Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (27 page)

The L.A. émigrés coped with the outrage the only way they knew how—through music. As a tribute to the hometown they'd abandoned but would always love, Carole, Charlie, and Danny created a band called The City, with Carole on piano and vocals, Charlie on bass guitar, and Danny on rhythm guitar. They found a temporary drummer in the excellent Jim Gordon.

Carole's determination was the guiding force, says Danny. “Her attitude was: ‘We're gonna write a song today, now!' while the rest of us were, ‘Uh, do I…
feel
like it?' She would sit down and—
BAM!
”—a song or arrangement emerged. The City found a welcoming listener in Lou Adler, a star within L.A.'s lustrous hip-istocracy. “Lou Adler was the coolest guy I ever met,” Danny says. “His laconic style, his insouciance, his not taking it too seriously. He was a great dresser, and he was living with [
Mod Squad
's] Peggy Lipton.” (Later he would have a love affair, and a baby—the first of his eventual seven sons, by various women—with Britt Ekland.)

The four of them—Charlie on bass, Danny on guitar, Carole pumping the piano, Jim Gordon on drums—put a sophisticated gloss on a raft of new Carole-Gerry songs, three Carole-Toni songs, and two songs Carole wrote with Dave Palmer. Later critics would cite her trademark “hook 'n' riff heavy arrangements,” evident on this album.

During the sessions that led to The City's album,
Now That Everything's Been Said,
“Carole would sing or play parts to Charlie and [me],” Danny has said, “and once we got it right, we could hear how great this record was going to be.” At the demo sessions a young organ player, Ralph Schuckett, had been enlisted to help. Schuckett was so excited he was nervous. Here was “Carole King, the famous Brill Building hit maker,” as Danny had hyped her—her songs had been Ralph's “favorite songs in elementary school and junior high”—sitting at the piano, writing the chord charts when Ralph walked in. “She said, ‘You must be Ralph,' and introduced herself to me with that wonderful smile, intent on putting me at ease.” This would be a template for her integration into a younger group of L.A. musicians. Many of them would view her, barely past twenty-five, as a legend of a
bygone
era that had dovetailed with their early adolescence; she would disarm them with her warmth and approachability, earning a role for herself. That role would have a name: earth mother.

The album cover shows three characters—Charlie (with his huge, sad eyes; long-limbed, in paisley shirt); hipster Danny, in banded broad-brimmed hat; and an intense and earthy-looking Carole in a white Indian shirt—squatting on the grass in front of an old car. In a breakthrough for her, Carole sang solo on almost every one of the twelve tracks. But the album's most compelling cut was “A Man Without a Dream,” with Danny singing Gerry's lyrics (“It was such a good song,” Danny says, “even my singing couldn't diminish its power”) and with Carole's melody echoing the infectious plaintiveness of Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions.

Now That Everything's Been Said
was the first album Danny had ever played on, so it seemed like a big accomplishment. But meanwhile, over in England, Danny's friend James Taylor was one-upping him.

• • •

James, nineteen, had crossed the ocean some months earlier with the idea of being a “street musician” in London. As shambly as he seemed, he left behind a local reputation, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, as a young “remarkable virtuoso folk guitarist and singer,” says novelist Russell Banks, who had played big brother to the tormented young James. Once in London, James dug into his jeans pockets and pulled out an address that Danny had given him: that of singer and Beatles intimate Peter Asher. Danny had met Peter several years earlier, when Danny's King Bees were touring with Peter and Gordon, Peter's duo with Gordon Waller. Toward the end of the duo's pop reign, they'd played L.A., and Peter had stayed with newly arrived Danny and Joyce at their Canyon home; Peter offered to reciprocate, should Kootch ever find himself in London. Now Peter beheld, at the front door of his London maisonette, not Kootch, but Kootch's friend—a handsome, rangy young man bearing a demo tape. Peter's wife, Betsy, coming out of the bathroom in flannel bathrobe and hair rollers, was struck by the young stranger's paradoxes. “He was like a big, goofy guy, but he was all Southern grace and charm.” Peter played James's tape and—Betsy recalls—“both of us immediately knew how gifted James was; it was obvious.” “I heard great music, great talent,” Peter says.

Peter agreed to bring James to Paul McCartney, his friend and once near-brother-in-law (Paul had been engaged to Peter's sister, actress Jane Asher). James Taylor would be the first non-Beatle produced on Apple Records, and Peter soon came to know James as “a mass of contradictions: a thoroughly shy, self-effacing person
and
an extremely straightforward person. He was very smart, but,” as he would learn later, “he was also a junkie.”

Peter not only obtained an Apple deal for James; he and Betsy put him up. The willowy Betsy Doster Asher, the daughter of a Kentucky Secret Service officer, was affecting a British accent and eagerly growing into her new status-by-marriage as part of a family—the Ashers—so cultured, they'd awed the lowly pre-fame Beatles. Peter's psychiatrist father and oboe professor mother had opened working-class Paul McCartney's eyes to the finer things in life when, four years earlier, he'd come courting Jane and had moved in. But, in truth, if Betsy had been a few years younger, she might have crossed paths with James Taylor on MacDougal Street: she'd been a waitress at the Café Wha? and had worked in the office of the Cafe Au Go Go; she'd met Peter while she was working for a publicist and he was singing with Gordon. Now, here she was: playing the beleaguered hostess to this “big kid who was in some ways mature beyond his years” but was untroubledly, and seemingly indefinitely, freeloading on them. Betsy started leaving newspapers open to the “Flats to Let” pages, as a hint that James ought to find his own place. “I thought of James as a kind of nuisance younger brother,” says Betsy.

The crowbar that pried James out of the Ashers' maisonette was Margaret Corey, the girl with whom James had engineered a meeting through her brother Richard. She had come to London to study acting (and to link up with James), and, funded by her father, Professor Irwin Corey, she leased a Belgravia apartment, where James joined her. Tiny Margaret (“James would pick her up, she would jackknife her legs up, and he would bounce her up and down like a basketball,” Richard says) was so outspoken and madcap, she seemed to have enough assertiveness for both of them, which was very appealing to James.
*
She had once insisted so loudly on putting her feet up on an airplane seat, she was bodily ejected before takeoff. Margaret would walk around the Village in short skirts and see-through blouses; a dancer herself, she was forever developing crushes on beautiful male ballet stars (just before James, she'd pursued and, to her rapture, finally bedded dashing Bolshoi Ballet choreographer Yuri Vladimirov); and she was sophisticated—she knew Lenny Bruce through her father, and she cultivated a friendship with photographer Richard Avedon. As James prepared to record
James Taylor
at Apple, he found familiar solace in heroin. Being game for any new experience and eager to bond with her boyfriend in the ultimate way, Margaret shot up along with him.

James Taylor
would turn out to be overproduced, an imperfect showcase for this complex young singer-writer who would prove capable of exuding darkness, thoughtfulness, and intimacy in equal measure. Peter Asher, convinced of James's talent, would vow to get it right the next time. He and Betsy were planning to join the musical diaspora and settle in L.A., where he would concentrate on producing and managing James to best effect. Still, all the best producing and managing couldn't do what one just-right song could do, as Peter Asher knew better than anyone. It was to his mother's basement music room that Peter had been summoned one day in 1963, to hear a new song by the still-unknown Paul McCartney, who was practicing there with the unknown John Lennon. Peter descended the stairs—and heard “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”

Now, in the summer of 1968, James and Margaret welcomed house-guests—Joel and Connie O'Brien and Richard Corey—bearing unhappy news. There was a girl, Susan Oona Schnerr, from Long Island, whom they all knew. James had had a brief romance with her when both were psychiatric patients at McLean; James and Joel had hung out with her in the Village during their Flying Machine and scag-shooting days; and she'd reentered their life as a State University of New York at Stony Brook friend of Joel's brother Geoffrey. Susie Schnerr was a beautiful brunette with what Richard Corey calls “Brigitte Bardot lips.” The severe depression that had landed her in McLean had over the years gone unabated. Richard had met and had a shipboard romance with her on a youth tour ship to Europe, during which she'd unnerved him by walking the deck near the railings, talking about how much she wanted to kill herself. Richard had been greatly relieved when they'd made it to port without her having jumped overboard. But now Susie Schnerr
had
killed herself, by overdose. Joel, Connie, and Richard had known this for a while, but had not told James—Richard and Connie had felt the news would dampen their friend's mood at a critical moment: the acquisition of his record contract. But Joel, the group's hipster-sage, felt James deserved to know. He informed James.

James absorbed the shock of the news. Then, in a brooding, reflective mood, he used the unsettling fact that they'd delayed telling him to craft the opening bars (changing “Susan” to “Suzanne” for rhythm)—“Just yesterday morning they let me know you were gone…”—of a ballad he would complete over the course of months in various locations, the last being Austen Riggs Psychiatric Hospital in Stockbridge, while getting addiction treatment. He called the song “Fire and Rain.” The loss of the doomed “Suzanne,” James's struggle to stay straight, and his cry for help (“Look down upon me, Jesus, you gotta help me make a stand”
*
) all gave the song
earned
white-boy soul. In two years, the song—and James—would usher in a musical sea change.

• • •

Now That Everything's Been Said
was released at the beginning of 1969, but with no tour (Carole was afraid to go onstage, for one thing) or promotion, it sold abysmally. Carole, whose expectations for the album had been sensibly low—“I'm a songwriter, not a singer,” she would tell people—easily steeled herself against the album's lack of airplay and notice. But Charlie had been banking on the album, of which he was inordinately proud. “It didn't occur to me that it wouldn't be a success; it was a big surprise when it wasn't,” he says. He was twenty-one, barely more than an amateur, and he was living with a successful songwriter five years his senior. He didn't want to be swallowed up; he needed to find and prove himself as a musician in his own right. He broke up with Carole, rented an apartment over a garage on nearby Stanley Hills Drive, and, to support himself, got a job as a busboy at the new vegetarian restaurant Help! on Fairfax.

“Carole was upset when Charlie left; she'd be crying,” recalls a friend—then she would feel guilty about that irresponsible show of emotion. Her life “was complicated. She had kids! [She bewailed that] ‘I can't be a good mother to them because my boyfriend just left me,'” yet she couldn't turn off her emotions. Around the country, other young women for whom the new times had brought divorce and freedom were negotiating the same conflict. They were responsible parents (now, functionally,
single
parents) who put their children first, but they were also in the position of being, once again, teenagers in love. The
need
for complete control in one's maternal life and the complete
loss
of control in affairs of the heart: it was a tough push-pull. “All the people I'm friends with now are four and five years younger than I,” was the seeming non sequitur that Carole would volunteer to a reporter in two years' time. Perhaps her proffering of that self-conscious detail was a way of expressing not just the new lightness she felt but also the heaviness, unique in her new circle, that she carried, as well.

Finally, there may have been a sense of familiar failure. Carole consistently succeeded at her work. But love was a different story. “Since she had ‘failed' with Gerry,” says a friend, “she was going to make this [relationship with Charlie] ideal. But it wasn't ideal.”

• • •

Meanwhile, a new young woman had moved to the Canyon, “and she was all anybody could talk about,” says Danny. “She was so dramatically talented, so beautiful, so utterly charismatic.” David Crosby brought her to Danny and Barry Friedman's house one day. “She was shy,” recalls Danny. “Oh, I was
round-shouldered
shy!” is how she—Joni Mitchell was her name—would describe herself during those weeks. The shyness was an element of that “gosh-golly” propriety that had served her well, obscuring her innate toughness. But the shyness may have also been something else—a self-girding, against a looming irony: receiving the reward that her work deserved would actually be more painful than
not
receiving it, given what she had gone through, and then decided to do, two fraught years earlier.