Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

  By now, Carole and Gerry had signed up with Aldon. Neil Sedaka had had a hit with a song “Oh! Carol” (Carole and Joel concluded it had to have been about Carole), and, with Gerry’s help, Carole had written a novelty “answer” song, “Oh! Neil,” bringing Donny Kirshner into her and Gerry’s lives. (Carole herself sang “Oh! Neil,” and Sidney Klein played the shotgun-wielding father at the end of the record, a humorous reenactment of his early anger at Gerry.) The young couple’s workaholism was just what Kirshner was looking for. He paid them $1,000 for the coming year. They started to write, but “one song after another, Donny couldn’t do anything with them,” Gerry says.

  On March 23, 1960, Carole went into labor, was admitted to a hospital in Brooklyn, and had a baby girl. Fathers weren’t in the delivery room with their wives back then; they paced or, if they were broke and barely out of their teens, stayed with their buddies, then entered the maternity wing in a mixed state of excitement and fear. “I went with Gerry to the hospital—he was nervous; they were kids, and now they were parents,” Jack Keller remembered. “They needed things—they needed a couch, they needed a car. I think Al Nevins gave them a couch.” The baby was named Louise Lynn—Louise, for Gerry’s deceased paternal grandfather, Louis. They called her Lou Lou.

  Carole went back to writing songs with Gerry almost immediately after giving birth. For his $1,000 investment, Donny Kirshner was eager to use all her time, day and night. One day, she was in the Aldon office when another young female songwriter, Cynthia Weil, presented herself. As Cynthia recalls the first meeting: “In walks this little girl, who looks about twelve, with no makeup and a Band-Aid on her knee.” Cynthia, by contrast, was a Manhattan-raised, Sarah Lawrence–educated fashion plate who had only been to Brooklyn a couple of times in her life—accompanied by, and visiting the family of, her German nanny. Cynthia recalls, “Donny said, ‘Her husband is working as a chemist and he writes lyrics with her, but they can only write at night. She should be writing during the day. So she can write with you during the day.’ Then Carole sat down and played something for me, and she was amazing. Just to see this little girl sit down at that piano and pound with that voice—amazing!”

  Soon after that first meeting, Cynthia took two subways to the unknown depths of Brooklyn to meet with Carole, who had month-old Louise in a bassinet as she delivered a catchy melody. Cynthia agreed to write lyrics for it, and she took the lead sheet home on the long trip back to Manhattan. An hour later, Cynthia was turning the key in the lock of her apartment door when she heard her phone ring. It was her brand-new partner, apologetic. “Carole says, ‘I know this is not the right way to start a good writing relationship, but Gerry came home from work and he was very angry that I gave you that melody, because he likes it and has a great idea for it.’” Cynthia had no choice but to give the melody back to Carole for Gerry to work with. The incident underscored the relationship of the newlywed parents. Carole might have been the dynamic instigator of songwriting, but Gerry was the possessive husband, and he called the shots.

  For eight months—through spring, summer, and fall of 1960—the young parents lived the life of frenetic hack songwriters. In the small apartment with its budget furniture, amid the baby’s cries, they wrote one mediocre song after another. “Thirty, forty, forty-five songs—none any good,” Gerry recalls. “They were derivative. They were novice. They weren’t melodic, and the lyrics were poor.” Barbara Grossman visited Carole. “I was a college cheerleader, still living with my parents. Carole had quit college, was married with a baby, paying her own rent, and writing songs at night with Gerry after he came home from work. It seemed unbelievable, the distance between my life and her life.” Late 1950s rock ’n’ roll was themed on working-class melodrama: stanched dreams, grueling work, two kids against the world—the existence that Carole was living.

  In 1959 a new “Earth Angel” had risen to the top of the pop charts. If you were a suburban girl of thirteen or fourteen and heard the Drifters’ “There Goes My Baby,” you stopped in your tracks, drew a breath, and realized: “This is a song I could go ‘all the way’ to.” The urgent ballad with its booming doo-wop intro and its sexual narrator, desperately wailing

  “There goes my baaa-by / Movin’ o-on down the line…”

  was enveloped in a classical string section. The lead singer—who lost his girl because he “made her cry” and is now beside himself wanting her back—had a phlegmy-from-wailing-so-hard voice; his dropped verb endings (“There go’ my baby”; “I want to know if she love’ me”) suggested some intriguing neighborhood that little white girl radio listeners didn’t know; and his every utterance was bathed in Carnegie Hall–like strings, giving his anger and pain a haunting ennoblement. Virginal middle-class girls imagined sex in big-R romantic terms—like Shakespeare, like the Brontë sisters—and here it was, in this bodice-ripping ballad by this Othello.

  His name was Benjamin Earl Nelson (soon to be self-renamed Ben E. King: like Carole, he’d added a “King” to his name), and he’d only gotten the lead singing job because the intended lead, Charlie Thomas, froze up in the studio. The writing and production were done by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who had spent their youths writing as black as they desperately wanted to be (their first R&B hit, in 1951, was Charles Brown’s “Hard Times,” which was later recorded by David “Fathead” Newman for Ray Charles and was more authentically bluesy than two teenage white boys could ever be expected to be); who had been recently adapting for Elvis their songs, like “Hound Dog,” that had originally been recorded by black blues singers; and who had been for the last few years burnishing the safely unsensual and humorous side of the doo-wop tradition to a commercial high gloss with their series of snarky hits for the Coasters, like “Yakety Yak,” “Charlie Brown,” and “Poison Ivy”—all following the bold “Searchin’.” Now the pair had taken the Drifters, a fallen-on-hard-times pet group of Ertegun’s and Wexler’s (Ertegun had proudly discovered the original Drifters lead singer, Clyde McPhatter, whom he and Wexler considered one of the best R&B singers ever), who had a new, default lead singer (Nelson)—and brazenly reversed course. They worked up an operatic strings arrangement on a slow-dance lament (“What can I do? What can I-I do-o-oo?”). Wexler was so angry when Mike and Jerry played him the violin-filled arrangement, he wanted to hurl the tape recorder at the wall. But Wexler was not a fourteen-year-old suburban girl. Carole and Gerry got it immediately: the new Drifters sound was West Side Story.

  By now, black a cappella–based popular music had finally gained some female voices. In 1957 four schoolgirls at St. Anthony of Padua High School in the Bronx—girls who’d harmonized together on Gregorian chants in chapel for years and improvised secular music in the gym and the halls—named themselves the Chantels (after their basketball rival school, St. Francis de Chantelle) and recorded a song called “Maybe.” “Maybe” was not the kind of song—coy, upbeat—that some record companies thought that girls should like and that black girls should deliver. (When a Bronx group, the Bobbettes, wrote vengefully about a teacher they hated, a man named Mr. Lee, the record company made them rewrite the angry song as a bouncy paean to him. It was recorded in that latter, insincere form.) “Maybe,” by contrast, was a serious blues-and-gospel-flavored plaint: “Ma-ay-be, if I cry e-very night, you’ll come back to-o-o me…” What’s more, it was written by one of the girls, the group’s lead singer, Arlene Smith. Pioneeringly, in early 1958 (when black male groups didn’t score as often as white male groups, and black female groups almost never charted), “Maybe” became a pop hit.

  Across the river in Passaic, New Jersey, four teenage girls had taken heart at the Chantels’ earned fortune. They were Shirley Owens, Addie Harris, Beverly Lee, and Doris Coley, a foursome who called themselves the Poquellos. Like the Chantels, they had harmonized in the high school gym, had made up their group name in school (“One day in Spanish class, we just made up the word ‘the Poquellos’; it sounded flighty and pretty, like birds,” says Beverly Lee), an
d had long listened to New York’s premier R&B station, WWRL, which represented the real black-music sound, not the Negro-music-for-white-kids presentation by Alan Freed on WINS. Mary Jane Greenberg, a fellow student in the racially integrated Passaic High, saw her classmates perform a self-written novelty song called “I Met Him on Sunday” at the school talent show and virtually begged them to meet her mother, Florence Greenberg, who owned a small record label with the feminine name Tiara (later renamed Scepter). After brushing off several of Mary Jane’s entreaties, the Poquellos finally agreed. During the living room audition Florence Greenberg was floored: the material’s mediocrity couldn’t hide lead singer Shirley Owens’s distinctive voice: deep, low, carelessly nasal, occasionally flat, as confidently relaxed as a jazz singer’s. But Greenberg knew they had to have a more commercial name. So, taking the “Shir” from their lead singer’s first name and the “els” from their admired Chantels, Greenberg anointed them the Shirelles.

  The group’s first efforts (including the song they’d sung at the talent show, and two songs with “boyfriend” in the title, with Shirley’s voice inexplicably relegated to background) never gained traction, and they were dropped from the label that, through Shirley’s efforts, had adopted them. When respected R&B A&R man Luther Dixon entered the picture to help them stage a “comeback” six months later, he used Shirley to sing lead on “Tonight’s the Night,” which announced a girl’s intention to abandon her virginity. But the title was the only thing revolutionary about the mild hit. It had a leaden, monotonous melody and robotic non-lyrics. Still, the thoughtful ambivalence that Shirley expressed (“I don’t know, oh I don’t know right now…”) in her breaking, vinegary alto—early in the first year, 1960, of a brand-new decade (and during the season that the Food and Drug Administration had quietly approved the sale of the first birth control pill)—can be seen, in retrospect, as a kind of run-up to something. But a run-up to what?

  Carole King was an eighteen-year-old mother of a six-month-old when she sat down at the Brown Street piano one late afternoon in the fall of that same year. In a couple of hours she’d be off to play mah-jongg with Genie. Gerry was at Argus Chemical, completing a day of testing polymers and epoxies; he had a Marine Corps Reserves meeting afterward. Carole and Gerry had given fifty songs to Donny. In their tight, two-person universe—small apartment, no-sleep schedule, paycheck-to-paycheck existence, demanding baby, pump-’em-out songwriting—they had almost become one person. With his voyeur’s knack, Gerry could intuit the feelings of his young wife, who kept her emotions hidden.

  Kirshner worked by pitching to one or two artists’ managers or A&R men at a time. He knew he could get to Florence Greenberg, so he told Carole to think of the Shirelles as she wrote. Still, Florence was too easy a sell—she had come to him—and Donny wanted what he couldn’t have; he was secretly obsessed with selling songs to Guy Mitchell, who, having engineered Johnny Mathis’s string of hits, was the hottest A&R man on the street. Carole didn’t know this. She thought of the Shirelles as she sat down at the piano.

  Carole stretched her hands over the keys. She produced an elegant semiclassical ballad, its third bar containing an emotional chord (called the “major III” or “secondary dominant of VI”) that George Gershwin might have used but that was never heard in current pop songs. She had trouble finding a melody for the bridge, so she left that incomplete. After finishing the song as best she could, she pushed the “on” button on the big Norelco tape recorder that sat on the piano next to the full ashtray, and she da-dah-dah’d her wordless melody while she played it. As she grabbed her coat to go meet Genie, she wrote a note to Gerry: “Donny needs a song for the Shirelles tomorrow. Please write”—and propped the note against the tape recorder.

  When Gerry came home to the empty apartment and listened to the tape, he was euphoric. “I had never heard a melody like that from Carole before! It was melodic!” he recalls. “It was structured better musically than anything she’d written before—it was AABA; the others had been: verse, chorus, verse, chorus. I listened to it a few times, 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? It wasn’t a great lyric, but it was very simple: Will you love me in the morning, after we’ve made love?”

  Gerry showed the lyric to Carole when she walked in the door around midnight. He’d begun the song with decorous metaphors for lovemaking, arranged in a tight, alliterative, conversational two bars (“Tonight you’re mine completely / You give your love so sweetly”); and he’d filled her Gershwin-like third-bar melody with a triple rhyme—“Tonight the light of love is in your eyes,” to reinforce the urgency of its quickened last six beats. He’d also written the bridge melody (with a yearning third bar) and its lyric about heartbreak with the morning sun. Carole picked it out on the piano, following along as he sang it. Working until two a.m., they nailed it.

  The song (which they temporarily called, simply, “Tomorrow”) was about a young woman sleeping with a boy despite no promise of commitment. Channeling the sensibility of the matter-of-fact, emotion-hiding girl who fell in love with him a year and a half earlier, Gerry wrote a whole character. The words tell us the singer is a cut-to-the-chase person who, despite her vulnerability, possesses restraint—she’s not demanding constant reassurance. She also accepts responsibility for her freedom; it’s her job to manage the emotional ambiguity and the risk of pregnancy. It’s not a supplicant’s “Please tell me now” or an arm-twisting “Just tell me now.” It’s “So tell me now,” implying, I’ll take it from here; the burden is now on me. Because it reflected them so effortlessly, Gerry says, “We just thought it was another song.”

  Donny Kirshner helped Carole and Gerry fortify the hook and shorten the song from five to three minutes. They made a demo, with Carole singing (sans strings arrangement). Even though it was a woman’s song, Donny brought the demo to Guy Mitchell. Mitchell listened and told Kirshner he loved the song but was committed to the composers of Mathis’s “Wonderful, Wonderful” and “Chances Are.” Kirshner left the meeting dejected and only then let Florence Greenberg hear the demo. Greenberg gave it to Luther Dixon and he played it for the Shirelles. Beverly Lee recalls, “We looked at each other like, ‘Is this a joke?’ It sounded like a country-western song, real twangy.” The girls’ consensus: it was too white. But Dixon, who is black and whom they trusted, said, “You’re gonna record this song,” Beverly says. The Shirelles begrudgingly agreed to show up at the studio.

  Carole and Gerry knew their song had to be bathed in violins and cellos. Gerry was “dying to steal from the Drifters,” as he puts it; he and Carole had written a song for the group (“Show Me the Way”) that got shelved, and he loved the cellos in “This Magic Moment” and “Dance with Me.” If anyone admired two Jewish boys who seemed black, wrote black, and successfully produced black groups, it was Gerry. But it was Carole who was determined to write the string arrangement. As soon as she knew the Shirelles had agreed (however reluctantly) to show up for the session, she approached Al Kasha, Jackie Wilson’s A&R man (and a Madison High alum). As Kasha recalls, she said, “You write with Luther Dixon. Do you think he would be upset about using strings?” Not waiting for an answer from Dixon through Kasha, she started the arrangement, undaunted by her ignorance of the instruments. “I came over to Carole’s house and she was sitting at the kitchen table, writing the score,” Camille remembers, “using a book she checked out of the library, How to Write for Strings. She taught herself from a library book!”

  Luther Dixon wasn’t sure he wanted Carole’s arrangement, but Gerry pushed on her behalf. “I kept asking Luther if she could write it,” Gerry says. “He resisted at first. Then he said, ‘All right, I’ll give her a shot.’” The next issue was: How many cellos, how much of a Drifters sound? “We wanted four cellos,” Gerry recalls. “Luther gave us two.” Carole and Gerry schemed to double the two to four in the studio—and they did so.

 
; When the Shirelles got to the studio and heard the arrangement, they were stunned, says Beverly Lee. “The song was completely different than the one on the demo. It was beautiful. All those strings! It blew our minds! I thought: Thank God for Carole King, for this.”

  With Carole on kettle drums, they recorded: Shirley taking most of the song alone, her low, nasal voice, with its catch in the throat, fading on the long notes and straining on the high ones with amateurish humanity; the violins soaring rapturously; the cellos grinding anxiously; Addie, Doris, and Beverly chanting “sha da DOP shop, sha da DOP shop”—but all of that receding on Shirley’s two “So tell me now, and I won’t ask again”s.

  By the end of the first week of December 1960—just as the brand-new Enovid birth control pills were rolling off Klein Pharmaceuticals’ assembly lines lab in Skokie, Illinois, and reaching their first customers; and three weeks after John F. Kennedy won the election (he and his beautiful, subtly ironic, and Europeanized young wife changing American culture with a jolt, overdue/overnight, just as rock ’n’ roll had), the Shirelles had become the first African-American female group in American history to have a #1 hit. And a song that reflected a concept so new—a young single woman’s declaration of herself as an emotionally and sexually independent and responsible person—that it didn’t have a name, was the song all America was singing.

  CHAPTER TWO

  joni

  A world away from the second-generation Jewish New York pop-culture realm of Carole King lay the deep plains, Northern European Protestant milieu that Roberta Joan Anderson was born into on November 7, 1943, in Fort Macleod, Alberta, Canada.