Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (19 page)

As a freshman art student, Joni took the required curriculum—two drawing courses: one expressive, the other analytical; the history of art; an English course; elements and principles of art (composition in second semester); and an elective: introduction to painting or printmaking, textiles, or ceramics. Joni was talented; fellow student Doug Bovee recalls her paintings were “very poetic—she was not someone who handled high realism very well, but they always had a lyrical quality—the figures were elongated”; Beverly DeJong cites her “beautiful drawings: flowers and self-portraits.” Most of the young women in her class were also talented—showing one's work was a prerequisite for enrollment. But while women comprised a third of the art school, the prevailing sentiment was that important artists were, by definition, male. Not one of the 2,300 artists cited in H. W. Janson's
History of Art
(the seminal text at the time) was female. On New York's Abstract Expressionist/Color Field scene—the students' lodestar—amid Pollock, Still, de Kooning, Motherwell, Rivers, Rothko, Twombly, and Noland, there were very few women, chiefly Helen Fran-kenthaler and an American named (coincidentally) Joan Mitchell, who moved to Paris. This Cedar Tavern/Tenth Street galleries crowd was high-testosterone; its females were either gallery owners like Betty Parsons, or artists-turned-husband-managers like Lee Krasner, or molls, like Larry Rivers's mate Maxine Groffsky, a literary agent in her inconspicuous nonloft life, and Ruth Kligman, the crowd's Elizabeth Taylor in both appearance and romantic appetite, who quickly went from mourning her lover Jackson Pollock (dead in the drunken car crash she'd survived) to romancing Willem de Kooning. In this two-fisted set it helped that a woman artist be beautiful, like Eva Hesse, or beautiful
and
towering, like Marisol.

That gender assumption was alive and well at SAIT. Beverly DeJong, who today makes large architectural installations, remembers that shortly after she arrived there, “a male guidance counselor told me, ‘You should go into crafts. My wife did that and she always had fun, teaching children.' And there were discussions with male students about it; a friend was absolutely
certain
he should be paid more for an art job than me. A few years later I joined the staff of the art college—I was the only female among fifty instructors from 1969 to 1976—and, sure enough, I got paid less than the men.” Of the many art instructors in 1963–64, all were men, DeJong recalls, except Marion Nicholl, an Abstract Expressionist and a large woman “who wore muumuus and always seemed angry that she had to be teaching rather than painting, but that made her more endearing.”

Joni has said that the school's emphasis on Abstract Expressionism turned her off, though George Mihalcheon, a painter and painting teacher who was on its faculty, says that, though Ab-Ex prevailed in painting, “the college had ten different disciplines at the time; it's hard to say there was a common direction.” Whatever the reason, “music was part of Joni's life in that school, from day one. She used to sit in the hallway and pluck her guitar,” recalls classmate Doug Bovee. “She played the guitar in the washroom—the bathroom,” Beverly DeJong says. Then she started performing at lunchtime—on a little raised platform, in the foyer of the auditorium, which was right across from the cafeteria, so all the students could hear it. “She was pretty good,” remembers ceramics teacher Walter Drohan. “We thought she was leaning more toward entertaining than art.” “Many, many lunch hours, Joni would be in the foyer, or in the auditorium itself, singing,” Bruce Sterling recalls. “Songs like ‘Kumbaya.' We were all very political. The day Kennedy was assassinated everyone congregated together. A lot of us felt very close to him—he was going to save the world for
us,
too. Except there were also anti-American Canadians, who were mad at Kennedy for antagonizing the Russians during the Cuban missile crisis and who figured the Russians would come down from the north on
us,
not the U.S. They figured he got what was coming to him. The school was polarized when Kennedy was assassinated. I don't remember which side Joni was on, but she was very vocal and political in favor of the civil rights movement, so she probably mourned Kennedy, like most of us did.”

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, seated before a dramatic, Bosch-like student-painted mural of Viking dragon slayers. A teacher from the industrial drafting department who was also an amateur folksinger—a man in his thirties named Eric Whittred—formed a duo with her. “Ours was a 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' and ‘Jamaica Farewell,' songs by the Kingston Trio and Harry Belafonte. ‘Tom Dooley' was at the height of its popularity”—actually, it had been a hit five years earlier—“so we definitely did that.” As SAIT students gathered around and sang and swayed in unison, Joni Anderson and Eric Whittred sang “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. Joni was aware of Dylan by now (and in her earliest appearances in Canada, in the coming year, her look would be compared to Mary Travers's), though it would not be until he 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 lightning bolt, that “you could write about
anything.
It was a different kind of song than I had ever heard.”

On weekends Joni played the local clubs—mainly the Fourth Dimension—“singing long, tragic songs in a minor key,” as she puts it. Joni's eminence as the campus folksinger, her beauty, and her growing self-possession made her extremely popular. “There were lots of suitors at her door—and, unfortunately, I wasn't one of them, not that I didn't try,” says Bruce Sterling, adding that Joni's popularity could make her “aloof” and argumentative. “One day she would be going on, with her social consciousness, about the poor bum on the street, and the next day she'd walk right by him; but if you called her attention to her inconsistency, she'd snap at you.” But she also exuded kindness. “She was very patient and compassionate to Doug Bovee,” Sterling remembers. Bovee had had polio as a child—even before the great epidemic of 1953, to which Joni had fallen victim—and he had been irreversibly affected. He got around campus in long-arm braces and sometimes in a wheelchair. “Our lockers were near each other's, and Joni would help me get things out of mine if I couldn't reach them” Bovee says. “I think she respected me—or maybe she feared me. Maybe it was ‘There but for fortune go I.'” Joni never told Bovee that she, too, had had polio; he learned this only after she was famous and the polio story became a dramatic, character-revealing part of her biography. No one at the art school knew. The symptoms of the childhood brush with the disease were gone, and, plunging into adulthood, she was keeping the frightening past
in
the past.

Joni, who had spent her post-polio girlhood negotiating the fine line between the “good girl” and “bad girl” dichotomy that existed in middle-class society, had now found a way to master it. Safely far from home, she developed a dual persona, alternating the department-store-model propriety with the coffeehouse freedom. Off campus, “she was a bit of a party gal,” says Doug Bovee. “There was a restlessness on her part; she was in the fast lane of the fast group.” Bruce Sterling says, “For all her straitlaced appearance in school, when she was down at the clubs she drank hardy, and she was kind of an animal, making sexual innuendos [sic] at the guys. She was picking up guys and letting them pick her up, putting out signals and spending time in cars and going places. She had lots of boyfriends at the time, boyfriends in the real sense”—at least from what he
heard.
How did he know? Reliably or unreliably: “Guys talk.”

In school, however, she took care to keep the alternate image burnished. SAIT had a beauty contest for queen of the school every year, and since the vast majority of the females in the school were in the art school, the pressure was on the pretty art students to enter. One of the most respected art teachers, George Anglis, told the women in his class they shouldn't yield to that pressure. “He said, ‘Don't run for queen, it will take too much time away from your work,'” recalls Beverly Nodwell DeJong, who at the time was an extremely fetching brunette who could easily have been a contender. Beverly took the teacher's advice and didn't toss her hat in the ring. Joni Anderson did, however.

The six queen candidates lined up for a photo in virtually identical dark, below-knee-length suits, black pocketbooks looped on their arms. They looked like a ladies' luncheon group or a sextet of dowdy stewardesses. Joni stands out: her expression, professionally camera-friendly; her suit, chic and youthful; her stance model-like; her accessories (long black gloves, arty brooch), cutting-edge. Unlike the others, she knew how to present herself in public, even in this conventional guise. The campaign poster she made for herself (a vertical, doubled “JOAN” next to a horizontal “Anderson,” with action-painter splotches over a self-portrait) was more sophisticated than the others. The student body voted. Joni was runner-up to Queen Sheila Dalgarno, a thick-eyebrowed brunette with chiseled features who'd had the advantage of being not in the art college but in lab tech.

At some point in the middle of the school year, Joni moved out of her rented room in a private house and formed what was, in early 1964, an avant-garde arrangement: she took a second-floor loft in an old warehouse in town with her boyfriend, a tall, thin, goateed fellow art freshman, Rick Williams. Joni kept the cohabitation secret from her parents.

Rick Williams hailed from a small town in British Columbia and had a warm laugh. Their loft, Doug Bovee recalls, “had a mattress thrown on the floor, a few drapes, and a lot of paintings against the wall—a great place for a party, and they had them. People would drift in and out on the weekends. There was booze, and someone might bring in some pizza. They played ‘heavy' stuff: Dylan, jazz, maybe some early Beatles. No Motown. We were ‘deep.' Everyone went to see Ingmar Bergman's
The Seventh Seal
and
The Virgin Spring
at the local film festival. We were hippies.” The word
hippie
was one year shy of coinage, but the concept was emerging. “We wore casual clothes, our ratty hair tied back. And acid was the drug of choice.”

Acid, of course, was LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), which was openly traded in class for $2 a tab, having freshly become available through a rapid-fire underground grapevine of psychology and art students all through North America. At a time when many long-distance phone calls were still made through an operator and Special Delivery was the fastest—and emergency-only—means of travel for messages exceeding telegram length, the speed of the news about consciousness-expanding drugs (and the dissemination of those drugs themselves), even to the hinterland likes of Calgary, Alberta, spoke volumes about an inchoate readiness for a new sensibility: a deeper window into mind and body, spirit and human connection.

LSD was first created in 1938 in a chemical lab by adding compounds to a base of lysergic acid (which is found in a grain fungus, ergot). In the 1950s, extra-medical interest in it and natural sister compounds was revived by Aldous Huxley's reports of his experiments with mescaline and then later in the decade stoked by a
Life
magazine article that described the use of psilocybin mushrooms in indigenous Mexican religious ceremonies. Harvard psychology lecturer Timothy Leary and professor Richard Alpert soon began conducting research on psilocybin and LSD with graduate students; the professors' pro-ecstatic bent (“[W]e are attempting to create a new paganism and a new dedication to life as art,” Leary wrote) resulted in their dismissal from Harvard, whereupon their mystique intensified. While Joni was living with Rick Williams in their painting-strewn party loft, to the west and down the coast in northern California Augustus Owsley Stanley III was perfecting the mass manufacture of LSD, opening the way for its more efficient dissemination, which would, along with other forces, spark the psychedelic era. Riding the toggle switch of her high good girl/bad girl life, Joni Anderson in 1964 could probably not imagine that the earmarks of the gentler, pensive side of psychedelic style (verbal free association; emotional depth and bravery; flowing hair and raiment; serpentine graphics) would be her ticket to the success that she was only now beginning to actively desire.

Increasingly, Joni spent weekends in nearby Edmonton, where she performed at the Yardbird Suite. Sometimes she ventured to coffeehouses in Regina and Winnipeg. “So I was leading this dual life, half in art and half in music,” she has said. Her insecure first efforts at the Louis Riel, where everyone had thought her voice “weird,” had given way, through these months of hootenannies and club performing, to a developed vocal style and a confidence at the microphone. Folksinger Chick Roberts first saw her in the Regina and Winnipeg clubs, “doing covers of others' songs,” of course—“and she knocked me out. She was very gorgeous, very ethereal, lovely, with her blond hair.” Her voice tone had modulated. “She sang great.”