The Romanesque, stone building still looms over Ferry Street near Detroit's Cultural Center, its zaftig curves and carved friezes a reminder of a long-ago age when wealthy Detroiters chose to live in luxury urban apartments.

This atmospheric pile is the Verona apartments, the "tenement castle" that Joni Mitchell sang of in "I Had a King." Here she lived in a five-room, fifth-floor apartment in 1965-67 with her first husband, the folksinger Chuck Mitchell.

Joni Anderson from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, met Chuck Mitchell from Rochester, Mich., in 1965 at a Toronto folk club, the Penny Farthing. A romance sparked and they married in 1965 on the front lawn of his parents' house just off Tienken Road in Rochester.

That Chuck brought her to the U.S. (he "carried me off to his country for marriage too soon," she sang) was vital because it gave Joni a green card and the launching pad to settle in California and forge her career as one of the defining voices of the West Coast folk-rock scene of the '70s.

A new book by journalist Sheila Weller, "Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon -- and the Journey of a Generation" (Atria Books, $27.95), weaves Joni's story in alternating chapters with that of the two other singers.

"I thought the way to tell the story of a generation was through these women," Weller says. "Music was everything then, there was no competition between music and any other medium. I thought about their songs, and also their lives -- I think many of us did. It was like, 'Oh boy, Joni really had a relationship with James

Taylor!' Young girls were really envious of her."

Crammed in between all the detail about their clothing, hairstyles and boyfriends, Weller makes some serious points. Her most potent one is that, unlike many of rock's male auteurs, the three women actually lived what they wrote about.

While the well-fed, middle-class Bob Dylan holed up in the New York Public Library reading old Civil War newspapers for inspiration, Joni Anderson was penniless and pregnant, living in a dismal flat in Toronto and occasionally playing a club date. A neighbor in her Toronto building, worried about her skimpy diet of pizza and cigarettes, made the isolated pregnant girl accept a bag of apples "for the baby."

After she moved west from her native New York, Carole King married several rugged (to the point of criminal) Westerners, lived in a remote cabin and canned food for the winter, compared to, as Weller writes, "the Hollywood Hills-dwelling Eagles' photo shoots amid parched coyote skulls."

"Girls Like Us" painstakingly documents the Byzantine twists and turns of each woman's romantic life (and the link to all three is the shaggy '60s heartthrob James Taylor, who got around). It brings to mind the pull-out charts once published by Rolling Stone mapping out the convoluted love connections between musicians, Joni's being particularly complicated.

Several recent books and movies have romanticized Joni's "Ladies of the Canyon" period, but Weller's book shows how the two years she spent living, performing and writing songs in a musically vibrant, mid-'60s Detroit helped shape her in the years of fame ahead.

Haunted by 'Little Green'

One issue that haunted Joni in her years in Detroit was what to do about the baby girl she gave birth to in 1965 in Toronto. She'd become pregnant by an artist boyfriend who then took off, leaving her alone in a one-room Toronto flat. Joni didn't tell her parents about it for years, but her song "Little Green" on the 1971 album "Blue" was an ode to that lost child, who was taken into foster care and then, given up by the singer for adoption.

(Mitchell's daughter Kilauren Gibb found her several years ago, and mother and daughter have forged a somewhat fraught relationship.)

During the early part of her marriage to Chuck, he says she was "maundering" back and forth about whether to claim her baby from foster care or give her up for adoption. But on the surface the couple -- Chuck handsome and clean-cut, Joni willowy and long-haired -- were celebrated by the local press as a happy, artsy couple around town.

The Detroit News profiled the two in 1966, running photographs of the duo in their "tenement castle," decorated with Indian-print curtains and ethnic cushions from Hudson's, a "green-hued fantasyland" straight out of J.R.R. Tolkien.

As Chuck and Joni Mitchell they played often at the Chess Mate folk club on Livernois Avenue at McNichols Road, although Chuck also played solo at the Alcove in Detroit, and Joni had her own solo gigs in distant cities, preshadowing their eventual split.

Traveling musicians, including Gordon Lightfoot, Jesse Colin Young, Tom Rush, Ramblin' Jack Elliot and Buffy Sainte-Marie, were among those who used the Mitchells' spacious Detroit apartment as their local crash pad.

Chuck remembers hiring two Motown sidemen to come write lead sheets (with the song's chords, symbols and lyrics mapped out) for some of Joni's songs, although he doesn't recall their names.

"They clambered up the five flights of stairs, and I remember them sitting in the kitchen with Joni going over her songs," Chuck says. "She'd play a chord in one of her (unusual) open guitar tunings, and they'd say, 'What's that again?' "

But after the men watched her hands on the guitar and understood what she was doing musically, according to her ex-husband, the Motown musicians were impressed, and wrote out big, bulky lead sheets for her. Some of Joni's most iconic songs were composed during her time in Detroit, including "The Circle Game" and "Both Sides, Now."

Ironically, Joni has been known for years as ferociously independent, but was described by The Detroit News reporter in 1966 as a "dutiful wife" to her more famous husband. She described how she got into music in Saskatchewan: "I got interested in a ukulele, and from there I turned to the guitar and folk singing. Thirty-six hours after I met Chuck, he asked me to marry him. But we waited two months."

Bohemians on Ferry Street

For her book, Weller tracked down Chuck Mitchell. He's now living in Keokuk, Iowa, and restores historic houses along the Mississippi while offering his music for sale online (mitchell song.com). After years of hearing Joni sing of their time together, and describing him in interviews as the possessive, angry husband who didn't want to raise another man's child, Chuck gets to air his side in Weller's book -- or to an inquiring journalist. In conversation the former Detroiter is alternately amused, irreverent (referring humorously to his ex-wife as Queen Joan), and wistful, but hardly bitter.

"The two of us are in possession of narratives that cross radically in those early years," Chuck said, speaking by phone earlier this week. "The big issue for her seems to be controlling her narrative, which she does extremely adeptly. The issue that seems to keep coming up, is, who is actually to blame for putting the child up for adoption. That was pretty much a fait accompliby the time I arrived. When she would ask me what she should do, I said very calculatedly that it was her choice."

That way, he figured, he couldn't be blamed.

The Mitchells lived a somewhat bohemian life in their hippie-luxe Ferry Street pad, although it seems innocent enough in retrospect.

"We were heavy smokers," Chuck says. "We would smoke and play poker all night, then we'd wake up at noon. We lived that life. Neither one of us was ever seriously into drugs, though. I remember getting stoned and trying to write songs and my God, what garbage poured out. (Good songwriting) comes by working hard, you get connected with something larger than yourself. That happened to me with the song 'Dreams and Stories.' If there ever was a song that expressed how I felt then and still feel, that's it. I have no idea where that song came from."

Author Weller traveled to Iowa to talk to Chuck and listen to his reel-to-reel tapes documenting his club appearances with Joni, complete with her nervous between-songs patter.

"His attitude is a little sarcastic as you can see in the book," Weller says. Chuck describes his relationship with his wife as fun, with a constant flow of banter.

"He would jokingly compare Joni's looks (without makeup) to a rhesus monkey," Weller says with a laugh. "He's jaunty and charming, a great guy. He talks about her being a girl from Canada, not very sophisticated, when he met her. He's more of a tell-it-like-it-is person than someone who had this enormous reverence for her."

Weller had the sense that Joni's story of the surrender of her baby, told repeatedly, wasn't the whole story. So whose account of the situation did Weller believe, Joni's or Chuck's?

"I kind of straddled it," Weller says. "You can't fault someone who says 'I did a very clever thing, I told her it was her choice.' Of course, women reading that will say, 'Damn him, my boyfriend did the same thing to me.' But if you look back, her parents' sense of propriety, how utterly shocked they would be if she'd had a baby out of wedlock, having to tell their neighbors. That was probably the bottom line, it just wasn't the time for her to have a baby."

Still: "She probably didn't forgive Chuck for saying, 'It's your choice,' instead of, 'I think you'd feel better if you went back and got the baby,' " Weller adds.

Interestingly, the singer's ambivalence about a woman's role in the home played out in her later relationships with men. She felt that Graham Nash (of Crosby, Stills & Nash) would have preferred a more domestic, wifely partner, although a baffled Nash tells Weller, "There was no way I was going to ask Joni Mitchell to stop writing and just be a wife!"

A 'classic Irish marriage'

As for her first marriage, with songs like "The Circle Game" and "Urge for Going" increasing in popularity with other singers, Joni was primed for flight. Her solo gigs at clubs like the Second Fret in Philadelphia were going so well that she resolved to no longer be the deferential half of Chuck and Joni Mitchell anymore.

There was an affair, documented in her song "Michael from Mountains," which prompted one last fight with Chuck, of which he says: "She brained me with a candlestick." After an abrupt departure from Chuck and the marriage, Joni returned to Detroit while he was out of town and had a male friend help her move half of their antiques down the five flights of stairs from the apartment and into a van.

Interestingly, one enduring legacy of his time on Ferry Street -- Chuck lived there from 1962-68 -- and their loving restoration of the 1890s apartment, including a painstaking stripping and staining of the wood paneling, Chuck found himself on the path to his current vocation of saving vintage houses.

He'd like to perform more often, when he's able to buy a fuel-efficient vehicle large enough to haul his musical equipment. As a "Detroit boy raised with Walter Reuther" he sighs over what he sees as Detroit's delay in producing such a vehicle.

As for Joni, Chuck hasn't seen his ex-wife in 30 years, although he's occasionally put a feeler out and says he would "dearly love" to have a reunion with her.

He worries that with her heavy smoking, time might be running out.

"She's going to be checking out," he says, with a sigh. "It would be fun to have a rapprochement. She was always good for a laugh. It was the classic Irish marriage, although neither of us was Irish -- we yelled and screamed and shouted, then we made jokes and we were in stitches. If we ever got back together and sang 'The Circle Game' together, it'd be kind of nice."