Hippies vs. Punks: Joy of Cooking's Closer To The Ground (1971)

Last weekend I spent a refreshing afternoon reading Paul Krassner's Patty Hearst & The Twinkie Murders: A Tale of Two Trials. It is a real treat. The section of the slim paperback devoted to the Patty Hearst trial mentions a mock interview with Patty that Krassner published in the April 1975 issue of Crawdaddy:

Q. What about music? What have you been listening to?

A. Well, we only have a radio here. At a previous safe-house there was a stereo, but we didn’t have a variety of records. Joy of Cooking, we played them a lot. Pink Floyd, too. And there’s a group called The Last Poets, and there’s one cut on their album where they give their interpretation of all the symbolism on a dollar bill, and we just sat around, wiped out on some really excellent grass, looking at a dollar bill while they were reciting that. It’s very powerful. I remember how I used to think, when I was a little girl, that real money was just official play money.

First mentioned? Joy of Cooking, the female-led Berkeley quintet, labeled previously on this page a "fern bar boogie band." It got me thinking, Why would Krassner imagine that the Symbionese Liberation Army listened to Joy of Cooking?

It sent me back to the band's recordings, specifically the second album, Closer To The Ground, which was released by Capitol Records in 1971, the same year as Joy's eponymous debut.

A couple years back I immersed myself in the first album as part of an effort to explore the bands that performed at the Aquarian Family Festival, a multi-day free festival of rock 'n' roll on the campus of San Jose State in May 1969.

I had heard about Joy of Cooking but never sat down and consciously listened to their music. To me the band evoked a distant past, a time, as Robert Christgau mentioned in one of his rock reviews, that represented a massification of bohemia in the United States.

The story of Joy of Cooking is ably set forth in an article by Tony Sclafani, "Joy of Cooking's innovative recipe." The band's two principals, keyboardist/vocalist Toni Brown and vocalist/guitarist Terry Garthwaite, meet in Berkeley and form a band in 1967. Both were folk/country-folk performers who worked at the university. Brown was a literature major from Bennington College who traveled to the West Coast because of her love of the Beats. Garthwaite was a Bay Area native.

Robert Christgau describes the band in an unusually adulatory appraisal from April 1971 "Joy":

Joy of Cooking is Berkeley-based and has gigged around Northern California--most often at a little club called Mandrake--for the better part of three years. It is led by Toni Brown and Terry Garthwaite, women in their thirties who are veterans of the Bay-area folk scene. Toni does most of the composing, plays keyboards, and sings harmony, counterpoint, and some lead. Terry is the lead singer and plays guitar. The other band members are men. Conga drummer Ron Wilson studied classical piano for twelve years and somehow ended up working with computers, a life he gave up at age thirty-five to join the group. Bassist Jeff Neighbor, who also plays violin and numerous other instruments, replaced Terry's younger brother David shortly after the first album, Joy of Cooking, was released. Neighbor teaches music in the Berkely elementary schools. Drummer Fritz Kasten has also played piano and alto sax. He has worked with Vince Guaraldi and with the San Francisco State Symphony Band. At twenty-six, he is the youngest member of the group.

Joy of Cooking was a house band at Mandrake's, a roots music club on University Avenue near San Pablo. There is a good description of Joy's attractiveness from the Sclafani piece:

Joy of Cooking became the "house band" at the Berkeley club Mandrake's, performing Wednesday evenings. It was there they acquired a rabid local following and attracted the attention of record company executives. Rock critic Ed Ward recalls the scene. 

Ed Ward: When I went to see them, people got up and danced. That may not seem like such a huge thing, but I was coming off of life around Rolling Stone, where you'd go to the Fillmore and people would sit on the floor in comatose lumps, smoking dope and looking at a band. The musicians could have been on television, almost, for all the interaction there was. And then I discovered that there was a club scene in Berkeley, that a lot of the music there was funkier, and that people got up and shook their butts. The Joy was the band that got people up the most. Plus, the audience was different: Fillmore audiences tended to be guys, with the girls dragged along as an afterthought. The Joy attracted a more varied crowd, maybe a tad bit older, who seemed a bit smarter.

(If you ever want a get a taste of what Ward is talking about in terms of the Fillmore scene, watch Last Days of the Fillmore (1972). Shot in early summer of 1971, the Hippies have doom written all over them.)

This week I've immersed myself in Joy's second record, Closer To The Ground. And I've got to say it keeps getting stronger with each listen. Though it is Christgau's lowest rated of any of the band's albums at B+, I like it better than the first. Toni Brown's piano and organ are always pushed up to the top of the mix, which is the way I like it. Her skipping keyboards on "Humpty Dumpty" propel the tune. It is a great song.

What is distinctive about Joy as a band is its combination of keyboards, congas, harmonizing vocals, understated guitar playing -- all smartly arranged.

I appreciate Toni Brown's take on masculinity -- an empty, devouring infantile narcissism -- in "The War You Left."

As well as her deconstruction of the one-night stand, "First Time, Last Time" -- a manifesto of liberation.

Christgau thought that Joy of Cooking was going to be the next big thing. I don't think I've ever read such a positive Christgau review. I laughed out loud:

Terry's unique power as a performer came clear to me the third time I saw the group perform, between a terrible macho-rock band called Robert Savage and sexpot Linda Ronstadt in the enormous Long Beach Municipal Arena. My previous experiences had been at the Mandrake, in Berkeley, and at the Troubadour, in Los Angeles, where the intimate circumstances favored the group's quiet style. At Long Beach, especially in the wake of all that amplification, they seemed likely to disappear. Response was lukewarm to "Hush," which had enjoyed some local AM air-play, and the next song was no better. Then the band went into an adapted folk medley of "Brownsville" and "Mockingbird." To my astonishment, the intro elicited some spontaneous clap-time from the audience. Toward the end of "Mockingbird" Terry took the mike off its stand and began her scatting counterpoint with Toni. Then Terry began to scat alone. She has been described as a laid-back Janis. Her voice has that gritty quality, but she never screams, and what she abjures in power she makes up in subtlety. There is no better improvisatory singer in rock, but she gives the sense that it hasn't been easy. Terry is a beautiful woman whose initial impact is mostly toughness; both her frizzed-out hair and something embattled in her face obscure its delicate bone structure until you get to know her. The sexuality she projected as she bobbed about the stage in Long Beach showed a similar reserve. It was self-contained, true to its own rhythms; it was sexual, not sexy, completely unlike the gyrations expected of chick singers who are getting it on. Yet the audience began to clap again, and the turned-on greaser next to me, who had been demanding an encore from Robert Savage half an hour before, turned and commented: "They've really got it together." Could any band of women ask for a more miraculous compliment? Not yet. 

Edgily, Toni and Terry insist that Joy of Cooking is not a band of women, and it isn't. It's an integral unit. But it's led by women, and it seems to speak for them. Not long ago, Joy of Cooking preceded Barry Melton, the former Fish, at a small Bay-area concert. Melton is a good guy in his way, but he is a classic example of the white singer who tries to camouflage his racial confusion with a mask of phony black misogyny, and when he started to sing about gittin him four or five wimmin, he was booed to a halt. Such incidents have been rare, but they're bound to increase. Whenever hard-core rock fans talk about their subculture, they forget how many brothers and sisters are left out of the consensus. Many vaguely feminist women have no special connection to rock not out of ideology but simply because it has never really spoken to them. Joy of Cooking can end that. Not that Toni's lyrics are any more political, in the narrow sense of that term, than her stage demeanor. She is simply a literate female who has not been a girl for quite a while and who writes from the experience of trying to be her own person. Allow me to quote a long stanza as a kind of finale: "I used to think a woman was just made to love a man,/ That a man was someone for a woman to hold to while she can./ And then one day my man walked out on me. Well, you know I got the blues./ I'd been living off him for so long I had nothing of my own to lose./ And now I'm gonna move,/ Stretch out and find my wings and who I am/ And if I ever pass this way again I'll be ready for a good man." 

If the women's movement has taught us anything, it is that such realizations are political if anything is. It's enough to make you believe in art. You, and maybe the greaser next to you, too.

Which is probably why Krassner imagined Joy in heavy rotation on the SLA turntable. The message is simple. It is a radical leveling. Women can lead and men can follow. Women can be strong and sexual and creative and so can men, but men can also be weak and needy and selfish. The frozen traditional division of the sexes is upturned in favor of a more equal, productive collaboration.

That was the talk that Joy of Cooking walked. It took a much more egalitarian society than we have today to produce the massification of bohemia of the late 1960s/early 1970s. Joy never achieved super-stardom. Toni Brown left the band in 1972. Women have made important strides in the 40-plus years since. But in many ways it is still man's world, more so today than back then.