Best Books Q&A: Sheila Weller, author of Girls Like Us
By Anna Katterjohn -- Library Journal, 12/10/2008 9:55:00 AM
The bibliography of the 1960s counterculture largely revolves around male rock 'n' roll icons—the Beatles, the Stones, Bob Dylan. Women, however, carved out a place for themselves, too, and in the LJ Best Book Girls Like Us, New York Times best-selling author Sheila Weller (Dancing at Ciro's) tells their stories through the singular lives and careers of singer/songwriters Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, and Carole King.
When did you first notice the lives and careers of Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon intertwining closely enough to warrant a joint biography?All through their hit-making years, I knew that each one, in her own way, resonated with the rest of us—noncelebrity women close to their age, who considered ourselves hip and creative and lived in places like L.A., New York, and San Francisco. Their incremental path, in rejecting the destinies we’d all had as little girls watching women in TV commercials kissing their refrigerators—we were on it, too. We not only listened to the songs of theirs (from Carole’s “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” by the Shirelles to Joni’s “Cactus Tree” to Carly’s “That’s the Way I Always Heard It Should Be”) that marked the various stations on the arc of that journey, we paid attention to their personal lives…across what I now call the “celebrity divide.” They represented us.
I had wanted to write a history of the women of the 1960s for over 20 years but never had a form, and on a cold winter day in early 2002 I took a walk down Beech Plain Road in rustic Sandisfield, MA, and it came to me like a lightning bolt: I would write the story of our generation through equal alternating chapters of the lives of Carole, Joni, and Carly. I came home and excitedly called my sister, who is close to my age (and dressed like Joni while I was dressing like Carly, back in 1971) and said, “What do you think of this idea?” And she loved it; I knew I was home.
With the huge cast of talented and engaging figures who play a role in the narratives of this book, is there anyone in particular you’re inspired to learn or write more about, or anyone you were surprised to find little available information on?
Actually, a lot of them were people I spent time describing because I remembered how important they seemed to us back then, an importance that might not be clear to younger women or that wasn’t made clear in the homogenizing documentaries about the times that would appear, more vapidly, every year, on PBS—women thought Stephen Stills and Robbie Robertson were sexy, and Leonard Cohen was the ultimate hip, sexy poet. And we all wanted to look like Julie Christie. I knew Laura Nyro was so important (I personally adored her and thought I was channeling her); I knew Jimi Hendrix was the opposite of his image: gentle, vulnerable, polite. So I relished landing on and explaining the icons who mattered to us in our reaching-across-the-celebrity-divide way.
As for people I stumbled on who I wanted to learn more about, certainly, there were many. And, fortunately, I got to meet and interview them. Before I started this book I had a dim understanding of who Danny Kortchmar was; once I started the book, I quickly saw that he was the spoke in the wheel of all of the women and men. I was lucky to have lovely lunch-time conversations with major jazz drummers John Guerin and Don Alias—names I didn’t know before I started the book. They were colleagues and lovers of Joni during her creatively fertile period of moving from confessional singing to jazz. Tragically, they died soon after. I feel blessed that I had precious time with these musically brilliant jazz greats, who were also sweet, humble, funny—and introspective—guys.
Did you find your interview subjects eager to speak with you? How different do you think the book would have been if you’d had ongoing input from Carole, Joni, and Carly throughout your research?
Most of them loved speaking about those times in their lives that were so incandescent. They were very happy that someone was recording their part in what they—correctly—saw as a collective journey and a musical collaboration. I was lucky for their openness. They were geographically far-flung, and many had been out of touch with their old friend, whether it was Carole, Joni, or Carly, for many decades, so they didn’t rush to pick up the phone and check and see if it was okay to talk. People in music—rock music, especially—are open and easygoing.
If I’d had ongoing input from Carole, Joni, and Carly…well, I’m sure the book would have been enhanced. But, also, it would have been stifled. Carole did not want people to know about many things I revealed in the book, from Gerry’s baby with another woman to much of her life in Idaho. Joni, too, had secrets (she never would have revealed her suicide attempt) and had her own interpretation of things. Her interpretation of giving up her baby for adoption squarely places the blame on her then-husband, Chuck Mitchell. I found it wasn’t at all so simple. As for Carly, she did cooperate, and she was—and is—very open. Still, it is often true that a subject’s own memory of her life may be, while it is her truth, not the truth. So while I relied on her interpretation of things, I didn’t rely on her interpretation of everything—and other viewpoints were arrestingly astute.
Also, biographers—especially those who admire their subjects to begin with—can be hampered by the admired subject’s looking over her shoulder, so to speak. The more active input the subject has, the more control she wrests, and the more under her thumb a biographer feels. Once I really got a critical mass of sources from every period of my subjects' lives talking to me, I didn’t really miss the ongoing input, though I certainly would have wanted to interview them toward the end.
What was it about the 1960s that made this new type of softer, folkier rock ripe for success?
Well, the 1960s were an apocalytpic, purple, romantic time—I called them “a little Messianic age in the middle of the 20th century.” They were highly emotional, exhibitionist, extremist, romantic-capitol-R. Like a wild spinning star, they burnt out—Altamont, Kent State, the Democratic Convention riots, the Weathermen (now making a selectively memory’d comeback via Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn cashing in on their pre-election notoriety), the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the drug overdoses of Jimi, Janis, and Jim. It was the pullback from, the reaction to that destructive wildness that led to that softer, folkier rock. Carole and James Taylor (the boy amid my three girls) pioneered it, and, in one way or another I suppose all three women embodied it. But I kind of resist viewing them that way. I view their musical careers as more stylistically diverse—tinged with jazz, with Sondheim and Rodgers, with many musical influences—and different at different points in the continuum. “Folk rock” is also a kind of put-down. They were bigger, richer, more ambitious than that reductive label.
Were any books in particular helpful to you in researching or presenting this historic cultural milieu?
Oh, yes! Sara Davidson’s Loose Change, David Hajdu’s Positively Fourth Street, and Don Katz’s Home Fires were three books that were a kind of collective model for what I wanted to do. As for research books…I have a whole bookshelf, from Taylor Branch’s history of the civil rights era, to Todd Gitlin’s The Sixties, to Tom Hayden’s Reunion, to individual biographies and autobiographies of musicians. Here’s a book I found, the minute I read it decades ago, a great snapshot of the 1960s, which might come as a surprise to the casual 1960s-book aficionado: Candice Bergen’s Knock Wood. Read the sections of it that took place in the 1960s, and the whimsy, conceit, mischief, and hubris of the era in L.A. will jump out at you.
Have the three artists made any public statements about the book?
Carly has praised the book on her web site (thank you, Carly) and mentioned it in interviews. Carole made a passing allusion to a small mistake (corrected in the forthcoming paperback!) I made on the Tavis Smiley Show. I was happy to see the book announced on JoniMitchell.com. But neither Carole nor Joni has talked about it, and I don’t know if they have read it. I sincerely hope they understand that I am honoring their lives, talent, and careers—and their generationally resonant and (in my 1960s mind) forever laudible sense of adventure in the book. I think they are icons not just of music but of character. They had courage, tenacity, decency, and sensitivity. They were durable and inspiring in the way that so many young performers are not any more.
What’s next for you?
I don’t want to be coy, but something is going to be announced soon. It’s tremendously exciting and will be challenging. I’ll be back to doing what I spend a lot of my professional life doing: respectively begging people to talk. Hint: We thought—I thought—the magical days were behind us. Happily, events have proved us wrong.
