B005S8O7YE EBOK (36 page)

“I love doing all those things,” I said. “They make so much more sense than driving up and down the Canyon to bring one kid to this friend’s house and another kid to that after-school activity, or shopping for clothes and furniture, or for that matter buying overpriced groceries wrapped in plastic.”

“I just don’t get it. You could be dining at the finest restaurants, drinking champagne, eating caviar, taking limos, and going to movie premieres. Instead you’re performing tasks that any woman in her right mind who could afford it would be asking her ‘people’ to do. Why would you want to give that up?”

I’d heard variations on that question from other friends and read similar questions in letters from fans who missed seeing me on tour. The way most of them put it was, “Why have you dropped out?” I might have answered, “I thought I dropped in,” but that wasn’t the answer they were looking for.

Why had I “dropped out”?

Because when I said I wanted to get back to the land, I meant it. Notwithstanding a local saying that there were only two seasons in Idaho—winter and the Fourth of July—there were in fact
four seasons, each of which brought me great pleasure. I loved living within earshot of a creek in a forest with a view of mountains and meadows. And I was grateful to wake up every morning hundreds of miles away from the fast lane.

Obviously, it was easier for me economically than for many natives of my adopted state. I had a dependable source of income, and though I had chosen to be where I was, I could leave at any time. Indeed, I did leave frequently for work and to spend time with my Goffin daughters. And though I was perfectly comfortable living without electricity and other modern paraphernalia, I was glad to have the occasional use of telephones, tape recorders, electricity, penicillin, and modern medical and industrial conveniences that had been unavailable before the twentieth century. But Burgdorf was affording my children and me a rare opportunity to live as close as we could get in modern times to a basic, down-to-earth way of life.

I wanted to say all that and more, but it was getting really cold in the phone booth.

Instead I said, “I’m okay. Really, I am.”

Just then I heard my neighbor approaching on his snow machine. He was hauling a cargo sled with our groceries and other items under a tarp.

“That’s my ride. I have to go.”

“Okay,” she said. “I just want to say two more things: I love you, and I can’t believe you’re not writing songs or playing music at all.”

Tears came to my eyes as we said goodbye. I hung up the phone, stepped out of the booth, put on my helmet, and climbed onto the back of my neighbor’s snow machine. Then, with a cloud of smoke and the distinctive sound of an accelerating two-stroke engine, we were off.

I
t wasn’t as if I’d made a conscious decision at Burgdorf not to write songs or play music. It just seemed to work out that way. Knowing that there wouldn’t be room in our cabin for a piano, I’d brought a guitar, but I hadn’t taken it out of the case since we moved in. I listened mostly to the tapes Rick played on our battery-powered cassette player. In a one-room cabin, when one of us listened to music, everyone listened.

Among Rick’s favorites were the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, Patsy Cline, and Waylon Jennings. I not only listened but sang along to
“Fire on the Mountain,”
“Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,”
“Mama Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,”
“Mama Tried,”
“Crazy,”
and
“Put Another Log on the Fire.”
Though I was not unfamiliar with country music, listening to it every day reminded me that the best country songs had a great story, a well-crafted lyric, and a performance that made you laugh, cry, or both.

One night, after hearing Jerry Jeff Walker sing about an Austin bootmaker named Charlie Dunn, Rick said, “You should go to Austin and record an album with Jerry Jeff’s band.”

“Interesting,” I said, and immediately put it out of my mind.

Several nights later we were entertaining a couple of Rick’s friends who had skied in when one of them asked if I’d ever played the piano in Gretchen’s cabin.

I had not.

I knew that Gretchen occupied her cabin rarely in summer and never in winter, but it was her cabin and I respected her privacy. Even if I’d been inclined to check out her piano, which I did know about, the cabin was unheated, which wasn’t conducive to keeping a piano in tune. But I was intrigued enough to ask the skier to call Gretchen when he got to McCall and see if she’d give me permission to enter her cabin and play her piano. Two days later word came in with another skier that Gretchen had said yes.

The following morning I hiked up the steep hill to Gretchen’s cabin in knee-deep snow. Idahoans call it “post-holing,” because each step leaves a hole deep enough to support a fencepost. I had no objective beyond seeing just how badly out of tune the piano was, or if it was even playable.

How badly out of tune was it? The piano was playable; it just wasn’t listenable. But in this situation my lack of perfect pitch was a blessing. Removing my gloves, I sat on the bench and played a chord. Ouch! It was way out of tune. But I heard it in my mind as it was supposed to sound. I played another chord, and then another. I stopped counting after the fourth chord. I just kept playing while my brain, in neural self-defense, replaced the out-of-tune notes with the correct ones. But then I encountered another obstacle. The outside temperature in the sun was –5°F. Gretchen’s cabin was in the shade and therefore at least ten degrees colder. After a while my fingers became too frozen to continue playing, and I went back home to warm up. As soon as I could feel my fingers again I resolved to learn how to play and write music on guitar.

The linear layout of chords on a piano was second nature to
me. In contrast, the square configuration of chords on frets was as foreign to me as the Cyrillic alphabet. At first I found it difficult to adapt, but the thought of putting on layers of clothing, post-holing up to Gretchen’s cabin, and playing an out-of-tune piano until my fingers froze motivated me to persevere. That February I wrote most of the songs for my next album on guitar. I also turned thirty-seven.

When Rick again suggested that I record with Jerry Jeff’s band, the next time I went to McCall I reached out to some of the players. In March 1979, I left Molly and Levi in Rick’s care, flew to Austin, and recorded
Touch the Sky
. The Austin cats not only added a country music sensibility to every song but were even more talented than Rick had predicted they’d be. To this day I’m convinced that keyboard player Reese Wynans had fourteen fingers, but I couldn’t prove it because the extra four automatically retracted when anyone was looking.

I spent the rest of 1979 alternately living at Burgdorf and visiting my Goffin daughters. While I was there I collaborated with other songwriters, including Gerry. In January 1980, I returned to Austin to record a fourth album for Capitol. This time Rick and the children came with me. Sherry flew down from L.A. and took the cover photo for
Pearls: Songs of Goffin and King
. That album comprised new versions, with me singing, of nine vintage hits that Gerry and I had written in the sixties and a more recent composition by the two of us called “Dancin’ with Tears in My Eyes.”
Pearls
brought together a mélange of the men in my life that included my current boyfriend and two ex-husbands. I had written the new song with Gerry, who wasn’t in Austin, but Charlie was there to play bass on the entire album. In addition to his being an outstanding bass player, a friend, and a cooperative coparent, I knew Levi and Molly would enjoy having both parents with them in
the same city. The situation was fraught with potential for disharmony, but Rick seemed to take it in stride.

I didn’t think about it at the time, but it’s possible that I was attempting to answer the questions that John Lennon had answered for me in “Imagine.” A similar question would become a permanent part of twentieth-century American pop culture a decade later when Rodney King, stammering with emotion, would ask, “Can we… can we all get along? Can we… can we get along?” In the twenty-first century Mr. King’s plaintive appeal would probably have been Auto-Tuned, set to a beat, uploaded, and viewed as entertainment by millions within an hour of the initial news coverage.

For so many years, I, too, had wondered why people couldn’t get along. In 1980, while I was recording
Pearls
, it almost seemed as if we could.

T
he morning of December 9, 1980, as usual, I was the first one up. The fire in the heat stove had died down to embers. I had gone from being cozy in flannel sheets to shivering in a frosty cabin where my every exhalation was visible. I opened the damper and the draft, fed the stove, and turned our battery-powered radio on at a barely audible level. In preparation for walking up to the outhouse, I put on my robe, hat, boots, and my right glove. As I was pulling on my left glove, I thought I heard the announcer say something about Lenin. I thought, Why is he talking about a deceased Bolshevik leader? I turned the radio up slightly and realized that the newscaster wasn’t talking about Vladimir Lenin. He was talking about John Lennon, and I thought I had just heard him say Lennon was… dead??

Horrified, I woke Rick up and we listened to the report together. I thought back to the evening I had spent with John and Yoko and how sad it was that Sean would grow up without a father. I thought about how unfair it was that just when John was hitting his stride as a happy, healthy man living with his family in productivity and peace, his life had been cut short by an appalling act of violence. I
thought about the psycho who had singled John out for whatever reason and taken him away before his time.

For my generation, the murder of John Lennon was more than the loss of an icon. It was a loss of hope. We who had lived through the previous three decades had been catapulted into the eighties, which seemed a lot like the fifties except without the innocence. Politically, the rise of conservatism was a déjà vu some people didn’t want to see again. Musically, things were pretty cool. Rockabilly was back in style, and the girl groups of the fifties inspired the more independent women who came to prominence later in the eighties. The Bangles, the Go-Gos, the Wilson sisters (collectively known as Heart), and the Motels’ Martha Davis not only wrote their own songs and played their own instruments but in some cases also produced their own albums.

In the eighties we had Live Aid, Farm Aid, Band Aid, and “We Are the World.” A list of Quincy Jones’s accomplishments would have to include his shepherding all the “We Are the World” stars into one room and getting them to perform as an ensemble at full diva power while behaving reasonably well to one another. I would have wanted so much to be at that session, but I was too out of touch to hear about it until after the fact. I participated in more events later in the eighties, but most of my experience of the first couple of years of the decade was filtered through my self-imposed isolation in the backcountry. We did listen to the news enough that I was aware of people whose names became so ingrained in twentieth-century cultural history that the name alone evokes the memory of that person’s story. To wit: Tawana Brawley; Mikhail Gorbachev; Bernhard Goetz, known as the Subway Vigilante; Ferdinand Marcos, the corrupt president of the Philippines, and his wife, Imelda, whose name would become a metaphor for a woman who owns too many pairs of shoes. I heard pronouncements from James Watt, President Reagan’s secretary of the interior, who set
out so blatantly to reverse all efforts to preserve the environment that conservationists didn’t think there could ever be a worse secretary of the interior. And reading about Ayatollah Khomeini and Lech Walesa in newspapers brought in via ski-mail made me thankful that I had the radio as an alternate news source or I would never have known how to pronounce their names.

In 1982 Jane Fonda’s Workout brought fitness into the lives of women across America who wanted to look and feel more healthy. Aerobics classes and athletic clubs sprang up like daisies in a field. Women who had never stretched a leg wore dancewear to the grocery store and tried to look as if they had been practicing ballet for several hours when they suddenly remembered they needed a head of lettuce.

As women tried to break through the glass ceiling, massive shoulder pads came back in style along with rolled-up sleeves and oversized suit jackets. Perhaps we thought we might have more credibility if we were built like football players.

In the spring of 1981, my wardrobe consisted mostly of T-shirts, flannel, and denim flecked with hay.

O
ne of Burgdorf’s main drawbacks was that the owners could ask us to leave at any time. Another was the public road over which (depending on the season) cars, campers, snowmobiles, or commercial logging trucks roared past our cabin and the pool. During the winter of 1980–81, we let it be known through our ski-mail system that we were interested in purchasing a place in the backcountry with more privacy. Though not necessary, a natural hot spring on the property would be desirable.

In the spring of 1981 we heard about a ranch for sale in central Idaho. First we arranged for someone to stay with the children; then, with the direct route still closed, we drove the long way round. Turning off the paved highway, we went down a hill, crossed the river on an old-fashioned steel bridge, and continued along the dirt road to the west gate of the property. Above the open gate we saw a sign on a wooden crossbeam with the name of the ranch and smaller posted signs saying “Private Property” and “No Trespassing.”

Good, I thought.

We pulled up to the main building. One of the owners came out
to show us around. A visitor from the city might have described the buildings as old and run-down, the kind that realtors euphemistically call “fixer-uppers.” I saw them as rustic and historic.