By Steve Rhodes
“How you feel about Sheila Weller’s Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon – and the Journey of a Generation may depend on how you respond to Weller’s dedication, which reads: ‘To the women of the 1960s generation. (Were we not the best?)’ If that’s the sort of thing that gets you all hepped up to pour a glass of chardonnay and order some gauzy embroidered tunics and Clarks sandals from the Soft Surroundings catalog, then you go, girl! If, on the other hand, the nakedly self-congratulatory quality of that dedication makes you want to play a record by the Slits or Hole or Sleater-Kinney, really loud, you may be in a different category, or just a different age group – not the ‘best’ one,” Stephanie Zacharek writes in the New York Times
I’ll take loud. Really loud. And I’m a fan of the 60s.
Still, Zacharek finds much of value in this book, though to my eyes it looks like the value has everything to do with emerging songwriting talent and nothing to do with anything generational. In fact, Zacharek argues that of the three, only Carole King really changed the world.
“By 1961,” she writes, “King was not yet 20, although she was already a wife and mother and had written, with her husband, the Shirelles’ No. 1 hit ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow.’ At the time of its writing, Goffin was still working full time at a chemical company; King was at home, taking care of the couple’s infant daughter. The two were building a dual career as songwriters in the little spare time they had. King wrote the music; Goffin supplied the lyrics. King wrote much of the melody for ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’ during the course of an afternoon. She recorded what she had and then dashed off to a mah-jongg date with a friend, leaving a note near the tape recorder for her husband to find upon his return from work. The song had to be ready to present to the Shirelles the next day. ‘Please write,’ the note said.
“Goffin loved what he heard on the tape. ‘I listened to it a few times,’ he tells Weller, ‘then I put myself in the place of a woman – yes, it was sort of autobiographical. I thought: What would a girl sing to a guy if they made love that night?’ And so this glorious song, as astonishing a summation of women’s insecurities as has ever been written, and one that shocked listeners with its frankness, came to be. The melody, at once pleading and confident, had come first: it was so powerful that it inspired a man to slip into the skin, and the heart, of a woman.
“Later, King would leave Goffin and reinvent her life, several times over. She went on to make a bold, beautiful and enormously popular LP, Tapestry (1971), one of those rare albums that both connect with an era and survive that era’s baloney. Later still, she’d move to Idaho and become an environmental activist. But in 1961 she was a muse who had turned a man – just for the space of a song – into a woman. And that may be even harder than changing the world.”
Sexual Science
I’ve read several views of Mary Roach’s Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, but this is the only one that makes the book sound like any fun (which could very well mean it isn’t.)
“She straddles the border between insider and outsider reporting, offering description explicit enough to interest a physiologist but perpetually amazed and amused enough to reach those of us who don’t spend all our time mulling matters like the orgasms of paraplegics, the AMS Malleable 650 Penile Prosthesis, the intercourse rates of rats wearing little polyester pants, or whether uterine upsuck (if it exists) affects fertility,” Alexander Kafka writes.
“I recall one instance (in a footnote) of the ‘F’-word, used in the context of a chimp’s digital stimulation, and lots of common slang like ‘wang’ and ‘boner.’ But while I wouldn’t necessarily give the book as a confirmation or bat mitzvah present, it generally tilts toward the tasteful when it could tilt otherwise. Fundamentally, it is, as Roach puts it, ‘a tribute to the men and women who dared. Who, to this day, endure ignorance, closed minds, righteousness, and prudery. Their lives are not easy. But their cocktail parties are the best.'”
Book Bites
* The title of former Major League Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent’s new book is We Would Have Played For Nothing: Baseball Stars of the 1950s and 1960s Talk About The Game They Loved.
Not if they found out how much money the owners were making off of them. Come to think of it, I think that’s what happened.
And new in paperback:
* Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole.
* Teenage: The Prehistory of Youth Culture, 1875 – 1945
Posted on April 28, 2008