Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon--and the Journey of a Generation

Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, and the Journey of a GenerationBy Sheila WellerI rarely read celebrity bio's, but this one was irresistible. I'm a long-time Joni Mitchell worshipper--you know, one of those women who hung on her every word to find out what was really happening deep within my psyche. It began with her first album and the song "Marcie" -the spelling's different, but the sentiments, even "Marcie's" circumstances, rang uncannily true. This went on year after year, decade after decade, with a hiatus between Hejira and Wild Things Run Fast, during which Joni experimented with jazz and other musical styles, letting the personal lyrics get lost in the mix. At first I was a little put off by Weller's categorizing these musicians together: Joni Mitchell is far and away the best of the trio--the best of her generation, right up there with Bob Dylan and the Beatles. In terms of Weller's book, however, and the sociological point she's making, it doesn't matter: Carly and Carole have had at least as strong of a cultural influence.Pre-Joni, Carole King's songs provided the backdrop to my furtive groping in cars--only I didn't know they were Carole King's, since they were sung by The Shirelles, The Drifters, and every other doo-wop group played by Alan Freed and Murray the K. And "That's the Way I Always Heard It Should Be," Carly Simon's profound anti-marriage ballad, hit the airwaves at the exact moment that I was struggling to break free of my marriage and suburbia. Thus, when I saw Girls Like Us, connecting these three as representative of my generation of women, I was blown away.Ditto when I read that King's "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" was about a girl puttin' out for her boyfriend, hoping he'd still respect her in the morning. I was thirteen when that song came out, still a few years from catching its real meaning, and during all this time it never once dawned on me. This was just one of many delicious tidbits I learned about the lyrics I've been hearing and singing all my life. Even juicier is all the dish on these women's relationships, and the incestuousness of their interactions with others in the music world. You'd have to call it celebrity gossip, and I'm as guilty as anyone of eating it up. In my defense, these women, the men who surrounded them, their music, and their lives have been crucially important-- to me and to a generation. They've accompanied me on my life's journey, from 45's, LP's, tapes, and disks, right up to my iPod. The dish in this book is more than just dish: reading it deepened and enriched my appreciation of the music.James Taylor plays almost as big a role in this book as the women: he was romantically involved with all three, while they themselves barely know one another. As Weller says, "the tortured boy was the only one worth having," and man, was JT tortured. He only got off heroin for good in the eighties, and I'm sorry to have discovered that he wasn't as nice a guy as his high-minded lyrics might suggest. He was cold, emotionally withholding, barely present as a father (of Carly's kids) and even, on occasion, downright cruel. But hell, the guy was a dyed-in-the-wool junkie who only got off the stuff after divorcing Carly, a point the author deems significant--but he was a junkie for years before they even met.The "You're So Vain" mystery is settled once and for all: its subject is neither Warren Beatty nor Mick Jagger, but a composite of several men that Carly slept with during a particularly busy season. I was going to say "promiscuous" rather than "busy," but it would ring false in the context of the book and the era it chronicles. These women slept with the best and the brightest, some of them, like JT, overlapping, especially between Carly and Joni. By contrast, the girl who worried musically if respect flew out the window once she gave it away, married half the men she took to bed, starting at seventeen with Gerry Goffin, her first and perhaps most prolific writing partner, ultimately racking up four or five husbands. (I lost track. Also, these ladies, now well into their sixties, are still doin' it. Rebels and role models to the death.)That's one of Weller's points--that King, Mitchell, and Simon were products of their time, as well as role models who led the way for the rest of us. In the sexual arena, sure--but more significantly, by wanting, and pursuing, their own ambitions, and paying the cost as the first generation of women to stare down the conflicts inherent in female rebellion. For Joni, the cost was high: she suffered long and deeply for giving up her daughter ("Little Green"), with whom she is now reconciled. For Carly, a hopeless romantic who read Anna Karenina ten times, the cost came in her relationship with James Taylor, an all-consuming obsession that drained and devoured her. Carole was the most out of control; she married men with whom she felt she had to minimize her accomplishments, diminishing herself to keep their fragile egos intact (these Peter Pan creatures continually failed despite her sacrifices; one husband even killed himself.)Was the cost worth it? Were Joni's years of guilt, the loss of so many years with her daughter worth it for Blue? Was Carole's abuse at the hands of men a small price to pay for Tapestry? Was Carly's bleeding heart no big thing in view of "Life is Eternal," "You're so Vain" and dozens of other hit songs? Easy for me to say it was. I owe these gals a great big thank you. Also thank you Sheila Weller for your book. My gratitude is vast.(NOte: You can read this review and others on my website: [...]

Everything in GIRLS LIKE US will be amazingly familiar to those of us born in the bay boom, and yet Sheila Weller, a talented if erratic prose stylist, brings us to emotional places that will be new to all but those most intimate with the trio of songwriters whose lives, she declares, form a "journey of a generation." I don't know if I'd go that far, but I'm not a woman, and Weller's argument is that King, Simon, and Mitchell pushes back the barriers for women specifically, "one song at a time."The cryptic one remains Carole King, whom Weller just can't illuminate in any meaningful way. Her life was amazing--up to a point, then it stopped being of any interest at all, which is a shame. We hear again and again how she wrote all those Brill Building masterpieces before she was 21, and broke down under the strain of a troubled marriage to a high-stakes husband and lyricist, Gerry Goffin, coming out the other end with an LP. Tapestry, that everyone loved. Then what happened? Bad men galore, attracted to her wealth. She once estimated that every time she divorced a man, it cost her a million dollars. Weller gives us all the facts ad nauseam but we always wonder, why did King do this to herself?Carly Simon, on the other hand, who cooperated with Weller extensively or so it seems, comes off as nearly normal. Of the upper, upper middle class, Simon was to the manor born and the icy, plangent chords of her first song, "That's the Way I Always Heard It Should Be," gave notice that the old New Yorker fiction writers of the 40s and 50s hadn't died, they had just rolled over and told Carly Simon the news. Though obviously spoiled and cosseted by her own wealth, Simon doesn't seem spoiled; her reactions throughout, even meeting and marrying the drug-zombie James Taylor, are always understandable and sympathetic.Joni Mitchell isn't sympathetic per se, but she has the integrated personality of the genius totally in love with herself and obsessed with her own reflection, so she's great in a special way. Weller pokes amused fun at Mitchell's vanity and enormous self-esteem, but we get the picture that, in her opinion at any rate, Mitchell actually is pretty f--ing amazing. Does our society have it in for women who want to be artists? Mitchell's encounter with the aged, reclusive Georgia O'Keeffe seems like a emblem of a certain baton-passing, as is Carly Simon's relationship with former First Lady Jackie Kennedy. Weller is OK about male-female relationships, but in this book at any rate she's more interested in the ways women deal with each other.It's nearly a biography of five people, not just three, as there is so much about James Taylor you will never need to read another word about him if you have this book on your shelf; and for some reason there's tons of material about Judy Collins. I wonder if Weller proposed a book with King, Mitchell, Simon, and Collins, and some editorial board nixed the addition of Collins--but there was so much good material about Collins, Weller kept it in anyhow. She is the Vanity Fair writer supreme, whose motto is that no sentence is complete without some action and punch, and the best way to get that is to string along many words with hyphens to invent new forms of adjectival excitement. You won't be able to read for more than a few minutes without being hit on the head by Weller's mad stylings--here's a typical hyphenfilled sentence about the Eagles: "Their at-home-in-Death-Valley image and bleating-lost-boy-in-expensive-boots sound had become era-definingly successful." (Ten hyphens in a mere 20 words! Sheila Weller is era-definingly successful at inventing a new form of writing--like the classic circus act when a small VW would pull up to center ring and then clown after clown would prance out. Then more clowns--then still more. She's pretty amazing and GIRLS LIKE US is a book that, for all its flaws, convinces us roundly in its larger arguments and dazzles with its wide-ranging portraits of artistic life in the 50s, 60s and 70s.

The book arrived promptly and is just what I wanted. Thanks, James.

It has fascinating information on each of them and provides a real insight into how they developed their respective talents.

Such a good book and in great condition

Excellent introduction to individual biographies.

Great book and well packaged.