Joy of Cooking - Biography
By Paul Andersen
Funky, soulful, unique and unpredictable – these are just a few of the myriad words one can use to describe the music created by the Berkeley, California-based band Joy of Cooking. From their 1967 Summer of Love beginnings to their break-up in 1973, the quintet – Toni Brown, keyboards and vocals; Terry Garthwaite, guitar and vocals; Ron Wilson, percussion; Fritz Kasten, drums; David Garthwaite (Terry’s brother, later replaced by Jeff Neighbor), bass –laced together elements of folk, blues, gospel, country, jazz and Latin percussion into a delicious aural stew that still sounds fresh today.
Yet Joy of Cooking is often remembered more for their gender makeup, as they were one of the first female-led rock bands to be signed by a major label (Fanny, an all-female quartet, scored their contract a few months prior, but Joy was the first female/male collective to make chart noise). Up to this time, the rare women in rock and roll were almost always cast out front as the vocalist. But though it is true that Joy of Cooking broke ground for the highway over which groups such as Heart, Hole and latter-day Fleetwood Mac would travel, ultimately their legacy is defined by the music they left behind.
As members of the local Berkeley music scene, Toni Brown and Terry Garthwaite had been aware of one another for awhile before a mutual friend brought them together to swap songs. Though their styles and backgrounds were totally different, the pair immediately found common ground in their music and in their words; without necessarily being overtly feminist, their songs, which gave a woman’s viewpoint of a world dominated by men, still proved liberating nonetheless. What could have been easily turned into a novelty factor succeeded simply by being human.
Brown, a New England native, traveled West to Berkeley in the early ‘60s after getting her degree in literature from Vermont’s Bennington College (she had written a book of poetry for her thesis). Wanting to immerse herself in the world of the North Beach Beat writers, she found instead a burgeoning music community. Having had a childhood full of piano lessons as well as picking up guitar and ukulele along the way, Brown, blessed with a naturally classic folk-style voice, quickly adapted her poetry into songs, and was soon playing in local clubs, both as a solo artist and as a member of the Crabgrassers, which played old time ethnic folk music.
Meanwhile, Garthwaite was already a regular on the local folk circuit. Having grown up in the Bay area, she, like so many others who came of age at that time, had been transformed by The Beatles when they first appeared on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show.’ The guitar was her instrument, and her dream was to eventually plug in and be in a band, which had been reinforced by a year spent in England. Blessed with a voice somewhat similar in timbre to that of Janis Joplin, she also had a blues side to her, as she had been listening to artists like Muddy Waters and Blind Willie Johnson (Pop Staples was an early influence on her guitar playing) most of her life. And, like Brown, Garthwaite also had a day job at UC Berkeley, where she had graduated with a degree in sociology in 1965.
The gestation of Joy of Cooking began quickly after Brown and Garthwaite formally merged their paths together. Garthwaite brought her younger brother David in to play bass, while Brown tapped Wilson, a classically-trained pianist turned computer programmer, to play congas. The last piece of the puzzle came together with the addition of drummer Kasten, who had previously played with jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi. Taking their name from the popular cookbook – not only did it help identify the group’s female slant, it also described in basic terms what their music was about – Joy of Cooking fashioned an organic group sound that was different from anything else on the scene at the time.
On the surface, the fact that Joy of Cooking featured two women handling the lead instruments, the lead vocals and the songwriting duties was what first got the group noticed, but what completed the package was the jazzed-up Latin percussion of the driving rhythm section. With literate lyrics, intertwined and perfectly matched harmonies and a propulsive backbeat, Joy of Cooking produced music that was both food for the mind and fodder for the feet (Berkeley also happened to be a town where music fans took their dancing seriously). This was not teen music, but rather an adult take on rock – after all, the members were in their late 20s and early 30s, so it was only natural that their music had a bit more maturity to it.
The group soon became a favorite on the Bay Area music circuit, but it would take nearly four years before they finally entered a recording studio. A steady Wednesday night gig at Mandrake’s, a Berkeley rock club, served as their base, drawing an ever-widening crowd that eventually got noticed by the record companies, and the band ended up signing with Capitol Records. Finally, after years of honing their sound in small clubs around Northern California, the band was more than ready to document their music on acetate.
Released in January 1971, Joy of Cooking immediately garnered enthusiastic praise from the rock press, and while much attention was given over to the obvious gender issues raised by the band – after all, the women’s movement was just starting to take off – the music contained in those grooves also received enthusiastic raves. Recorded in San Francisco by producer John Palladino, the album featured the group in a live studio setting with minimal overdubbing, which is probably the reason it captured the essence of the band so well. “Brownsville,” a classic blues tune by Furry Lewis that the two women had heard on a Folkways recording which they spun together with some original lyrics to make a chug-along locomotive of a song, was their first (and only) hit single, reaching number 66 on the Billboard Pop Chart. (On the album, it was paired as a medley with the traditional “Mockingbird,” but Capitol felt that at nearly six minutes it was too long for radio, so they simply cut it in half.) The album itself cracked the Billboard Top 100 (naturally, at number 100), and the subsequent tour found them well received in college towns and urban centers across the country. Things looked promising for the band, especially when Time magazine chose to profile them a few months after the record came out.
By the time Joy of Cooking returned to the studio to begin work on their second album in June of 1971, Jeff Neighbor had replaced David Garthwaite on bass. With John Palladino once again handling the production chores, this time out the band temporarily relocated to Southern California, recording at the Capitol Studios in Hollywood. Rather than simply recording live, they spent more time on tightening the arrangements and overdubbing extra layers.
The result was Closer to the Ground. Released in August 1971, it was bracketed by a pair of propulsive jams, leading off with the title cut and ending with “Laugh, Don’t Laugh,” a crowd-pleasing favorite of their live sets which featured Ron Wilson to great effect. In between, with tinges of folk, country and jazz bubbling to the surface, the album featured another great set of Brown and Garthwaite originals. Though the reviews were just as ecstatic as they were the first time out, Closer to the Ground, without a charting single, only reached 136 on the Billboard Top 200, and the sales dropped to half of what their debut sold.
Castles followed in May 1972, and though it featured some of their best work yet – Joy of Cooking had become an amazingly cohesive unit by this time, and the writing was only getting better – sales sagged even further, peaking at number 174. Facing yet another long tour, Brown decided to exit the band. Garthwaite and the guys replaced her with a keyboardist and a pair of back-up singers, with whom they went into the studio to record Same Old Song and Dance in early 1973. It would turn out to be the band’s swan song, and was released only in Canada, partially to fulfill their contract; the scant airplay it received was on airline radio, and the group finally called it quits, though over the years they reunited for special occasions.
Around the time of the sessions for Castles, Capitol offered Brown and Garthwaite the chance to cut a record, minus the band, in Nashville; since Brown had a passel of songs that would be perfectly framed in a country setting, they jumped at the chance. Produced by Wayne Moss, and featuring a veritable who’s who of Nashville session players, the aptly named Cross Country, credited simply to Toni and Terry, was another gem that gave Capitol one last chance to capitalize on the pair’s talents. Released after Castles, it is a much sought-after vinyl collectors item, not yet reissued on CD.
After that, Brown and Garthwaite parted ways, with each pursuing solo careers. Brown recorded Good for You Too (1974 MCA) and Angel of Love (1980 Fantasy), before leaving the music industry (she would go back to college to earn a master’s degree in clinical psychology, and she also produces digital fine art photography). Garthwaite recorded Terry (1975 Arista), Hand In Glove (1979 Fantasy) and Moving Day (1984 Catero) before venturing off into spiritual new-age music, song circles and music as therapy. In 1977, the pair reunited briefly to record the jazz-hued Joy (credited simply to The Joy). In 1992, Capitol finally released an anthology of the group in their short-lived American Originals series, which quickly fell out of print. It is the only collection to include a few tracks from the unreleased Same Old Song and Dance. It would mark the only appearance of music by Joy of Cooking on CD format until 2003, when Evangeline Records, a British reissue label, began releasing the group’s three Capitol albums on compact disc.
In 2007, Joy of Cooking returned nearly 40 years later with a new set of recordings that Garthwaite and Brown culled from demos, band staples that were part of their live set but never made it to their records, and a live concert from 1972. Released on the pair’s own Njoy imprint, the double CD set makes a fitting epilog to one the best bands you may never have heard of. Long live the Joy!
