Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (44 page)

It was a family based on equality. Despite James's sudden success, “he was just our friend and we were glad he was making it,” says John. Abigail says, “I never had an inkling Carole was a wealthy woman. She must have had money from her years of success with Gerry, but she didn't live any differently than we did. If there was a pecking order, I didn't sense it.” “We were just a bunch of hippies, for God's sake,” John says. “Just hippies who happened to have money and live in bigger houses, but we were like everyone else at the time.” The guys imitated the cool of the bebop greats and the Southern rockers (Leon Russell, Dr. John, Levon Helm) they idolized; the girls were part of the “no-bra, hairy-underarm” ethic, says John. “Every one was an earth mother.”

But while all were earthy, Carole was a little more motherly. She was the only real mother of the crew, and she'd been the first single mother many of them had ever known. When most of Laurel Canyon was “still sleeping off drug hangovers,” says Betsy Asher, “you'd go to Carole's house and she was already making stuffed peppers for dinner…at
eleven a.m.
” Carole kept lists and schedules. Carole had everyone over for Passover seder. Carole—despite her yoga and vegetarianism—smoked cigarettes, shopped at Ralph's Market, and didn't hide her Brooklyn accent. And she was always shoring up that ex-husband of hers; when Gerry's romance with Sue Palmer ended and Stephanie fixed Gerry up with her friend Barbara Behling, a tall, blond ex–New Yorker who had a boutique on Sunset, Carole had them over to support the new relationship. “Carole was
haimische,
” says Ralph. “A sincere, homey person who does the right thing, who you felt you'd known all your life.” But if she reminded the others of a real world beyond their hip, new world, the influence went the other way, too. “I think Carole was comforted and inspired by the freedom and the closeness she found with us,” says Stephanie. “She blossomed.”

All around the country, there were “families of friends” like the one Carole was now a part of. Many young Americans were forming communes, transforming homes to group-living spaces, from suburban Long Island to Berkeley (where Tom Hayden's Red Family was established on Hillegas Avenue, complete with a day care center, Blue Fairyland). Even when they weren't in actual communes, a funky, loyal communitarian spirit prevailed. The young writer Ann Beattie would soon be publishing, in
The New Yorker,
her keen-eared short stories about, as one writer-critic described them, young “characters [who] have come for weekends, broken up relationships, fixed themselves scrambled eggs, rolled joints, flipped coins to determine where they should go next” and where there were “lots of extra mattresses or sleeping bags lying around these houses, and a constantly shifting number of occupants.” (The reason the 1983 movie
The Big Chill
was so magnetically nostalgic is that so many people really had lived that way.) Within such circles there was often a Carole: the salt-of-the-earth woman who had the slightly wider, wiser view.

And increasingly, such salt-of-the-earthiness and such a wider view were valued. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and the Democratic convention riots had not, it turned out, been the crowning violence of the late 1960s. In November 1969 it was revealed that U.S. troops had slaughtered hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese, mainly women and children, in the village of My Lai; and in May 1970 four students at Kent State University in Ohio were killed and nine others injured by National Guardsmen trying to stop an antiwar protest.

Violence was coloring the world of music, as well. Dashing Woodstock's dream a mere four months in, in December 1969 a man was killed during a Rolling Stones concert in Altamont, California, by rampaging Hells Angels; three-quarters of a year later both Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died of drug overdoses. Jim Morrison's drug-induced fatal heart attack would follow in July 1971; all three were twenty-seven. The triumphalist chaos of late '60s rock, the radicals' political opera, the psychedelic madness: it all seemed to have backfired. There was a longing for decency and earnestness. Bobby Kennedy had said, “We're here to make gentle the life of this world.”
This
seemed the time to try to do it.

Older intellectuals in thrall to youth culture evinced (despite their awe at the ecstatic euphoria that had dominated for the last several years) such earnestness. In his book
The Making of a Counter Culture,
which coined the term that has become the widely accepted description of the amalgam of political and cultural changes that marked the times, California State history professor Theodore Roszak, in 1970, pleaded that the question facing the country was not “How shall we know?”
*
but “How shall we live?” An even more sincere and impassioned tome, published that same year by Yale University law professor Charles Reich, decreed that the country was on the brink of a youth-led nonviolent revolution to yield a life “more liberated and more beautiful than any man has known, if man has the courage and the imagination to seize that life.” Reich's
The Greening of America
started out as a
New Yorker
essay that drew almost half a million letters to the editor and became a #1
New York Times
best seller. People
wanted
to believe in a “greening”—a sweet new consciousness—in America. That same year Earth Day became a national holiday,
The Whole Earth Catalog
reached its apex of readership, and at Esalen Institute clones thousands of people were being taught to relate to one another without “game playing.” There was a welcoming of sincerity and (as Ralph had described Carole) of
haimisch
ness.

• • •

At some point in the summer and fall, Carole began doing something new: writing whole songs—melody
and
lyrics. She was becoming spiritual; her classes at Swami Satchidananda's Integral Yoga Institute, coupled with her trip to India, had led her to meditation. (She would eventually take the disciple name Karuna.) Meditation may have helped the pragmatic young woman tap a deeper vein of expression, for, as prolifically as Carole was writing these new songs, Danny noticed that “they didn't sound like they came from a journeyman or a mere craftsman. They sounded like they came from somebody who was deeply feeling what she was writing.” The songs trace the course of this once conventional young woman's adjustment—with anguish, awe, and finally joy—to the new life she has made, and they celebrate the integrity of improvised “families.”

In “Tapestry”—melodically, a Broadway-tinged story song—the narrator is a young woman looking back on an eventful past (“a tapestry of rich and royal hue”), marveling at ephemeral new sensations (“a wondrous, woven magic…impossible to hold”). She enters the rustic tableau she is needlepointing and comes upon “a man of fortune, a drifter passing by” in a “torn and tattered cloth.” Is he a Calcutta beggar? A Satchidananda-like guru? A capped and knickered figure with crooked staff, from one of those sew-by-numbers tapestries that adorned many a Brooklyn living room? Whoever he is, he's warning her that rewards from this bucolic new world can be chimerical, but she knows that already; too much freedom has never been her style. “A figure gray and ghostly” comes to take her “back” to responsible life.

“So Far Away” is the first of three songs that puzzle out a new idea of “home.” She has moved clear across the country as if it were no big deal, but in 1970 people are really just two generations away from travel by animal cart. If you ask the song's question (“Doesn't anybody stay in one place anymore?”) at face value, it sounds like the kind of quip uttered by common-sense housewives in Carole's childhood neighborhood.
Rolling Stone
's Jon Landau would cite the song's melancholic opening to say that Carole was now “her own best lyricist.”

“Home Again” makes the same point, but more worriedly, yet “Way Over Yonder,” set to a deep gospel melody, the final song in the “home” trilogy, seems to say: yes, a crew of renegades from dysfunctional traditional homes
can
create its own nurturing community. “You've Got a Friend” is a vow of loyalty, leaving no question as to the salience of posttraditional ties. The arrangement Carole wrote for it opens it with the solemnity befitting a congregation's favorite hymn. Stephanie says, “I think Carole wrote ‘You've Got a Friend' for all of us.”

When Carole tried out “You've Got a Friend” on Toni Stern, Toni thought it was “too obvious,” and when she tried it out on Cynthia Weil, Cynthia thought it was “too long.” But Cynthia's overwhelming feeling—while watching Carole, who was in New York on the James tour, sitting at the piano at the Mann-Weil apartment, playing the new songs she'd composed—was great surprise. “I had no idea that Carole could ever write lyrics or was ever interested in writing lyrics; it was a complete shock, because Gerry had been so powerful.” Cynthia believes that having a different kind of marriage helped make the leap possible: “Charlie was a supportive husband, instead of the one who was leading the way. Carole was able to be her own lyricist and express herself. She'd come into her own.”

Although Toni and Cynthia weren't crazy about “You've Got a Friend,” it did have one big fan, who accurately took the measure of its appeal, and for good reason: his own meaningful friendship with the writer. When James heard the song (which
Rolling Stone
's Landau would later deem “perfection”), he loved it so much that he said, “Damn! Why didn't
I
write that?” (He would end up recording it; it would be his only #1 hit.)

Writer
had been almost all Gerry-Carole songs, but in this new album, Carole included only one Gerry coauthorship—“Smackwater Jack,” a rocking yarn about a colorful western outlaw. She would include two songs she cowrote with Toni, both bearing the productive tension between the sometimes-sentimental pro songwriter and the cool bohemian. Carole had written most of the lyric of “Where You Lead” as well as the music, but then she got stuck. She handed the incomplete song to Toni and said: “I can't write the bridge to this; if you can figure out the bridge, you can get credit for the song.” Toni looked over the lyrics—it was another full-throttled loyalty song but over-simply conceived
*
—and thought, “
I
would
never
write a lyric about a woman
following
a man!” If the girl was going to follow the guy, it would damn well be on
her
terms. Toni lay down on her couch and the words fell out: “I always wanted a real home, with flowers on the windowsill. But if you want to live in fucking New York City, honey, you know I will.” Carole cut the “fucking,” asked Lou if the “New York City” was okay (he said yes), and the song was a go.

As for the song that would be the album's monster hit: though Toni often agonized over lyrics (as Gerry had), “I wrote ‘It's Too Late' very fast, in a day,” she says. Toni pointedly says that she wrote the heartfelt lyric
after
her love affair with James Taylor was over (he'd gone on to Joni), but then she carefully adds, “I won't say who ‘It's Too Late' is about—I don't kiss and tell.” Whoever inspired it, the lyric expresses a blithe woman's depressed,
embarrassed
realization that a romance she'd secretly banked on is over. On the surface she's shrugging and cool—the two of them “really did try to make it”—but the insistent internal rhymes (“inside,” “died,” “hide”) trumpet her hidden emotion.

• • •

Tapestry
was recorded in January 1971, when everybody had just come off a leg of the James–Carole–Jo Mama tour. “We were loose, because we'd been playing a lot, and we were looking forward to recording,” says Charlie. Carole, Charlie, Danny, Joel, Ralph, and James piled into snug Studio B at A&M Studios on Sunset and La Brea; Lou Adler had expert sound engineer Hank Cicalo on hand to crisply separate the sound of every instrument. “Lou and Hank knew just how to mic Carole,” says Toni, who arrived with her dog and watched everyone across the control booth glass for the first of the three-hour sessions. Carole handed out the charts while tending to Louise and Sherry. Ralph, for whom “little kids were like aliens from another universe,” was “impressed that she could lead a recording session and fully relate to her kids like a hands-on mom, and she didn't take shit from them, either.” Hank Cicalo found Carole an exception to the difficult rock stars he was used to. “She knows just what she wants on a record,” he said, and when something went wrong with the equipment, “Carole [had] enough of a head on her shoulders to wait until the problem [was] corrected—she's very professional. Best of all, she makes everyone feel at home. There's no tension when she's around.” “The credit for the smoothness of the
Tapestry
sessions goes to Carole,” says Toni. “She was singer, writer, arranger; she set the mood.”

“It's Too Late,” “You've Got a Friend,” and “I Feel the Earth Move” were nailed in that first session. “Carole would suggest a couple of overdubs and she would overdub a few harmony parts,” says Danny. “‘Done!' ‘Done!' ‘Done!'
Snap! Snap! Snap!
—three, four, times a day.” The entire album, Carole's later overdubs and all, was completed in under two weeks. The sessions yielded what John Rockwell of
The New York Times
would call Carole's “signature” sound of “consoling chords, full of homey fifths and octaves; [a] relaxed, softly rocking blend of folk music and gentle soul funk.” Her voice (which Jerry Wexler and Mike Stoller had always loved) had attained a confidence. It was strong and theatrically enunciated yet also earnest and breaking: a trusted friend, cajoling you to listen to a mulled-over insight—or a yelp of fun—in a quiet bedroom. Her inclusion of a sombered “Natural Woman” and “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” on which Joni sang background
*
—like “Up on the Roof” on
Writer
—told “serious rock” fans not only that she could join the club but that she'd always belonged there.