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Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon--And the Journey of a Generation By Sheila Weller ( Atria )
Release Date: 2008-04-08
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Product Description
A groundbreaking and irresistible biography of three of America's most important musical artists -- Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon -- charts their lives as women at a magical moment in time. Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon remain among the most enduring and important women in popular music. Each woman is distinct. Carole King is the product of outer-borough, middle-class New York City; Joni Mitchell is a granddaughter of Canadian farmers; and Carly Simon is a child of the Manhattan intellectual upper crust. They collectively represent, in their lives and their songs, a great swath of American girls who came of age in the late 1960s. Their stories trace the arc of the now mythic sixties generation -- female version -- but in a bracingly specific and deeply recalled way, far from cliché. The history of the women of that generation has never been written -- until now, through their resonant lives and emblematic songs. Filled with the voices of many dozens of these women's intimates, who are speaking in these pages for the first time, this alternating biography reads like a novel -- except it's all true, and the heroines are famous and beloved. Sheila Weller captures the character of each woman and gives a balanced portrayal enriched by a wealth of new information. Girls Like Us is an epic treatment of midcentury women who dared to break tradition and become what none had been before them -- confessors in song, rock superstars, and adventurers of heart and soul.
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 A Cultural Document of Music for the Ages ( digitalkarl2002 )
Sheila Weller creates an insightful look at three individually talented singer-songwriters and their lives as they attain increased cultural signifigance. As a 38-year old male, I found it a very interesting look back at a lot of the cultural attitudes in the 1970s. It's not that it was the Dark Ages but there were plenty of boggy undersides to the groovy chic of the time. As some of those my age can attest, I didn't grow up in a household where these three singers were considered Most Relevant by my 20-ish Mom. Sure, we had Laura Nyro, Nancy Wilson, Streisand, Melba Moore and Dionne Warwick, but Carly Simon was an FM radio staple. You almost didn't need to buy her singles, they were that ubiqitous and welcomed. Carole King was the domain of your slightly older sisters or teenaged aunts, penning their initials into 45s of Carole King's 'It's Too Late'- the universal lament crossing any age lines. Joni Mitchell, until 'Court and Spark' (in my house, anyway), was someone you found in your local library, intrigued by her album covers (there's Joni as...a Black man!? Hmm. Let's listen to this!). Perhaps the very interior mastery of their work, especially Mitchell's, made them less a communal indulgence from time to time. You didn't get to sit in a room while your sister wrote in her diary with 'Blue' on the stereo. Wasn't happening!
Ms. Weller weaves a thorough, respectful narrative of the three musicians and isn't too heavy-handed in placing them in the cultural context of their time. The book is an excellent example, especially to writers, of how powerful the written word is, especially when a lyric, song or sentence can express sentiment that becomes globally received and appreciated. The book will clearly steer you to your own memories of classic songs and where you may have been at the time. It made me remember being in Union City in California when "You're So Vain" came on the radio in the family car as we took in a stormy blue sky and thinking that Carly's song would open the heavens. It was that powerful to me at a very young age. It's flashpoint moments like that which make the book an extra-sensory look back in cultural history. Music was more of an integrated landscape then and if a song went to #1 on "the charts" then it was a part of the national zeitgeist, even if for a week. The supposed and real decadence of musicians then, as now, never really translated beyond their origins in Los Angeles or New York. For one, who else could afford it? It wasn't practical for the consumer. Still, a lot of misadventure and lost years can be supported by wealth, but for most of the country the decadence translated to towns in different ways of open-mindedness, cocktail parties with a different soundtrack (and more drinks) and a more decadent sexual assertion with music its ubiquitous background.
The current lives of these three singular women is certainly not a let-down and it's a testament to their individual endurance that they were able to stay culturally and emotionally viable. It's disappointing to see that many of their men let them down and took them through what their stardom, on the surface, would never seem to leave room for. Weller underlines throughout the book the breaking of sexual and social taboos that women advanced in this country. As a parent of a single mother, I sure remember my Mom, post-divorce, in the late 70s going into 'the city' to make a wage beyond the suburban rate; how her style changed more to her expression and how she single-handedly raised her kids. Millions of women, not just a selct few cultural icons, pushed through the real-life gains and advances that eradicated some of the danger/economic peril of being considered constrained minorities. As for the often-louche lovers of the women in this book, many are now deceased, or liquor-bloated semblances of their former shining selves or parodies, still hovering over the younger gliteratti of today. Time waits for no one, so if you find someone and the love is mutual, don't fu** it up! Carole comes across as a grounded woman who supported her core group of friends/musicians enough to embark, on her own terms, the relationships she chose, whether disastrous or not....and hadn't she earned those attempts? Carly Simon made a marriage to a heroin addict work for 9 years, which is like 30 years in real-time when you don't know that love can't replace a blood-and-bone addiction. Joni Mitchell, aggregating the finest points of disappointment and romantic fancy, is still a formidable woman and musician. I found this book extremely honest, even just the lyrics alone speak for their writers thoughts and imagination. I wish enduring happiness for all of them.
At one point in the book, the early 80s, when Joni, Carol and Joni are all close to or past their 40th birthday, Weller notes that with the change of musical icons and chart-burners, they all become aware that music, especially rock/popular music, is for the young. True, true. But don't the young always go back to the past and what isn't exactly right-this-minute? Just like I found my way at 13 years old to The Doors, The Mamas and The Papas, Jefferson Airplane and Hendrix, long after their 'hit' status, I still bought their albums and claimed my own memories to the songs, as people have done decades before and since. Mitchell, Taylor and King will always have their music rediscovered and listened to for the first time and for that they will always be relevant.
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I loved their stories
This book made me proud to have grown up exactly when I did. Its a superbly detailed story of three fabulous women whose music really was the sound track of some of the best years ever. Their bumpy and passionate love lives were something so many of us can identify with. I've been watching Carly Simon videos on her web site and elsewhere since I finished the book. I knew it had to end sometime but I really didn't want to say goodbye to these talented, fab women!
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The Soundtrack of My Life! ( moneypenny14 )
I can't begin to write how much I'm enjoying this book...it's as if the author wrote it just for me! Joni Mitchell is my favorite female artist (James Taylor being my favorite male)--and I have many albums of Carly Simon and a few of Carole King's as well. Reading this book is like reading a soundtrack of my life! At every twist and turn I find out how incestuous the music business is, and how interrelated and connected my favorite musicians are. While the bulk of the book deals with Joni, Carly and Carole, you'll learn tidbits and interesting facts about many other musicians/actors/celebs as well: James Taylor, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Jackson Browne, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson...the list goes on and on.
The beginning was a bit dry (about their childhoods), but once the women start performing in the music business "katie bar the door!" There are fascinating revelations on nearly EVERY page. Reading the book has made me go back and listen to nearly each and every song by all three artists with a new appreciation and understanding. Brilliant!
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Hits it out of the park!!
Who thought you could do a biography of three different people, each so distinct in background and sensibility, and yet make it read like a fascinating novel? I would not have thought so until I opened this book. I saw people reading it on trains and on the beach so I thought, okay, I'll try. (Skeptical.) Well, it didn't take too long, like 30 pages in, for me to get hooked. The sheer number of people the author got to talk to her, and the variety of their impressions of these women, made it so revealing, I could barely stop reading. But I did stop from time to time, just to process the information. Carole King and a husband who had a baby with another woman (a singer) while they were married? Joni in Canada as an unknown folksinger smitten by Joe of Joe and Eddie? (I thought I knew everything about her.) Bianca Jagger calling James Taylor about Carly and Mick, and James proposing because of it? Somehow it didn't sound like the National Enquirer, though. It had the weight of a serious social history. I didn't want this book to end.
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 Good on Details, Short on Meaning ( mikegunther )
At first glance, Sheila Weller's choice of subjects seems incongruous: Joni Mitchell is one of the transcendent talents of our time. Carole King and Carly Simon, however prolific, cannot possibly come up to that standard. But Weller is concerned with the popular zeitgeist, not comparative musicianship, and we must take her book on its own terms.
Weller writes from a feminine, not a feminist, perspective. She would probably disagree with this assessment, but her particular brand of retrospective feminism has, by now, become so mainstream as to be unexceptionable. We have all come a long way since the 60's.
Three women singer-songwriters, three different life trajectories played out against the background of the 60's. Weller's "parallel lives" succeeds as biography, but fails to extract any greater meaning. I most appreciated her obsessively detailed research; I learned a lot of factual information from this book. Later on, though, it became bogged-down in an interminable and Oprah-like recitation of who slept with whom and how they all felt about it; I would have liked more information about the corporate and sexual politics of the era, and much more about the music itself; for me at least, and I think for many of my generation, it was really all about the music, and the People-Magazine-type shenanigans of its creators and performers are really, more or less, beside the point.
That said, I again praise Weller for her incredibly detailed knowledge and accurate feel of the life and times. It's not exactly the book I had hoped for, but it is certainly worth reading.
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