Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

  Danny and Carly were more or less engaged now—he thought. According to Danny, they’d planned to have a wedding “in a pine forest somewhere.” They were looking at houses; “we even found one in Silver-mine, Connecticut.” Lucy had her baby—a daughter, Julie—“and that put more pressure on Carly,” Danny observed. “Women are programmed to fall apart over babies, and Carly was falling apart over this baby.”

  At the same time, however, Danny could feel Carly’s priorities shifting. “When she moved into the new apartment, I suspected she had intentions of forming a new sort of base of operations,” he said. During this period “Jake and I became inseparable,” Carly has said. Carly had had years of talking to therapists about her childhood. Now she shared the stories with Jake, and to his fresh ear the “rich girl’s problems” that had been deemed meritless by the reverse-snobbish times achieved a universal poignance. An image stayed with Jake: Richard Simon, in failing health, silent in the dark; Carly yearning for his attention.

  One day Carly handed Jake a notated melody she had written months earlier but for which she couldn’t come up with lyrics. The melody’s opening bars, shifting back and forth between two minor-mode sequences with close dissonances, were so tensely poignant that Village Voice rock critic Robert Christgau would later, upon hearing them on the car radio, be “grabbed” by their “calculated drama.” She had composed the melody as the soundtrack for a proposed TV documentary called “Who Killed Lake Erie?”—one of her freelance jobs—but nothing had come of it, “and I was stuck,” she remembers; in writing songs by herself, it was easiest for her to start with the lyric, not the melody. “So I had that melody for so long that I was blocked.” When Jake came over, “She gave it to me with la-la-las,” Jake recalls.

  Thinking of what Carly had told him about her father, Jake wrote: “My father sits at night with no lights on / His cigarette glows in the dark.”

  Jake used that childhood view of the sadness of marriage as a bridge to skepticism about friends from college being married. “They have their houses and their lawns.” Jessica, Ellen, and Lucy were happily married, but the larger point was that young women had suddenly stopped seeing marriage as the ultimate event of their early twenties. Two souls huddled against the world—the romantic image that had prevailed when Carole and Gerry had gotten married—was an archaic position. There was too much in this new world; romance, belonging, and ecstasy literally flooded the senses. Sometimes it seemed to require a lack of imagination for a couple to stay together.

  Danny initially worried that Jake was “putting moves on” his girlfriend, but he quickly saw that their intimacy was not physical. They were partners. “I wrote lyrics for Carly,” says Jake, “like a playwright writing for an actress.” It would take the first step of this partnership to boost Carly to a point where she’d start writing a stream of her own songs, increasingly prolific, well crafted, and era-defining—all of this so near but far from the scene Danny saw, of Carly and Jake, “sitting on the couch, talking over phrases, talking them into lyrics,” he recalled. “She’d say, ‘This isn’t quite what I wanted to say here…’ She brought him the melodies, and a lot of the ideas for the songs were hers. Jake would be like a blacksmith and hammer the songs together, and she’d steer him; she’d turn the songs in her rich-college-girl direction.”

  One night Carly went to the Village Gate to see David Steinberg’s comedy routine. A friend of David’s, a young woman named Arlyne Rothberg, who was starting out as a manager, came backstage to say hello to David and his girlfriend, Mary Ellen Mark. “It was a long, narrow club, and the dressing room was in the back,” Arlyne Rothberg recalls, “so I’m walking toward a sofa in the dressing room…and I see a pair of legs hanging out. And as I’m getting closer, I see more and more of the legs. It was mesmerizing—she has these unbelievable legs. And she’s seated, and we’re introduced. She was heavier in those days,” but, Arlyne thought, here was a woman who couldn’t “do anything that isn’t sultry and seductive while she’s smiling and laughing.”

  Carly and Danny were spending less time together—“We weren’t firing on all cylinders,” he said. He could tell their romance was “thinning out,” but the man who thought himself a more accomplished electric guitarist than Eric Clapton couldn’t quite accept that he might not be the one to end it. Still, one day, at a recording session with Carly, he couldn’t escape the conclusion that his sexy rich dilettante lover had a striking talent. For an album that Lucy and Carly were making, The Simon Sisters Sing the Lobster Quadrille and Other Songs for Children, Lucy had set classic poems—by Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson, and others—to music, among which was Robert Burns’s “A Red, Red Rose.” When Carly took the microphone in the studio and sang, “My love is like a red, red rose that’s newly sprung in June…,” Danny thought, She sounds like an angel. (So moved was he by what critics have called her “low, earthy, and subtle” voice on that song that for decades he “heard” her singing it.)

  One night Carly came down hard on Danny for smoking. His two-pack-a-day habit had always annoyed her, but that night “she lost patience,” he recalled. Danny Armstrong wanted to think that the breakup with Carly was about her hating his smoking. It was easier for him to think that than that his girlfriend was moving on. But one day soon after, Danny dropped by Carly’s apartment, knocked on the door—and “a youngish guy answered and said Carly wasn’t home.” That bird had flown.

  Danny Armstrong had underestimated his uptown-cool girlfriend. He thought she was a dilettante, but she was turning out to be ambitious. He thought she was a happy little rich girl, but she’d had her share of desultory jobs, rejections, insults, and depression. He thought that he, who didn’t want any more children, would decide when it was over between them, and that she craved the stability of Lucy’s life—women wanted that. Didn’t they? And he thought the “preppy girl” song she and Jake were writing was inconsequential. That, too, would turn out to be a misperception.

  PART FOUR

  “i feel the earth move under my feet”

  CHAPTER TEN

  joni

  late 1967–mid-1970

  The word of mouth that Joni Anderson Mitchell had earned for herself in New York accompanied her to Los Angeles. She arrived around Christmastime with her new, devoted manager, Elliot Roberts, and her boyfriend and chief champion, David Crosby. Having as strong-minded and talented a woman as Joni for a girlfriend was new for David, who had dominated his previous girlfriend, Christine Hinton (he’d broken up with Christine when he’d fallen in love with Joni, but they would later reunite). All he’d had to do was shout, “Christine! Joint!” and she was rolling and handing him a slender reefer. “Christine was always anxious, always ready to please,” remembers Hinton’s then-close friend Salli Sachse, who lived at Peter Tork’s artistic collective. “David treated women badly, but then, so many guys did.”

  By contrast, Joni would never be servile, and according to Salli, David “respected her as a peer.” She was also emotionally “turbulent”—David’s word—and so, in those first weeks in L.A., it was often left to Estrella Berosini, who’d moved from Florida to L.A. at the same time, to play the little sister buffer and mediate between the two headstrong singers. One night, when they were all driving up to Stephen Stills’s house (and David and Joni had unaccountably broken out into a chorus of “Abba dabba dabba dabba dabba dabba dabba, goes the monkey to the chimp”), David came down hard on Joni for her expensive purse. While they were still in Florida, he had gotten her to scrub off her Carnaby Street eye makeup in favor of the natural look; now he wanted her clothes to be more hip and funky, less discotheque-y. “That’s the right purse!” he’d said, pointing to Estrella’s raggy fabric pouch (while Estrella longed for Joni’s handbag, “which she probably bought on Madison Avenue”). “You know, Estrella,” Joni said to her young friend, one day during those early weeks in L.A., “I really do love David, but when we get together, we just don’t get along.”

/>   Still, there existed no more heartful trumpeter for Joni’s arrival in L.A. than David. He presented Joni like a showman. One night, for example, he lured members of the San Francisco–based theater group the Committee up to a house in the Canyon, where, as he and memoir coauthor Carl Gottlieb described it, “a half dozen stoned and lucky actors heard a never-before-recorded Joni Mitchell sing half her new album in the predawn light. The company was stunned.” One of them apparently said: “We thought we hallucinated her.” David’s account sounds exaggerated, but Leah Cohen Kunkel, the sister of Cass Elliot and, at the time, the new wife of a young drummer up from Long Beach, Russ Kunkel, says it isn’t. “When Joni would sing over that guitar, men were riveted—they stopped what they were doing, they were absolutely enamored. Before that it was always women [in the Canyon] riveted by the male guitarist—this was the first time it changed. Joni got introduced to the cream of the pop rock world, and she was accepted right away.”

  Russ recalls the new-to-the-Canyon Joni this way: “Most of the women there were pretty magical then ’cause there was this incredible feeling of freedom that was enhanced by various things, including drugs, but Joni was drop-dead beautiful. And she had this amazing voice: her voice register and her guitar tunings, which no one had heard.”

  Joni recorded her first album, Joni Mitchell, which, in subsequent pressings, came to be known as Song to a Seagull, in the first weeks of 1968. David had himself named producer of the album; Joni termed him its “conservationist” because he held the line against those who might complain that as she put it, she’d “had a whole paintbox and use[d] only brown.” In reality Joni was in control of her product, an unusually nervy move for a newbie on her maiden voyage with a major record label. She kept the album acoustic and intimate: just Joni and her guitar and piano. The album may have suffered from the spareness, for it had an astringent forlornness and never got past #189 on the Billboard chart.

  The album cover was a painting by Joni. Her psychedelic mélange of voluptuous flowers in orange, green, and yellow enclosed a fish-eye-lens photograph of her standing on a dark, trash-can-strewn New York street, dressed for winter, carrying her belongings, hoisting an umbrella over her head. Her sketch of Crosby’s boat was off to the right, under the words “Song to a Seagull,” etched brokenly by a flock of gulls. Amid the painted flowers—petals opening from stamen—were two almost anthropomorphic cacti, for her alter ego, the cactus tree. Joni dedicated the album to Arthur Kratzmann, the seventh-grade teacher who had mercilessly scrawled “Cliché! Cliché!” all over her essays until she finally learned to write with originality.

  The songs introduced listeners to veiled snippets of this still very unknown singer’s life. In “Part One [A side]: I Came to the City” there unfolded, in this order, her marriage-gone-wrong to Chuck in “I Had a King”; her affair with Michael Durbin in “Michael from Mountains”; the joyous “Night in the City,” her touché to the small-minded moralists who’d looked on the Yorkville folksingers (including that poor, pregnant one) as degenerate hippies; and, finally, with “Marcie” and “Nathan LaFraneer,” her testimony to the trials of a young woman alone in Manhattan. She named the B side “Part Two: Out of the City and Down to the Seaside,” making her meeting of David in Florida into a kind of deliverance—which, in career terms, it was. “Cactus Tree” is the stem winder on that side. Joni’s atypically rousing guitar intro, a change of pace after the more melancholy fare, creates the impression that she’s bounding out from behind a curtain, ready to present this female-triumphal anthem as an encore to a worked-up audience. At least that’s how it sounds now, with almost forty years’ hindsight.

  The reviewer for Rolling Stone was breezy—“Here is Joni Mitchell. A penny yellow blonde with a vanilla voice…a lyrical kitchen poet”—but ultimately respectful. He duly noted her reputation among folk music followers and her excellently recorded songbook, but he couldn’t quite get excited. “The…album, despite a few momentary weaknesses, is a good debut,” he concluded.

  The album had been initially put at risk by a tape hiss that was audible only after all the tracks were laid down. A worried David Crosby had driven the tapes to the Laurel Canyon house of Elektra sound engineer John Haeny. “The tapes were a mess,” Haeny has said. Slipping into the studio, he remixed Joni’s album, rescuing it.

  Around this same time, Haeny awakened in his Ridpath Lane house one morning to “some chaos” and found Judy Collins, nude, amid a tangle of yellow flowers at the wooden fence in his yard. Judy was a friend, and she was having herself photographed for the cover of the Joni-song-filled album Wildflowers. Judy had recently broken up with rock writer Michael Thomas, so Haeny introduced her to his friend Stephen Stills, who proved a good match for the tempestuous Collins. Educated in military school and raised in Florida and Louisiana, Stills was conceited and combative; some used the word “obnoxious.” With his sleepy-lidded blue eyes in a wide, high-foreheaded face framed by muttonchop sideburns and wispy blond hair (and despite—or maybe with the help of—his terrible teeth), Stills was very sexy in a young Steve McQueen kind of way. (Had many people known that he’d auditioned to be part of the Monkees, some of his edgy charisma might have evaporated.) Just before the Collins-Stills match was made, another interlocking connection was struck during Joni’s recording sessions. In the adjacent studio, Stills and the Buffalo Springfield were recording; one of Stills’s group mates was Vicky Taylor’s good friend from Toronto, Neil Young. Stills, who was (of course—wasn’t everyone?) a friend of Crosby’s, ended up playing bass guitar on “Night in the City,” the only outside musician (except the banshee player) to intrude on Joni’s solo performance. Joni introduced Neil Young to Elliot Roberts, thinking their humor made them kindred spirits, and Roberts became Young’s manager, too.

  Completing this new musical circle was a gentle English rocker who would become one of the great loves of Joni’s life.

  Graham Nash was, as he says, “a poor man’s son,” from Blackpool, England. When he was fourteen, he’d wanted nothing more than to use his voice and guitar to make others feel like he felt when he listened to the Everly Brothers. He and his friend Allan Clarke had formed the Hollies and, with the group, were part of the British Invasion. “Bus Stop” and “Carrie-Anne” were more-than-likable hits—the former, dark; the latter, fetching—in 1966 and 1967, the twilight of formula English pop. Nash, who was one year older than Joni, had married young and was divorced. He was a tall, thin, approachably handsome man with intense, closely set eyes in a narrow face framed by a rich mass of shaggy dark hair, and his manner was both gracious and intimate. In his travels to Laurel Canyon, he’d struck up a close friendship with Cass Elliot, to whom he found it comfortable to pour out his heart. He was a romantic and an appreciator. To him, Laurel Canyon was like “Vienna at the turn of the century or Paris in the 1930s.” But he was edgy, too (what rock star wasn’t?), and he dressed with neo-Edwardian panache. When Joni ran into him at a radio station’s party for the Hollies at a hotel in Ottawa (where they were appearing in a concert hall and she in a coffeehouse) shortly after she finished recording her album, “he was very British mod,” Joni has said. He was wearing one of “these ankle-length black velvet coats and yards and yards of pink chiffon, almost foppish, like the way Jagger and a lot of the British bands dressed at the time.”

  Knowing they’d be in the same city, David Crosby had given Graham (they’d met through Cass) advance word on Joni. “He’d said, ‘Watch out for this woman’—in a good way, that she was very special and very beautiful,” Graham recalls. But Nash had all but forgotten those words when “through the usual lineup of beers and juices, I saw this woman sitting by herself with what looked like a Bible on her lap. [It was actually an antique photo album encasing a music box.] She was something to behold.”

  Meanwhile, Hollies manager Robin Britten had grabbed Nash’s ear. “He kept talking to me about business,” or so it seemed, “but I just wasn’t there,” Graham says. “My attention—m
y essence—was over in the corner, with that girl. Then Robin said, ‘Shut up for a moment! There’s a woman I’m trying to tell you about and you haven’t heard a word!’ I said, ‘That’s because I’m looking at this woman.’ He replied, ‘That’s the woman I’m talking about.’

  “So I walked over to Joan and introduced myself, and she invited me to her room in the hotel, and I ended up spending the night with her, and”—he admits, thirty-five years later (and in the midst of a long, happy marriage to another woman)—“I haven’t been the same since.” In the dim light of her room at the Hotel Château Laurier, which gave off on a romantic view of rooftop turrets and the adjacent Parliament building, Joni took out her guitar. “But I loved her before she played a note,” Graham says, “just from looking at her and talking to her and realizing what her spirit was.” For her part, Joni thought Graham “very gentle, soft-spoken, and kind, with a certain degree of rock ’n’ roll arrogance mixed in.”

  Joni wooed the already smitten Graham as she had Roy Blumenfeld, Leonard Cohen, and David Crosby—with her songs. Despite her femininity, like a man, she displayed her work to her would-be lovers. “She played fifteen songs, almost her entire first record, and a couple of different ones, too,” Graham says. “By the time she got through ‘Michael from Mountains’ and ‘I Had a King,’ I was gone. I had never heard music like that.”

  Graham returned to England, but on the basis of transatlantic counsel from Mama Cass, he began thinking of quitting the Hollies, moving to L.A., and trying to launch himself as a solo act. He had already written the bouncy, quite wonderful “Marrakesh Express” about the trend that the rich English hippies had started—and American counterparts would soon pick up—of traveling to that fabled souk-laced city in Morocco and paying a court visit to Ahmed, the wacky, notorious “King Hash,” in his rug-smothered lair.