Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (2 page)

october 21, 1964: exposing herself

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Half Beat,” the young man greeted the tables of patrons, their faces strobed by candle flames spouting from Chianti bottles. There were more than a dozen coffeehouses like this one in Yorkville Village, Toronto's folk music quarter. On any given night the mournful Scottish and English ballads, rousing work songs, and angry protest anthems (courtesy of the Dylan imitators) soared from the lungs of young performers who were hoping to get their breaks—and hoping to purge themselves of the bourgeois primness of their parents in the provinces. These were the years when folk music was providing the rebellion and authenticity commercial rock 'n' roll had stopped supplying. One of these “folkies” was the delicate-featured, high-cheekboned twenty-year-old in the wings, with feather-banged blond hair curled up in a flip just past her ears and long legs terminating in go-go boots. A Gibson guitar was strapped over her miniskirt, but she also carried a small, mandolin-type instrument, the
tiple
(tee-pleh).

“Tonight we have for your entertainment…Joni Anderson!” the emcee announced.

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 Tomorrow” had 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. Carole King had solved the dilemma the way girls always had—she married the boy who had gotten her pregnant in a big traditional wedding. Joni Anderson was dealing with her pregnancy in a brand-new way: unmarried and alone. She was extremely afraid her parents would find out about her pregnancy, yet she refused to let it stop her life or curb her dreams.

“Joni's been appearing here for the last two weeks and will be for the next three weeks,” the emcee continued. “Starting next Monday, we have her under contract. We hope she'll stay here. We hope you'll enjoy her as much as we have.”

Yorkville was Canada's version of Greenwich Village and Cambridge, Massachusetts, where six years earlier, three Boston University coeds, in spontaneous protest, had thrown off their freshman beanies and had become best friends and soul mates. The three—a Boston Brahmin named Betsy; a Staten Island lawyer's daughter named Debbie; and a California physicist's kid named Joanie—were one of any number of cliques of folkie girls then asserting their nonconformist sensibility, playing English ballads on their Gibsons and Martins and reinforcing in each other an adventurousness that was otherwise hard for girls to pull off; guys could at least pretend to be romantic wanderers, while rebel girls could just get pregnant. (“There were tears over boys, and a harrowing trip to a doctor who was supposed to be able to ‘fix' things,” the Betsy of the threesome—Betsy Minot Siggins—says today. “It felt like we were both the initiators of
and
the victims of the sexual revolution.”) But this clique turned out to be
the
clique: the one that advanced the narrative. The Joanie of the threesome, Joan Baez, didn't just achieve stardom; her stardom constituted the first time in the United States that an arcane musical genre was lofted to commercial popularity on the strength of a
female
performer. Now, four years after her rise to fame and two years after she graced the cover of
Time
magazine, Joan Baez remained the gold-standard embodiment of the sensitive girl curled over her guitar. It was Baez's bell-clear soprano that Joni Anderson was emulating.

“Let's give her a little bit of a welcome now—Miss Joni Anderson!”

Through a round of applause, Joni strode to the chair, sat down, and, in a breathless, Canadian schoolgirl's voice, said: “It's sure refreshing to have a mic to work with for a change”—a giggle—“after some of the places I've been in.” Sympathetic laughter from the audience. What they (and she) didn't know was that this moment would be one of her last singing songs meant to
sound like
traditional ballads. In less than a year, she'd begin to offer audiences the original songs of vulnerability, wit, wonderment—and only retroactively understood sadness—that she was starting to write. On the heels of those first compositions of hers would come a new wave of songs that, as she put it, were “beginning to reveal feminine insecurities, doubts, and recognition that the old order was falling apart”—songs that “depicted my times.” With that eventual torrent, in six years she would set the bar for emotional self-exposure—“confessional” songwriting—just about as high as it would ever be set by anyone. But tonight her self-exposure concerns were literal: She was single and at slightly over five months, visibly pregnant. Already, the small tiple was much easier to manipulate than the guitar.

“The first song I'd like to do is a song about when a man becomes so involved in almighty liquor 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, eighteen hundred miles north of the North Dakota border. 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. She had recently moved to a room-with-shared-bath in a rooming house on Huron Street. It was from this extremely modest base that she was trying to make her way as a folksinger, without money or connections and in deep secrecy about her pregnancy.

But if she was self-conscious, she hid it, as she strummed her tiple and gaily sang the traditional Scottish song—

After the audience applauded her final bars of “Nancy Whiskey,” Joni announced: “In 1961 a man named Ewan MacColl wrote a song and entered it into a song 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,
now
—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.

Joni's neighbor across the hall at her rooming house was a young poet from the Ojibway tribe named Duke Redbird. They'd squeeze past each other in the hall—Duke with his long black braids, Joni with her flaxen hair. He could see that she was pregnant, but he sensed from her attitude not to mention it. “Joni had a stoicism that reminded me of the Indian women I grew up with,” Redbird recalls. “When we'd walk by each other's open doors, she never acknowledged her difficulties.” Inside her small room, pungent with incense, she showed him her scrapbook, proudly turning the pages and explaining the newspaper clips of her performances at coffeehouses in Calgary, a few in Edmonton, and her real-live TV debut, singing on a Saskatchewan hunting and fishing show.

Still, Duke Redbird worried about his neighbor, who was living on pizza and donuts. He mentioned his concern to his brother so much that one day his brother arrived at Duke's door with a bag of apples and said, “Let's give them to that pregnant girl.” The two young men knocked on Joni's door and held out the fruit. “They're
root,
from nature;
good
for you now,” Redbird's brother said awkwardly. Joni gratefully—and hungrily—took the bag. There were other signs of her vulnerability. “Late at night,” Redbird says, “when Joni's door was closed, I'd hear her playing her guitar and singing: not words, just sounds, like she was using her voice to meditate. I was struck by her melancholy.”

That same melancholy was in her voice now as she continued to sing what she had identified as the MacColl song (it was actually written by Sydney Carter) to the Half Beat patrons:

After covering a Woody Guthrie number, among other songs, Joni packed up her instruments and exited the club, perhaps stopping to jam at the crash pad of her friend Vicky Taylor, with whom she would soon form a duo. Then it was back to the Huron Street room and her meditative strumming and vocal yodeling. Listening from the hall one such night—maybe it was even
this
night—Redbird was moved to pick up a pen and write a poem, which, though never published, he has kept to this day: A “woman with the cornsilk hair and sweetgrass [incense] in her hand” is on a water journey, navigating a river's “invisible shoals” and “silent rapids”—the poem was explicitly about Joni's pregnancy, her circumstances. Redbird understood both the risk (those “shoals” and “rapids”)
and
the lack of acknowledgment of and respect for that risk: its “silent,” “invisible” nature. Indeed; male folksingers might boast of riding the rails, but few of the young ones, including Dylan, ever did. (Dylan hadn't even hitchhiked to New York—he was given a ride by a friend.) For girls, the tougher though completely unacknowledged and unsung rite of passage was being pregnant, alone, penniless, and courting scorn in a rented room far from a home that you couldn't return to. Sometimes Duke Redbird would knock on Joni Anderson's door and ask if she was all right. She never said she wasn't.

Over the next three years, Joni's life would be typical of many North American women's when the early to mid-1960s—that Jack-and-Jackie-influenced era of glamorized traditional marriage—slowly turned into the later 1960s, and a new culture was spawned, both by the neo-Edwardian style of the English groups and by the softer offshoots of psychedelia. Just as some of Joni's counterparts attending college would marry young professors, Joni would marry a man eight years her senior who was already living the life she thought she wanted. But as she pulled ahead of her husband in talent and ambition, she would realize—as other girls would—that young marriage to a sophisticated man was
not
the start of Real Life but, rather, an impediment to it. She would write her prematurely wise song about the cycles of age in part to lambaste
Esquire
's claim, during those years, that, as she put it, “a woman was all washed up after 21,” and she would move to New York in 1967, just when single women were starting to live in cities in a new way: eschewing the old regulating supports—roommates, day jobs—for solitary, emotion-driven, night-based experience. Sex was then newly immediate—an innocent generosity, a basic communication—but romance was rough and ready laissez-faire capitalism, the only rules of the game being men's rules. Joni's cactus tree metaphor would be a secret playbook and shared record for the relatively few young women who lived in that then vulnerable manner.

Joni would leave for L.A. when California dreaming was becoming a reality, and she would become both the It Girl and anthropologist of her newly coined female archetype, a rusticated American version of Left Bank femininity. She would write the haunting national anthem of her generation's most emblematic gathering, and she would play Wendy to three choirboy-voiced Lost Boys powwowed from equal tribes, and with one of them she would legitimize the gallantry of a new kind of intimacy. She would leave this ideal love to set off as a vagabond, living in a cave with a self-made outlaw who “kept [her] camera to sell.” Young women who liked “clean white linen and fancy French cologne” had never toured Europe like this before. In 1970 it was the
only
way many of them would want to do so.

Throughout the next decades, the 1970s through mid-1990s—years when young women would push the limits of independence, ambition, and self-fulfillment as never before—Joni would compose the bumpy epic poem of that exploration. She would choose the title of the signal album
Hejira
because she liberally interpreted the Arabic word to mean “to run away, but honorably,” something that women were starting to do: even when the After was no better than the Before, when the destination was worse than the starting point.

Those songs would echo Joni's own life journey: solitary cross-country road trips and even more solitary months in the woods; a fan-shearing turn to jazz; an almost unceasing, night-crawling workaholism, yielding twenty-one original albums and a “crop rotation” of paintings, as well as a self-assured choice of long-term lovers. These were men who—since they “mirrored [her] back simplified” and were far less wealthy and celebrated than she—stood in almost intentionally pointed contrast to her male
friends,
who were the most successful and glamorous men in Hollywood. In all of this she would turn a new twist on an old type, the “dame,” the tough, cranky, boastful woman living for her craft. But where previous versions (Lillian Hellman, Gertrude Stein) were masculinized,
she
would remain, illuminatively, feminine.