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Pop music has never been an easy profession for women. Recognition and glamour are common enough, but women looking for artistic control and financial leverage are usually thwarted. The Crystals and the Ronettes were high on the pop charts in the early '60s, but Phil Spector, multifaceted rock tycoon, wrote the lyrics, produced the records and pocketed most of the profits. In the '60s the men who sold pop music saw women as petulant screamers (Lesley Gore) or filigreed folkies (Judy Collins). Occasionally, women defied the image makers. Janis Joplin and Grace Slick escaped briefly from San Francisco psychedelia. But separated from their back-up bands, neither prospered for very long. Joplin turned to drugs, and Slick lost her creative flair.
Women had musical ability but seldom on the right instruments; parents liked girls to play the piano, not phallic bass guitars. Rock was blues electrified, rough music from back of the barn. English groups who adopted the sound in the late '60s did little to improve the image with guitar smashing and satanic prancing. When 16-year-old Singer Maria Muldaur proudly brought home her first recording contract, her mother immediately tore it up. Says Maria: "She was afraid it would lead me into white slavery."
The record business is still controlled by men, but companies are giving women lucrative recording contracts with complete artistic control to produce albums with a distinctly feminine flavor. Songwriters like Carole King and Carly Simon deal with sexual fantasies, spiritual restlessness and conflict between home and outside work.
An entire generation of female rock performers has matured over the past two years. Maria Muldaur, 32, performed in several jug bands before splitting from her husband last year to start a separate career. She now swaggers through a repertory of Dixie soul and gospel like a raunchy roadhouse vamp, while her nine-year-old daughter watches from the wings. Bonnie Raitt, 25, a honey brunette equally at ease with Ionesco's plays or Muddy Waters' music, plays tough-mama blues, slapping her guitar strings with an old bottleneck or steel slide to produce a gutsy low-down sound. Isolating herself from rock's opulence, she cultivates the friendship of elderly black bluesmen and devotes a large proportion of her profits to activist politics. She explains, "I deliberately don't spend money on cars or land."
most rock women lead relatively modest lives. Wendy Waldman, 24, who began her career singing Proud Mary in a nude bowling alley, lives in a stone cottage in Los Angeles' rural Topanga Canyon. The songs she writes deal mostly with wandering and the road, probably because her house is so small that there is barely room for her piano, dulcimer and guitar.
The L.A. canyon where Dory Previn lives is somewhat less rustic, but the sexual gambits and Peyton Place plays enacted in the neighborhood serve as a source for lyrics that have won her a strong cult following. The lyrics produced by Minnie Riperton, 26, are a bit less worldly. Her songs about personal motivation, spiced with a soupçon of I'm O.K.-You're O.K. philosophy, are deliciously upbeat. Few miss the message, since several years of operatic vocal training have given her a five-octave range.