Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (45 page)

Just as with
Writer,
“we didn't have any expectations here, either; we just wanted to play as good as we could,” says Charlie. Lou Adler alone seemed to know that this was no ordinary album, despite his trademark übercool at the session. When Danny asked Lou if he thought “It's Too Late,” which featured his solo electric guitar vamp, came off okay, Lou allowed, “Yeah, man, it's gonna be huge.”

This time the cover was just right: There is Carole in a nubby gray sweater and roomy blue jeans, splay-foot barefoot on her Wonderland window-seat in her unlit living room, working on her needlepoint, with her about-to-pounce cat, Telemecat, comically hogging the camera. Light pours in through the transparent Indian-fabric curtains (which she'd sewn herself), illuminating half of her unsmiling face; glinting off her rippling, frothy hair. Carole looks like the earth mother next door.

Tapestry
was released in early February and started to work its way onto the radio. The first two reviews unsettled—even frightened—Lou Adler, who had silently predicted that the album would be to music what
Love Story
was to movies:
The Long Beach Independent
and another small paper had dismissed it and had complained of Carole's “squeaky” voice. (Could Adler have been so off?) But then came Jon Landau's long review in April in
Rolling Stone.

Landau introduced Carole to the serious rock crowd. He recapped her Brill Building career, her switch to singer-songwriter, and then he puzzled out the subtle punch of her new album. There is an “area of feeling on this record that is hard to get at,” he says. “This music is not the product of someone adopting styles and then discarding them…It is an album that takes a stand.”
Tapestry,
he realizes as he writes, “is an album of surpassing personal intimacy and musical accomplishment…The simplicity of the singing, composition and ultimate feeling achieved the kind of eloquence and beauty that I had forgotten rock is capable of.” The closeness of the musicians registered with Landau: “Every note reminds you that [it] is not the work of pop star hacks diddling around in the studio to relieve their boredom.” He concluded: “Conviction and commitment are the lifeblood of
Tapestry
and are precisely what makes it so fine…Carole King reaches out towards us and gives everything she has. And this generosity is so extraordinary that perhaps we can give it another name: passion.”

By June
Tapestry
had sold a million copies, and the single released from it—“It's Too Late,” backed with “I Feel the Earth Move”—hit the #1 mark, staying there for five weeks. “There was hardly an under-thirty soul in the Western hemisphere four years ago who couldn't hum at least a few bars of ‘It's Too Late,'”
The Washington Post
's Alex Ward would write in 1976. (“How the
fuck
did
you
know, man?” Danny asked Lou Adler. In response, “Lou smiled and lit a joint—he just
knew,
” Danny says.) “Earth Move” got almost equal airplay; both sides were hits. In July “It's Too Late” went gold, and James Taylor's version of “You've Got a Friend” hit #1. By now
Tapestry
had become the #1 album in America; it would stay in that position for fifteen weeks. “So Far Away,” backed with “Smackwater Jack,” was released as a single and peaked at #14 in October. By the end of 1971
Tapestry
had sold 3 million copies and was still selling 150,000 copies a week. It would be named, by the National Association of Recording Merchandisers, the best-selling album of 1971. Cynthia Weil puts it this way: “Carole spoke from her heart, and she happened to be in tune with the mass psyche. People were looking for a message, and she came to them with a message that was exactly what they were looking for, were
aching
for.”

There was a uniting quality to the album; it was hummed along to by working-class young marrieds pushing strollers
and
Ph.D.-laden back-to-the-landers, listened to by teenage girls
and
their mothers. Ironically, though it was the most clearly “white”-niched and non-urban music Carole had ever written, it was only through it that she got credit for how unself-aggrandizingly
non
-white her more commercial music had always been. Timothy Crouse made the point in
Rolling Stone
that “Carole King is the most [emphasis added]
naturally, unaffectedly
black of our white pop stars—black in her phrasing, in the feeling of the songs she composes, and in her deep love of rhythm and blues.” The crossover of the gospel-soul hitmaker to soft rock singer-songwriter was picked up on by young soul performers trying to go mainstream themselves. Of
Tapestry
's impact on him as he was starting out with the Commodores, Lionel Richie recently said: “Oh, my God, please! That record was just crazy to me! It was a greatest-hits package in itself.”

Not only did it cross social class, generational, and in some ways racial lines;
Tapestry
became that rare thing in pop music: a perennial. It would stay in
Billboard
's Hot 100 for
six years
and go on to sell 24 million copies worldwide.

• • •

Recorded in March 1971, when Joni was at her most vulnerable,
Blue
was the album to which, appropriately, she entrusted the song she had withheld for so long, “Little Green.” The song is so deftly coded, its love and relinquishment are crystal clear even while the subject is inscrutable. (
Rolling Stone
's Crouse annoyedly declared its references so esoteric, they “passeth all understanding.”) Critics guessed, from its more conventional meters, that it had been written earlier than her breathless, stream-of-consciousness new offerings, like “All I Want,” “Carey,” “Blue,” “California,” “This Flight Tonight”—but they couldn't know why she'd waited until right now, or why a song with a wistful adieu (“Little Green, be a gypsy dancer…”) bestowed on a mysterious person “call[ed]…Green, and the winters cannot fade her…” belonged in
this
album. But, of course, the long shadow of Little Green entirely underscored
Blue.

Joni was in such a state of fragility when she recorded
Blue,
“not only did I have no defenses, but other people's defenses were alternately transparent, which made me very sad.” Joni has described this feeling as akin to being “clairvoyant”—“…or people really tend to aggress on you when you're weak.” Perhaps thinking of her high school poem “The Fishbowl,” she said, “It was like being in an aquarium, with big fish coming at you…It was like the scene in
All That Jazz
[in which Bob Fosse ‘dies'], when suddenly the heartbeat becomes dominant.” She was also suffering from a physical infection, the result of an ill-considered alliance, a rebound relationship after James. Still, says Leah Kunkel, who was present for many of the
Blue
rehearsals, “my impression was that Joni was raw, but she wasn't weak. I didn't ever think of her as a shrinking violet.”

Joni's
Blue
was in every way the counterpoint to Carole's
Tapestry.
Whereas
Tapestry
was created in a sense of communality,
Blue
was recorded in almost utter privacy—so “transparent” was Joni now that “if you looked at me, I would weep; we had to lock the doors to make that album. Nobody was allowed in” except the backup musicians, who included Russ Kunkel (on drums and hand percussion on “California,” “Carey,” and “A Case of You”), Stephen Stills (on “Carey”), and James (on “California,” “All I Want,” and “A Case of You”). While
Tapestry
was an enormous commercial success, one whose own musicians, while they enjoyed playing on it, didn't think it was such a big deal (“What did I know?” says Danny Kortchmar. “I loved the Isley Brothers”),
Blue
was a more moderate success (it peaked in the Top 20 in September) that accorded Joni legend status in the rarefied world of her musician peers. After hearing that album “people were throwing themselves at Joni's feet; nobody didn't think she was fucking brilliant,” says Leah Kunkel.

Indeed, Kris Kristofferson, who had just given Janis Joplin her post-humous #1 hit “Me and Bobby McGee,” says, “I was in awe of Joni from the moment I met her [at the Isle of Wight concert]; I thought at one point she was Shakespeare reincarnated.” Kris was so struck by the vulnerability of the songs of
Blue,
he urged Joni: “Please! Leave something of yourself.” Danny says, “People used to burst into tears when they'd hear it; they couldn't get through it.” And Russ Kunkel says that he and others had come to believe, on the basis of that album, that “Joni was as distinct a woman performer as Jimi Hendrix was a male performer, and her effect on the music scene was as bold. When I heard the songs of
Blue,
while playing on the album, it was the same as hearing ‘Hey Joe' or ‘Purple Haze.'” During the
Blue
sessions, “She was harder on herself than she was on anybody else; she was always trying to perfect her performance,” says Russ.

The cover of
Blue
(designed by Gary Burden, the husband of “lady of the Canyon” Annie Burden) was a departure from Joni's previous albums. No Joni paintings, no esoteric feminine symbols. Rather, the cover was that of a
jazz
singer's album: a blue-tinted Tim Considine
*
performance head shot of a passionate Joni, as if mid–torch song. Like the cover of a Billie Holiday or an Ella Fitzgerald album, it was forthright.

Tapestry
and
Blue
provided two different views of the new freedom women were creating for themselves. While Carole had found (or remade) a “home,” restless Joni was still “traveling, traveling,
traveling.”
While
Tapestry
sprang from the life experience of a young woman who had adapted the options of a changed culture to her own life and ultimately found loyalty and creativity (and while the example of its enormous success created opportunities for other women in music), the freedom and creativity that
Blue
's narrator has staked her life upon were obtained by a decision that was
supposed
to have been liberating but has haunted and dogged her, exacting its price. Furthermore, love—for this woman, Joni, who (male) critics duly noted was “no longer the innocent of her earlier days” (Don Heckman, of
The New York Times
) and who was “a freelance romantic, searching for permanent love” (
Rolling Stone
's Crouse)—was not the adventure it had been a few years ago. She now knows how love subtracts from autonomy (“I love you when I forget about me,” in “All I Want”); she can recite all her faults (“Oh, I'm so hard to handle, I'm selfish and I'm sad,” in “River”); she sees through men's bullshit (“Constantly in the darkness? Where's
that
at?” in “A Case of You”); and she rues the destructiveness that's come with her choices (“I've gone and lost the best baby that I ever had”); yet she
so
cannot escape the crazy integrity that's behind them, her responsibility feels unbearable: “I wish I had a river, I could skate away on.”

One critic negatively prognosticated the risk in
Blue
's rawness—Heckman “suspect[ed] this will be the most disliked of Miss Mitchell's recordings, despite the fact that it attempts more and makes greater demands on her talent than any of the others”—but women who, like Joni, had reached their late twenties eschewing commitment despite its risks found the album tremendously consoling and affirming. Decades after its release, two women fans told Joni, speaking of
Blue,
“
You
were our Prozac.” Younger women writers, in all media, would take from it a bracing lesson; the novelist-essayist Meghan Daum recently said: “If there's anything I've learned from listening to [Joni] over the years, it's that if you don't write from a place of excruciating candor, you've written nothing.”
Rolling Stone
's Crouse got it; he saw this “very powerful” album as a gamble, and one well taken: “In portraying herself so starkly, she has risked the ridiculous to achieve the sublime.”

Joni—who by now had the audacity to think of herself as a sacrificing artist, like her adored Van Gogh, who'd cut off his ear for truth (while Carole thought of herself as, as her then-publicist reductively put it, “a housewife”)—viewed her nervous breakdown as the price of
Blue.
With her trademark immodesty, she has likened
Blue
to a Charlie Parker “pure opera of the soul” and has called it “probably the purest emotional record that I will ever make in my life…[T]here is not one false note in that album. I love that record more than any of them, and I'll never be that pure again.”