Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

  Two very important things came of that day for Joni. First, she was riveted by Leonard Cohen. As she would later describe it (in “That Song About the Midway”), in one of her most memorable lines, Cohen “stood out like a ruby in a black man’s ear.” Her recent fascination with Jewish men—Katz, Blumenfeld—found its ultimate destination in this hound-dog-faced unlikely rock star (whose visage would be uncannily twinned in another handsomely unhandsome young man—The Graduate star Dustin Hoffman—who would, within a few months, similarly emerge as an against-type sex symbol). Cohen was a poet in a sea of lyricists. His first volume of verse, Let Us Compare Mythologies, had been published while he was a McGill University undergraduate. His lauded second collection, The Spice-Box of Earth, had earned him acclaim, and his second novel, Beautiful Losers—mystical, ecstatic, tortured, and sexual: refracting his life with lover Marianne Jensen on the island of Hydra—had moved one critic to liken him to James Joyce.

  Joni embarked upon a love affair with Leonard Cohen. Although their romance was short-lived, its influence was among the most important in her career. In fact, no brief relationship in Joni’s life produced as many songs—and so many of her better songs—as did her few-weeks-long romance with Cohen. She seems to have understood that she required a literary writer to ratify her more instinctual (but just as virtuosic) poetics—and that in their polar personifications of the Canadian experience lay a profoundly romantic fit. In “Rainy Night House,” she transports herself back to the Sundays in Reverend Logie’s North Battleford church, opening her hymnal (“I am from the Sunday school / I sing soprano in the upstairs choir”), standing next to Peter Armstrong while Frankie McKitrick plays the organ: a provincial naïf awed to be approaching intimacy with a counterculture shaman (“You are a holy man, on the FM radio”), whom she addresses as “thee.” But that “holy man” is actually fresh out of bourgeois life himself, a life to which he’s still tethered: “You called your mother / She was very tan.” This is wry sociology and earnest love song in one. The song reflects the times: all over America there were such couplings of opposites, each lover remaking himself or herself away from a conventional, preordained destiny. Joni’s image of falling “into a dream” on Cohen’s mother’s “small white bed,” with each of them, in turn, awakening to watch the other sleep, describes the awe of two self-transforming people, each seeking anchor in a lover who is tenderly exotic.

  In “The Gallery,” which she would sing (on her second album, Clouds) in that choir girl’s voice, she slyly explains the reason for the brevity of their relationship—Cohen’s womanizing—in the consciousness of an impressed innocent who nonetheless knows that only a fool would tolerate such behavior. And it is Leonard Cohen who is reliably believed to be at least half of the inspiration for what may be one of her best songs, “A Case of You,” written two years later; its punning title suggesting both “case” as in course of an illness and “case” as in quantity of wine bottles. “I could drink a case of you and still be on my feet”: you’d have to ransack the best of country music to find a line as good as that.

  “Leonard was a mirror to my work,” Joni would later say of the bond that developed in Newport and strengthened at the Mariposa Festival, and then in Montreal and New York, “and, with no verbal instructions, he showed me how to plumb the depths of my own experience.” “Leonard,” who, being just shy of thirty-three when they met, was roughly nine years older than Joni, “was very much an intellectual—more of a leftover beatnik than a hippie,” says Joy Schreiber Fibben. “Joni grew more serious after she met him. She was rarely larking about lyrically after that.” During their brief but intense relationship, Joni was also influenced by Cohen’s best friend from childhood, Mort Rosengarten, a sculptor, whom she credits with teaching her an exercise that gave her drawing “boldness and energy—he gave me my originality.” Rosengarten, for his part, recalls that Joni in early fall 1967 “was driven; she clearly had a path; she was…on the trail of her creative truth.” As if describing the awe in “Chelsea Morning,” Rosengarten says: “Joni was seizing every moment of life that was going by.”

  But it was Judy Collins’s time spent with Joni at the festival that would prove the most significant upshot of the day. Judy would record both “Michael from Mountains” and “Both Sides, Now” for Wildflowers. (She would also release “Chelsea Morning” as a single in 1969, the year Joni recorded it on Clouds.) Judy opened Wildflowers with the first of these songs, perhaps in part because she had her own charming Michael; her boyfriend at the time, tousle-haired, sexily droop-eyed English rock journalist Michael Thomas, told people that the song was about him. But it was the production and recording of “Both Sides, Now,” which Judy most loved, that would be key. The arrangement was turned over to twenty-four-year-old Joshua Rifkin, a Juilliard-trained musicologist and Bach scholar whom Jac Holzman knew from Rifkin’s work on Holzman’s classical label, Nonesuch, and with whom Judy had worked on earlier albums. With Rifkin’s celestial harpsichords ringing over, under, around, and through Judy’s emotional, reedy contralto, the words sounded as if they were emanating from a cathedral of the collective female soul. When the song was finally released as a single in November 1968 (after almost a year on Wildflowers), it sold a million copies. (The record has since been entered into the Grammy Hall of Fame.) “Both Sides, Now” was ultimately recorded by a list of singers that includes Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and Willie Nelson. Indeed, Judy’s version of “Both Sides, Now” became to women in their twenties in 1968 what “My Way” would be to males: a kind of personal anthem. In their tiny-mirror-studded, embroidered Moroccan vests over flounce-sleeved, stock-tied blouses tucked into jeans or miniskirts, silk scarves pirate-tied low on their brows—as those “incense owls” (and the roach-clipped billows) spiraled in the air while clay-potted candles threw hypnotic flickers on exposed brick walls—countless young women (some enduring heartbreak over the shadier guys who’d replaced the boring college boys they’d happily jettisoned) heard in Joni’s words, through Judy’s voice, a shared epiphany about the emotional risks they had chosen.

  Another person Joni met at Newport was rock promoter Joe Boyd, a Massachusetts native and Harvard graduate now living in England, who occasioned Joni’s first trip abroad by inviting Joni to his adopted country to open for the Incredible String Band at a London club called the Speakeasy. “In her miniskirt and long straight hair, she stole the show completely,” Boyd recalls. “She dazzled the crowd of liggers with the power of her voice, the originality of her melodies and lyrics, and her quiet but confident stage presence. Her guitar playing was very strong, and her voice was controlled and powerful in the small room.” Boyd found her “gawky, kind of earnest, wholesome, fresh-faced”—in endearing sharp contrast to the “sophisticated, decadent” blond beauties that England was used to: Marianne Faithfull, Pattie Boyd, and Julie Christie. Joni remembers coming home from England during that “Twiggy-Viva era…all Carnaby Street, with false eyelashes, sequined belts—flashed out.”

  By fall, Joni had a manager—and a passionately devoted one; ultimately, they would make each other’s careers. His name was Elliot Roberts (né Rabinowitz, from the Bronx), a funny, antic, pot-smoking junior agent at Chartoff-Winkler, and he’d been so knocked out by her talent when he’d caught her act at the Cafe Au Go Go that he’d flown to Detroit to travel with her at his own expense for three weeks before she agreed to his representation. Elliot quit the agency to devote himself to Joni. Joni had gotten recording contract offers from Vanguard and other small folk labels, but she’d dismissed them all as “slave labor.” Roberts resolved to change all that, and Joni seemed to believe him. During the Detroit engagement, Joni stopped in to see Chuck and pick up some items from the apartment. Chuck remembers her sitting against the oak-wainscoted walls “on a rainy fall night, with a moody, golden light coming from the chandelier.” Then she stood up, “and I can still see her, standing with her back to me, looking out the window. Joni said, ‘It’s gonna happen, Charl
ie. I’m scared, but I’m gonna be a star.’”

  Elliot took the tape he’d made of Joni’s Michigan performances and made the rounds of the record labels, then almost all still based in New York. He had every confidence he would prevail. “Both Sides, Now,” “Chelsea Morning,” “That Song About the Midway,” “Michael from Mountains”: “How could you not hear them and go, ‘I’d take a risk on that person’?” he felt. But the A&R men viewed Joni as a singer in the passé folk genre (an art song singer might have been a more apt label); they declined to offer her a contract.

  Meanwhile, in late October, Joni had flown to Coconut Grove, Florida, the arty section of Miami Beach, to perform at a club called the Gaslight South. Joni had played the Gaslight—and another club on the South Florida folk circuit, the Flick in Coral Gables—both with Chuck and, in the last year, as a solo. She knew the regular performers, including a seventeen-year-old blues singer named Estrella Berosini, the daughter of a Czech trapeze artist. Tawny-skinned, brown-haired Estrella had grown up touring America with the circus; she could wire-walk and handle elephants. Now she was belting out Bessie Smith and Lightnin’ Hopkins at the Gaslight, alternating sets with Joni, who was trilling “I had a king in a tenement castle…”—it was a contrast.

  Biding his time in the Grove was David Crosby, who’d just been kicked out of the Byrds (by his own design, he told people). Since his eviction from that bellwether group that he’d helped to form, which had established the very genre of folk rock, Crosby had been tooling around California, landing on various perches of the drug-kissed, rich-hippie set—hanging out with the Grateful Dead in Novato, on the outreaches of San Francisco; and with Jefferson Airplane in their Victorian mansions in the city—acting as a liaison between the still-fractious southern and northern California rock scenes. (The San Francisco groups viewed L.A. as slick, commercial, and even—tainted by images of Johnny Rivers at the Whisky a Go Go—corny. Had it not been for deft persuasion by older local men the psychedelic groups trusted—concert promoter Bill Graham and music columnist and Rolling Stone paterfamilias Ralph Gleason—the Dead, the Airplane, and Big Brother would not have taken the stage at Lou Adler and John Phillips’s Monterey Pop Festival.) Crosby had recently borrowed $22,500 from his friend Peter Tork* to buy a billowing-sailed schooner, The Mayan, and had spent the fall sailing the Caribbean, with Buffalo Springfield’s Stephen Stills and the Airplane’s Paul Kantner accompanying him part of the way (the three creating the haunting ode to a postapocalyptic dream world, “Wooden Ships,” as they sailed).

  Crosby knew Estrella from his previous forays, with his brother Ethan, to the Grove. “David would sweep into the clubs with his Byrds cape on,” Estrella recalls. His father, Floyd Crosby, was a Hollywood cinematographer who’d won an Academy Award for High Noon and then had quit the movie business to sail around the world—and now this was what David was going to do. His plan was to sail—and find and produce singers; the kind of singers who could change the world, he told Estrella. “David was really into changing the world; money didn’t matter to him.”

  Estrella had been catching Joni’s set between her own sets, and she was knocked out by the new songs her seven-years-older colleague had written.

  David had not seen Joni sing—he had only seen Estrella and, according to Estrella, he liked what he saw. “David came into my dressing room,” Estrella recalls, “literally dropped to his knee, and, in the best imitation of Cyrano de Bergerac, asked to produce me. He said my voice threw him against the wall—words like that.” For reasons Estrella isn’t sure of now (“I think I knew she was more ready than I was”), she deflected Crosby’s overture, then pointed through the diaphanous stage curtain to where Joni was singing a “haunting, lilting melody” she’d written. “Joni was wearing a black dress with gold and blue sparkles, and over her long, straight hair she had an Indian bell necklace—she looked medieval.”

  According to Estrella, David took a quick look through the curtain, then turned back to Estrella and said, “She’s just another blond chick singer.” Estrella rebutted, “‘No—you’re wrong! Listen to her words.’ And he’s astonished—he’s a connected L.A. person in his twenties, and I’m a kid who’s just turned down my biggest opportunity, and now he’s turning into a dutiful little boy and going to give Joni a listen because I said so.”

  Crosby more than agreed with Estrella Berosini’s assessment. By the end of the evening he was not only in love with Joni’s singing but with Joni. (Joni soon repaid Estrella by making her—“Estrella, circus girl, comes wrapped in songs and gypsy shawls…”—one of the three featured “ladies of the canyon.”)

  Deleting the Estrella precursor in the account that he wrote (with Carl Gottlieb) in his 1988 autobiography, Long Time Gone, Crosby said that, seeing Joni sing, “I thought I’d been hit by a hand grenade. Her voice, those words…she nailed me to the back wall with two-inch spikes.” As similar as these words were to the ones Estrella recalls him using on her (Crosby was nothing if not passionate), by the time he’d listened to Joni Mitchell, he forgot about the other, younger singer he’d originally been trying to woo.

  Crosby had another performer in the club, Bobby Ingram, introduce him to Joni, and he did his best to win her, as a lover and as a protégée. David was pudgy and heart-on-sleeve; not the likeliest lothario—Joni looked at him and thought of Yosemite Sam, the short, hot-blooded Looney Tunes character. But he’d been a Byrd, which conferred immense prestige. Besides, as Estrella recalls, “David made up for his pudginess with that Cyrano de Bergerac charm—and, with those beautiful cheekbones, he looked like a Cossack.” Over the course of the two-week Gaslight engagement, Estrella saw Joni come to reciprocate David’s feelings. “They were both smitten; they both had that glow.” Joni has said, “David was wonderful company and a great appreciator…His eyes were like star sapphires to me. When he laughed they seemed to twinkle like no one else’s.”

  Joni moved onto David’s boat. The Gaslight group rented bikes and rode around the Grove, and Estrella and the other girls noticed “that Joni—who looked like a Nordic princess, with her hair in two braids—had jeans that fit perfectly, like a high-fashion model. We wondered, ‘How could she get jeans to fit like that?” Estrella knew about the importance of “costuming” from the circus, “and Joni understood costuming.” As she observed Joni over the next weeks and months, she saw that Joni subtly understood other survival skills, too. “You never show fear to an animal—that’s a rule in the circus. It’s the same in the music industry and with rock ’n’ roll men. To get far, a woman must never show fear. And Joni didn’t.”

  One day during the idyll, a love-struck David approached his new kid-confidante, Estrella, and thrust a piece of paper—a poem that Joni had written him—in her face. “He was practically in tears. He said: ‘Look at this—it’s in perfect iambic pentameter! My career is winding down and hers is taking off! I’m so in love! I’m more in love with her than anyone I ever met before. What am I gonna do?’”

  What David Crosby ended up doing was ditching his plan to sail around the world. Instead (as Joni would soon put it, in the moody, internal-rhyme-rich song she wrote about him, “The Dawntreader”), “Leave your streets behind, he said, and come to me.” In other words: He would take her to L.A. and produce her first album.

  With an introduction to Warner Bros. Records arranged by Crosby, Elliot flew to Los Angeles with Joni’s tapes. He secured a contract for her with Warner Bros. (she would be on their Reprise label), which included a rarely granted privilege, especially rare for new artists: creative control.

  At the end of 1967 Joni moved out to Los Angeles, her fourth change of city in just over three years. She and Elliot, who was also relocating there, had a plan, which he articulated thusly: “The role model was Bob Dylan, and it wasn’t a matter of radio play or hits, it was”—emphasis added—“a matter of people being guided by your music and using it for the soundtrack of their lives.” As Joni would later put it, “love and freedom: wome
n in America freeing up their lives” was a main theme in her personal life, and of that soundtrack she was creating. “We had a lot more choice” than her mother’s generation, she said, “which was very confusing. There were no guidelines.” But with a song—“Cactus Tree”—that she wrote around the time she was leaving New York for Los Angeles, she did offer a guideline for that new challenge: women would keep their hearts “full and hollow, like a cactus tree.” She invokes sailor David in the first verse of the third-person-narrated song; mountain-climbing Michael Durbin in the second; Chuck in the third; and others throughout (Roy is the “drummer”). Her narrator is not suffering Marcie-like obsession when these men are absent; rather (emphasis added), “She will love them when she sees them.” Over the years, frequent quotings of the song’s catchy hook—“she’s so busy being free”—have tinged its message with disapproval. “Busy being free” seems a self-contradiction and even a petty selfishness. But a woman did have to keep psychologically “busy” to match men at romantic free agency in the late 1960s. And the options, comfort, and confidence that young women enjoy today were born of all that busyness—that emotional effort to be revolutionary creatures—of the young women of that era.

  As for Joni’s “heart” being both “full and hollow”—that tricky duality had been necessary over these last three years. She’d struggled with impoverished pregnancy, a shamed childbirth in a charity ward, the decision to put her baby up for adoption even after she had found a male partner, and divorce and independence, despite the threat of people exposing her secret. Her musical creativity owed to each of those situations and choices, all made in a climate of risk. She’d had to have a “hollow”—self-protective—heart to make it this far. But now success seemed in view, so she could afford for her heart to not be hollow. And that held its own danger.