Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (18 page)

• • •

Unsupportable pregnancy leapt the centuries and the ocean as a pressing issue for women in folk music. Betsy Minot, who worked in the Boston/ Cambridge folk clubs and formed the folkie-girl best-friendship with Joan Baez and Debbie Green, remembers how dangerous and harrowing it was to get a safe abortion in the late 1950s and early 1960s, even if, as she was, you were privileged and connected. Dave Van Ronk, whom Dylan had anointed the “king” of MacDougal Street, remembers, during that time, the girls who hung out at the Caricature pulling each other aside for nervous “consultations” about, Van Ronk rightfully inferred, pregnancy worries.

But to be pregnant and unmarried in midwestern Canada in the early 1960s incited far more terror than to bear that burden in worldly Boston or Manhattan. In the early months of 1963, Joni Anderson and the other women at the Louis Riel watched stridently bohemian D'Arcy lose her cool and start to grow panicked and flustered over her imminent fate as an unwed mother. “It was all shame, shame, shame,
double
shame, to be pregnant and not married,” D'Arcy recalls. “It was just awful to ‘get caught' by pregnancy. Somehow we thought, with the wishing and pull-it-out method, we'd never get caught. Abortions were too dangerous. You'd hear stories from girls in our circle—a couple of them had frightening illegal abortions: you'd go in and there'd be this dirty old cot. Three doctors owned our coffeehouse—and they were from more-forward-thinking England—but even
they
weren't going to help me! Although one of them did give me a bottle of saline solution and said, ‘This might do something,' and I remember standing in the bathroom and then, in a flash, thinking, ‘I can't handle this!' and flushing it down the toilet.” As the weeks went by, the young women in the Riel—Joni included—noticed, with anxious sympathy, D'Arcy growing more desperate and struggling into pregnancy-disguising girdles, a sight that drove home the mores of their provincial community. In Canada in the early to mid-1960s, Joni would later say, “the scandal [of unwed pregnancy] was so intense. The main thing at the time was to conceal it. A daughter could do nothing more disgraceful. It ruined you in a social sense. You have no idea what the stigma was. It was like you murdered somebody.”

During these months Joni was changing her persona. She was now wearing her hair long and straight—“She was a very nice little waitress who looked like a hippie; she wore furry hats and what I thought of as bag-lady clothes,” the club's co-owner Colin Holliday-Scott recalls. “She had contempt for me because I was so straight and conservative, a Perry Como fan. She had attitude.” In this freshly bohemian guise, “Joni used to come to my apartment, which was above a plumbing shop,” D'Arcy recalls, “and once she painted a whole wall with a tree with triangle leaves, each with a different poetic saying.”

But Joni was more eager to express her creativity through music than through art—and publicly. So one day she strode up to the mic at the Louis Riel'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 isn't folk music—this is really odd.'”

Still, Joni was committed to performing, and she made her case to D'Arcy's boyfriend, the club's co-manager Rudy Hinter. Hinter asked Colin Holliday-Scott and Rene Gold if they would give Joni a chance to pinch-hit in an emergency. The two owners agreed to listen to the pretty waitress sing and then consider it.

Joni's 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.” Within weeks, featured entertainers Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee sent word through their manager that they would be one week late for their scheduled engagement. Rudy and D'Arcy pushed to allow Joni to fill in, and Rene Gold was in their corner. Holliday-Scott recalls, “I said, ‘You're all mad!' but Rudy was so keen on it. So, though I had great reservations about Joni, I ended up saying, ‘All right, if you think so, I'll let her sing for the two weeks.'” To his surprise, during the November 5 to 14 engagement, “the crowd received her much better than I thought they would. Those young people
really
liked her.” From then on—spring and summer 1963—when a featured performer couldn't make it, either Joni Anderson, paid in tips alone, or a local group called the Nomads would substitute.

Through these sporadic evenings in which she doubled as entertainer, Joni was developing a following, and she was determined to improve her musicianship. “Joni wanted to play better,” recalls Shawn Phillips, a featured performer at the Riel. “I distinctly remember telling her that anything she could do at the lower end of the guitar neck she could do higher up. I think she was intrigued by my use of nonstandard chords” on his signature “The Bells of Rhymney,” in which Pete Seeger embellished and set to music the words of a coal-miner friend of Dylan Thomas, yielding a song—

—that was typical of the romantic, half- or faux-archaic songs that were then so popular.

Joni has said she was fascinated by Phillips. “He was the first person I'd ever known who had written a song. For some reason that was really intriguing to me, really exotic.” Joni's awe at the new world she was in was not lost on Phillips. “Joni was curious,” Shawn says. “There was that glint in her eye—she wasn't asleep at the wheel, like most inhabitants of a small town are. She had the sense that many young people who grow up in the stifling ambience of rural communities have—that there was certainly something
more
to the world than Saskatoon.”

Wearing a veil, a long white wedding gown—and an extremely tight girdle to hide her three-month pregnancy—D'Arcy Case married Rudy Hinter in a proper ceremony in a high-vaulted local Anglican church on May 11, 1963. Joni was a wedding guest. A special entertainment was built into the ceremony. Just before D'Arcy walked down the aisle, from the balcony two soaring-voiced young male Negro singers stood and delivered a stirring hymn in the formal timbre and phrasing that recalled Paul Robeson but with a folk and gospel undertone. The singing wedding guests were Joe Gilbert, a tenor, and Eddie Brown, a baritone—two very handsome young men in the Harry Belafonte mold, from California's Bay Area. They were wearing, as they did in their performances at the Riel and other clubs, matching small-shouldered jackets with skinny lapels. In the elite world of black folksingers (of which Josh White was king) the pair—billed as Joe & Eddie and possessed of a chart hit, “There's a Meetin' Here Tonight”—were the strongest comers. For years they had been favorites at campus parties at the University of California in their native Berkeley; then they had played San Francisco's legendary Hungry i. As their discoverer and producer Gene Norman, of Crescendo Records, put it in the liner notes to their first album, “They appeal to every age and musical preference group…The teenage ‘Top 40' fan, the college crowd, the ethnic folknik, the gospel fan, the old-timers who simply enjoy good old two-part harmony—Joe and Eddie reach them all.” They had just appeared on television's
The Danny Kaye Show.

Of the two, Joe—compact, honey-skinned, particularly handsome—was the ladykiller. With his furrowed brow and his sensual lips, set in a generous jaw, he radiated intensity. Joni turned her head up to the balcony as they sang and noticed him. Afterward, at the reception, she and Joe moved toward each other and began talking. They made a striking pair—two beautiful, trim, poised young people of counterpoint complexions. They did more talking at the Louis Riel that week, between Joni's bobbing and weaving among the tables with her trays full of steamed coffee and sandwiches, and Joe's spirited duetting with Eddie on “[They Call the Wind] Mariah” and “Children, Go Where I Send Thee.”

Joe and Eddie were staying with D'Arcy and Rudy, who now had a large home with a pool. The Hinters played host to the club's black singers, who felt uncomfortable in the nearly milk-white outpost. (When, originally, D'Arcy had driven Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee to the best hotel in town, the medieval-castle-like Bessborough, where she expected them to check in, the two snapped at the naïve little white girl, “You don't know
nothing.
We can't stay
here.
” “They looked like they were about to be lynched,” recalls D'Arcy. After that, Terry and McGhee stayed at D'Arcy and Rudy's house whenever they played the Riel. So did folksinger Len Chandler, who came to Saskatoon with his white wife, Nancy, and didn't want to be hassled.)
*

Joe and Eddie stayed with the newly married Hinters, but not out of fear of standing out in an all-white hotel. “They had none of that old-school attitude: acting so polite, being scared of the white authorities,” says D'Arcy. Rather, they did so for comfort and camaraderie. “Both of them were married, but their wives didn't come with them on the road”; staying at a private home and getting home-cooked meals was a perk. The two were different. “Eddie was a big softie, but Joe was arrogant—
very
arrogant,” D'Arcy recalls. “So arrogant he was almost mean. That Joe, he could break any girl's heart.”

D'Arcy noticed that Joni Anderson was falling for Joe. A romance seemed to be blooming between them—either that or, D'Arcy hastens to add, it may have been “just a meeting of the minds” or a case of “love of the person and the musical sounds they were producing.” Whatever the scope of the infatuation, one night D'Arcy took Joni aside and, in an effort to protect her, said, “Look, Joni, it will never work—Joe's married!” But the warning seemed to fall on deaf ears. “I think she fell in love with him,” D'Arcy says.

In the fall of 1963 a very pregnant D'Arcy Case, despondent in her marriage to her abusive husband, tried to throw herself off a building. After the failed suicide attempt, D'Arcy was hospitalized with “situational depression”; out of concern for the health of her unborn baby, she refused medication—and then, faced with the likelihood that the baby (a girl, born in November 1963) could be legally snatched away from her, she “got sane, real fast,” as she puts it.
*
The lesson implicit in D'Arcy's near-tragedy—that serious misery could ensue when panic and shame forced a pregnant girl to marry the wrong man, just for respectability—would soon prove a useful cautionary tale to Joni Anderson.

• • •

The Southern Alberta Institute of Technology—SAIT, as it was called—was a pair of buildings: a modern one of brick and glass and a stately Gothic counterpart, both set on a wide-lawned campus in Calgary, Alberta. There—engulfed by the institute's main student body (one thousand slide-rule-wielding crew-cut males majoring in aeronautical engineering, aircraft maintenance, agricultural mechanics, commercial radio, diesel mechanics, power plant engineering, and a half dozen similar fields)—as if air-dropped from a separate planet, were 160
other
students. Most of them were sporting goatees, growing out their own crew-cuts into greasy ponytails, donning T-shirts with holes in them, and inwardly smiling triumphantly as—in a touché to their farm-raised parents' puzzled disapproval of their career choice—they charcoal-sketched every curve of the nude models in life drawing class. These were the students in SAIT's College of Art. Although the engineering students probably thought, as one art student surmised, “Who
are
these kooks?” the art students were proud of their individualism and thrilled to be drawn together like kindred needles culled from the vast haystack of central Canada. As one of them, Bruce Sterling, says, “We were all small-town country kids trying to be Jackson Pollock.”

The other thing that distinguished the College of Art from most of the rest of SAIT was women—something the industrial students took note of, by way of gauntlets of wolf whistles. Every third art student was female and, judging from the 1964 yearbook, many of them were lovely, stylish girls—girls with gamey smiles and teased bubbles and flips (“We were still back-combing our hair, but we were hippies,” says Joni's classmate Beverly Nodwell DeJong) and some with long, Left Bank–worthy tresses and serious, penetrating gazes. Among the loveliest was Joni Anderson, whose class photo shows her with a bouffant-topped, thick-banged “shelf pageboy,” the popular hairstyle that year, attained by setting the rollers vertically. Joni was still assuming that art, not music, would be her calling.

Although she'd come from a year of sophisticated coffeehouse life—and, just as college was starting, had traveled north to take the stage with her guitar at the Yardbird Suite and the Depression, two coffeehouses in Edmonton—she had the same “quiet country girl” way about her as the other students, Bruce Sterling recalls. “But she also seemed driven, and equally so about art and music.” Beverly DeJong remembers “a presence about Joni, a
strength.
” Sterling adds something else: while many of the girls switched from skirts to pants as the freshman year wore on, “Joni continued wearing skirts all year. And she always smelled good. She maintained a straitlaced, ladylike air with the administration and the teachers, and she became one of their favorites.”