Like any great nighttime host, Ruskin turned a congenial mishmash of creators and outcasts into a dazzling elite. His dried-chickpea-munching aristocracy consisted of two-fisted painters and sculptors from places like Nebraska and their symbiotic urban complements (fey poets, cerebral critics); fashion designers and photographers; filmmakers and dancers that no one except The Village Voice knew to write about; briny denizens of a secret hard drinkers’ bar scene whose unmarked north star was the 55 on Christopher Street; the occasional discreet prostitute, of either gender; everyone from Andy Warhol’s Factory; heiresses gone underground; ruined or soon-to-be-ruined bards (Tim Hardin, Tim Buckley); and Park Avenue art collectors in artists’-tab-paying thrall to it all. Party addresses were passed around Max’s bar on weekend nights under the twisted-metal John Chamberlain sculpture; the semi-invited took taxis to the empty industrial streets south of Houston and followed Otis Redding’s recorded, Stax-backed moans up steep, rickety wooden stairs to lofts (their walls covered with nearly wall-sized paintings) crowded with sexy, brooding hipsters, expensively miniskirted socialites like Warhol Girl of the Year Baby Jane Holzer, Paraphernalia publicist Pam Sakowitz, and fashion photographer Jerry Schatzberg’s rapier-cheek-boned hipster actress girlfriend, in months to be shot-out-of-a-cannon famous in Bonnie and Clyde: Faye Dunaway. Girls would dance up a fine coat of sweat—to Carole’s hit for Aretha, “Natural Woman,” among other LP tracks—and collapse behind fabric room dividers on coat-piled beds with cocky would-be Larry Riverses or silky, urbane “spade cats” (a slyly self-embraced term of awe, not insult) who seemed to have tumbled out of a Norman Mailer or James Baldwin novel.
If you got an apartment for, say, $78.50 a month—rent was sometimes calculated to the half-dollar—it often featured “tub in kitchen.” Gun-toting landlords could walk in on their single female tenants at will; there was no one to complain to. Joni found a second-floor, street-fronting one-bedroom with high windows (tub, thankfully, not in kitchen and no sadistic landlord) across from a church, off Fifth Avenue, two blocks north of the Village. The apartment, at 41 West Sixteenth Street, had a fireplace and the newly prized exposed brick wall. Today the neighborhood is called Flatiron; it’s chic and bustling. Then it was a genteel residential wedge abutting small factories and office buildings. It didn’t have a name—the closest neighborhood, Chelsea, lay northwest—but realtors called it Chelsea anyway.
Joni decamped, filling the apartment with her thrift shop antiques, making it homey (“milk and toast and honey, and a bowl of oranges, too”), and she continued what would be her most prolific period. She would write more songs in 1967 than in any other year—upping her output from twenty-five compositions to sixty, and bringing her total of published songs to thirty-eight by the time she turned twenty-four. She walked the city at night—a Whitman, an Arbus with a guitar case: a voyeur to what she would call the “incredible” “street adventures…There are a thousand stories in a single block. You see the stories in people’s faces. You hear the songs immediately.”
As she put it in “Song to a Seagull,” she lived self-shipwrecked “like old Crusoe” on that “island of noise in a cobblestoned sea,” and she described that vulnerable state with precision: Her character “Marcie” tries to shake off her preoccupation with an absent lover by going uptown to see a Broadway play (a thoroughly New York thing to do), but when she travels back to her apartment via the West Side Highway, “down along the Hudson River, by the shipyards in the cold,” we know that the city’s touted culture hasn’t lifted her out of her pain. Churlish taxi driver “Nathan LaFraneer” ferries an anxious Joni “from confusion to the plane,” on which she’ll fly to one of those out-of-town club appearances—a jolt of travel that doesn’t dispel her life’s nagging questions. She’s trapped in the back of the angry man’s cab, but naïve civility (“we shared a common space”) leads her to overtip him (he snarls). These are the songs that would lead Time magazine to say of Joni that, among other things, “She is the rural neophyte, waiting in a subway.”
She was divorcing Chuck; she was living alone; she was in the big American city with her thrift shop clothes and her hungry heart. She knew she was moving away from Myrtle’s approved borders: “My gentle relations have names they must call me…” The worry was not gratuitous. During those first weeks in New York Joni was fearful that the existence of her illegitimate baby would be revealed to her parents—and to the public. According to what she told a friend, she worried she’d be blackballed for disbanding the duo and leaving her husband. “I had the impression [that the threat] was insinuated in conversation,” says that friend, adding that Joni “was quite concerned about it, as any woman would have been during those years.* I don’t remember how the issue was resolved…probably [those who threatened the blackballing] simply dropped the idea when she left Chuck, since any other musicians they were handling would have hated them for it.” (Chuck Mitchell dismisses such rumors as baseless. He says they “pick up on the ‘meddlesome, difficult Chuck’ motif” that Joni and her supporters have “put forth for years.”)
Like small-town girls turned writers before her, Joni took the measure of the city through windows, which provided both protection and voyeuristic satisfaction. In the same way that, twenty-nine years earlier, Ohioan Ruth McKenney had recorded how she and her sister Eileen had slept so close to open windows in their Greenwich Village basement that men would stick their heads in and say “Hiya, babes!” and “urchins ran sticks across the iron window bars, creating a realistic imitation of machine gun fire”; and in the same way that, eighteen years after that, fresh-from-Sacramento Joan Didion, “on a certain kind of winter evening…already dark and bitter,” peered into East Seventies windows at dinners being made, and imagined candles lit and children bathed; so too, Joni from Saskatoon pressed her nose to her glass pane. “Now the curtain opens on a portrait of today,” she announces, in “Chelsea Morning.” She’s proud—this country girl—to be peering out, from her own perch, at all of this roiling urbanity. “Chelsea Morning”** is a Summer of Love love letter penned by a young woman alone in Manhattan. Here was the fruition of the promise she held out to her female Second Fret audience. Here was the new “Norwegian Wood.”
Joni eventually booked herself into the Cafe Au Go Go, where the headliners included her mentor, Eric Andersen, and, on other nights, the cape-wearing, Brooklyn-born black folksinger Richie Havens. One night in late spring, she walked around the corner from the Au Go Go to a new restaurant upstairs from the Dugout called the Tin Angel. Dave Van Ronk was holding forth at the Angel’s bar, waxing proud and protective of the girl he’d met as part of Chuck-and-Joni at the Chess Mate. He would soon record “Both Sides, Now,” renaming it “Clouds,” retrofitting its feminine mulling of “rows and flows of angel hair and ice cream castles in the air” to his sandpaper growl. Joni was suddenly making a name for herself as a songwriter. In January, country-western star George Hamilton IV had an improbable country hit with “Urge for Going”; a month later Ian and Sylvia recorded “The Circle Game,” as would Buffy Sainte-Marie, who would also imminently record Joni’s newly written “Song to a Seagull.” So Van Ronk was showing off Joni to a crowd at the bar that included his former guitar student Steve Katz. The guitarist and vocalist for the Au Go Go’s house band, the Blues Project, Katz was a lean young man whose somber-Jewish-boy manner exerted a pull on women. He would later have a passionate affair with Joan Baez’s sister Mimi Fariña.
A small group including Van Ronk and Katz ended up at Joni’s apartment. “We jammed, and then I asked Joni if she wanted to go back to my place, which we did,” Steve Katz recalls. “We spent the night together, and the next day Joni was going off to play a gig or two somewhere in the South. We looked forward to seeing each other when she came back.” One of Joni’s Southern engagements was at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, an army base where, “hippie” though she was, she entertained the Vietnam-bound soldiers. (“You got a lot of nerve, sister, standing up there and talking a
bout love!” one war-scarred private she referred to as “Killer Kyle”* angrily admonished, at her dressing room door. “So,” she would later recall, “I sat down, and he poured his little heart out to me [about] how the war had robbed him of his sensitivity because of the atrocities he’d experienced. Even the tender act of touching a woman, he felt, was beyond him. So I held him, I hugged him, I felt bad for him.”)
Within days of their evening together, Steve Katz was surprised to find in his mailbox “a card from [Joni] which was essentially a love letter.” The prematurity and strength of Joni’s affection took him aback (and indicate how vulnerable she was at the beginning of this freewheeling time during which she would soon make so many conquests). “At this point in my very chauvinistic young life I did not want to get tied down,” he recalls, “and I certainly didn’t feel as strongly toward her as that letter might have assumed.” He decided, discreetly, to hand her off.
When Joni returned to town, she called Steve, and Steve invited her over, along with his friend Roy Blumenfeld, the Blues Project’s drummer. Tall and handsome in a sunny-faced way, Blumenfeld had a girlfriend—a young Frenchwoman named Marie, “who was a very, very fiery Sagittarius,” Roy says. Marie was “sexy and European; she had a mockingly combative style and smoked Gauloises.” She was back home in Bordeaux for the summer, which turned out to be very convenient.
Roy Blumenfeld remembers entering Steve’s living room, “and I see long blond hair draped over the guitar. Joni was playing. She turned toward me, and…I was absolutely stunned, knocked off my feet. The high cheekbones, the sculpted face…she was the perfect shiksa. She was the epitome of the woman I had dreamed of.”
Joni and Roy took a walk and talked about their shared love of music and art (Roy had been a student at Pratt Institute). They wound up in Joni’s apartment, and, as was her standard gesture, she played Roy her compositions: “Little Green” (she did not disclose the song’s meaning) and “Both Sides, Now,” as well as the never-to-be-recorded “Go Tell the Drummer Man.” “I was listening to a lot of R&B and Motown at the time—‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine,’ ‘Mustang Sally,’” Roy says, “so I was used to macho music; Joni’s music was light and melodic and different, but it straddled so many forms. Musically, I was enamored—her music was more original than Dylan’s.”
Joni and Roy spent most of the summer of 1967 together. To Roy, Joni was “somewhat like a Canadian Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz—pure, clear, surrounded by light, on a mission to get home and that [mission] was her muse and her power source. She was like a…scientist of love, and I was like other lovers accompanying her on her journey: small dots on [what would be] a great metaphoric line drawing.” It was with Roy’s help that Joni papered a whole wall of her apartment in aluminum foil,* a flower child touch that gave the room a soft underwater feeling. They danced to the Temptations’ “Beauty Is Only Skin Deep” and “I Want a Love I Can See” on the painted floor of Roy’s small, $80-a-month East Village loft. They had dinner at Emilio’s, an inexpensive Italian restaurant on Sixth Avenue, where, in its tree-swept garden, umbrellaed tables teetered on a pebbled ground, and young couples felt sophisticated. Roy gave Joni musicianly advice: attack the guitar as if it were a drum. They talked astrology—she was a Scorpio, a water sign; he was the opposite, a Taurus—so “we were really connected.” They traveled to Philadelphia together and stayed with Joy and Larry Schreiber while Joni played the Second Fret. They frequented the Tin Angel (the sad song she wrote about finding love “in a Bleecker Street café,” which she titled “Tin Angel,” is likely about Roy). “I was crazy in love with Joan Mitchell,” Roy says today. “The way I felt about her…it scared me, because I felt I was going to go into this spiral of crazy love.” Joni seemed to reciprocate Roy’s feelings.
In August, Roy’s girlfriend Marie returned from France, found out about Joni, and flew into a rage. Roy did what he thought was the right thing (although he regretted it later). In order to keep peace with Marie—who, after all, had prior claim—he told Joni he had to stop seeing her. Devastated by the news, Joni sat sobbing at the bar at the Tin Angel.
But a very consequential silver lining would emerge that night, by way of one of Roy’s best friends.
Consoling Joni at the bar for three hours was Roy and Steve’s bandmate Al Kooper, the Blues Project’s keyboardist, lead singer, and composer. Kooper was famous in recording circles; two years earlier, his inspired organ-playing on Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” which opened the cut in what sounded like a riot of calliopes, had done much to make the song the marvel it was held to be. Al Kooper was crashing at Judy Collins’s apartment; the established folksinger was a kind of big sister to young rockers. Joni was still lamenting over Roy at “Last call!” so Al offered to walk Joni home. When Joni invited him up to hear her songs, “she, being sorta pretty, had me bounding up the stairs figuring if the songs were lousy, maybe I could salvage the evening some other way,” Kooper recalled in his 1977 autobiography Backstage Passes, written with Ben Edmonds. But “in a few minutes, that became the furthest thing from my mind. Her songs were incredible and totally original…She would finish one, and I would say: more, more. And she had enough to keep going for hours, most of them brilliant. One song especially killed me, ‘Michael from Mountains.’ I thought it would be great for Judy.” Even though it was the middle of the night, he decided to call Judy Collins and tell her about his discovery.
With almost otherworldly-luminous blue eyes and long light-brown hair, twenty-seven-year-old Judy Collins had, by the summer of 1967, already lived a remarkably full life. Raised in Washington state and Colorado, the daughter of a blind songwriter–radio personality, she’d become a virtuoso classical pianist at thirteen and, like Joni, had weathered polio. She’d fallen in love with folk music in her teens and switched from piano to guitar. At nineteen she married graduate student Peter Taylor and traveled with him from campus to campus as he completed his Ph.D. in English, supporting him with clerical jobs and, with increasing success, by folksinging. She juggled the care for their baby son, Clark, with her blossoming cabaret career, despite disapproval from her mother-in-law and others for being a working—and performing—mother.
In 1963, divorced from Taylor, Collins moved to Greenwich Village with Clark; Taylor sued for custody. In those days, mothers almost automatically received custody of their young children. Judy was that very rare exception. After a highly acrimonious battle waged by her ex-husband and his family, Judy lost her son (she believes that being in psychoanalysis led the court to disfavor her), a blow that left her reeling.
Jac Holzman had discovered Judy at the Village Gate one night, and, defying the “she’s-just-another-Baez-clone” naysayers, signed her to his Elektra Records. After she recorded her debut Maid of Constant Sorrow, Judy was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She had no health insurance; Holzman advanced her against future albums so her hospital bill could be paid. She rebounded and recorded four more albums for Elektra—the latest, In My Life, featured her deeply felt version of the Beatles hit of that name, as well as the art song “Suzanne” by her friend, Canadian poet and novelist Leonard Cohen, who was about to release his own Songs of Leonard Cohen, offering “Suzanne” and his other poem-songs in his brazenly unmusical drone of a voice.
Collins was a woman who had definitely looked at life “from win and lose”—and, like Joni, she had the WASP choir girl voice and appearance that could render the idea of female worldweariness unthreatening. She was searching for a few last songs for her album-in-progress, Wildflowers, which would include two Leonard Cohen songs, “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” and “Sisters of Mercy.” So when Al woke her up, she was receptive. In a few hours Judy would be driving to Newport for the first day of its folk festival, of which she sat on the board of governors. “I asked her to take Joni in her car with her to Newport, listen to Joni sing her songs on the ride, and see if she could find a spot on the bill for her,” Kooper says today. Judy agreed to do so.
The next day, an excited Joni—packed and ready—waited, in vain, for Judy Collins to show. “Judy stood me up,” Joni has said, “and she was my hero, [so] it was kind of heartbreaking. I waited and waited and waited, and she never came…A day went by, and I got a phone call from her, and she sounded kind of sheepish. She said somebody had sung one of my songs in a workshop. It was a terrible rendition, she said, but people went crazy [over the song]. Judy thought I really should be at Newport.” She had a car pick Joni up and take her to the festival.
After Joni arrived at the festival grounds, Judy—who had by now fallen in love with “Both Sides, Now” (she has said that the minute she heard it, she “knew it was a classic; I had to sing it”*)—felt deeply committed to getting Joni onstage. An obstruction materialized in the form of Joan Baez and Mimi Fariña’s mother, “Big” Joan Baez. Using her considerable influence, the matriarch had Joni barred from the schedule, presumably fearing that the comely arriviste would steal the thunder from her daughters.
At this point Judy—who was known as one tough lady—stepped in and pulled weight of her own. Judy told Mrs. Baez, “If Joni doesn’t perform, then I won’t perform and Leonard [Cohen] won’t perform.” By dint of Judy’s threat, Joni got onstage at Newport. (So did Cohen, who was beset by such stage fright he would only sing with Judy standing next to him, holding his hand.)
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