Chapter Four
The walk to and from my neighbors’ houses on Wonderland Avenue was semivertical. We learned to pronounce it “Wonderlind,” as locals did, rather than “Wonderland,” as Alice might have pronounced it if she had tumbled down a rabbit hole in New Jersey. Rustic houses peeped out amid luxuriant greenery and dotted the hillsides with hues not often found in nature, and there were more shades of bougainvillea than Crayola had names for.
Sherry and Louise already had friends in the Canyon. Apart from my brief forays into Bel Air, writing with Toni, and playing Discover California! with my daughters, I didn’t get out much. Whenever I got the blues I found familiar comfort in attempts at solitary songwriting and playing the piano. One night, when the girls were with Gerry, I remembered that a neighbor who played guitar just for fun had invited me several times to come up and hang. On impulse, I walked up the street to his house. When I arrived, he and some of his friends were jamming. Knowing I was a musician, he invited me to sit in. At first I was reluctant, but he kept asking me to join them. When finally I did I was surprised at how much I enjoyed playing with other musicians in a casual setting. Usually when I played with other musicians it was in a studio, it was my song, and someone had just said, “Take One. Rolling!”
At first I had trouble keeping up with the spontaneous turns the music took at jam sessions. But then I began to listen to the other musicians’ musical motifs and respond with respectable figures of my own. I found that the key principles were listening, knowing when to step out with confidence, and knowing when to play sparsely. Applying those principles I was able to develop a fair number of licks that I could pull out of my musical kit bag at will. This gave me the security of knowing that even if nothing fresh or inspiring came to mind when I was called to improvise, at least I could play something.
I never aspired to be in the same league as Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, or McCoy Tyner. I couldn’t imagine any great jazz pianists or other extraordinary players such as Miles Davis or John Coltrane ever having to resort to lick number 27. Few things were as exciting to me as hearing musicians of that caliber create spontaneous magic on instruments they knew inside and out. The fact that I was doing a rudimentary version of what they did gave me great pleasure.
Marijuana was present at these jams. Many players believed that pot would enhance the flow of spontaneous magic through their creative channels. Listeners thought it would help them get more deeeeeeeply into the muuuuuusiiiiiiic. Marijuana may have helped both players and listeners focus more deeply on one part of the magic, but that was to the detriment of being able to appreciate the whole. If you’ve ever listened to music on pot—not that I ever have—you probably remember how hung up you got in the bass line, or the guitar solo, or the lyric the lead singer repeated over… and over… and over….
You’ve probably guessed by now that I inhaled during some of these jams, but I soon realized that the marijuana only made me think I was playing better. The fastest way to come to that realization is to listen to a recording made when you were jamming high. In the cold light of morning you hear yourself on tape playing the same mediocre riff again and again. I remember thinking, Wow. This is sooooo cool! But it wasn’t cool at all. And besides, I didn’t really like smoking pot. I had smoked more of it than I had wanted to when I lived on the East Coast.
The ready availability of pot and other mind-expanding substances and their use by so many of my friends and neighbors was as prevalent in Laurel Canyon as the bougainvillea, century plants, and steep winding roads. It would not be easy to maintain a healthy lifestyle. However, three things made me resolve to do that: Louise, Sherry, and my fervent desire to provide a stable home environment for them. The problem was, I wasn’t sure how to define “stable.”
When members of my parents’ generation used the word “freedom,” they had in mind the founding fathers, the flag, and representative democracy. When the following generation (mine) used the word “freedom,” they meant the freedom to cast off the social values imposed upon them by their parents, and the freedom to live by their own rules, which in 1968 meant no rules. For many residents of Laurel Canyon, freedom meant the freedom to conform to the social expectations set by their neighbors, who in most cases had no expectations beyond their neighbors’ willingness to smoke dope with them.
Along with newfound freedoms came newfound confusion. With no rules, no boundaries, and no blueprint, as a twenty-six-year-old divorcée and mother at a time when other women my age had not yet married, I was unsure about virtually everything. The only thing of which I was certain was that I loved Sherry and Louise more than anything in the world. Rather than feeling tied down by motherhood, I treasured having my children—not only because we loved each other so much but because I understood in a way I couldn’t have articulated at the time that their presence kept me grounded in reality. Though Willa Mae was a huge help, ultimately I was responsible for the girls, the house, our dogs, and our overweight cat, whom I probably would have named Puss-in-Boots or something equally obvious. I was glad that Gerry’s scholarly suggestion of Telemachus, after the son of Ulysses and Penelope, had prevailed. The photographer Jim McCrary would make our fat feline famous by including him in a photo that would become the cover of a bestselling album.* Jim’s photo would also immortalize my living room on Wonderland Avenue with its hatch-cover bench and Indian-print curtains. The black Baldwin Acrosonic spinet piano on which so many hit songs had been written was behind Jim and therefore not visible in that photo.
When Toni and I wrote at that piano we hoped to have more of those hits. Sometimes we wrote with that in mind, but often we wrote simply for the joy of writing. At first our songs were recorded only as demos. Then Lou Adler recorded “Lady of the Lake” with Peggy Lipton, and Strawberry Alarm Clock released “Lady of the Lake” and “Blues for a Young Girl Gone” on their album The World in a Sea Shell. The Carpenters’ performance of “It’s Going to Take Some Time” was Toni’s and my first joint appearance at the top of the charts. Later, “Where You Lead” and “It’s Too Late” would find a home on the album with the corpulent kitty on the cover.
In the year 2000 Amy Sherman Palladino had the idea of using “Where You Lead” as the theme song for Gilmore Girls, a TV show she had created about a young mother and the teenage daughter to whom she had given birth out of wedlock when she was sixteen. The women walk a blurry but entertaining line between being mother and daughter and each other’s best friend. Before the movement known as “women’s lib” had blossomed in the early seventies, Toni’s original lyric had taken a “stand by your man” approach. By the time that song was released on Tapestry in 1971 the lyric was already outdated. When Amy said she wanted “Where You Lead” rewritten as a love song between a mother and daughter, I asked Toni if she would modify the lyric. She rose to the occasion with a version we retitled “Where You Lead I Will Follow.” My by then adult daughter Louise joined me in singing the music that opened each episode of Gilmore Girls. This unexpected exposure carried Toni’s and my song to a second and third generation. The life of a song continues to amaze me.
When Toni brought her lyrics to me they were either neatly typed on a sheet of white paper or written on lined yellow paper in her distinctive handwriting. Her lyrics were artistic visually as well as lyrically, with the verses and choruses of each song forming a unique shape on the page. As soon as I placed the lyric on the music stand of my piano I let my mind go free, not so much thinking as absorbing the meter and content. This process often brought a melody to mind even before I was conscious that one was being suggested. Sometimes I worked on the tune without Toni there, and then she’d come by the next day to help polish what I had written. Other times I wrote the music with Toni right there to change the lyric if I took the song in an unexpected direction. Though the process was different for each song, it was always fun, and it was always creative.
In 1970 I began to experiment with writing my own lyrics again, with the underlying thought that maybe this time I could work up the courage to play them for someone. It was difficult to shake the memory of earlier times when, during some of the more discouraging periods of my marriage, I had tried to prepare for the possibility of having to earn a living by writing my own lyrics. I had been so intimidated by Gerry’s gift, his intellectual capacity, his skill, and his success that I could never bring myself to show my lyrics to anyone. Often I didn’t even finish them. After having worked with Gerry for so long and knowing the level of excellence of which he was capable, I would stop myself in mid-lyric, thinking, Why bother?
It was Toni’s generous approach to songwriting that first inspired me to think that maybe I could write lyrics on my own. A second wave of inspiration would come in 1970 from someone I had met a few years earlier.