Theresa K. (Tesstarosa) -
Helpful Score: 4
I read this book for one of my book clubs. I was actually looking forward to reading this book as I thought it would be very interesting to learn about three women pioneers in the music industry: Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon. But I often found myself struggling to get through it many times. The author is challenged with tracking friends of the three women whose name change throughout the story as they marry and divorce which could cause some confusion. But there were only two or three women that I recall that being the case and none of them had the same first name.
The bigger challenge, for me, was the focus the author put on all the people around them especially focusing on who worked with them in the studio. To someone who is an insider in the music industry or who has a strong historical background in the 60s and 70s music production those details are probably very impressive. To me, the average schmoe, it looked like an attempt to drop names but Im not all that impressed because I dont know who these people are.
The three womens stories are very interesting and its very interesting how much their lives intertwined with each other.
Carole King was born to a middle-class working family and grew up in a family that strongly encouraged her musical talents. She married and had children while she was young. She didnt start out as a singer and had no desire to sing. She was a song writer foremost in her mind when she got her first break in the industry. She wrote many hits for early R&B artists while living in New York by the time she was 21. Eventually she divorced her husband and moved to California where she continued writing and eventually started her own singing career. She did some work with James Taylor.
Joni Mitchell was born in Saskatchewan Canada to a middle class family. She grew up in a family where the women focused on raising their families. As a teen-ager, she was considered a very talented artist and poet and did work as a model. At college, she studied art and writing and performed music to share her poetry and make some money. In her early 20s, she became pregnant and eventually gave her daughter up for adoption. This was a big secret that she carried with her until it was made public by a British tabloid. As to how this was a big secret is hard to understand, since every man she dated after that was told about the daughter given up for adoption. I felt Joni took the most control of her career writing and producing most of her albums. At one point, she was dating James Taylor. At least until he met Carly Simon.
Carly Simon is the daughter of publisher giant Richard Simon of Simon and Schuster. She grew up in wealth and privilege and in her sisters shadows. She wasnt the one that anyone thought would become famous. She worked as a secretary and other clerical type jobs and did some writing. She wrote a successful commercial jingle and eventually got into writing and recording her own music. She spent a great deal of her life seeking psychological help for her feelings of abandonment as a child (her parents marriage was not a hpappy one and had affairs) and she had to overcome extreme stage fright. Eventually she met James Taylor he was still dating Joni Mitchell when the two of them started a relationship. After a while, they married and had two children. Throughout their marriage, James was addicted to heroine and it was a strong factor in the break-up of their marriage.
Overall, its not a bad book, but I think it could have left out about 1/3 of the information and still told the story effectively.
The bigger challenge, for me, was the focus the author put on all the people around them especially focusing on who worked with them in the studio. To someone who is an insider in the music industry or who has a strong historical background in the 60s and 70s music production those details are probably very impressive. To me, the average schmoe, it looked like an attempt to drop names but Im not all that impressed because I dont know who these people are.
The three womens stories are very interesting and its very interesting how much their lives intertwined with each other.
Carole King was born to a middle-class working family and grew up in a family that strongly encouraged her musical talents. She married and had children while she was young. She didnt start out as a singer and had no desire to sing. She was a song writer foremost in her mind when she got her first break in the industry. She wrote many hits for early R&B artists while living in New York by the time she was 21. Eventually she divorced her husband and moved to California where she continued writing and eventually started her own singing career. She did some work with James Taylor.
Joni Mitchell was born in Saskatchewan Canada to a middle class family. She grew up in a family where the women focused on raising their families. As a teen-ager, she was considered a very talented artist and poet and did work as a model. At college, she studied art and writing and performed music to share her poetry and make some money. In her early 20s, she became pregnant and eventually gave her daughter up for adoption. This was a big secret that she carried with her until it was made public by a British tabloid. As to how this was a big secret is hard to understand, since every man she dated after that was told about the daughter given up for adoption. I felt Joni took the most control of her career writing and producing most of her albums. At one point, she was dating James Taylor. At least until he met Carly Simon.
Carly Simon is the daughter of publisher giant Richard Simon of Simon and Schuster. She grew up in wealth and privilege and in her sisters shadows. She wasnt the one that anyone thought would become famous. She worked as a secretary and other clerical type jobs and did some writing. She wrote a successful commercial jingle and eventually got into writing and recording her own music. She spent a great deal of her life seeking psychological help for her feelings of abandonment as a child (her parents marriage was not a hpappy one and had affairs) and she had to overcome extreme stage fright. Eventually she met James Taylor he was still dating Joni Mitchell when the two of them started a relationship. After a while, they married and had two children. Throughout their marriage, James was addicted to heroine and it was a strong factor in the break-up of their marriage.
Overall, its not a bad book, but I think it could have left out about 1/3 of the information and still told the story effectively.
ANNA S. (SanJoseCa) reviewed Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon--And the Journey of a Generation on + 328 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 2
This book is written in a juicy gossipy form about their boyfiriends, husbands, break-ups and breakdowns, (more information than I needed to know!)and about the Los Angeles music scene in the 70's. I especially enjoyed reading about the stories behind the songs. It is a fun and informative read about 3 of my favorite female singers who represent the music of my generation.
Deborah E. reviewed Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon--And the Journey of a Generation on + 12 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 1
A true and realistic 'journey' as one follows three major singers through the phenomenal 60's. An excellent read for one with enough experience to understand the behaviors and challenges facing these talented women!
Lynda C. (Readnmachine) reviewed Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon--And the Journey of a Generation on + 1498 more book reviews
'Girls Like Us' is a monumental undertaking that ultimately collapses under its own weight. Author Sheila Weller's attempt to write three simultaneous biographies of young female singer-songwriters whose works upset the male-dominated apple cart of pop music is an ambitious look at too many topics, with too many characters, and not enough editorial oversight.
Weller has chosen as her subjects three significant female voices that emerged from the saccharine pop music scene of the late 1950s, tapping the deep roots of American folk music and thriving in the upturned soil of second-wave feminism. Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon were all babies of the early mid-1940s, all children of the Gray Flannel 50s, and all began to find their own voices and their own identities in the turbulent 60s. Each came into her own via a different path â King married early and cranked out pop hits from the time she herself was still a teen; Mitchell fled the stultifying life of Canadian small towns and poured out a series of autobiographical lyrics that eventually caught the current of the times; Simon grew up in a moneyed family whose social set included the Manhattan literati. All ultimately wound up creating music that served as a soundtrack to the lives of millions of Baby Boomers struggling through the Vietnam War era in a world that was profoundly different than that of their parents.
There are enough significant commonalities in the career paths of these women and in the struggles they faced to make a certain sense of attempting this tripartite biography, and enough differences to make it necessary to follow each one as a separate, intertwining path.
And that's where the trouble starts. Weller wants to use a microscope on her subjects instead of a wide-angle lens. Her prose is breezy and gossipy, often degenerating into little more than a who's who list of the 60s and 70s music scene from Greenwich Village to the Haight-Ashbury and Laurel Canyon, with few stops in between. She can't resist dropping every name on the list, often piling them into a single paragraph or sentence like toppings on a pizza. Here's a brief example, a partial sentence from a paragraph describing the attendees at a glossy Greenwich Village party, including: ââ¦Jerry Schatzberg's rapier-cheekboned hipster actress girlfriend, in months to be shot-out-of-a-cannon famous in 'Bonnie and Clyde': Faye Dunaway." Neither Schatzberg nor Dunaway have anything to do with the careers of the main characters, nor do they ever make another appearance in the book. The full sentence is just a 101-word conglomerate cramming in 30 unnecessary adjectives and eight semi-recognizable names, apparently to prove how in-the-know and hip the writer is. After a few hundred pages of this breathless, over-adjectivized prose, often recounting little more of substance than who was sleeping with whom, the whole thing becomes overwhelming.
There's definitely a story line in here, but it's buried so deeply under the trivial that it asks the reader to do the excavation job that should have fallen to the author. Like virtually every young woman coming of age at the time, King, Mitchell, and Simon were all asked to re-evaluate the traditional male-female roles they had grown up with. As artists, they had to fight battles for self-determination in an industry that was utterly controlled and directed by men. Mitchell was savvy enough and determined enough to retain all the rights to her own work, from the very beginning â an unheard-of demand from a wispy little girl singer from the Canadian sticks that no one had ever heard of. All three had relationships destroyed when the men they had chosen to love were unable to cope with being the lesser-known, lesser-successful half of the partnership. Each of the three women enthusiastically embraced the sexual freedom rising from a combination of factors â the empowering message of feminism, the introduction of the birth control pill, and the rising social acceptance of non-marital relationships. Their combined list of lovers could sustain a book all its own, and there are enough names that would appear on all three lists as to make diagrams and timelines helpful, if not downright necessary.
Weller also chooses to follow her subjects into the 21st century, where all struggle to cope with changing musical tastes, the fallout from failed relationships, and the inevitable reality of physical aging. It's a sad and largely depressing end to the book, which was published in 2008.
At its best, 'Girls Like Us' will send Baby Boomer readers digging through their music collections to revisit old favorites. At its worst, it will simply bore them. And that is something its subjects, for all their professional ups and downs, never did.
Weller has chosen as her subjects three significant female voices that emerged from the saccharine pop music scene of the late 1950s, tapping the deep roots of American folk music and thriving in the upturned soil of second-wave feminism. Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon were all babies of the early mid-1940s, all children of the Gray Flannel 50s, and all began to find their own voices and their own identities in the turbulent 60s. Each came into her own via a different path â King married early and cranked out pop hits from the time she herself was still a teen; Mitchell fled the stultifying life of Canadian small towns and poured out a series of autobiographical lyrics that eventually caught the current of the times; Simon grew up in a moneyed family whose social set included the Manhattan literati. All ultimately wound up creating music that served as a soundtrack to the lives of millions of Baby Boomers struggling through the Vietnam War era in a world that was profoundly different than that of their parents.
There are enough significant commonalities in the career paths of these women and in the struggles they faced to make a certain sense of attempting this tripartite biography, and enough differences to make it necessary to follow each one as a separate, intertwining path.
And that's where the trouble starts. Weller wants to use a microscope on her subjects instead of a wide-angle lens. Her prose is breezy and gossipy, often degenerating into little more than a who's who list of the 60s and 70s music scene from Greenwich Village to the Haight-Ashbury and Laurel Canyon, with few stops in between. She can't resist dropping every name on the list, often piling them into a single paragraph or sentence like toppings on a pizza. Here's a brief example, a partial sentence from a paragraph describing the attendees at a glossy Greenwich Village party, including: ââ¦Jerry Schatzberg's rapier-cheekboned hipster actress girlfriend, in months to be shot-out-of-a-cannon famous in 'Bonnie and Clyde': Faye Dunaway." Neither Schatzberg nor Dunaway have anything to do with the careers of the main characters, nor do they ever make another appearance in the book. The full sentence is just a 101-word conglomerate cramming in 30 unnecessary adjectives and eight semi-recognizable names, apparently to prove how in-the-know and hip the writer is. After a few hundred pages of this breathless, over-adjectivized prose, often recounting little more of substance than who was sleeping with whom, the whole thing becomes overwhelming.
There's definitely a story line in here, but it's buried so deeply under the trivial that it asks the reader to do the excavation job that should have fallen to the author. Like virtually every young woman coming of age at the time, King, Mitchell, and Simon were all asked to re-evaluate the traditional male-female roles they had grown up with. As artists, they had to fight battles for self-determination in an industry that was utterly controlled and directed by men. Mitchell was savvy enough and determined enough to retain all the rights to her own work, from the very beginning â an unheard-of demand from a wispy little girl singer from the Canadian sticks that no one had ever heard of. All three had relationships destroyed when the men they had chosen to love were unable to cope with being the lesser-known, lesser-successful half of the partnership. Each of the three women enthusiastically embraced the sexual freedom rising from a combination of factors â the empowering message of feminism, the introduction of the birth control pill, and the rising social acceptance of non-marital relationships. Their combined list of lovers could sustain a book all its own, and there are enough names that would appear on all three lists as to make diagrams and timelines helpful, if not downright necessary.
Weller also chooses to follow her subjects into the 21st century, where all struggle to cope with changing musical tastes, the fallout from failed relationships, and the inevitable reality of physical aging. It's a sad and largely depressing end to the book, which was published in 2008.
At its best, 'Girls Like Us' will send Baby Boomer readers digging through their music collections to revisit old favorites. At its worst, it will simply bore them. And that is something its subjects, for all their professional ups and downs, never did.
Beth G. reviewed Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon--And the Journey of a Generation on + 72 more book reviews
I was a bit disappointed in this book. There was too much overlapping of events and people. I think I would have preferred to read 3 separate biographies.
Margaret M. (margaretlee) -
I'm halfway through this book and really enjoying it. I bought it primarily for the chapters about Joni Mitchell since I already know a great deal about Carole King and am not that interested in Carly Simon. Lots of great stories and history on all three women.
My only complaint is the way the book is organized, alternating chapters between them. Somewhat distracting.
My only complaint is the way the book is organized, alternating chapters between them. Somewhat distracting.
