Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (35 page)

In hindsight, the last three years of the 1960s were like some self-wrought mini–Messianic Age plunked in the middle of the twentieth century. Hubristic prophets spouted melodramatic rhetoric in contemporary versions of Temple squares (the campus, the TV screen, the FM radio, the rock concert, the newspaper headlines); believers found revelations in holy texts (Weather Underground manifestos, acid visions, Dylan or Beatles lyrics); witnesses watched the heavens heave both frogs (dollar bills fluttering from Wall Street balconies; the naming of a pig as a candidate for the Democratic nomination; Jimi Hendrix immolating his guitar) and thunder (the Vietnam War dead, the political assassinations). The original proclamations upon which much of this change had been built had featured a Sermon-on-the-Mount-like grace; SNCC's founders had declared, “Love is the central motif of nonviolence”; SDS's (male-pronouned) Port Huron Statement had declared that “human relationships should involve fraternity and honesty…human brotherhood must be willed.” But they'd devolved into tableaux both satirically grandiose and improbable: the (revolutionary) daughter of a wealthy advertising executive and the (revolutionary) daughter of a wealthy leftist lawyer blithely preparing to take a sauna in a luxurious town house, while in the basement their friends were making fatal nail bombs; bereted, rifle-wielding Black Panthers posing for photos in wicker chair thrones, then nibbling canapés at Leonard Bernstein's cocktail party. Life
had
to be grand-gestured and cosmically mischievous, or you were missing something. But under the mischief lay a hoary earnestness. Highly educated young culture warriors, whether of the political or sex-drugs-and-rock-'n'-roll stripe, believed as straightfacedly that the Revolution was coming as evangelicals today believe in the Rapture.

This was not the moment to be a secretary. Carly found a job as backstage handler-hostess for the talent on a new TV show,
Live from the Bitter End.
The show was televised from the Bleecker Street rock club that was right next door to the Dugout and the Tin Angel, where Joni would soon be hanging out with Dave Van Ronk and the Blues Project. Carly dropped the role of budding songwriter. “I didn't try to sell my songs. I took care of Marvin Gaye and the Staple Singers and Redd Foxx and the Chad Mitchell Trio and Peter, Paul and Mary. I brought them tea and honey and cough drops.” One night, when Carly asked Marvin Gaye if he wanted anything to drink, he told her to stick her tongue out. She obeyed and found herself in the midst of a soul kiss. “I couldn't release my tongue for a little while, let's just say that,” she's recalled. (Forty years later she'd rate Gaye's
Sexual Healing
as one of her ten favorite albums.)

Carly's next low-level job—attained with the help of Jeanie Seligmann, who was a “researcher” (that is, a reporter who didn't have a penis) at
Newsweek
—was in that magazine's lowly Letters department; she was hired to read, forward on to editors, and respond to reader mail. Already a bit chubby, Carly gained even more weight by being one of many Manhattan women to fall for a diet scam of locally sold “low-cal” milk shakes; the supposedly ninety-calorie shakes were later exposed as having ten times that calorie load, so everyone who “dieted” on them got fat.

By spring of 1967 Carly had taken stock of the year and a half: being dumped by Willie Donaldson; being subject to house rules by Joey; the what-would-now-be-called sexual harassment from Bob Johnston; Grossman's scuttling her record and freezing her out; the rejection by Robbie Robertson; the depressing secretarial job; her lunchtime gorging and weight gain; the boring
Newsweek
job and
more
weight gain. It was time to get out of Dodge, at least for the summer. In July Jessica opened a letter, postmarked Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Carly had taken a job as—of all outgrown things—a camp counselor.

The camp, nestled among the stately Colonial homes in Norman Rockwell's late-adopted hometown in the Berkshires, was called Indian Hill. Housed on the grounds of a stone mansion just around the corner from the psychiatric hospital Austen Riggs,
*
it offered an elite arts program that drew culture-loving upper-middle-class kids. (In 1967, director Julie Taymor, who, forty years later, would evoke the era in her magical movie
Across the Universe,
was a camper, and
New York Times
theater critic and cultural/political columnist Frank Rich was a recent alumnus.) It was a milieu Carly knew
so
well, it might have seemed that—as she arrived there, guitar in tow, from a city in the sexy clutch of the Summer of Love—she was regressing to her childhood. Yet it would be here that she'd meet someone who would help her realize her future.

Carly was a music counselor, and one of the first things she did was start a rock group. She was its lead singer and lead guitarist, and she gathered up four male campers—a pianist, bass guitarist, two drummers—who started rehearsing in the barn, providing, as the camp yearbook would note, “a swinging life for the boys.” She named the group Lust for Five and she wrote a song, “Secret Saucy Thoughts (of Suzy),” for them. Lust for Five held forth in the camp's improvised discotheque, Carly stimulating fantasies in more than a few male campers. In at least one case she returned the favor, harboring a crush on a seventeen-year-old trumpet player, and (shades of Andrea) wondering, could she get away with having a relationship with the kid?

Rippling through the pines during that first week of camp was anticipation for the delayed arrival of head counselor Jacob Brackman. Popular with the campers from years past, Jake was a tall, handsome twenty-four-year-old Harvard-educated writer who was suddenly a little famous: his just-published
New Yorker
essay, “The Put-On”—in which he analyzed the new hip form of humor, with examples from Warhol, Dylan, and the Beatles—was the talk of New York's young intelligentsia, drawing comparisons to Susan Sontag's “Notes on Camp,” which had been published in
The Partisan Review
three years earlier.
*

Carly and Jake met at the campfire hootenanny. “She seemed like Daisy Mae, in a little denim miniskirt and a halter top and a straw hayride hat—lots of bare arms and legs, very Al Capp-y,” Jake recalls. Something clicked between them, and fortunately it wasn't a sexual click (though over the course of their friendship, they may have made half-hearted attempts to enter that more predictable precinct), because that might have deprived them of a rich and useful lifelong friendship through which many of the most important breaks and relationships in Carly's life would materialize.

While dodging mosquitoes in the pines, and during the bumpy bus rides to Tanglewood (summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra) and Jacob's Pillow (outdoor stage to avant-garde dance troupes), Jake became Carly's confidant. She told him about her crush on the high school student trumpet player—“I was listening to her strategize about whether or not she could put a move on this seventeen-year-old,” he says.

The last couple of years bumping around had taken their toll on Jake's new friend. “Carly didn't have the confidence she would have a year or so later,” Jake says. “She didn't trust herself in a social situation to say something that just came out of her mind that may be quite funny.” Jake took advantage of her vulnerability. “I was cruel to Carly. I would encourage her to eat fattening things and then make her feel bad for the weight she was gaining.” Later Jake would see that whole sweep of time for Carly this way: “She was in a down period; she had grown up” in a glamorous, accomplished world “and she had lost her rightful place in it. The only way out for her was to become a star.”

Carly and Jake and the other counselors guided the campers through an ambitious arts gauntlet: stagings of plays by Arthur Miller, Samuel Beckett, and Euripides; readings of Joyce, Sandburg, Shakespeare, Brecht, and Dylan Thomas; dances to Varèse and Schoenberg; recitals of Haydn, Handel, and Mozart. The campers hoisted posters of Yippified Allen Ginsberg in his American flag top hat, drew sketches of John Lennon, wrote poems and essays with the names of Stockbridge favorite son Arlo Guthrie
*
and Ravi Shankar and Miriam Makeba sprinkled through them, and they “voted” for the legalization of both marijuana and (this was over five years before
Roe v. Wade
) abortion.

After Carly hugged her sunburned campers good-bye, she moved back to her bedroom in Joey's apartment on East Fifty-fifth Street; and Jake, to his borrowed house in Vermont.

Carly's crowd, like everyone's crowd, was living the stoned life now. “Those were crazy, heady, exciting times—no rules and no consequences,” recalls Ellen. Carly was intermittently trying to place her songs (she tried in vain to interest the group Every Mother's Son in “Secret Saucy Thoughts”), as well as looking for jingle-writing gigs. Ellen's brother Stephen (brilliant and unstable, he would eventually fall to his death from the rafters of a converted church) came up with a chicken nuggets idea, a precursor to the McDonald's gold mine, which he wanted to market to dope smokers; Carly wrote a jingle with the hook “Long-term physical effects are not yet known,” implying that the nuggets were psychedelic. Neither nuggets nor jingle got off the ground. (Carly did, however, eventually, get an assignment to write and record a jingle for a Massachusetts bank.)

At some point in 1968, Carly contributed a song she had written, based on a Brahms melody, to a project sponsored by the New York Symphony Association, through which rock groups would collaborate on classical music. A pop-rock group called Elephant's Memory was chosen to play her song at Carnegie Hall. The band needed a female singer; Carly was signed without even an audition. It was a match
not
made in heaven.

The jazz-flavored group, which consisted of what Carly has recalled as “very New York street-smart jazz hip people” (they would later back up John Lennon and Yoko Ono), took an instant dislike to Carly. Though they liked her singing and her animated stage presence fine, and they approved of the songs she'd written enough to continue to play them (one, “Summer Is a Wishing Well,” in particular) even after she left the group on bad terms, they were
not
going to cut the uptown girl a break. They had the same antipathy for her background that Albert Grossman had, except they expressed it more baldly. “They pretty much said, ‘Get off your fat ass and help us carry our speakers,'” Carly has recalled, adding, “I
did
have a fat ass at that point, by the way.”
*
Speaking for himself, Myron Yules, who was the group's trombonist, admits he resented Carly's air of privilege: “I thought she was a spoiled brat; she didn't want to rehearse much, she didn't think I was up to par musically, so I resented that, and I personally didn't like women standing around and not carrying the mic stand.” One night, when the group was rehearsing at a club named Wheels, a dispute occurred (its source forgotten) and all seven musicians verbally ganged up on the fat-assed rich girl. In return, she boycotted the show that night, which only increased their resentment. In late-1960s rock, it hurt to emanate a certain upbringing. You could only get past your despised caste by turning it into a goof, like cool, sarcastic Grace Slick (who several years but another lifetime ago had walked down the aisle in a white wedding gown in a San Francisco cathedral) did, by bringing Abbie Hoffman to her Finch College reunion to prank-out fellow alum Tricia Nixon. Carly “hated the gigs” with Elephant's Memory, she has said. But one providential chance encounter grew out of the experience.

Among the clubs Elephant's Memory played was the Scene, with a house band led by a longish-light-brown-haired, mustachioed young guitarist named Danny Armstrong. Danny thought Carly was “a good singer, very musical, and she had all kinds of sex appeal.” But Danny was too cool—and too married—to let on that he'd noticed her. Danny Armstrong's middle-class, Midwestern background and his child-barnacled present made him vastly different from Carly's more compatible previous beaux, the wealthy, cultured, and unencumbered Delbanco and Donaldson. Danny was an engineer's son from Cleveland who'd started playing guitar on Ohio's weddings-and-polka-band circuit and had moved to New York to be a jazz guitarist, working with Kai Winding. Between children he had with his wife and those from a teenage relationship, he had four sons and a daughter.

Electric guitars were Danny Armstrong's life. He was gifted not only at playing electric guitars but at designing, constructing, and repairing the instrument that was now the focal point of all rockdom. In fact, playing at the Scene had been a parting-shot gig—he'd become a guitar entrepreneur. The previous year he had opened Dan Armstrong Guitars, on West Forty-eighth Street, and his timing had been dead-on—he had captured an exploding market. As he immodestly put it, in one of a number of interviews conducted for this book before his death from emphysema in 2004, “I was the first and [at the time] only electric guitar specialist in the world, and I knew every big-time guitar player in the world—I just plain
owned
New York at the time.” When Cream came to town to play concerts featuring their haunting underground hit “White Room,” Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce would sit with Danny in the back of the store, the three playing blues riffs—and, according to Armstrong, “Clapton only knew
one
way of playing blues riffs and I knew
twenty.
”