Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (5 page)

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 “Tutti Frutti”), but most of those songs—while highly danceable—were not emotionally affecting. Instead, being frenetic, they were safely
un-
sensual. By contrast, the slow, languid “Earth Angel”
was
sexual. When Alan Freed moved 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 (with their classic “Twilight Time” and “The Great Pretender”), the Moonglows (who gave the new genre one of its first national hits, “Sincerely”), the local-hero Cleftones (whose “You Baby You” was a proudly borough-born national seller), which had a sweet, pleading urgency.

Often that pleading urgency was leavened by the humor of the lowest basso “answering” the highest falsetto, the farcelike vocal contrast handily erasing the threatening sexuality. But when that humor was absent, as it was in “Earth Angel,” and all you heard
was
the poignance (“I'm just a fool…a fool in love with you-ou-ou…”), the result was a high-voiced longing—a linking of vulnerability to carnality—that was highly appealing to girls. “‘Earth Angel' was the breakthrough for us,” Barbara Grossman Karyo remembers, expressing a widespread feeling among girls about the song, which, after various releases, became a hit in 1955 and 1956. “Slow dancing to ‘Earth Angel' was the beginning of our sexual awakening.” And so the year before the decade-long battle for civil rights began in the South by way of Rosa Parks's refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man, and the year that fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was violently murdered in Mississippi for supposedly whistling at a white woman (his killers enjoying a kangaroo-court acquittal), white girls were getting in touch with their sexuality with the help of black male voices.

Two things, however, were absent from this music. One was girls. The tight harmonics of doo-wop were perfected at night on street corners, and it was neither feminine nor safe for girls to be hanging out at night on street corners; they were indoors, minding their younger siblings and washing the family's dishes. The Royaltones had Ruth McFadden and the Platters had Zola Taylor (whom they recruited from a—rare—all-girl doo-wop group, Shirley Gunter and the Queens), but, in the mid-1950s, that was about it. Still, for the white girls in the audience at the Freed shows, these two young singers modeled a new way of being female: moving their bent arms in and out at waist-level as their hips bobbed so effortlessly it seemed as if they had an extra joint.

The other thing that was absent was strings. Violins and cellos gave a song a classical feeling and a melodrama that might make it accessible, and, with the right soloist, could lend it pathos. In a few years this formula would be struck upon by an unlikely young pair of composer-producers—“unlikely” because melodrama was the last thing any acquaintance would associate with them. Though Jewish, they considered themselves twelve-bar-blues-writing Negroes at heart: New York–born Mike Stoller and Baltimore-raised Jerry Leiber. Right now Leiber and Stoller were in Los Angeles, the quiet capital of R&B recording, using their wit, their commercial instincts, and their adulation of Negro life to lob a new genre of black music into the Top 40.

• • •

Genie Klein encouraged Carole to audition for the famous, and famously selective, High School of Performing Arts. Carole was accepted, and she braved the long daily commute to and from the uppermost tip of Manhattan. (A later recording colleague would say of Genie, “I think she would have loved to have been an actress and a star” and that, ironically, Carole ended up achieving “many things”—like fame—“that Carole didn't even value as much as Genie did.” Another later friend says: “Genie was a ‘cope'—a very strong-willed and difficult woman, and she pushed Carole, to make up for what Richard couldn't be.”) After only a semester at the specialized school, she quit and rejoined her friends at local Madison High, where she resumed her close friendship with Camille—the two of them now fighting off despair about their looks. Camille says, “Carole and I thought everything was wrong with our faces, but we had no idea how to change it. We had no options, no money—where would we even start?” True, they both wore the fashionable cinch-belted straight skirts and blouses with the collars turned up, under which scarves were jauntily knotted to the side of their necks, but their versions were knockoffs of the better-labeled ones worn by Madison High's style queens, like the pretty, wealthy Nancy Tribush, whose social ease and confidence they coveted. Hair was a problem. “We despaired of our hair,” Camille recalls. “The ideal was the WASPy straight blond hair in a flip or a pageboy. Carole and I would look in the mirror and there was
nothing
we could do with our curly hair! Our hair had a mind of its own!” Then there was the issue of their facial imperfections. “Do any teenage girls like how they look? Think they're pretty? We didn't.”

But you didn't need a mirror when you had a piano. When she wasn't at the Freed shows, Carole was trying out her compositions—her first one was called “Go Steady with Me”—for Joel after school. He'd sit on a stool in her living room while she played and sang, and she'd ask him, as soon as she'd plunked the last note, “So whaddya think? Whaddya think?” “She was very driven to become a success,” Joel remembers. She talked almost exclusively about music to Joel. She never mentioned her parents' divorce. He was her boyfriend, but he never met her father and didn't even know she had a brother.

Sometimes on weekends Carole would go to her friend Leslie Korn's house for slumber parties, with another group of girls who were, as Leslie puts it, “just on the edge of being goody-goody. We all had ponytails and poodle skirts and fuchsia and chartreuse sweater sets, and whoever didn't have a boyfriend wanted one, badly.” They were racy enough to sometimes sneak a cigarette and pose for a picture on New Year's Eve in nothing but their bras and panties, album covers hiding their faces. “And all of us were virgins.” A whole week of this crowd's telephone talk time was once devoted to the question of whether Sandy, a seriously good athlete, should, on her bowling date with Danny, throw the game she could easily win. Boys
had
to win at sports.

Despite such thinking—so much a part of life for girls that no one noticed—Carole 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 junior year 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.” “She was the unquestioned leader, and she ran a tight ship,” doing “lots of the writing and all the arranging,” recalls Joel, whom she'd selected (“more because I was her boyfriend than anything”) as tenor. Camille's boyfriend Lenny Pullman was made baritone, and Carole chose Iris Lipnik, a policeman's daughter, as soprano. “Every day after school we would go over to Iris's apartment and rehearse from three to five p.m.,” Joel remembers. “Carole would write out lead sheets—my lyrics for ‘Go Steady with Me' were, literally, ‘Doo wot da doo wat da doo wat da doo wat, ooh, ooh, ooh…' For all Carole's talent, she couldn't keep up with the fast rhythm of ‘At the Hop,' so another friend of ours, Richie Suma, would be brought in, just to play piano on that one song.”

They named their group the Co-Sines for their advanced math class at Shellbank, and they played local Sweet Sixteen parties, sometimes teaming up with a group from Brighton Beach, the Tokens, to perform at USO halls in the New York area. The Tokens' lead singer was a talented, enthusiastic cabdriver's son who had an unrequited crush on Carole. His name was Neil Sedaka. By senior year, Sedaka had arranged for the Co-Sines to audition for Ahmet Ertegun. “Ertegun offered us a contract,” says Joel Zwick. “But because we were minors, our parents had to sign it.
One
parent held out, and we were all pretty sure it was Carole's mother, Genie. Which makes sense: Carole was the only real talent among us, and if she got a record contract, that would be the end of school for her.” The other Co-Sines didn't dream of objecting to Mrs. Klein's presumed putting the kibosh on their prized Atlantic contract. Emotional and theatrical, “Carole's mother,” Joel says, “scared the bejesus out of us.”

So the Co-Sines remained amateur, and Carole got through her last year at Madison with a big role in the group-written
Senior SING!
musical. Its plot had the class of 1958 escaping their humdrum lives to live in so-near-yet-so-far Greenwich Village.

• • •

One young borough man who
was
spending his days in Greenwich Village coffeehouses during this time was a quietly passionate but frustrated nineteen-year-old Brooklyn Tech graduate named Gerald Goffin. Gerry had had a complicated, partly traumatic childhood. His conservative Jewish parents had divorced when he was young, and he had lived with his salesman father, Jack, for five years, while his younger brother, Alvin, remained with their mother, Anne. Sometimes Jack, an untrustworthy man and a womanizer, would disappear for weeks at a time, leaving a bewildered and insecure Gerry in the care of relatives. Gerry eventually returned home to his mother, but home was a depressing place—a cramped Jamaica, Queens, apartment that was shared with Gerry's stern, old-world Orthodox grandfather, a furrier, who put Gerry to work doing scut work on the fur pelts in the basement.

He escaped those confines by spending a year at another regimented place, Annapolis. Needing to earn his college tuition, he'd joined the Marine Corps National Guard, had scored 158 out of a top score of 160 on the academy entrance test, and had gained admission. But he was expelled for demerits. He was now back in the cramped apartment with his mother, grandfather, and brother, commuting to Queens College, and attending Marine Corps Reserves meetings. Greatly gifted at math, he'd been pushed by his mother to declare a chemistry major, though he dreamed of being a playwright.

To escape from all of these strictures, and failure, he took to sitting in Village coffeehouses—the only racially integrated part of the city. He had a fascination with African Americans—like many over-monitored, life-cramped white kids, especially in areas where progressive politics was the norm, he romanticized that population as a vicarious key to his own liberation. He appreciated a nervy, soulful life to which he felt drawn and yet unequal. “I wasn't really a beatnik, but I read a lot about beatniks,” he says. Gerry was a voyeur of sorts—and he made a good one, being so inarticulate as to be almost monosyllabic. Yet beneath a personality that could erupt in temper, he observed deeply, and he was empathic—he had a talent for absorbing someone's essence. That inarticulate intensity—together with his lean, dark good looks—made him appealing to girls.

Still, for a nineteen-year-old would-be rebel, he 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. Gerry was moved to imitate the breakthrough musical. He started writing a serious, urban musical, which he named
Babes in the Woods,
about Beat generation dreamers in Greenwich Village.

While this boy she didn't know was writing hipster dialogue on tabletops at Bleecker and MacDougal, Carole was writing a more conventional—but uplifting—essay, “You're a Senior,” for the Class of 1958 Madison yearbook. She described the excitement of making one's mark on the future, in musical terms: “The baton rises…You wait apprehensively. There it is—the downbeat. You're a senior…your note is different from any other:
you are an individual.
”

After graduating in June 1958, at age sixteen (because of advanced placement early on, Carole, Barbara, Camille, and Joel all graduated young), Carole now tried in earnest for a record contract, not with the Co-Sines but on her own. Over the summer and at the beginning of her first semester at Queens College, she regularly rode in to visit the publishers and producers who had offices in the Brill Building at 1619 Broadway, and at nearby 1650 Broadway, both edifices comprising the revived latter-day counterpart to Tin Pan Alley, that long-demolished block of brownstones on West Twenty-eighth Street where, during the first two decades of the century, tunesmiths had hawked their catchy songs to player piano roll and sheet music publishers.

“Carole would come in by herself, this very cute little girl in bobby sox and schoolbooks under her arm,” recalls Jerry Wexler, Ahmet Ertegun's partner at Atlantic. “She would bring a demo, or she'd sit down at the piano and play. I loved her voice, and I thought her music was very unusual, very soul-inspired. The fact that she had classical training enabled her to play popular music very well, bordering on blues and jazz, but not quite—it was her own mixture. She had a sense of purpose, but she also seemed a little intimidated. One time she was playing a record she'd made and it kept skipping. Something was wrong with its manufacture. She got so upset she started crying.”