The Way I've Always Heard it Should Be

More from Girls Like Us:

In 1973, shortly after their wedding (the first between two rock stars), James Taylor and Carly Simon gave an interview to to Rolling Stone, in which James said of Carly that "[she's] a piece of ass . . . if she looks at another man, I'll kill her," and Carly said that she was "addicted to James."

In 1972, after waiting in vain one night for her current lover, Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell attempted suicide by taking pills, "[cutting] herself up," and throwing herself against a wall. She then repaired to a residential treatment institution (she would write the nervous "Car on a Hill" about the night she waited for Browne, and the sedated-sounding "Trouble Child" about her psychiatric treatment, both of which appeared on her great 1973 album Court and Spark).

Carole King's 1972 album, Rhymes & Reasons, includes a song,"Feeling Sad Tonight," that sums up the post-1960s emotional landscape that her generation of women -- and all subsequent ones, I would add -- have had to face: the experience of "always feeling half right and half safe." (Carole, the mother of four children from her first two marriages, would soon find herself married to an abusive, drug-addicted ex-con, who on more than one occasion "took his fist to his wife's mouth").