Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (30 page)

Or
two
songs? For “Both Sides, Now,” which she wrote on the cusp of her estrangement from Chuck, also seems undeniably tied to her turmoil about the baby, despite what she has claimed were the song's roots. She once said that “Both Sides, Now” was inspired by
The Lord of the Rings
(she'd begun to write a children's fantasy based upon it), while Chuck remembers her reading enough of his copy of Saul Bellow's
Henderson the Rain King
to have come upon Henderson musing from his airplane seat: “And I dreamed down at the clouds, and thought that when I was a kid I had dreamed up at them, and having dreamed at the clouds from both sides, as no other generation of men has done, one should be able to accept his death very easily.” (Joni has also independently given this version of the song's origin.) But on top of these stated influences, “Both Sides, Now”'s theme of thoughtful indecisiveness and of the shifting, illusory nature of truth suggests it was unconsciously autobiographical. (Fluidity of meaning is “the great thing about songs,” Neil Young recently said to interviewer Terry Gross, in describing how a lyric he wrote that was directly inspired by a male friend's phone message was nonetheless correctly interpreted as a love poem to his wife.)

• • •

Tom Rush had been singing “Urge for Going” all over Cambridge, and his fans loved it. He was eager for more of Joni's songs. “I remember asking her, ‘What else do you have? What else do you have?' So she sent me a reel-to-reel tape. It was a tape of nice songs, and then at the end she says into the mic: ‘This is a new song. I've just finished it. It's awful. I don't even know why I'm bothering you with it.' And it's ‘The Circle Game.'” Rush phoned her right away. He would not only record the song; he would use the song as the title of his 1968 album.
*

Joni's creative fertility and her work discipline were noticed not just by Chuck, who saw in his young wife a penchant to plunge herself into work until it was finished (“whether that work was songwriting or making a pant suit from an old navy blanket”), but by Chuck's friend Armand Kunz. “Joni had incredible focus,” Kunz recalls. “If she decided to write, she wrote—it didn't matter what time of day. I remember her being closeted in a little room off their hall, working intensely, working seriously. Joni had a powerful work ethic; I don't recall her ever complaining or saying she was blocked.” Kunz had just been made general counsel of the Michigan Bar Association, and his wife Marji had become fashion editor of the
Detroit Free Press.
“Marji's columns were chatty and approachable,” Armand recalls, of his late wife. “She wrote about fashion like you were having coffee with her. And, like Joni, she never blocked. ‘We need three column inches? I'll get to work on sandals.' Though Joni wasn't writing to space or deadline like Marji, they had that work ethic in common.” Foursome dinners were frequent. Both fine cooks, the Kunzes lived in a carriage house in a marginal neighborhood; the Mitchells, in their antique-filled “tenement castle” in a student ghetto—totally urban-romantic.

That romanticism became a matter of public record when Marji hired Joni and Chuck to model for the
Free Press
's fashion page, and then in March 1966, the other Detroit paper got on the bandwagon by running an article about the Mitchells, touting them as connubial tastemakers-about-town. Tucking that news clipping into an envelope, an amused Chuck typed a note to a friend: “The
Detroit News,
treating in rather idyllic fashion the life and digs of a young couple footloose in the big city…us'n. We be the new urbanity, it says. How about that?” How about that, indeed? This was the life that a great many twenty-two-year-old American females dreamed of having.

Until right now. Until just this very minute.

For Joni, Chuck was an anachronism. He sang of “wars and wine” to blushing “ladies in gingham,” while she, in her “leather and lace,” was a fresher breed. Besides, female youth could grow its own wisdom. “Well, something's lost but something's gained, in living every day”—Joni had plucked from the emerging zeitgeist a sister-version of what Carole and Gerry were limning with “Natural Woman,” the idea of the young middle-class woman as soulful risk taker. In Joni's freshly minted form, she was a thrift-shop fairy princess, romantically adventurous yet proper and decorous, ensconced in an updated version of a Montparnasse garret.

As Chuck and Joni traveled the country playing together, Chuck couldn't fail to notice how Joni's songs were catching on—and, in a letter to a friend who was the investor in their musical duo, he acknowledged as much, revealing as well a bit of his husbandly gulp at the comeuppance: “Joni is writing beautiful songs,” he wrote in April 1966. And in June: “Joni's songs…have hit bang: Buffy Sainte-Marie wants some, Joan Baez wants some…My skeptical mind reeled at the response. Everyone is scrambling desperately for good material to give to the waiting public. Joni is the only good gal songwriter around.” These manual-typewriter-produced missives contradict Joni's complaints (which she gave in interviews long after she became successful) that Chuck wasn't supportive of her songwriting. However—out of naïveté—Chuck was unrealistically optimistic about their performing duo. “We could not have been more enthusiastically received [at the Gaslight, in New York],” he said, in that same June letter, of a joint performance that was, indeed, well received. “We both seem to have that presence on stage which is a valuable and rare commodity.” However, despite that strong set, the audiences were mostly entranced by Joni. She had performed alone at Mariposa in August—returning to the seminal Canadian folk festival where, two years earlier, she and Brad MacMath had slept in the field and carried equipment—and the crowds had been captivated. (Still, the festival's founder, Estelle Klein, a tough gatekeeper, as well as den mother to Canada's folk community, was more measured in her praise. Shortly before her 2004 death, in an interview for this book, she recalled of that performance, “Joni didn't have that many songs, and she was kind of an airy fairy [though] she did have a poetic sense, and it made her different. I said I really liked her, but if she came back, we would need more material.”)

Then Joni started making solo bookings of her own, over Chuck's protests. (“I was hurt, and I was envious. ‘Where am
I
in all of this?' I wondered.”) In the latter half of 1966 she traveled to Cambridge; Tom Rush had arranged for her to open for him during a series of New England engagements. Rush felt proprietary about the “slip of a girl” he'd discovered at the Chess Mate. “I brought her east,” is how he recalls it now; adding her to his show was “something I'd campaigned for; I felt like a big brother to her.” Joni stayed at Tom's Cambridge apartment, and on their off-night they traveled to his family's home in Connecticut. “She was clearly creating some distance between herself and Chuck, on purpose,” he says, adding that although Joni made no “overt” statements about leaving her marriage, “she was in an adventuresome mood.”

During this visit, Tom was surprised by his delicate-looking protégée's ambition. “She was determined to make it; she was hungry for recognition.” It seemed to Tom that Joni was “somebody who just needed more. What you've got doesn't count; it's what you
don't
have that counts.” Perhaps defensively—using his folkie idealism to cover his masculine surprise—he was somewhat alarmed by this. “I remember thinking at the time, This is a potentially sad situation. Nothing is going to be satisfying for her. No matter what level of recognition she receives, it won't scratch that itch.” (Two years later, when Tom would visit the now-successful Joni in Laurel Canyon, he would note, not happily, that “she was telling me things instead of asking me things.” For all its thunderous freedoms and rebellions, the late 1960s would give a woman a very small space to turn around in, even among the most educated, forward-thinking of young men.)

As half of Chuck and Joni Mitchell, Joni previewed her emerging solo persona at various folk club microphones. A November 1966 performance shows her charm. “This is a song about a daydreamer,” Joni says (as she fingers her guitar:
strum, strum
), at Philadelphia's Second Fret. Her voice is high, pristine, and polite—as if she's raised her hand and been called on in grade school. She is wearing a minidress, her long wheat-colored hair glinting against its gold lamé. “Do I have time to tell a story?” she asks the stage manager.
Strum, strum, strum.
Permission granted. “One night I walked into a restaurant…and there was a couple sitting behind me in a booth…and I think it was their first date.” She imitates a demure, excited girl: “‘Gee! I'm really glad we could go out tonight 'cause I really think you're neat!…And I'm really glad we got a chance to go to that movie, 'cause it was a really groovy movie…You're really neat. And my friend is going to be furious in school on Monday cause'”—exaggerated abashment—“‘she thinks you're swell, too.'” “Gee,” “neat,” “swell,” “golly”: this is art-college-faculty-pleasing Joni. Her patter's not witty; it's artless and clunky, playing against the gold lamé, the Nordic beauty. “About that time,” she continues, describing the dating couple she's overheard, “he looked up and”—
strum, strum, strum
—“said…‘Huh?'” Laughter! “She was completely shattered by…a daydreamer! So I figured I should write a song for her.” She segues into her (to date unrecorded) composition, “Song to a Daydreamer.”

Who is this beautiful—and gabby—young woman? the young men are wondering. The women are thinking that, however—endearingly—corny her example is, she gets it; she's on my side. (“Everybody at the Second Fret fell in love with Joni, including the owner, Manny Rubin,” says Joy Fibben, who, as Joy Schreiber, was then the club's manager. “They called her ‘The Enchanted Lady' at the Fret,” says Gene Shay, then the city's main jazz and folk radio disc jockey.)

Continuing with that performance: Now Joni's winding up to another song—
strum, strum, strum.
“This is the song of a young lady who was…pov-er-ty strick-en…”—she pronounces those last five syllables with autobiographical care—“and a young man, who fall in love. She lives on—oh, let's say Walnut Street, 'cause that's the only street I know in town. And she has a little apartment in the back of a very nice row house, and she invites him up to see her apartment one evening. And he walks in and discovers, by golly, she really
is
poverty stricken, because in her apartment she has”—now we see and taste brio trumping circumstances—“the following items: she has a rug.” Joni plays a couple of bars of snake-charmer music; the audience laughs. “It's an Indian rug,” she explains. “And, because she's a good hostess, she has a bottle of wine.”
Strum, strum.
“And over in the corner she has a bea-
u-
ti-ful old bathtub, that kind of sits on its feet. It's an Eastern bathtub. And then off in the corner is her prized possession—a beautiful, hand-wrought, hand-fashioned”—
strum! strum! strum! strum!
—“tongue-and-groove-dove-tailed bed!” The men are amused (all this excitement for
furniture
?), but the women are hearing code. It's not just furniture; it's the independence of an elegant young bohemian woman that Joni is bringing alive. (“What I didn't understand at the time was this business of identification,” Chuck Mitchell says today. “The guys loved Joni because she looked great, but the girls were identifying with her in droves.”)

Now Chuck, who's been on the sidelines, joins her for a duet on the song that Joni's scene setting has been leading up to. (“He was more serious, more conservative than Joni; they didn't seem to go together,” Gene Shay recalls.) They sing the new Beatles hit, “Norwegian Wood.” It's about a young woman who's so self-possessed, she leaves for work while her new lover is still asleep. Waking alone, the man realizes, “I was alone, this bird had flown.” It used to be the man who crisply walked away after a one-night stand, but John Lennon sensed a change in the air, wrought in part by the Beatles' own music and the Carnaby Street clothes that went with it. Also, such a “bird” used to be slatternly. Now she's a punctilious, discerning young woman, the kind who'd remark, “Isn't it good? Norwegian wood.”

By late 1966 Joni had “flown,” at least in terms of duetting with Chuck. As Chuck recalls it, they'd both watched what he calls the “flawless” Jim and Jean (an Ian and Sylvia–type duo) at the Chess Mate one night and she'd said, “We'll never be as good as Jim and Jean, so the duo is over!” Chuck admits, “Maybe she was looking for an excuse” to go solo. Chuck reluctantly conceded, describing the events (and praising his wife's talent) in a letter to the friend-investor: “Joni is an excellent songwriter. I rate her among the best in the business…She is ready to go as a songwriter, and this has resulted in further tension…Result: the duo has been disbanded…Joni simply feels more comfortable performing her songs on her own. Since that is her feeling, and I as a performer know that the critical element of a good performance is comfort…I could not disagree, since I could not, in spite of great effort over the past few months, alter her feeling.” Beneath this mature exegesis lay ragged feelings. “Everyone wanted her and no one wanted me; did I like it? No!” Chuck says today. Joni recently explained what she thinks was Chuck's reason to continue insisting on the duo: “He made more money with me than he did without me. He held the purse strings completely.”