Let's hear it for the 'Girls'

Has any pop song evoked a generation's romantic self-infatuation more hauntingly than Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock"?

Sheila Weller, in her book "Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon -- and the Journey of a Generation" (Atria Books), which weaves the biographies of these singer/songwriters into a post-feminist history, writes: "It was the first line of the chorus -- 'We are stardust, we are golden' " -- that "conveyed the impression of hundreds of thousands of people speaking as one."

Stardust-sprinkled, golden children determined to save the world was one way of describing the youth culture's heady self-image. The generational axiom that all you need is love persisted into the 1970s, when soft-rock singer/songwriters such as Mitchell, King and Simon personalized the communal conversation.

As Weller astutely emphasizes, the three singers in her biography belonged to the first generation of women to come of age with the pill. The belief in love as the answer coincided with the women's liberation movement. An unvoiced question suggested by the book that has persisted through these women's lives and their music is whether romantic love and promiscuity are compatible.

As fiercely as the rock counterculture rejected its parents' tastes in music, all three women are revealed here as heavily indebted to traditional pop and its quasi-religious faith in romantic love. For Mitchell, an early epiphany was the swooningly beautiful 18th variation from Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, which she discovered in the movie "The Story of Three Loves" and visited a record store to play repeatedly. Another early idol was Edith Piaf, the French voice of female suffering and resilience. The song choices and lush arrangements on some of Mitchell's later records pay homage to her favorite Billie Holiday torch songs.

Simon grew up in a privileged household listening to classical music and to Richard Rodgers and the Gershwins. Her career-making hit, "That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be," is an art song with a semiclassical melody in the style of Gabriel Fauré.

King, who idolized Rodgers and Hammerstein, translated their aesthetic into a less flowery, Brill Building style of soul-flavored teenage pop with optimistic messages in the cheerleading spirit of Hammerstein. What is "You've Got a Friend" but a plainer, demystified echo of "You'll Never Walk Alone"?

But if medical science allowed them to be sexual pioneers, they were still gripped by fairy-tale mythology. In the early years of the sexual revolution, there was widespread belief that romantic sex was the most important thing in life, the key to happiness and a pathway to world peace. The dictum "Make love, not war" was taken seriously. Drugs fortified the mystique.

A gossipmonger's feast

"Girls Like Us" chronicles the singer/songwriters' lives from birth in the early and mid-1940s (born before 1946, they are technically not baby boomers) to the present. The book names many of the lovers and husbands referred to in the women's lyrics. Of the three, only Simon talked to Weller. Information about Mitchell's and King's personal lives was compiled from extensive interviews with former husbands, close friends and relatives.

The one man common to all three was James Taylor, a prince with a heroin habit (since kicked); he was King's sometime musical partner (but not her lover), Mitchell's lover and later Simon's husband in a turbulent marriage that ended in divorce.

Simon's notorious hit, "You're So Vain," Weller reports, reflected her "belle of the ball year and a half," during which she "had belt-notched" Cat Stevens, Kris Kristofferson, Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty and Mick Jagger. Along with Taylor, they are the most famous names in a life of ceaseless erotic adventure pursued by a self-described romantic.