Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (39 page)

At her next concert, in Cambridge a month later, a lanky, handsome unknown with deep-set eyes, long brown hair, and a thin mustache opened for her. He played a song he'd written, “Something in the Way She Moves,” and when he got to the words “my troubled mind,” his nasal-voiced melancholy hinted at a
real
troubled mind, though his well-bred manner belied all his brooding and slumping. His name was James Taylor, and he was back in America, after making his first Apple album, dividing his time between his family's Martha's Vineyard home and L.A., where he would soon start recording his second album,
Sweet Baby James.
He was hanging out with Kootch's crowd. James came back to Joni's dressing room and said hello. But she was involved with Graham Nash, and he with Margaret Corey.

Meanwhile, the fan base Joni had first found in her post–Chuck and Joni concerts was gathering number.
Clouds
would better
Joni Mitchell
's
Billboard
standing by half (it charted at #93). Joni's face—framed by her waxy blond hair; sporting a wary, sideways expression, her long, manicure-nailed hands forming a little teepee in front of her lips—filled a
Rolling Stone
cover in May, accompanying an article that began: “Folk music, which pushed rock and roll into the arena of the serious with protest lyrics and blendings of Dylan and the Byrds back in 1964, has reentered the pop music cycle.” The review ended with, “Joni Mitchell has arrived in America.”

Significantly, the article mentioned that Joni “shares a newly purchased house with Graham Nash.” This, of course, was
Rolling Stone
—not a “straight” magazine like
Life.
Still, in mid-1969, a tossed-off reference to “living together” announced an avant-garde state. Choosing to cohabit out of wedlock with such thoughtful, romantic gentility as Joni and Graham were applying to their lives (the article took note of Joni's “antique pieces crowd[ing] tables, mantels, and shelves,…[her] antique handbags…on a bathroom wall, a hand-carved hat rack at the door…castle-style doors…a grandfather clock,” and mentioned that during the interview, Nash was “perched on an English church chair” while Joni was “in the kitchen, using the only electric lights on in the house…making the crust for a rhubarb pie”) elevated the seedy state of cohabitation to elegance and proved you could get the piety of the wedding-in-the-woods
without
the wedding. Increasingly, young middle-class-turned-hip women were choosing to “live with” their boyfriends, not marry them. You had to have a name for your living-withee, so, to cut against the elite sweetness of the lifestyle, gruff working-class terminology was appropriated: “my old man,” “my old lady.” Joni wrote “My Old Man” to legitimize this phenomenon and to locate herself and Graham within it; Graham's “Our House” seconded the motion.

Being someone's old lady was a proud sign of emotional security (a young woman didn't
need
marriage to feel that she was
not
being taken advantage of by her boyfriend), and it was the expression of a new—negative—way of viewing the institution of marriage. It wasn't just the guy who liked things fine the way they were, who (as the crass saying went) wouldn't buy the cow now that he'd started getting the milk for free, while the girlfriend longed, and lobbied, for commitment. Rather, it was the
girl
who now disparaged marriage in her own right, out of idealism and anti-authoritarianism. Joni presented the argument, in folky dialect: “We don't need no piece of paper from the city hall, keeping us tied and true.” (“And we
did
feel that way,” Graham says. “We
didn't
need to get married to feel that way.”) Living with a man without a wedding license had always been considered low-class (“common-law” marriages were for common people), desperate, or morally shady—or all three. Now, the choice to live in a situation that included sex but not a wedding license was a mark of enlightenment for a young woman.

Crosby, Stills and Nash had cut their album, and the atmosphere in the studio had been giddy. “It was scary; once we knew what we had, you could not pry us apart with a crowbar; we knew we'd lucked into something so special, man,” Crosby has said, of their aural combination. And Joni said, “The feeling between them was very high, almost amorous. There was a tremendous amount of affection and enthusiasm…. Part of the thrill for me being around them was seeing how they were exciting themselves mutually. They'd hit a chord and go, ‘Whoooaa!,' then fall together, laughing.”

“Joni was one of the boys,” Graham says. “She would have picked up a basketball and shot hoops. It wasn't that we were in a club that she needed inviting to. It all came naturally.” She accompanied them to rustic Big Bear to shoot the inside photographs of
Crosby, Stills and Nash.
In pictures from the day, she's in the back of the limo between dapper, mustachioed David and handsome, scruffy Graham: demure in a cap-sleeved sweater, a cross dangling on a chain around her neck; straight hair streaming, topped by a knit cap. She kisses a delighted-looking Graham's hand as she pens a lyric for a song about him, “Willy,” on a notepad: “Willy is my child, he is my father / I would be his lady all my life.”

• • •

In mid-August, Joni and Crosby, Stills and Nash (now with Neil Young, with whom they would record their next album,
Déjà Vu
) flew to New York to appear at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, and for her booking on the prestigious
Dick Cavett Show
the night after the festival. By now she had opened for her boys at several packed concerts, and the huge fan reaction had proved that three (now four) male rock stars were exponentially more charismatic than one female folksinger.

Woodstock, “Three Days of Peace and Music,” was a festival planned for August 15, 16, and 17 in Bethel, New York, at $18 to $24 for the entire three days. Two promoters in their early twenties, Artie Kornfeld and Michael Lang, backed by a twenty-six-year-old financier named John Roberts, wanted it to be the biggest rock festival ever. They had duly emptied their pockets, doubling Jefferson Airplane's going $6,000 fee to $12,000, and paying Jimi Hendrix, now the biggest rock star in the country, $32,000 (his manager had asked for $150,000 but settled on the smaller figure on the condition that no act follow Jimi). Woodstock would feature the most glamorous, top acts: Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, and Richie Havens (who would open the show); Jimi Hendrix, who would close it, providing, from the depths of a soul torn between erotic showmanship and an embrace of aboriginal New Music, the most dramatic “Star-Spangled Banner” in recent history; the Grateful Dead, the Who, Joan Baez, Country Joe and the Fish, Tim Hardin, The Band (becoming
the
group, by way of their quirky Canadian-cum-Deep-South roots, fresh-from-the-Civil War sound, and adoption by Bob Dylan), Ravi Shankar, Blood, Sweat and Tears (which included Joni's Blues Project friend Steve Katz and had been founded by Al Kooper, who was no longer in the group), and tomorrow's stars: Sly and the Family Stone, Santana, and Creedence Clearwater Revival.

Throughout Kornfeld and Lang's negotiations with the town of Wallkill, New York, they continued to insist that a crowd of, at
most,
50,000 would be attending. But, given the aggressive promotion the festival was receiving in
Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, The New York Times,
and on the radio, the townspeople doubted the numbers would stay that low. A month before the festival, the town of Wallkill abruptly rescinded its offer.

The promoters looked for a savior, and they found one in Max Yasgur, the biggest dairy farmer in the valley and the holder of an NYU law degree. Yasgur offered his 600-acre farm for $75,000, even though, with the crowd count now whispered to be an astonishing 200,000, extensive trampling seemed likely. The promoters enlisted the Hog Farm, the country's most famous commune, led by ex-Cambridge folkie Hugh Romney (an old friend of Joan Baez and Betsy Siggins), who now called himself Wavy Gravy, to bestow back-to-the-land authenticity and to provide infrastructure: security, food stands, shelter, a “free school” for kids. Wavy Gravy called his cross-country counterpart, Ken Kesey, at his commune in Oregon, and dozens of overalls-clad, acid-tab-bearing Merry Pranksters were promptly dispatched east in psychedelic school buses.

The divide between young/hip and old/straight had been around since 1966's Human Be-In in Haight-Ashbury, and it had been celebrated with every smoked joint, every dunking of a knotted cotton T-shirt into a tub of Rit dye, every raised two-finger peace sign. It had taken three years for the lifestyle's tentacles to stretch to the vast domain of American middle-class youth, and now that it had, a haj to a mecca seemed in order. Where Monterey Pop had been the hip elite—a jazz concert's savvy crowd of fans close to the age, taste, and coolness level of the performers—Woodstock would be hip democracy: wildly enthusiastic college kids, working-and middle-class hippies, and drug-brined riffraff. Where Monterey Pop had been a bellwether boutique, Woodstock would be Wal-Mart. As Arnold Skolnick, the artist who designed the festival's catbird-on-guitar logo, put it, “Something was tapped—a nerve—in this country. And everybody just came.”

As Joni, Graham, David, Stephen, and Neil were preparing to fly to New York, the Bethel town elders and Yasgur's neighbors were angrily hectoring Yasgur to give back the money and keep the hippies from over-running their orderly town. But Yasgur held firm to his agreement, even as reports shot through the news that 800,000 people—sixteen times the original maximum estimate—were on their way there.

Joni wanted to perform, but Elliot and David Geffen were fearful for her safety. Besides, even if she got to the festival safely, would she get back in time for the Cavett show, the next night?
*
The festival had already started; the round-the-clock performances were a half day or more behind schedule; traffic was blocked for twenty miles; many festival-goers had left their cars on the highway or sides of the streets and, truly like pilgrims now, were walking. The stars were being airdropped in by army helicopter.

The boys hired a small plane to fly them into the festival; Joni went to Geffen's apartment and, from the point of view of “the girl who couldn't go to the party,” watched it on TV. “The deprivation of not being able to go,” she has said, “provided me with an intense angle on Woodstock.” That longing showed up in the song she wrote.

Ultimately, some 450,000 exuberant souls came to the festival, to withstand the rain and mud and the inadequacy of facilities (there were only 620 portable toilets) with joyful brio. Street signs sprouted up: Groovy Path, Gentle Way, High Way. People made love and shared food, tents, acid, dope, Band-Aids, water, blankets. A couple of babies were born. Three people died, and four hundred bad acid trips required medical attention, but no violence broke out. Swami Satchidananda wafted in and gave the crowd his blessing. Max Yasgur (suddenly the biggest rock star of all) intoned to the mic, “This is the largest group of people ever assembled in one place, and I think you people have proven something to the world: that a half a million kids can get together and have three days of fun and music and have nothing but fun and music, and God bless you for it!” Joni, who had been feeling religious of late, felt that what she was watching on TV was “a modern miracle, a modern loaves-and-fishes story. For a herd of people that large to cooperate so well, it was pretty remarkable—there was tremendous optimism.” She also viewed the spectacle through the eyes of a girl from a long line of farmers; Yasgur (she would cite his name early in her song) had done all farming folk proud, including her grandparents.

Joni wrote her song about the raucous weekend in counterintuitive minor mode; it had a primordial, Nordic winter-forest sound, with biblical echoes that started with the first line's mention of the “child of God.” The mirage of “the bombers riding shotgun in the sky”—she conflated the peaceful helicopters soaring into the meadow with the military craft of the Vietnam War—“turning into butterflies across our nation” mirrored the naïve hope that had fueled the day. But it was the first line of the chorus—“We are stardust, we are golden”—set to those spectral, pessimistic chords—that made the song so hauntingly elegiac and conveyed the impression of hundreds of thousands of people speaking as one. Years later, cultural critic Camille Paglia, in her book
Break, Blow, Burn,
would feistily place the lyrics to “Woodstock” along with works by Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson—and Shakespeare—on her list of the forty-three best poems produced in the English language.

By the time the boys got back—talking of how they'd commandeered a pickup truck with Jimi Hendrix to get from the airfield to the festival tent and how they hadn't performed until four in the morning—Joni had completed the song. She'd intuited the significance of Woodstock from her armchair. “[Joni] contributed more towards people's understanding of that day than anybody that was there,” Crosby has said, of the song that, in rock version, he, Nash, Stills and, technically, Young (whose voice is not heard on the cut) would make into their defining hit.

Days later, back in L.A., Joni opened for her boys at the Greek Theatre. If there had been doubt as to where she was now positioned in relation to this male group she'd helped ignite, it was banished by
Los Angeles Times
critic Robert Hilburn, who called Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's performance “a triumph of the first order” and said that Joni's performance had been “overwhelmed” by theirs. She may have been beginning to wonder: What was the price of being someone's old lady?