Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (8 page)

BOOK: Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation
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Donny Kirshner helped Carole and Gerry fortify the hook and shorten the song from five to three minutes. They made a demo, with Carole singing (
sans
strings arrangement). Even though it was a woman's song, Donny brought the demo to Guy Mitchell. Mitchell listened and told Kirshner he loved the song but was committed to the composers of Mathis's “Wonderful, Wonderful” and “Chances Are.” Kirshner left the meeting dejected and only then let Florence Greenberg hear the demo. Greenberg gave it to Luther Dixon and he played it for the Shirelles. Beverly Lee recalls, “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, who is black and whom they trusted, said, “You're
gonna
record this song,” Beverly says. The Shirelles begrudgingly agreed to show up at the studio.

Carole and Gerry knew their song had to be bathed in violins and cellos. Gerry was “dying to steal from the Drifters,” as he puts it; he and Carole had written a song for the group (“Show Me the Way”) that got shelved, and he loved the cellos in “This Magic Moment” and “Dance with Me.” If anyone admired two Jewish boys who seemed black, wrote black, and successfully produced black groups, it was Gerry. But it was Carole who was determined to write the string arrangement. As soon as she knew the Shirelles had agreed (however reluctantly) to show up for the session, she approached Al Kasha, Jackie Wilson's A&R man (and a Madison High alum). As Kasha recalls, she said, “You write with Luther Dixon. Do you think he would be upset about using strings?” Not waiting for an answer from Dixon through Kasha, she started the arrangement, undaunted by her ignorance 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!”

Luther Dixon wasn't sure he wanted Carole's arrangement, but Gerry pushed on her behalf. “I kept asking Luther if she could write it,” Gerry says. “He resisted at first. Then he said, ‘All right, I'll give her a shot.'” The next issue was: How
many
cellos, how
much
of a Drifters sound? “We wanted four cellos,” Gerry recalls. “Luther gave us two.” Carole and Gerry schemed to double the two to four in the studio—and they did so.

When the Shirelles got to the studio and heard the arrangement, they were stunned, says Beverly Lee. “The song was completely different than the one on the demo. It was
beautiful.
All those
strings
! It blew our minds! I thought:
Thank God
for Carole King, for this.”

With Carole on kettle drums, they recorded: Shirley taking most of the song alone, her low, nasal voice, with its catch in the throat, fading on the long notes and straining on the high ones with amateurish humanity; the violins soaring rapturously; the cellos grinding anxiously; Addie, Doris, and Beverly chanting
“sha da DOP shop, sha da DOP shop”
—but all of that receding on Shirley's two “So tell me now, and I won't ask again”s.

By the end of the first week of December 1960—just as the brand-new Enovid birth control pills were rolling off Klein Pharmaceuticals' assembly lines lab in Skokie, Illinois, and reaching their first customers; and three weeks after John F. Kennedy won the election (he and his beautiful, subtly ironic, and Europeanized young wife changing American culture with a jolt, overdue/overnight, just as rock 'n' roll had), the Shirelles had become the first African-American female group in American history to have a #1 hit. And a song that reflected a concept so new—a young single woman's declaration of herself as an emotionally and sexually independent and responsible person—that it didn't have a name, was the song all America was singing.

CHAPTER TWO
joni

A world away from the second-generation Jewish New York pop-culture realm of Carole King lay the deep plains, Northern European Protestant milieu that Roberta Joan Anderson was born into on November 7, 1943, in Fort Macleod, Alberta, Canada.

Fort Macleod was a barely populated town in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies (a fifty-mile straight shot north from Montana's western border) that had been, sixty years earlier, a snowbound, wind-mauled Mounties outpost in Blackfoot territory. Raised as an infant in that 2,000-resident town, in wartime conditions of quaintness (mail and water coming in open wagons) and privation (soap scarce enough that when you got it, “You washed your dishes and your hair and your clothes with it, whether it was detergent or shampoo,” Joni has said), then moving northeast with her parents to a succession of towns on the flat, wheaty plains of midwestern Canada, Roberta Joan took her entertainment the old-fashioned way: from family stories. Those about her parents' mothers stood out most. She heard aunts' accounts of her Grandmother Anderson and Grandmother McKee, and she made these women into supporting characters in her own life narrative, turning their unfulfilled talent into her legacy and their frustrated ambition into her obligation. “There must [have been] some kind of genetic thrust,” she's said, of the career that both her grandmothers had desired. “I'm the one who got the musical gene; it landed in a female, and it had to be taken home for the sake of these women.”

As a fourteen-year-old Norwegian farm girl, Joni's paternal grandmother had longed to be a pianist, but she knew that dream was out of the question, so she'd “wept…behind [the] barn,” Joni has said, then ordered herself, “‘Dry your eyes, you silly girl! You will never have a piano.' She became a stoic.” She and her family moved to New Norway—a newly incorporated but primitive village in Alberta that attracted Scandinavians and Scandinavian Minnesotans looking for cheap, fertile land—in the first decade of the twentieth century. There she met and married a fellow Norwegian émigré, a young man named Anderson, who was, as Joni has called him, “a nasty drunk”; with him she had “baby after baby,” Joni has said. “She raised eleven children and lived a horrible life: giving, giving, giving—a self-sacrificing animal to her many children.” Still, “through all the hardship,
she never wept.
” Such reiningin of emotion seemed to Joni a heroic refusal of weakness.

One of those eleven children was William, a good-natured boy who liked to play the trumpet and who inherited his mother's rectitude. Bill escaped the chaos of home by joining the Royal Canadian Air Force and by avoiding marriage throughout his twenties.

On Joni's mother's side was Canadian-born Sadie McKee, descended from a man who, in Scotland, had worked on the estate of Sir Walter Scott. Unlike Grandmother Anderson, Sadie McKee wasn't an old-world peasant; she hailed from a long line of classical musicians. She didn't tearfully jettison her musical gifts as a young adolescent; she played the organ, wrote poetry, and listened to opera on the gramophone well into her years as a frontier farm wife. She wasn't a baby-making doormat but rather a snob. (She married “an oxen-plowing prairie settler and thought she was too good for him,” Joni has said.) And she most definitely wasn't a stoic; she was “a spitfire, a tempest, the
opposite
of long-suffering [and] good-natured. She was always having fiery fits [and she felt] that she was too good [for her fate]—a poet and musician stuck on a farm.” In the midst of one fight with the tempestuous Sadie, her husband threw his wife's treasured gramophone records to the floor; Sadie retaliated by kicking a door off its hinges. If Joni inherited from her father's mother the stoicism that Duke Redbird would be so struck by in the Huron Street rooming house, then she inherited from her
mother's
mother what she has called “the Irish blood: fight before you think.” (Joni never kicked a door off the hinges, but she did once throw a drink in
Rolling Stone
publisher Jann Wenner's face when he supposedly smirked at the sight of her struggling to enter an awards show, unaided, through a mass of fans. And in the midst of separate emotional fights with two women close to her—one was her housekeeper, Dora—Joni slapped them both on the face.) The lesson that any ambitious, talented girl in the Canadian prairie might draw from these matriarchs seems clear: having babies in poverty and desperation, and remaining in the provinces, will destroy your dreams almost before you can dream them.

Sadie's daughter Myrtle McKee was raised on the farm that her mother disdained, and she was as proud and particular as her mother was—determined to move up and out. She passed up offers to marry common men—farmers, policemen—biding her time as a teacher in a rural school and feeling so superior to the materials she had to work with, she often made her own schoolbooks. When she was still unmarried at thirty, Myrtle took a job in a bank in the big city of Regina, Saskatchewan. After expressing her frustration at the lack of eligible men in town (it was 1942 and they were all in wartime military service), she was introduced by a friend to Bill Anderson. They married on his two-week air force leave; their only child, a daughter, was born within the year. She was named Roberta, but almost immediately everyone called her by her middle name: Joan.

The young family 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-harmony, piped through the console radio. Myrtle was a controlling mother. “I have a very early memory of being walked on a leash,” Joni has said. “You know, they used to put children on these leashes.” Hearing Victrola music tin-speakered out the front of a Woolworth's, “I stopped on my leash and began to bounce up and down and sing with great enthusiasm. My mother gave me a tug, and I remember thinking that was very insensitive of her.”

When Joan was five, the family moved again, to nearby North Battleford, a town with a three-block-long downtown, of about 7,000 residents. Joan made friends with two children on the street: red-haired, freckle-faced, classical-music whiz Frankie McKitrick, the son of a school principal, and short-blond-haired Sandra Stewart, the daughter of a road contractor and a nurse. Sandra, who was called Sandy, remembers first meeting her new neighbor Joan—“this very, very fair-complected girl with wispy, shoulder-length white-blond hair.” All three children were in strict Mrs. Thompson's first-grade classroom at the Alexander School. In a town of robust boys who threw rocks and sticks, Frankie was a hopeless misfit, so unathletic that he was excused even from volleyball, in love with the sonatas and rhapsodies he was learning to play (he would later become a choir director). Similarly, in a town where girls played with dolls (which Joan eschewed, though Myrtle did make her sparkly princess costumes), Sandy, to Joan's approval, disdained the company of girls, “and I messed up a lot of playtimes by gathering up the boys and crashing the party,” Sandy recalls. Add Peter Armstrong, a mammoth boy with a glorious voice (he went on to have a singing career in Europe), and an Our Gang was formed: Frankie, the pianist; Joan, the artist; Sandy, the tomboy; and Peter, the fat boy with the celestial tenor.

The foursome put on circuses in Sandy's garage, and Joan was the choreographer of these efforts. “Joan always had to be the lead character—it had to be done
her
way; she always played the ringmaster, so she could be the boss, and a lot of the acts she came up with were
not
well received by those of us who had to do them,” Sandy remembers. Frank agrees: “Joan was unflinching. She and I would have serious arguments about how we would present a backyard circus. Her artistic temperament wouldn't yield to mine, and I usually gave in.” Sandy wasn't so good-natured. “Joan and I would have fights. We were both headstrong, but Joan liked to rule the roost.” When they weren't playing circus, they were singing and dancing. Joni has recalled, “I danced around the room while Frankie played the piano, and we all did the hula on the lawn in the sprinklers.”

Older than all the other children's parents, exotically possessed of but a single child (in a neighborhood of medium-sized families) and a “house full of very nice things,” as Sandy says, the senior Andersons trained a startling, almost glamorous attention on their daughter—“Joan was totally indulged”—and displayed a notable gentility and decorousness. “Both of them were proper,” Sandy says. “It's not that they were strict. Mrs. Anderson was a lovely mum, with the gentlest voice, but you felt you always needed to mind your p's and q's around them and be on your best behavior. Joan's dad was very, very quiet—a gentleman to the
n
th degree: very proper.” Big band horn playing was his release. Frankie would come over to the Anderson house after school 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) and Joan made her paintings. “No one at school could hold a candle to Joan's ability to blend color and draw; she absolutely excelled in art,” Frank says. Myrtle served juice—soda pop didn't darken her door—and Joan would run around after her pet rabbit, nervously picking up the pellets it left outside the cage before her mother noticed. (Myrtle considered even
cats
barn animals and wouldn't let Joan keep a kitten.)

Perhaps in compensation for the fact that their Queen Street home was a “wartime house”—one of many identical, inexpensively built houses for veterans—Myrtle was doubly determined to make it an impeccable one. She vacuumed the garage daily and sniffed at neighbors' housekeeping deficits. (“Mrs. Dawson across the street keeps a very, very dirty home, you know…,” Joni would paraphrase later.) Joni grew up in an atmosphere “almost Victorian, in the sense of such an emphasis on what neighbors would think, and on those relatively strict codes of what is proper,” says her second husband, Larry Klein, of the stories Joni told him about her childhood. But if Myrtle knew what her daughter must
not
be, she also guided her to what she should—and would—be: a lover of the arts and beauty. She trained her Joan to press flowers in scrapbooks and recite Shakespearean sonnets. And when Joan was eight, Myrtle and Bill and Harold and Katie McKitrick were the only parents who wrote permission notes to have their children excused from school to see the art film
Tales of Hoffman,
a sequel to
The Red Shoes.
“In strict, proper Canada, in 1951, to be released from school because your parents thought it was important for your development to see a movie—well, it just wasn't done! And it was thrilling!” Frank recalls. The movie—with its ballets and romance (the male protagonist has love affairs with a mechanical doll, a Venetian courtesan, and a Greek singer)—captivated Joan. “I remember standing on the street with her afterward: she was reliving one of the characters, making an emerald appear in his hand,” Frank says.

That Myrtle would want her young daughter to see a culturally uplifting movie doesn't surprise Chuck Mitchell, whom Joni married when she was twenty-one. “From what Joni said, Myrtle was constrained in her own life, and she didn't want her daughter to be constrained,” Chuck says. “She knew she had a gifted daughter, so she gave Joni her all—she was 140 percent mom, and an
assertive
mom—and she made it very clear that the only way Joni could escape the prairie was to go with her talents.” “Joan was
completely
different from her parents; she got a different gene somewhere” is how drummer John Guerin, one of the most significant men in her life, described Joni and her parents, in an interview he gave for this book, shortly before his January 2004 death. Guerin wore a puzzled smile and shook his head as he said, “I don't know
where
she got it. 'Cause her mother and father are very straight-ahead, middle-class midwestern people.” Graham Nash remembers: “Myrtle! Oh, God! I once went to Joni's parents' house; I think it was 1970. Downstairs in the spare bedroom, which is where I slept. I'd been living with Joni for two years, but no, no, no, we couldn't stay in the same room at Myrtle's! I'm talking to Joan, I've got my hand on the door. I said to Joan: ‘What's your mother like? Give me a clue here.' And she said: ‘I'll tell you what my mother's like: run your finger on top of the door.' Now this is downstairs in the
spare
bedroom. I run my finger across the top of the door. Not a
speck
of fucking dust
anywhere
! I said, ‘Wow!' She said: ‘Myrtle.'”

Myrtle's exacting standards, fierce control, and faith in her daughter's artistic gifts probably combined to keep Joan emotionally beholden to her. A mother who underestimates a little girl can eventually be written off as unsupportive, but a mother who sees her daughter's best self even before
she
does is harder to disengage from. “When I knew Joni, her mom could upset her,” says Dave Naylor, a record producer who was involved with Joni in the 1970s. “A couple of times I'd be talking to her and then she'd get a call from her mother, and by the time I got over to her house she was a mess. I always wondered how this little old lady sitting in a rocking chair in Saskatchewan could reach out and grab her and still pull the chain. It amazed me.”

BOOK: Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation
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