Chapter Seventeen
At fifteen, when I was a high school junior, I had come upon a drawing in True Story magazine of a young man with dark hair and dark eyes. It had so epitomized my ideal boyfriend that I cut it out and put it in my wallet. It was still there the day I met Gerry Goffin.
In the fall of 1958, when Gerry was nineteen and I was sixteen, he was a night student at Queens College. Since I was a day student, our schedules were unlikely to overlap. One afternoon, while studying for a test in the student union with my friend Dorothy, I was having trouble concentrating due to intense menstrual cramps. I was just putting away my books when the door opened and Gerry walked in. My heart stopped. He looked exactly like the drawing in my wallet.
As soon as my heart started beating again I received another surprise. Dorothy knew Gerry. She waved him over, introduced us, and told Gerry I wasn’t feeling well. He offered to drive me home. On the way we stopped at a drugstore, where Gerry bought a pack of cigarettes and I bought some Midol. Back in the car, Gerry stripped the cellophane from the top of the pack, shook out a cigarette, and put it between his lips. After lighting the cigarette, he shook the match and tossed it out the window. I thought of my father’s occupation and cringed inwardly but said nothing. Gerry started driving again. With the radio playing jazz, a conversation about music was quite natural. We had in common two genres that we liked—jazz and show tunes. When Gerry said there was one kind of music he didn’t like, I asked, “What kind is that?”
“Rock and roll.”
Oh, great.
Gerry elaborated by citing the opinions of people of high intellect and musical sophistication who considered rock and roll a temporary and inferior trend.
“A lyric’s gotta have a deeper meaning with emotional impact,” Gerry said in his thick Brooklyn accent. “ ‘A wop wop-a loo-mop’ doesn’t meet those criteria.”
I wanted to tell him how emotional the impact of Little Richard’s music had been on me, but at that moment the boy who looked like my drawing could have persuaded me that the sun rose in the west.
Then Gerry revealed that he had written a book and lyrics for a musical he called Babes in the Woods, based on a novel, The Young Lovers, by Julian Halevy. Gerry was looking for someone to set his lyrics to music so he could bring the project to a Broadway producer and achieve his dream of making so much money that he would never again have to work at a nine-to-five job.
I waxed enthusiastic in telling Gerry how it felt to play a song for an A&R man and have him like it enough to record it. Gerry listened intently, finished his cigarette, and threw it out the window. I wanted to scream, “Don’t do that!” but again, I said nothing. A couple of minutes later, he lit another cigarette with one hand while steering with the other. He looked so incredibly cool that I lost mine, which is probably what made me do what I did next.
“Actually,” I volunteered, “Atlantic is looking for a song for Mickey and Sylvia.”
Gerry took a deep drag on his cigarette, exhaled, and said, “Why don’t we write something for them?”
I was taken aback. He had just spent twenty minutes conveying the low esteem in which he held rock and roll. When I asked why he wanted to write a song in a genre for which he had so little respect, he said he wanted to do it as an intellectual exercise, just to see if he could.
Seeing that we were only a block from my house, I rapidly recounted how I had first seen Mickey “Guitar” Baker backstage at the Alan Freed show.
“And then Mickey teamed up with a woman named Sylvia Robinson for a vocal duet on Atlantic Records, and then ‘Love Is Strange’ became a smash hit, and that’s what we need to use as a model… Oh, look! Here we are!”
I introduced Gerry to my mother, then he and I went into the living room. After only two spins of “Love Is Strange,” Gerry came up with an idea for the follow-up. “The Kid Brother” would be about a couple of teenagers trying to make out who were constantly interrupted by the girl’s little brother. The punch line, to be half sung and half spoken by Mickey, was “Here’s a quarter, kid. GET LOST!!”
We completed our first Goffin and King song in less than an hour.
Writing with Gerry was easy and comfortable. After we agreed that he would write lyrics for my rock and roll songs and I would write the music for Babes in the Woods, our next few writing sessions were devoted to the musical. But because pop songs had the potential to deliver a more immediate financial reward, we began writing more in that direction. Our work together in the fledgling discipline (or lack thereof) of rock and roll would become so lucrative that Babes in the Woods would be permanently relegated to the dusty attic of memory (or lack thereof).
The financial reward for our first effort was less than we had hoped. We brought “The Kid Brother” to Atlantic, and Jerry and Ahmet liked the song. Unfortunately Mickey and Sylvia had just broken up. Mickey and his new partner, Kitty Noble, recorded our song, but the capricious winds of fortune blew “The Kid Brother” in the opposite direction of “Love Is Strange.” “The Kid Brother” was released as the B side of an A side called “Ooh Sha La La” that didn’t do well. Nevertheless, we considered it a major accomplishment to have our first song recorded by Mickey Baker. We wrote more songs and occasionally sold one for a twenty-five-dollar advance—pocket change for a publisher, but a fortune to us.