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."
The young Anderson family (Joni Mitchell's real last name) moved around a lot, as Bill advanced - from butcher-grocer to manager - in his work for a regional supermarket chain. They lived in Fort Macleod until Roberta Joan was a year and a half, then moved to Maidstone, Saskatchewan, a village of just over four hundred residents, where the family entertained itself by listening to the Andrews Sisters' and the McGuire Sisters' mellifluous close-harmonies piped through the console radio in the mid-40's.
Page 61 - Mr. Anderson plays the trumpet
Big band horn playing was Joni's fathers' release. Frankie would come over to the Anderson house and play piano while Mr. Anderson tooted his trumpet (Leroy Anderson's A Trumpeter's Lullaby) was a favorite duet for the two of them.
Page 64 - Joni's junior choir
During province-wide music festivals, Joan (Joni), Sandy and Anne would wait their turn in the rear pew while junior choir after junior choir filed to the front, shuffled into neat rows, and, pigtails bobbing, sand "Hey, Nonny, Nonny, on yonder hill there was a maiden...." while a stout woman sternly judged the entrants.
Note: unable to find a recording of this song with those exact lyrics. Still looking......
Page 69 - Joni falls in love with music
In her tenth year (1953), Joni Mitchell fell in love with the idea of writing beautiful music. It was the majestically romantic Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganiniby Sergei Rachmaninoff that did it. Joni was in the movie theater audience for one movie that utilized it, The Story of Three Lovesand she left the theater intent on tracking down the music.
Page 76 - Joni finds "her Beatles"
Around Joni Mitchell's junior year she bought herself a $38 baritone ukulele and a Pete Seeger songbook. In truth, though, folk music wasn't inspiring her as much as scat singing. She had discovered Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, and "they were," as she has said, "my Beatles".
The coffeehouse was the Louis Riel, Saskatoon's only folk club. Walking for the first time into the dark room with it's twinkling wall lights, Joni might have felt as if a curtain had just been slashed open on her future. At top volume, the record player blared Edith Piaf singing "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" followed by a Lenny Bruce album, as coffee boy Ralph Martin manned the noisy grinder.
Page 127 - Mainstream Ascendance of Folk Music
The 1960 mainstream ascendance of folk music, by way of Joan Baez (hit album, Time cover) was actually two years in the making. The Big Bang had been the Kingston Trio's 1958 surprise #1 hit, Tom Dooley, and before that the Weavers' version of Goodnight, Irene had reached #10 in 1948.
It was through the congenial, wholesome trio that a whole generation of college students began singing Michael, Row the Boat Ashore and Kumbaya at fraternity campouts and incorporating a watered-down version of the folk ethos into their sensibility.
Page 128 - Folks Masculine Imprint
The Kingston Trio were male. Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie were male. So was Huddie Ledbetter, a.k.a. Lead Belly, who thrilled young white middle-class folk devotees by being the genuine article: a black man whose voice carried the pain of the Jim Crow South and who'd done real time on prison chain gangs. And, of course, the artist who eventually vaulted folk music into the social and cultural epicenter, essentially inventing the American counterculture - Bob Dylan - was male.
Page 128 - Female folk storytelling emerges
What was so quietly significant about the rise of folk music among North American youth in the late 1950's was that it kicked wide the door to female storytelling - and storytelling based on an exaggerated version of real, not imagined, experience (family treachery, mating and pregnancy, all larded with troubling consequences).
The new female American folksingers in the mid-1950's, were Jean Redpath, Judy Henske, Bonnie Dobson, Peggy Seeger, Carolyn Hester (whose sensual good looks paved the way for phenomenom that was Joan Baez). These women sang Child Ballads such as Barbara Allen, Maid of Constant Sorrow, Geordie and Mary Hamilton.
Page 132 - Joni takes to the stage
Joni was eager to express her creativity through music than through art - and publicly. So one day she strode up to the mic at the Louis Reil's Sunday night hootenanny. She started strumming her ukulele, she opened her mouth to sing - "and she sounded unlike anything we'd been used to hearing," D'Arcy recalls, "Everybody thought she sounded very weird and off-key. People were raising their eyebrows, like, 'This is folk music? - this is really odd.'"
Still, Joni was committed to performing, and she made her case to the two owners. They agreed to let the pretty waitress sing. Her audition yielded sharply divergent opinions. Holliday-Scott recalls, "I thought, 'Oh my God, she's awful. She's a laughingstock, this girl with this ridiculous voice.' It was so different, not mainstream; she would change her pitch a lot." But Rene Gold vehemently disagreed. He said, "Colin, I think this girl has got something. It was agreed to let Joni play for two weeks and those young people really liked her."
Now Joni was determined to improve her musicianship. "I distinctly remember telling her that anything she could do at the lower end of the guitar neck she could do higher up", recalls Shawn Phillips. "I think she was intrigued by my use of nonstandard chords that I used on The Bells of Rhymney," in which Pete Seeger later recorded.
Page 139 - Hootenannies with Joni
Soon hootenannies were set up in the auditorium at lunch hour and after classes, and Joni - in her shelf pageboy and her proper skirt and blouse - was the main performer. A teacher who was also an amateur folksinger - a man named Eric Whittred - formed a duo with her. "Ours was a very strictly off-the-cuff presentation, but she certainly had talent and a lovely voice." Whittred recalls. "Joni did a beautiful job on a Kingston Trio song, Oh, Sail Away - it moved me, and many of us. We would sing Sloop John B,Jamaica Farewell, Tom Dooley, Michael, Row the Boat Ashore, The Whiffenpoof Song, Lemon Tree and Bob Dylan's Blowin In The Wind, which had been a hit for Peter, Paul and Mary the previous summer."
Page 139 - Dylan's influence on Joni
Joni was aware of Dylan by now, though it would not be until be blared out "You got a lot of nerve, to say you are my friend...." in the opening bars of Positively 4th Street in September 1965 that it came to her, like a lightening bolt, that "'you could write about anything. It was a different kind of song than I had ever heard."
Page 151 - Joni answers Neil Young with The Circle Game
Joni was still living in the boardinghouse around Christmas and six weeks away from her due date. As the new year, 1965, loomed, Joni's lugubrious eight-months girth rendered her unable to perform in clubs. Penniless, she went to live in Vicky Taylor's aerie over the Lickin' Chicken restuarant.
There, Vicky played Joni her friend Neil Young's song Sugar Mountain, and the song's premise - that Winnipeg boy felt so unhappily "old" at nineteen - led Joni to begin to write a kind of "answer" song about the value of age. Months later, she would pick up the song again and complete it. It would be called The Circle Game.
Note: Neil Young had suffered polio during the same epidemic that had felled Joni.
Page 152 - Joni gives birth to Kelly (Little Green)
Joni has said that she was fiercely judged by the staff in the charity ward at Toronto General Hospital. "The time of her birth was traumatic for me. That's why I could identify with the women who were sent to the Magdalene Laundries" - the punitive Irish home for "wayward" girls that she wrote about so stirringly in her song of the same name.
On February 19,1965, Joni gave birth to a healthy girl (Kelly Dale Anderson). As she explained in the wrenching song Little Green (sometimes, early on, she forthrightly sang the words as 'Kelly Green'), written about the birth: "Call her green for the children who've made her".
Chuck and Joni met in March 1965 at the Penny Farthing, one of the higher-profile Toronto folk clubs. Joni Anderson was booked in the upstairs room, as the minor act; Chuck Mitchell had star billing downstairs. This was his first Canadian appearance; his repertoire consisted of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill songs (they wrote the Bobby Darin hit: Mack the Knife).
Someone at the club knew that Joni had been fiddling with Mr. Tambourine Man and said, "That song you've been trying to learn? There's an American downstairs and he's singing it." Joni took Chuck to task for mangling Dylan's work. "He'd rewritten some of it, and badly, too," she said, "and so we immediately got kind of into a conflict." Still, she consented to take a walk with him in a nearby park. Chuck says, "We got together after the stroll, in Joni's narrow, cramped room, with it's single bed by the window."
Page 211 - Joni Anderson and Chuck Mitchell get engaged
Very soon after their meeting Joni Anderson took the train across the Canada - U.S. border; Chuck met her at the station and drove her to his home. He proposed within thirty-six hours. They fixed on a a June wedding date, setting out for club engagements and to meet each other's parents in the interim. Chuck wanted them to sing as a duo; Joni assented.
She called him Charlie. She was Joni - "and with a circle over the i when she wrote it; that was very important," he says. The practice of intimates calling her Joan came later; "If I called her 'Joan' - or especially 'Roberta Joan.' which I did when I wanted to piss her off - she'd say, 'Cut that shit out!'" Joni never talked about her polio to Chuck. "She did what she had to do. There's a line from a David Blue song: 'So Lucy, so easy she goes by, she moves on earth and sky.....': that was Joni. She not only looked great, she moved well."
Page 214 - Joni and Chuck Mitchell marry
Joni and Chuck were married on a June afternoon in 1965 in a small ceremony in the tree-dotted front yard of Chuck's parents' home in the countryside north of Detroit, by an Episcopalian preacher standing on an elm stump they'd rolled into place for the occasion. Joni made her own dress.
In those early weeks after her marriage, Joni would often go with Chuck to the Chess Mate, the main folk club in Detroit. Quiet, watchful Joni did not perform - at least that's how Eric Andersen perceived her. "She was just a fan in the audience: hanging out and listening, and impressed by all these people from New York, wanting to meet them," says Andersen, who was a highly regarded young singer songwriter from Greenwich Village.
Eric was a tall, classically handsome man - his chiseled features not unlike Neil Young's and James Taylor's - and Joni listened avidly to his Miss Lonely, Are You Blue, her own songs-in-progress brewing in her mind.
Page 218 - Joni Mitchell performs and Tom Rush takes notice
Joni Mitchell moved from Chess Mate listener to performer. "Joni came in with her husband and asked Morrie Widenbaum if she could do a set," remembers Tom Rush, who was the featured performer that week. "Morrie told her she could. So she stood up and sang her own songs. She was a slip of a girl: blond, intense. She was probably nervous. The songs blew me away - their poetry, their visual imagery."
One of the songs she sang was "Urge For Going" and Tom wanted to put it his repertoire. He struck up a friendship with Joni and Chuck, who invited him to stay at their apartment when he played the Chess Mate. Almost simultaneously Joni learned open tunings from Eric Anderson, who'd also become a friend of hers and Chuck's. Apart from liking the resonant sound of the open tunings, Joni found that the technique relieved her polio-affected "clumsy" left hand; with open tunings, fretting the chords is considerably easier on that hand. Bu the fall of 1965, she had a unique playing style and two handsome young male mentors.
Page 222 - The Circle Game is born
Tom Rush had been singing Urge For Going all over Cambridge, and his fans loved it. He was eager for some more of Joni's songs. "I remember asking her, 'What else do you have? What else do you have?' So she sent me a reel-to-reel tape. It was a tape of nice songs, and then at the end she says into the mic: 'This is a new song. I've just finished it. It's awful. I don't even know why I'm bothering you with it.' And it's The Circle Game.'" Rush phoned her right away. He would not only record the song; he would use the song as the title of his 1968 album.
Page 229 - Joni's lyrics break tradition
During Joni's time with Joy and Larry, a young musician from Colorado named Michael Durbin was playing in a group at the club, the Trauma. "Michael was a very dear man - charismatic, charming, boyish, and very outdoorsy: a breath of fresh air," Joy recalls. Joni and Michael started spending time with each other. They looked "dashing" together.
Joni wrote the bittersweet Michael From Mountains about new lovers ambling through a shut-down city on a rainy Sunday. The song is traditional - Michael will leave, while she will wait; but it's conservatism is the baseline for an ascending series of songs that will break tradition: Next will be a woman musing about wisdom and freedom (Both Sides Now), then living on her own, risks and all (Chelsea Morning), and, finally, achieving the same romantic power as a man (Cactus Tree).
Page 235 - Joni makes a name for herself as a songwriter
Dave Van Ronk was holding forth at the Angel's bar, waxing proud and protective of the girl he'd met as part of Chuck-and-Joni at the Chess Mate. He would soon record Both Sides Now, renaming it Clouds, retrofitting its feminine mulling of "rows and flows of angel hair and ice cream castles in the air" to his sandpaper growl.
Joni was suddenly making a name for herself as a songwriter. In January, country-western star George Hamilton IV had an improbable hit with Urge For Going; a month later Ian and Sylvia recorded The Circle Game, as would Buffy Sainte-Marie, who would also imminently record Joni's newly written Song To A Seagull.
Page 236 - Joni's light and melodic music
Joni and Roy Blumenfeld took a walk and talked about their shared love of music and art. They wound up in Joni's apartment, and, as was her standard gesture, she played Roy her compositions: Little Green and Both Sides Now, as well as the never-to-be-recorded Go Tell the Drummer Man. "I was listening to a lot of R&B and Motown at the time - I Heard It Through The Grapevine, Mustang Sally," Roy says, "so I was used to macho music; Joni's music was light and melodic and different, but it straddled so many forms. Musically, I was enamored - her music was more original than Dylan's."
Page 237 - Tin Angel
Joni and Roy spent most of the summer of 1967 together. They danced to the Temptations Beauty Is Only Skin Deep and I Want A Love I Can See on the painted floor of Roy's small, $850-a-month East Village loft. They had dinner at Emilio's, an inexpensive Italian restuarant on Sixth Avenue, where, in it's tree-swept garden, umbrellaed tables teetered on a pebbled ground, and young couples felt sophisticated.
They frequented the Tin Angel (the sad song she wrote about finding love "in a Bleecker Street cafe." which she titled Tin Angel, is likely about Roy). "I was crazy in love with Joan Mitchell," Roy says today. "The way I felt about her....it scared me, because I felt I was going to go into this spiral crazy love." Joni seemed to reciprocate Roy's feelings.
In August, Roy's girlfriend returned from France and Roy told Joni he had to stop seeing her. Devastated by the news, Joni sat sobbing at the bar at the Tin Angel. But a very consequential silver lining would emerge that night, by way of one of Roy's best friends: Al Kooper.
Page 238 - A late night call to Judy Collins
Consoling Joni at the bar of the Tin Angel for three hours was Al Kooper, the Blue's Project keyboardist, lead singer, and composer. Kooper was famous in recording circles; two years earlier, his inspired organ-playing on Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone had done much to make the song the marvel it was held to be.
Al was crashing at Judy Collin's apartment; the established folksinger was a kind of big sister to young rockers. After last call, he walked Joni home and she invited him up to hear her songs. "Her songs were incredible and totally original....She would finish one, and I would say: more, more. One song especially killed me. Michael from Mountains. I thought it would be great for Judy. Even though it was the middle of the night, he decided to call Judy Collins and tell her about his discovery.
Page 239 - Judy invites Joni to Newport
Jac Holzman had discovered Judy at the Village Gate one night, and, defying the "she's-just-another-Baez-clone" naysayers, signed her to his Elektra Records. After she recorded her debut Maid Of Constant Sorrow, Judy was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She rebounded and recorded four more albums for Elektra - the latest, In My Life, featured her deeply felt version of the Beatles hit of that name, as well as the art song Suzanne, by her friend Leonard Cohen, who was about to release his own Songs of Leonard Cohen.
Collins was searching for a few last songs for her album-in-progress, Wildflowers, which would include two Leonard Cohen songs, Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye and Sisters of Mercy. So, when Al woke her up, she was receptive. In a few hours Judy would be driving to Newport for the first day of the folk festival, "I asked her to take Joni in her car with her to Newport, listen to Joni sing her songs on the ride, and see if she could find a spot on the bill for her," Kooper says today. Judy agreed to do so.
Page 240 - Joni at Newport Folk Festival
After Joni had arrived at the Newport festival grounds, Judy - who had by now fallen in love with Both Sides Now, felt deeply committed to getting Joni on stage. An obstruction materialized in the form of Joan Baez. Using her considerable influence, the matriarch had Joni barred from the schedule, presumably fearing that she would steal the thunder.
At this point Judy - who was known as one tough lady - stepped in and told Mrs. Baez, "If Joni doesn't perform, then I won't perform and Leonard (Cohen) won't perform." By dint of Judy's threat, Joni got onstage at Newport.
Joni was riveted by Leonard Cohen. As she would later describe it ( in That Song About the Midway), in one of her most memorable lines, Cohen "stood out like a ruby in a black man's ear."
Page 241 - Leonard Cohen's influence on Joni Mitchell
Joni embarked upon a love affair with Leonard Cohen. Although their romance was short-lived, its influence was among the most important in her career. In fact, no brief relationship in Joni's life produced as many songs - and so many of her better songs - as did her few-weeks-long romance with Cohen.
In Rainy Night House: Joni's image of falling "into a dream" on Cohen's mother's "small white bed" with each of them, in turn, awakening to watch the other sleep, describes the awe of two self-transforming people, each seeking anchor in a lover who is tenderly exotic.
In The Gallery: she slyly explains the reason for the brevity of their relationship - Cohen's womanizing - in the consciousness of an impressed innocent who nonetheless know that only a fool would tolerate such behavior.
And it is Leonard Cohen who is reliably believed to be at least half of the inspiration for what may be one of her best songs, A Case Of You: "I could drink a case of you and still be on my feet".
Page 242 - Both Sides, Now
After the Newport festival, Judy Collins would record both Michael from Mountains and Both Sides Now for Wildflowers. (She would also release Chelsea Morning as a single in 1969).
When Both Sides Now was finally released as a single in November 1968, it sold a million copies. [ The record has since been entered into the Grammy Hall of Fame ] Judy's version of Both Sides Now became to women in their twenties in 1968 what My Way would be to males: a kind of personal anthem.
Both Sides Now was ultimately recorded by a list of singers that include Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and Willie Nelson.
Page 244 - Joni Mitchell meets David Crosby
While her new manager, Elliot Roberts, was trying to get Joni a record contract - she had flown down to Coconut Grove, Florida, to perform at a club called the Gaslight South. She knew the regular performers, including a seventeen-year-old blues singer named Estrella Berosini, the daughter of a Czech trapeze artist. Estrella was belting out Bessie Smith and Lightnin' Hopkins at the Gaslight, alternating sets with Joni, who was trilling "I had a king in a tenement castle..." - it was a contrast.
Bidding his time in the Grove was David Crosby, who'd just been kicked out of the Byrds [by his own design, he told people]. Estrella told Crosby to listen to Joni's songs and by the end of the evening he was not only in love with Joni's singing but with Joni.
Page 247 - Crosby moves Joni to L.A.
One day during the idyll, a love-struck David Crosby approached his new kid-confidante, Estrella, and thrust a piece of paper - a poem that Joni had written him - in her face. "He was practically in tears. He said: 'Look at this - it's in perfect iambic pentameter! My career is winding down and hers is taking off! I'm so in love! I'm more in love with her than anyone I ever met before. What am I gonna do?"
What Crosby ended up doing was ditching his plan to sail around the world. Instead (as Joni would soon put it in the song she wrote about him, The Dawntreader, "Leave your streets behind, he said, come to me." In other words: He would take her to L.A. and produce her first album.
Page 248 - The Cactus Tree
With a song, Cactus Tree, that Joni wrote around the time she was leaving New York for Los Angeles, she offered a guideline for the new challenge: women would keep their hearts "full and hollow, like a cactus tree." She invokes sailor David in the first verse of the third-person-narrated song; mountain-climbing Michael Durbin in the second; Chuck in the third; and others throughout [Roy is the "drummer"]. Her narrator is not suffering Marcie-like obsession when these men are absent; rather (emphasis added), "She will love them when she sees them."
Page 274 - Joni Mitchell's first album - Song to a Seagull
Joni recorded her first album, Joni Mitchell, which, in subsequent pressings, came to be known as Song To A Seagull, in the first weeks of 1968. David Crosby had himself named producer of the album; Joni termed him its "conservationist" because he held the line against those who might complain that as she put it, she'd "had a whole paintbox and used only brown." In reality Joni was in control of her product, an unusually nervy move for a newbie on her maiden voyage with a major record label. She kept the album acoustic and intimate: just Joni and her guitar and piano. The album may have suffered from the spareness, for it had an astringent forlornness and never got past #189 on the Billboard chart.
Page 275 - Veiled Snippets of Joni Mitchell's life
The songs introduced listeners to veiled snippets of this still very unknown singer's life. In "Part One [A side]: I Came to the City" there unfolded, in this order, her marriage-gone-wrong to Chuck in I Had A King; her affair with Michael Durbin in Michael From Mountains; the joyous Night In The City, her touche' to the small-minded moralists who'd looked on the Yorkville folksingers (including that poor, pregnant one) as degenerate hippies; and, finally, with Marcie and Nathan LaFraneer, her testimony to the trials of a young woman alone in Manhattan.
She named the B side "Part Two: Out of the City and Down to the Seaside," making her meeting of David in Florida into a kind of deliverance - which, in career terms, it was. Cactus Tree is the stem winder on that side.
Page 277 - Graham Nash is warned
Graham Nash was, as he says, "a poor man's son," from Blackpool, England. When he was fourteen, he'd wanted nothing more than to use his voice and guitar to make others feel like he felt when he listened to the Everly Brothers. He and his friend Allan Clarke had formed the Hollies and, with the group, were part of the British Invasion. Bus Stop and Carrie-Anne were more-than-likable hits - the former, dark; the latter, fetching - in 1966 and 1967, the twilight of formula English pop.
Knowing they'd be in the same city, David Crosby had given Graham (they'd met through Cass Elliot) advance word on Joni. "He'd said, 'Watch out for this woman' - in a good way, that she was very special and very beautiful," Graham recalls.
Page 278 - Graham Nash was smitten
Joni wooed the already smitten Graham with her songs. "She played fifteen songs, almost her entire first record, and a couple of different ones, too," Graham says. "By the time she got through Michael from Mountains and I Had A King, I was gone. I had never heard music like that."
Graham returned to England, but on the basis of transatlantic counsel from Mama Cass, he began thinking of quitting the Hollies, moving to L.A., and trying to launch himself as a solo act. He had already written the bouncy, quite wonderful Marrakesh Express.
Page 279 - Joni Mitchell opens her home
In July, Graham moved to L.A. and moved in with Joni at her new house in the Canyon, a romantic aerie home with wide plank floors, broad-paned leaded windows, and wood-beamed ceilings at 8217 Lookout Mountain. "We were pretty much terrified of a deep relationship," Graham says, but they slipped into one anyway.
One night, shortly after Graham moved in, David Crosby and Stephen Stills came over to Joni's. The ex-Byrd and the Springfield member had been spending days writing and singing together. For all his rock-bad-boy panache, David was a folkie at heart; his bottom tenor was luminous. As for Stills, it was his scratchy, bluesy voice that had made the Springfield's For What It's Worth a radical political battle cry.
Page 280 - Crosby, Stills and Nash harmonize
Stephen had penned a song, You Don't Have to Cry, for Judy Collins, whose high-powered career was pulling his macho nose out of joint. "In the morning, when you rise," the song asked, "Are you thinkin' of telephones / And managers and where you got to be at noon?" (Stills's Suite: Judy Blue Eyes would be his swan song to her.)
Both Crosby and Stills had heard kudos for Nash's high harmony, but they'd never tried to sing with him. Sitting around Joni's living room, getting high, Stills and Crosby sang the first bar of the new song: Crosby the tenor, Stills the alto. Nash asked, "Would you sing that again?" Stills and Crosby repeated the bar. Nash listened intently and then chimed in, producing a straining, poignant slightly sour top note that lifted the song to an ecstatic new dimension. "All four of us - the three of us fellows and Joan - knew! It was a truly amazing moment," Graham recalls.
Crosby, Stills and Nash would become a phenomenon - three stars of three different groups, each contributing beautiful songs (Stills's two for Judy Collins; David's rich-hippie dreamscape Wooden Ships and his elegy for Bobby Kennedy's murder, Long Time Gone; Graham's Marrakesh Express and his ode to his domesticity with Joni, Our House) to their eponymous album, sung in their piercing harmony.
Page 281 - Joni Mitchell writes about her old man
Joni and Graham would race each other to the piano after morning breakfasts at Art's Deli in Studio City. "It was an intense time," Graham has said. "Who's going to fill up the space with their music first? We were two very creative writers living in the same house, and it was an interesting clash: 'I want to get as close to you as possible.' 'Let me alone to create!'"
Those songs of Joni's that are clearly or presumably about life with Graham reflect that push-pull of intimacy, in lyric styles ranging from the biblical reference ("He would read to her / Roll her in his arms / And give his seed to her," in the achingly lovely Blue Boy"), to Nashville-worthy wit ("But when he's gone, me and them lonesome blues collide / The bed's too big, the frying pan's too wide." in My Old Man").
Joni did not tell Graham about her baby right away. "When you're wooing a new lover, you don't say, 'By the way, I've got this kid I gave up for adoption.'" But when she did broach the subject, she spoke of the pain of the "shame and guilt" and of the "rejection" she knew she would have faced from her parents had they known about the birth. Joni began to spot her daughter at music festivals. "At concerts, she would see a little girl's face, and she would wonder," says a friend.
The first Kelly sighting was at the Big Sur Folk Festival. "We thought we saw her daughter," says Graham. "There was a sound check before dinner. We lined up to get our food. And I remember this young-eight or nine-year-old blonde girl in line, waiting to go to dinner. The little girl said, 'Who are you?' Joni said, 'I'm Joni Mitchell.' And the little girl said, 'No, you're not; I'mJoni Mitchell.' And then Joan looked at me - it was one of those strange, Twilight Zone things - and then the little girl disappeared.
Page 285 - Joni Mitchell's Clouds
Joni began work on her second album, Clouds, in early 1969. The confrontational self-possession was almost groundbreaking, "almost" because, by now, Laura Nyro had raised the bar for female confessional songwriting. Her Eli and the Thirteenth Confession and imminent New York Tendaberry were tender, frantic operas, full of leaps and hints and dream shards.
Two of Joni's songs on Clouds were for Leonard Cohen - That Song About The Midway and The Gallery. She added her most iconic songs - Chelsea Morning and as last track Both Sides Now. Her mournful Songs For Aging Children would soon be included in the Arthur Penn-directed antiwar film version of Alice's Restaurant.
Page 286 - Joni Mitchell meets James Taylor
A Carnegie Hall concert on February 1, 1969, announced Joni as a celebrity. At her next concert, in Cambridge a month later, a lanky, handsome unknown, with deep-set eyes, long brown hair, and a thin moustache opened for her. He played a song he'd written, Something In The Way She Moves, and when he got to the words "my troubled mind," his nasal-voiced melancholy hinted at a real troubled mind, though his well-bred manner belied all his brooding and slumping. His name was James Taylor, and he was back in America, after making his first Apple album. James came back to Joni's dressing room and said hello. But she was involved with Graham Nash, and he with Margaret Corey.
Page 288 - Joni Mitchell and the boys ready for Woodstock
Crosby, Stills and Nash had cut their album, and the atmosphere in the studio had been giddy. "It was scary; once we knew what we had, you could not pry us apart with a crowbar," Crosby has said. "Joni was one of the boys," Graham says. "She would have picked up a basketball and shot hoops. It wasn't that we were in a club that she needed inviting to. It all came naturally."
In mid-August, Joni and Crosby, Stills and Nash (now with Neil Young) flew to New York to appear at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, and for her booking on the prestigious Dick Cavett Show the night after the festival. By now she had opened for the boys at several packed concerts, and the huge fan reaction had proved that three (now four) male rock stars were exponentially more charismatic than one female folksinger.
Woodstock would feature the most glamorous top acts: Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Richie Havens, Jimi Hendrix (who would close it with the most dramatic Star-Spangled Banner), and many more.
Page 290 - Joni Mitchell writes Woodstock
As Joni, Graham, David, Stephen, and Neil were preparing to fly to New York, the Bethel town elders and Yasgur's neighbors were angrily hectoring Yasgur to give back the money and keep the hippies from over-running their orderly town. But Yasgur held firm to his agreement, even as reports shot through the news that 800,000 people - sixteen times the original maximum estimate - were on their way there.
Joni wanted to perform, but Elliot and David Geffen were fearful for her safety. Besides, even if she got to the festival safely, would she get back in time for the Cavett show, the next night? The festival had already started; the round-the-clock performances were a half day or more behind schedule; traffic was blocked for twenty miles; many festival goers had left their cars on the highway or sides of the streets and were walking. The stars were being airdropped in by army helicopter.
The boys hired a small plane to fly them into the festival; Joni went to Geffen's apartment and watched it on TV. "The deprivation of not being able to go," she has said, "provided me with an intense angle on Woodstock." That longing showed up in the song she wrote.
Page 293 - Someone's Old Lady
Back in L.A., Joni opened for her boys at the Greek Theatre. The Los Angeles Times critic called Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's performance "a triumph of the first order" and said that Joni Mitchell's performance had been "overwhelmed" by theirs. She may have been beginning to wonder: What was the price of being someone's old lady?
Many young women (especially, it seemed, in Laurel Canyon) personified a glamorous new femininity - a kind of arty - sensual, esoterically spiritual chick for whom the coolest men had lust and awe for. There was Annie Burden, Trina Robbins and Estrella Berosini who Joni turned into her Ladies of the Canyon, according a verse to each.
On the other hand, medieval courtliness had its blowback: When you were someone's old lady, a piece of you belonged to your old man - and he was always coming out ahead, because he wasa man. David Crosby was madly in love with Christine Hinton again; he elegized her as Guinnevere (though one chorus of the song had been written for Joni), but still, he dominated her. Before long, Joni would muse aloud to a confidant: was she an artist - or a Crosby, Stills and Nash groupie?
Page 295 - Tragedy strikes Joni Mitchell's circle
September 30, 1969, the day that Crosby, Stills and Nashwent gold - tragedy struck their circle. Christine Hinton got behind the wheel of David's VW bus to take her two cats to the veterinarian. As she maneuvered onto the highway, one of the cats escaped the arms of her friend, who was sitting in the passenger seat. The cat pounced on Christine, sending her into a collision with a school bus; Christine was killed.
"Want to go sailing?" David asked Graham. Christine had been cremated, and David wanted to toss her ashes into the ocean from the deck of the Mayan. "I had never been sailing in my life," says Graham, "but I knew David was fragile and decided to stick close by him." They flew to his boat in Fort Lauderdale and planned on sailing it back to L.A.
Joni boarded the Mayan in Jamaica. Also aboard was folksinger Bobby Ingram and his wife Ronee Blakley. Ronee was a girl from Idaho who, on the strength of hearing Joan Baez's Barbara Allen, had bolted for a creative life in California. The trip was like the group's song Wooden Ships come to life - hippie superstars huddled together, alone of the vast sea with their dreams and their body heat.
Page 297 - Ladies Of The Canyon is released
Ladies of the Canyon was released in March 1970, and it was shot through with idealism and idealization. Henry Lewy again engineered the spare album (with Joni actually in charge), which contained the title cut, and her two odes to Graham - Willy (but with the roles reversed: in the song, the woman is the needier partner) and the haunting Blue Boy. Conversation and The Arrangement - as literate as Sondheim, as so many of her songs seemed to be - both describe a sensitive girl's affair with a prosperous man who has a superficial wife. For Free, puts a halo on the shabby "one-man band by the quick lunch stand" while Joni guiltily notes musical fame.
Joni's big hit from this album (only one of four Top 40 hits in her career), Big Yellow Taxi, was written during her and Graham's trip to Hawaii. "They paved paradise, put up a parking lot" was Joni Mitchell at her Tin Pan Alley best. Woodstock, her lovely Rainy Night House for Leonard, and her tuneful Morning Morgantown - quaint Canada Joni - round out the album. The last cut is The Circle Game, finally recorded in her own voice.
Page 301 - Nash gets a telegram from Joni Mitchell
A few days later, Graham Nash was laying a new kitchen floor in the Lookout Mountain house when the doorbell rang. It was Western Union. Joni's old man took the telegram from Greece, tore it open, unfolded the piece of paper with its pasted strips of jagged type, and beheld a single sentence: "If you hold sand too tightly, it will run through your fingers." Graham's heart sank. "I knew right away - it was over."
That night, Graham sat down at Joni's piano and wrote Simple Man, with straightforward lyrics: "I have never been so much in love and never hurt so bad at the same time." In answer to the worry (and accusation) that Joni had voiced, he said "I just want to hold you, I don't want to hold you down." But perhaps at this time in her life Joni Mitchell was simply unholdable. And that was a new thing for a young woman to be.
Page 302 - Joni Mitchell escapes fame in a cave
Joni moved into Cary Raditz's cave in Matala and stayed for five weeks, feeling the addictive infactuation with the primitive hippie expat life. "To me it was a lovely life, far better than being middle-class in America," she would later tell an interviewer. Of her enthrallment with him, Cary says, "You'll have to ask her why she was attracted to outlaws." She cheerfully acknowledged (in Carey and California) that he was "a mean old daddy," and a "red red rogue," and "the bright red devil who kept her in that tourist town."
Page 303 - Joni Mitchell jams with Taj Mahal
Joni was the guest of some of these "pretty people", and, with them, she "went to a party down a red dirt road," where, even in their rusticated otherwordliness, they were reading Rolling Stone and Vogue to stay connected to their publicity. But it was through sheer serendipity that she stumbled upon Taj Mahal (whose Corinna was the second most played song on the island that season). Hearing what she though was Taj Mahal's record wafting from inside a stone finca, she knocked on the door - and there he was, in the flesh.
They jammed together, and she would pay him homage in A Bird That Whistles on her 1988 Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm album.
Page 304 - Joni Mitchell and James Taylor begin a romance
In late July, Joni returned to Mariposa. The festival's steely director Estelle Klein had also managed to lure James Taylor to the event. James was now a star, on the basis of his second album, Sweet Baby James, and its hit single, Fire and Rain.
Joni had met James briefly the year before, in Cambridge, but now at Mariposa they began a romance. Peter Asher, who was there with James, thought the pairing inevitable, and so did others. "I think they saw a lot of themselves in each other" is how drummer Russ Kunkel puts it. "Both singer-songwriters, tall, handsome/beautiful, soulful, and talented."
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.
