantes that, as one puts it, "he was always judging her harshly; it was almost intimidating." "Joni said he was very critical of her all the time - and she couldn't take it."
Joni seems to have written This Flight Tonight about that time in New Mexico. Her "gentle and sweet" lover hurts her with 'that look, so critical," but she regrets leaving almost as soon as the plane takes off. She replays a tender moment of their watching a star in the sky between the movie set trailers and wants the pilot to 'turn this crazy bird around" so she can return to him.
Page 314 - Joni Mitchell and James Taylor in England
Joni joined James Taylor for a couple of months in England at the end of the summer. Peter Asher lived with them in a London flat. "I have a distinct memory," Peter says, "of listening to Joni play Blue, which she'd just composed on the piano." Asher thought the song (which Rolling Stone's Timothy Crouse would call beautifully mysterious and unresolved) was extraordinary. (Its references to a drug addict's "needles" and Joni's proffering a seashell to her lover - John Fischbach remembers Joni giving a seashell to James one evening in L.A. - make it fairly clear that Blue is about James.) Joni also played her newly composed A Case Of You on the dulcimer - "I thought it was just a masterpiece," Peter Asher says.
Page 315 - You Can Close Your Eyes
Joni and James's mutual infatuation was evanescent when they performed at London's Royal Albert Hall on October 28, 1970. James introduced Joni's songs like a prep school boy awed by his slightly older, more accomplished girlfriend. As Joni and James tuned their guitars, their talk seemed coyly double-entendred ("Ready when you are, James," she said; "I know....," he answered, to laughter from the audience). And when he thanked the cheering audience by saying, "You're too kind," he drove home the source of his appeal: those upper-crust manners juxtaposed with the brooding-junkie pathos. They performed a heavenly duet on You Can Close Your Eyes, which James was said to have written for Joni.
Page 316 - Carole King records a solo album
John Fischbach and his friend Andrew Berliner had built their studio, Crystal Sound, and, says John, "I said to Carole: Why don't you be a singer-songwriter like James?" John's suggestion, of course, was something Carole had already been discussing with Lou Adler. Carole recorded the album which was forthrightly named Writer.
Most of the songs were Carole-Gerry compositions. There are outright rockers like I Can't Hear You No More and the album-opening Spaceship Races. Goin' Back, with its Byrds-friendly bridge, essentially describes, through her ex-husband's words, Carole's last three years, morphing from a mah-jongg-playing, tract-house-dwelling Cadillac driver to a jam-session-ing, India-trekking Canyon chick. Eventually is Carole and Gerry's hymn for Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. The album closes with Carole singing Up On The Roof. While the other tracks have a garage band feel, in this one alone Carole and her resounding, confident piano stand at the center of the universe, pointing to the approach she will take next.
Writer was almost as much of a failure as Now That Everything's Been Said had been.
Page 323 - Carole King writes the songs for Tapestry
At some point in the summer and fall, Carole began doing something new: writing whole songs - melody andlyrics. She was becoming spiritual; her classes at Swami Satchidananda's Integral Yoga Institute, coupled with trip to India, had led her to meditation. The songs trace the course of this once conventional young woman's adjustment - with anguish, awe, and finally joy - to the new life she has made, and they celebrate in integrity of improvised "families."
In Tapestry - melodically, a Broadway-tinged story song - the narrator is a young woman looking back on an eventful past ("a tapestry of rich and royal hue").
So Far Way is the first of three songs that puzzle out a new idea of "home". She has moved clear across the country as if it were no big deal, but in 1970 people are really just two generations away from travel by animal cart. If you ask the song's question ("Doesn't anybody stay in one place anymore?") at face value, it sounds like the kind of quip uttered by common-sense housewives in Carole's childhood neighborhood.
Home Again make the same point, but more worriedly, yet Way Over Yonder seems to say: yes, a crew of renegades from dysfunctional traditional homes cancreate its own nurturing community. You've Got A Friend is a vow of loyalty, leaving no question as to the salience of post-traditional ties.
Page 324 - You've Got A Friend
Although Toni and Cynthia weren't crazy about You've Got A Friend, it did have one big fan, who accurately took the measure of its appeal, and for good reason: his own meaningful friendship with the writer. When James Taylor heard the song (which Rolling Stone's Landau would later deem "perfection"), he loved it so much that he said, "Damn! Why didn't I write that?" (He would end up recording it; it would be his only #1 hit.)
Page 325 - It's Too Late
As for the song that would be the album's monster hit: though Toni often agonized over lyrics (as Gerry had), "I wrote It's Too Late very fast, in a day," she says. Toni pointedly say that she wrote the heartfelt lyric after her love affair with James Taylor was over (he'd gone on to Joni), but then she carefully adds, "I won't say who It's Too Lateis about - I don't kiss and tell." Whoever inspired it, the lyric expresses a blithe woman's depressed, embarrassed realization that a romance she'd secretly banked on is over. On the surface she's shrugging and cool - the two of them "really did try to make it" - but the insistent internal rhymes ("inside," "died," "hide") trumpet her hidden emotion.
Page 327 - Carole King's Tapestry Soars
Tapestry was recorded in January 1971, released in early February and by June had sold a million copies. The single released from it - It's Too Late, backed with I Feel The Earth Move - hit the #1 mark, staying there for five weeks. Earth Move got almost equal airplay; both sides were hits. In July, It's Too Late went gold, and James Taylor's version of You've Got A Friend hit # 1. By now Tapestry has become the # 1 album in America; it would stay in that position for fifteen weeks.
Cynthia Weil puts it this way: "Carole spoke from her heart, and she happened to be in tune with the mass psyche. People were looking for a message, and she came to them with a message that was exactly what they were looking for, were aching for."
Page 329 - Joni Mitchell records Blue
Recorded in March 1971, when Joni Mitchell was at her most vulnerable, Blue was the album to which, appropriately, she entrusted the song she had withheld for so long, Little Green. The song is so deftly coded, in its love and relinquishment are crystal clear even while the subject is inscrutable.
Joni's Blue was in every way the counterpoint to Carole's Tapestry. Whereas Tapestry was created in a sense of communality, Blue was recorded in almost utter privacy - so "transparent" was Joni now that "if you looked at me, I would weep; we had to lock the doors to make that album." Nobody was allowed in except the backup musicians, who included Russ Kunkel, Stephen Stills and James Taylor.
Page 330 - Joni Mitchell's Blue is released
Blue was a more moderate success than Tapestry (it peaked in the Top 20 in September) but accorded Joni legend status in the rarefied world of her musician peers. After hearing that album "people were throwing themselves at Joni's feet; nobody didn't think she was fucking brilliant," says Leah Kunkel.
Indeed, Kris Kristofferson, who had just given Janis Joplin her post-humous # 1 hit Me and Bobby McGee says, "I was in awe of Joni from the I met her (at the Isle of Wight concert); I thought at one point she was Shakespeare reincarnated." Kris was so struck by the vulnerability of the songs of Blue, he urged Joni: "Please! Leave something of yourself." Danny says, "People used to burst into tears when they'd hear it; they couldn't get through it." And Russ Kunkel says that he and others had come to believe, on the basis of that album, that "Joni was as distinct a woman performer as Jimi Hendrix was a male performer and her effect on the music scene was as bold. When I heard the songs of Blue, it was the same as hearing Hey Joe or Purple Haze."
Page 334 - Joni Mitchell - For The Roses
Joni bought acerage in British Columbia, north of Vancouver, and helped build a stone house in the woods, overlooking Half Moon Bay. It was here that she would write the songs for her next album, For The Roses. Five of the songs were about James Taylor. For The Roses, takes musing account of his celebrity: she remembers how it was at the beginning; he'd slump in that way he had that, Kootch had said, made every woman fall in love with him. In See You Sometime she describes James as famous and in demand, but reminds him that she had fame first ("I tasted mine"); he had been awed by her. In Lesson In Survival, she complains about how James's "friends" protect you [and] scrutinize me" as she sank into the "damn timid" pose that was "not at all the spirit that's inside of me." Blonde In The Bleachers gives his fame the same who-wants-it? treatment that Cole Blue Steeland Sweet Fire darkly gives his addiction. With these five songs, protesting too much was Joni's best revenge; she was getting James out of her system.
Let The Wind Carry Me describes her ongoing struggle with her judgemental mother, "Mama let go now" she pleads. In Woman of Heart and Mind, she uses herself (and her secret relinquishment of the baby) to issue feminism's essential statement, a woman is whole by herself.
Page 337 - Carole King records her third album
Shortly before Molly's birth, Carole recorded her third album, Music, with Charlie, Danny, Joel, Abigail, Ralph, and James Taylor joining in again. On the cover, she's photographed smiling (her face, pregnancy-plump), granny-dressed, and shoeless at her grand piano in her Appian Way living room. Music was released at the end of 1971 and immediately rose to the top of the charts, reaching # 1 on New Year's Day 1972; its buoyant Sweet Seasons, written with Toni, became a Top 10 hit.
It's Going To Take Some Time, portrays a woman who knows she's messed up a relationship, has to learn to master the art of compromise, and is on to the next. The album's full of homage-paying - Carry Your Load channels Laura Nyro; Brother, Brother, Marvin Gaye. In Surely Carole attempts the blues; she scats in her remake of her and Gerry's Some Kind of Wonderful, she morphs into a piano bar busker on Music.
The most evocative cut is Song Of Long Ago, has a James-inspired melody, and James's la-la-laaaas -sounds like it belongs on Tapestry. Such comparisons would become her nemesis.
This was 1956. Mr. and Mrs. Ricky Ricardo had separate beds on I Love Lucy. Dissemination of information about birth control to married women was a crime in some states. Every word of Seventeen magazine was vetted by a pastor. In garment factories, union inspectors checked skirt lengths before job lots were shipped to department stores. Elvis may have been singing, Jack Kerouac writing, and James Dean's movies still being shown even after his fatal car accident, but there were few female analogues. Doris Day pluckily kept wolves at bay; the Chordettes crooned like estrogened Perry Comos. 
"The first song I'd like to do is a song about when a man becomes so involved in almighty liquour that he begins to think of it as a woman," she said, with a smile in her voice. "And he calls his bottle "Nancy Whiskey." Her real name was Roberta Joan Anderson, and her family hailed most recently from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. She had come to Toronto several months earlier, taking the train across the prairie with her art school boyfriend. Then he'd split, leaving her a painting of a moon as a goodbye-and-sorry-I-got-you-pregnant gift.
