Joni and James’s mutual infatuation was evanescent when they performed at London’s Royal Albert Hall on October 28. James introduced Joni’s songs like a prep school boy awed by his slightly older, more accomplished girlfriend. He dutifully listed the places (“partially in Paris and partially in Ibiza”) where she’d written “California.” Joni giggled and interrupted James’s patter with private-joke puns on his song titles and past venues (“I’m a night owl, baby…”). She also proudly talked of her weeks among fellow “freaks” on Matala and referred affectionately to Cary, who was standing backstage, as “my friend from Matala, from London, and Los Angeles—and North Carolina.” As Joni and James tuned their guitars, their talk seemed coyly double-entendred (“Ready when you are, James,” she said; “I know…,” he answered, to laughter from the audience). And when he thanked the cheering audience by saying, “You’re too kind,” he drove home the source of his appeal: those upper-crust manners juxtaposed with the brooding-junkie pathos. They performed a heavenly duet on “You Can Close Your Eyes,” which James was said to have written for Joni.
Joni, James, and Cary flew back to the States in November and lived together at New York’s funky Albert Hotel and the glitzy Plaza Hotel. On Joni’s twenty-seventh birthday—November 7—James was playing a concert in Princeton, New Jersey, when he suddenly laid his guitar on his lap and started to sing, “Happy birthday, dear Joni…” “Is it her birthday?” several girls screamed. After James smiled, the audience called out: “Bring out Joni!” Joni came onstage, to the crowd’s wild applause. According to Susan Braudy’s New York Times Magazine article, “The crowd’s shouts and applause have reached a manic pitch. As [Joni] sits down…James breaks out into…‘You Can Close Your Eyes’” and “a few voices from the audience interrupt him…and the whole audience is singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to Joni Mitchell. After it’s over, both James and Joni are nodding their heads in the same polite, distant way, and someone in the crowd loses her control completely, screaming, ‘Oh, God, I just love you two together! You’re beautiful!’”
By now Carole had cut a solo album. John Fischbach and his friend Andrew Berliner had built their studio, Crystal Sound, and, says John, “I said to Carole: Why don’t you be a singer-songwriter like James?” John’s suggestion, of course, was something Carole had already been discussing with Lou Adler; it was inevitable that there would be a Carole King album. Carole wanted to record it at John’s studio and give John his first record producer credit (he went on to produce Stevie Wonder) because she felt so close to him and Stephanie. They were there for her when she got emotional over Charlie—John, like others, saw how confident Carole was about her talent yet how vulnerable she was about men. More, John had recently taken to rushing to Carole’s house to protect her against Gerry.
Gerry had started appearing at Carole’s doorstep, literally “frothing at the mouth,” says John. “He wanted his family back. It scared the hell out of everybody, especially his kids. Everyone was afraid of Gerry. Not that he was doing it on purpose—he could be the sweetest guy in the world when he was on his medication, but when he was off it, it was another story.” One of Gerry’s doorstep visits occurred when Carole was on the phone with Jerry Wexler. Wexler heard, through the wire, Carole trying to placate the emotional Gerry.
Gerry’s acting out seemed a desperate attempt to reverse what, even over two years in, he’d had trouble grasping: that the woman he’d always taken for granted had moved on. Jack Keller had predicted as much. “Gerry didn’t treasure Carole and over the years he lost her” is how Keller put it. “When you lose somebody who was madly in love with you, you’re screwed. Gerry was totally destroyed when Carole left him.”
The sessions at Crystal Sound in March and April 1970 were a family affair. Carole did the arrangements, vocals, and piano; James was on acoustic guitar and singing backup; Danny on electric and acoustic guitar; Charlie on Fender bass; Joel on drums, percussion, and vibes; Ralph on organ; Abigail singing backup vocals; and John on Moog synthesizer. Gerry did the sound mixing. Carole forthrightly named the album Writer. On the cover she is standing against bare winter trees, with her long hair straightened. She’s wearing a form-fitting, bold-patterned granny dress (which Stephanie had made). Unsmiling, she looks uncomfortable; she hasn’t yet brought out that piece of herself the public will take to its heart.
Most of the songs were Carole-Gerry compositions, and their eclecticism shows the now-divorced couple continuing trying to retool their Brill Building magic for an FM-playlist age. There are outright rockers like “I Can’t Hear You No More” and the album-opening “Spaceship Races.” Critics would later note that Carole sounds like Grace Slick in this song, and the aria-rocker melody does recall the Airplane’s “Volunteers,” but Gerry’s opening lyrics are—rare for him—tired and strained. By contrast, the beautiful “No Easy Way Down” is an example of the best of classic-Carole-and-Gerry meeting the new era: the song is gospel-driven—Rolling Stone’s Jon Landau would call it a “masterpiece of a pop ballad with almost symphonic crescendos”—and its message about the inability to ease emotional collapse seems to reflect Gerry’s own breakdown. “Goin’ Back,” with its Byrds-friendly bridge, essentially describes, through her ex-husband’s words, Carole’s last three years, morphing from a mah-jongg-playing, tract-house-dwelling Cadillac driver to a jam-session-ing, India-trekking Canyon chick. “Eventually” is Carole and Gerry’s hymn for Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. The album closes with Carole singing “Up on the Roof.” While the other tracks have a garage band feel, in this one alone Carole and her resounding, confident piano stand at the center of the universe, pointing to the approach she will next take.
Writer was almost as much of a failure as Now That Everything’s Been Said had been.
Around the middle of the summer of 1970, during an “off” time with Charlie, Carole embarked upon a new romance with a young man named Tom Neuwirth. Neuwirth was a film buff and eventually became a cinematographer on TV shows and feature films. “He was sexy, handsome, serious but fun,” says a friend. “If they had stayed together, Tom would have married her.” The romance may have been the shot of competition Charlie Larkey needed to realize that if he didn’t act quickly he could lose the woman who was in love with him.
Charlie asked Carole to be his wife. She happily accepted.
Carole married Charlie on a hot September day in a simple, homey ceremony in her Wonderland backyard. Charlie’s parents, sister, and brother flew out, as did Sidney and the remarried Genie. A rabbi officiated; Louise and Sherry were the flower girls; Connie O’Brien brought food she had cooked. Carole wore the simple, white empire-line dress that Stephanie sewed for her; Carole put in the zipper. “The wedding was hippie-dippy, just like we were,” says Abigail, who came with Danny—broken up from Michael and Joyce respectively, they were now a couple. To friends of Carole, the day was a triumph. As one puts it, “Carole loved Charlie deeply, and in time he came to love her deeply, too.”
A few months after getting married, Carole and Charlie moved up the road, to a larger house with story-book turrets on Appian Way. She placed her grand piano in its large white living room. Charlie made a decision that wisely gave his career independence from Carole’s, at least for a while. He decided “if bass playing was going to be my career, I better know more about it.” On the Fender bass, he was, as his band mates noted, an insecure player; “he’d play his parts but he never really owned them,” one says. ( James once introduced him onstage as “the Electric Elephant.”) He wanted to learn the upright bass, so he arranged for private lessons in classical bass with Milton Kestenbaum, who played with the L.A. Chamber Orchestra.
The James Taylor, Carole King, and Jo Mama tour resumed. “Carole and Charlie cuddled a lot, which was sweet,” remembers Ralph. “I think every time Carole nuzzled up to Charlie and every time she deferred to Charlie,” Abigail says, “she felt a little less in charge and a little more womanly, as if she hadn’t lost her youth, running h
er little Carole King empire.” On the bus and on the road the group was a bouquet of personalities. Charlie was low-key, guarded, and serious. Joel, nicknamed Bishop, was everyone’s bebop older brother: charismatic, cool, a brilliant fount of music and film trivia—and self-destructive. Joel would remain on heroin even when James swore off. Connie was warm and compassionate; the women felt sorry for her, being married to an addict. As for Kootch: “Danny was probably the most outspoken person in that crew—a born leader and almost as much a driving force as Carole and James,” says Ralph. “Danny was always a little sharper than the rest of us; I looked up to him,” says Charlie. Abigail was a good match for Danny.* “She had a big personality, too,” says Ralph. “The two of them were tough, savvy, volatile, highly opinionated New Yorkers. Danny, Joel, James, and Abigail were very witty. Sometimes the repartee was hysterical.” Ralph hung back, playing cool to hide his insecurities. Stephanie, with her art-school chops and cooking and sewing skill, was the resident hippie Martha Stewart.
As for James—“James was magical,” says Abigail. “Stephanie and Abigail formed a picket fence around James; I think Joni was very intimidated by all these women circling around him,” says Betsy Asher, who had stopped regarding her husband’s find as a freeloading younger brother and now understood James’s “romantic and mysterious and unavailable, deep, brooding” charisma.
At Carole’s house—where Willa Mae ran the show and was deferred to and loved by one and all—Carole, Stephanie, and Abigail had a chicks’ sewing circle and made Nehru shirts for Charlie, John, and Danny. On the road, Carole and Abigail whiled away their time with needlepoint. When any of the guys was giving any of the girls a hard time, they’d have feminist bitch sessions. “We’d make sure Sherry and Louise were asleep and couldn’t hear us and then we’d be: ‘Fuck this shit…!’” says Stephanie. There were no secrets. “You couldn’t beat the closeness that comes from being on the road together—we were a reinvented family,” says Abigail.
It was a family based on equality. Despite James’s sudden success, “he was just our friend and we were glad he was making it,” says John. Abigail says, “I never had an inkling Carole was a wealthy woman. She must have had money from her years of success with Gerry, but she didn’t live any differently than we did. If there was a pecking order, I didn’t sense it.” “We were just a bunch of hippies, for God’s sake,” John says. “Just hippies who happened to have money and live in bigger houses, but we were like everyone else at the time.” The guys imitated the cool of the bebop greats and the Southern rockers (Leon Russell, Dr. John, Levon Helm) they idolized; the girls were part of the “no-bra, hairy-underarm” ethic, says John. “Every one was an earth mother.”
But while all were earthy, Carole was a little more motherly. She was the only real mother of the crew, and she’d been the first single mother many of them had ever known. When most of Laurel Canyon was “still sleeping off drug hangovers,” says Betsy Asher, “you’d go to Carole’s house and she was already making stuffed peppers for dinner…at eleven a.m.” Carole kept lists and schedules. Carole had everyone over for Passover seder. Carole—despite her yoga and vegetarianism—smoked cigarettes, shopped at Ralph’s Market, and didn’t hide her Brooklyn accent. And she was always shoring up that ex-husband of hers; when Gerry’s romance with Sue Palmer ended and Stephanie fixed Gerry up with her friend Barbara Behling, a tall, blond ex–New Yorker who had a boutique on Sunset, Carole had them over to support the new relationship. “Carole was haimische,” says Ralph. “A sincere, homey person who does the right thing, who you felt you’d known all your life.” But if she reminded the others of a real world beyond their hip, new world, the influence went the other way, too. “I think Carole was comforted and inspired by the freedom and the closeness she found with us,” says Stephanie. “She blossomed.”
All around the country, there were “families of friends” like the one Carole was now a part of. Many young Americans were forming communes, transforming homes to group-living spaces, from suburban Long Island to Berkeley (where Tom Hayden’s Red Family was established on Hillegas Avenue, complete with a day care center, Blue Fairyland). Even when they weren’t in actual communes, a funky, loyal communitarian spirit prevailed. The young writer Ann Beattie would soon be publishing, in The New Yorker, her keen-eared short stories about, as one writer-critic described them, young “characters [who] have come for weekends, broken up relationships, fixed themselves scrambled eggs, rolled joints, flipped coins to determine where they should go next” and where there were “lots of extra mattresses or sleeping bags lying around these houses, and a constantly shifting number of occupants.” (The reason the 1983 movie The Big Chill was so magnetically nostalgic is that so many people really had lived that way.) Within such circles there was often a Carole: the salt-of-the-earth woman who had the slightly wider, wiser view.
And increasingly, such salt-of-the-earthiness and such a wider view were valued. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and the Democratic convention riots had not, it turned out, been the crowning violence of the late 1960s. In November 1969 it was revealed that U.S. troops had slaughtered hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese, mainly women and children, in the village of My Lai; and in May 1970 four students at Kent State University in Ohio were killed and nine others injured by National Guardsmen trying to stop an antiwar protest.
Violence was coloring the world of music, as well. Dashing Woodstock’s dream a mere four months in, in December 1969 a man was killed during a Rolling Stones concert in Altamont, California, by rampaging Hells Angels; three-quarters of a year later both Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died of drug overdoses. Jim Morrison’s drug-induced fatal heart attack would follow in July 1971; all three were twenty-seven. The triumphalist chaos of late ’60s rock, the radicals’ political opera, the psychedelic madness: it all seemed to have backfired. There was a longing for decency and earnestness. Bobby Kennedy had said, “We’re here to make gentle the life of this world.” This seemed the time to try to do it.
Older intellectuals in thrall to youth culture evinced (despite their awe at the ecstatic euphoria that had dominated for the last several years) such earnestness. In his book The Making of a Counter Culture, which coined the term that has become the widely accepted description of the amalgam of political and cultural changes that marked the times, California State history professor Theodore Roszak, in 1970, pleaded that the question facing the country was not “How shall we know?”* but “How shall we live?” An even more sincere and impassioned tome, published that same year by Yale University law professor Charles Reich, decreed that the country was on the brink of a youth-led nonviolent revolution to yield a life “more liberated and more beautiful than any man has known, if man has the courage and the imagination to seize that life.” Reich’s The Greening of America started out as a New Yorker essay that drew almost half a million letters to the editor and became a #1 New York Times best seller. People wanted to believe in a “greening”—a sweet new consciousness—in America. That same year Earth Day became a national holiday, The Whole Earth Catalog reached its apex of readership, and at Esalen Institute clones thousands of people were being taught to relate to one another without “game playing.” There was a welcoming of sincerity and (as Ralph had described Carole) of haimischness.
At some point in the summer and fall, Carole began doing something new: writing whole songs—melody and lyrics. She was becoming spiritual; her classes at Swami Satchidananda’s Integral Yoga Institute, coupled with her trip to India, had led her to meditation. (She would eventually take the disciple name Karuna.) Meditation may have helped the pragmatic young woman tap a deeper vein of expression, for, as prolifically as Carole was writing these new songs, Danny noticed that “they didn’t sound like they came from a journeyman or a mere craftsman. They sounded like they came from somebody who was deeply feeling what she was writing.” The songs trace the course of this once conventional young woman’s adjustment—with anguish, awe, and
finally joy—to the new life she has made, and they celebrate the integrity of improvised “families.”
In “Tapestry”—melodically, a Broadway-tinged story song—the narrator is a young woman looking back on an eventful past (“a tapestry of rich and royal hue”), marveling at ephemeral new sensations (“a wondrous, woven magic…impossible to hold”). She enters the rustic tableau she is needlepointing and comes upon “a man of fortune, a drifter passing by” in a “torn and tattered cloth.” Is he a Calcutta beggar? A Satchidananda-like guru? A capped and knickered figure with crooked staff, from one of those sew-by-numbers tapestries that adorned many a Brooklyn living room? Whoever he is, he’s warning her that rewards from this bucolic new world can be chimerical, but she knows that already; too much freedom has never been her style. “A figure gray and ghostly” comes to take her “back” to responsible life.
“So Far Away” is the first of three songs that puzzle out a new idea of “home.” She has moved clear across the country as if it were no big deal, but in 1970 people are really just two generations away from travel by animal cart. If you ask the song’s question (“Doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore?”) at face value, it sounds like the kind of quip uttered by common-sense housewives in Carole’s childhood neighborhood. Rolling Stone’s Jon Landau would cite the song’s melancholic opening to say that Carole was now “her own best lyricist.”
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