Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

  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 J
ohn 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.”

  Chuck had begun having what he calls “gut aches” about his young wife outpacing and possibly leaving him. (The idea of the wife’s independence threatening a husband was still so counterintuitive that when Joni and Chuck gave a radio interview to announce their decision to perform separately, Philadelphia deejay Murray Burnett, assuming the separation anxiety was Joni’s, suggested that Joni assuage her loneliness while Chuck was on the road by thinking of a housewife married to a traveling salesman.)

  Joni’s first solo performance after she announced that the duo was disbanded was a return to the Second Fret, and Chuck insisted that, for her own safety, she stay with a married couple—the club’s manager, Joy Schreiber, and her husband, Larry. Joni returned to Philadelphia in late 1966, and the audience at the Fret loved her all over again. Among other songs, she played her secret lullaby to her baby, “Little Green” (without, of course, explaining its significance). “Everyone was saying that there was a magic to her songs,” says Gene Shay. “How she’d come up with these marvelous melodies and wonderful words, an artsy way with language.” When she wasn’t singing, she was drawing. “Pentels were new,” Shay recalls, “and she always had them with her, and pads of special tracing paper that gave the feeling of stained glass to her sketches.”

  Joy Schreiber, Joni’s slightly older hostess-chaperone, was also an artist, as well as a worldly bohemian. She had spent 1962 in Tangier, among a crew of artists, writers, and scenemakers that included poets Ted Joans and Gregory Corso. Joni, who had never confided in anyone in Chuck’s circle—not even in the seemingly compatible Marji Kunz—now made her first American female friend. Late at night, at the Schreibers’ large one-room apartment near Rittenhouse Square—often while the two women took turns on the same rapidograph drawing, with Joy’s Siamese cats underfoot—the talk flowed. They realized they’d both been hinterland art students, hungry for adventure. Joni confided to Joy about the baby. “Joni was greatly disturbed; she had many mixed feelings about having to give this child up,” Joy recalls. “She told me about the mental and spiritual turmoil she had felt during and after the pregnancy.” The two women talked about how illegitimacy was “a dreadful stigma for both the mother and the child”—even in 1966, it was simply a given that you couldn’t keep an out-of-wedlock baby.

  Despite these troubled evening ruminations, Joy recalls a full-of-life Joni whose talent was literally overflowing. “She never walked in the door without saying, ‘I’ve got to play you my new song!’ She’d be playing it before she took off her coat. The lyrics would just pour out of her—she was not self-critical. She was so excited to write something, it never occurred to her how it would be received or what other musicians would say about it. She wrote many songs in my presence; I don’t remember her ever changing a lyric.” True to the persona she was radiating, Joni was a ladylike, headlong adventuress. “She just wasn’t afraid, like the average young woman,” Joy says. “She didn’t say, ‘What happens if I get attacked on the street?’ or ‘What if I go home with this man and something bad happens?’ Or ‘Oh, this could be scary’ or ‘Oh, this could come out badly.’ It was all an adventure to her.” At the same time, “She knew how to be proper. She had a propriety that was so natural, you didn’t notice it. She could completely change clothes in a dressing room full of men without ever going bare; she could put on a whole outfit by putting it on top of the one she was wearing—it was an amazing trick!”

  During Joni’s time with Joy and Larry, a young musician from Colorado named Michael Durbin was playing in a group at Manny Rubin’s other club, the Trauma. “Michael was a very dear man—charismatic, charming, boyish, and very outdoorsy: a breath of fresh air,” Joy recalls. Joni and Michael started spending time with each other. They looked “dashing” together, Gene Shay says—Michael with his curly blond hair and his “gypsy-baby, new groovy guy” look; Joni, “gorgeous” in her fairy princess clothes, many of which—lacy, Victorian, seeded-pearled dresses—she now purchased from a Rittenhouse Square antique clothier named Zena. This was new; young women were suddenly strolling around Haight-Ashbury and the East Village, attired as if from Brontëera trunks and Elizabethan museum displays. For many young people in 1966, the day you first started seeing your peers dressed in clothes from other centuries (had people ever done this before?) was the day that Dylan’s lyric “Something is happening and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?” took on a sharp, delicious significance.

  Now Joni wrote the bittersweet “Michael from Mountains,” about new lovers ambling through a shut-down city on a rainy Sunday, noticing “oil on the puddles in taffeta patterns that run down the drain” and seeing children in a park as “yellow slickers up on swings, like puppets on strings”: uncommonly precise images for a pop song. It is a feminine song, braiding the wet children being scolded by (Myrtle-like) mothers in “wallpapered kitchens” into the story of intimacy on a depressing day; featuring a boy-man who is solicitous, impish, and gallant. The song is traditional—Michael will leave, while she will wait; but its conservatism is the baseline for an ascending series of songs that will break tradition: Next will be a woman musing about wisdom and freedom (“Both Sides, Now”), then living on her own, risks and all (“Chelsea Morning”), and, finally, achieving the same romantic power as a man (“Cactus Tree”). Before she hit her stride as a writer, songs used to be “what men thought women should sing,” Joni has said, “and they carried all the old feminine values, according to the ‘master.’” In her own arc of songs, she broke with that ingrained imperative.

  At some point after Joni returned to Detroit from Philadelphia, in the early winter of 1966–67, Chuck confronted her. His “gut aches” weren’t going away. This wasn’t the first time he’d shown his young wife his anger and insecurity. During a summertime trip to New York he’d smoked hash at Eric Andersen’s loft in SoHo, and “I got paranoid, and all this garbage was coming out [in my mind] about my trying to control Joni and my resentment” of her success “and my fear” of losing her. During that summer freakout, “Joni had said, ‘Charlie, are you okay?’” he recalls, “but when I said, ‘I’m scared,’ she said, ‘You’re bringing me down.’ I thought: ‘Bitch!’” This time, the fight was more heated. “I was pushy,” Chuck admits. He repeatedly asked her if she’d had an affair. She challenged his right to ask the question. “She said something like, ‘Well, what if I did?’” The evening was a stormy one. Joni was so angry at Chuck’s possessiveness (“She’d always say, ‘Don’t be possessive!’”) that, Chuck recalls, she picked the brass cand
lestick off her bedstand “and had it back and clocked for a swing. I had her wrist in one hand and the candlestick in the other.”

  And then, Chuck recalls: “I turned her over my knee and spanked her.”

  Soon after that fight, one night when Chuck was out of town, Joni arrived at the apartment with a guy she’d met at a poker game; she had talked him into helping her move exactly half of her and Chuck’s antiques down the four flights of stairs. Chuck only later realized that she had moved out within thirty days after she received her green card for residence in the United States. He believes that Joni—partly—used him (“but I didn’t mind being used, because we had too much fun”), and to some extent, she probably did. Now she was going off to the inevitable next phase of her life: living alone in New York City. The city would be her base of operations while, acting as her own manager and agent, she booked herself in clubs around the country.

  Manhattan was both a magical and a daunting place for a Pentels-and-guitar-case-toting young woman to enter, alone, in the spring of 1967. Downtown had its own ecosystem. The folk scene on MacDougal, to which Joni immediately introduced herself, was centered on the Night Owl (where James Taylor and Danny Kortchmar’s Flying Machine had been the house band until James went to London and Danny to Laurel Canyon) and the Cafe Au Go Go (where the Blues Project—“the Jewish Beatles,” from Queens and Long Island—held forth), with all the musicians piling into the Dugout around the corner after sets. English rock stars stayed at the Albert Hotel on Fourth Avenue, while beatnik expatriates thrust back on the city holed up at the Chelsea on Twenty-third Street. Uptown couples thronged to the new psychedelic discos, Cheetah, the Electric Circus, the Dom. The center of the hip universe was Max’s Kansas City; Wonderland Alices fleeing provincial hometowns could walk into the large Park Avenue South restaurant on a Sunday afternoon and go light-headed from all the dark-garbed, grave-faced Dylan types slouching at the bar. It was a mini-nation of weathered cool, unduplicable in any other city. Owner Mickey Ruskin had his choice of artists, models, and would-be writers as waitstaff—girls eagerly quit straight jobs in publishing to sling plates at Max’s. (For 1960s-generation women who’d lived in New York, there was nothing, in ensuing years, more status-conferring or instantly signifying than to have “Max’s waitress” on their life résumé.)