Girls Like Us the Music - a musical audio tour through the pages of Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and the Journey of a Generation by Sheila Weller.
In the spring of 1956, Carole King's parents had recently divorced - a virtual first in the neighborhood. Carole alone would change her name (from Klein to King), just as Carole alone was allowed to attend those magical Alan Freed shows (Camille's parents disapproved of "that jungle music"), often making the pilgrimage to the Paramount both weekend nights to soak up the plaintive doo-wop of The Platters, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, The Cleftones and Jerry Lee Lewis.
Page 6 - Female singers' influences in 1956
This was 1956. Mr. and Mrs. Ricky Ricardo had separate beds on I Love Lucy. Dissemination of information about birth control to married women was a crime in some states. Every word of Seventeen magazine was vetted by a pastor. In garment factories, union inspectors checked skirt lengths before job lots were shipped to department stores. Elvis may have been singing, Jack Kerouac writing, and James Dean's movies still being shown even after his fatal car accident, but there were few female analogues. Doris Day pluckily kept wolves at bay; the Chordettes crooned like estrogened Perry Comos.
The song clip of Doris Day's - Que Sera Sera which went to # 2 on the Billboard charts in 1956 ( The song was introduced in Alfred Hitchcock's film The Man Who Knew Too Much. Doris Day and James Stewart starred in the movie).
The song clip of the Chordettes Born To Be With You went to # 5 on the Billboard charts in 1956.
Page 10 - Joni Mitchell's favorite song in high school
Joni had loved pop music before it had gotten so bubblegum. One of her favorite songs from high school - indeed, for decades to come, (she would call it her favorite song of all time) was the Shirelles hit of four years before, Will You Love Me Tomorrow. It was written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin, a married couple who were among a group of barely-out-of-their-teens New York songwriters who mixed a deep infatuation with Negro church music and R&B with a Broadway songwriting style, and turned the results into Top 40 radio.
Will You Love Me Tomorrowhad been the first pop song to address the risks of sex in a woman's life - which was now, as she stood in the wings of the Half Beat, precisely Joni Anderson's dilemma. She was dealing with her pregnancy in a brand-new way: unmarried and alone.
According to the Shirelle's Wikipedia site - they were the first American girl group to have a number # 1 single on the Billboard Hot 100 - the year was 1961.
Page 12 - Joni Anderson performs at the Half Beat in 1964
"The first song I'd like to do is a song about when a man becomes so involved in almighty liquour that he begins to think of it as a woman," she said, with a smile in her voice. "And he calls his bottle "Nancy Whiskey." Her real name was Roberta Joan Anderson, and her family hailed most recently from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. She had come to Toronto several months earlier, taking the train across the prairie with her art school boyfriend. Then he'd split, leaving her a painting of a moon as a goodbye-and-sorry-I-got-you-pregnant gift.
"In 1961 a man named Ewan MacColl wrote a song and entered it into a contest in England. It wasn't much of a surprise to anybody when it won." What's significant is that she would choose - of all songs, this violent faux-Child Ballad about the anticipation, birth, and loss of a baby. "It has very, very dramatic lyrics," she warned as she began singing the song.
Note: I couldn't find any recordings of Joni singing these songs on later albums, but found some other artists from that period in time.
Page 17 - Carly Simon promotes her first single
April 6, 1971 - When Steve Harris knocked on the door of Carly Simon's room, he wasn't surprised at the fear he saw in her face. Harris, an A&R man at Elektra Records, had spent two months cajoling Carly, an unknown who had extreme stage fright, into consenting to a live concert, so necessary to promote the single, That's The Way I Always Heard Is Should Be, from her debut self-titled album. The record had sold only 2,000 copies, but it had ignited water-cooler talk among the special group of record company secretaries and receptionists that Elektra president Jac Holzman had sent it to: word-of-mouth had started, and Holzman was determined to maximize it.
NOTE: The video below is not from the Troubador, but it's in the same time frame.
Page 20 - Joni sings like a jazz instrument
Carole King and Joni Mitchell were in many ways opposites. Carole was Every-woman; Joni, the Bohemian. Carole's songs celebrated easy-to-grasp feelings in an optimistic spirit by way of clear, infectiously rhythmic expression. Joni's songs described complex needs and emotional states; they did not skirt pessimism; and - like the astonishingly original Laura Nyro, the only other female singer-songwriter Joni respected - she had began to use her voice like a jazz instrument, with abrupt shifts of tempo, octave, mood and volume.
"A mystic once said, 'You have two eyes; one says yes to the world, the other says no. You need to see with both of them.' Carly sees more with the eye that says yes, and that makes her so vulnerable. She belongs in another century, the era of grand feelings and penned love letters. Carly would be perfect in a Tolstoy novel."
Stuck in New York (eight months pregnant) on the night of Carly's Troubadour opening, Ellen mentally replayed a defining moment from their teen years. "Carly's sitting on the school steps with her guitar, playing When I Fall In Love, and she's singing the "....it will be for-ev-er...." with such passion." Neither Carly nor Ellen could know that, through an introduction tonight, the prophecy of that lyric - the inability to stop loving someone even after one can and wants to - would be set in motion in Carly Simon's life.
Everyone thought that Joni and James had split up. But here they were, gliding into the Troubadour together. After the show, James was invited to come up and say hello to Carly. When Steve left the room, Carly was seated on the couch; James, at her feet on the floor with his legs crossed. "They were deep in conversation," Steve recalls. "I could see the intensity between them."
In 1934, Carly's mother Andrea was a switchboard operator at Simon & Schuster. She caught the eye of her boss (Carly's father, Richard Simon) and he said "Hello, little woman." She responded, flirtatiously, "Hello, big man." Carly later wrote an evocative song about her parents' courtship.
Page 84 - Pete Seeger teaches Carly's class
For Carly's first six years, home was two fused apartments comprising the top floor of a gray six-story doorman building at 133 West Eleventh Street. Only twelve families shared it, including Elizabeth Simon Seligmann, her physician husband, Arthur, and their daughters, Mary and Jeanie. The building was a block away from the private school, City & Country, that the Seligmann girls and Simon girls attended. (Pete Seeger guest-taught in Carly Simon's kindergarten class, leading the children in rousing folk songs, that, since he was blacklisted, he could only perform offstage.)
Page 85 - Carly's bedtime music
Someone was always at the living room piano in the Simon house. As a child she would go off to bed singing the love ballads of Richard Rodgers (also a favorite of Carole's) and Arthur Schwartz. Carly would go on to record some of these songs herself. Alone Together, by Arthur is one of her favorites.
Page 88 - Carly Simon vamps it up
Despite Carly's phobias, her deep worry for her father's health, and her sense of being overshadowed by her dazzling sisters - or perhaps in reaction to those things - she seized on and burnished two personal assets. The first one was performing. "Joey and Lucy had nice singing voices, but Carly was amazing: Carly was lit from within - she was a performer from day one," says Jeanie. At the family recitals that Andrea endlessly staged, Carly would often belt out the bouncy Teresa Brewer hit Music, Music, Music and Rosemary Clooney's vampy, suggestive Come on-a My House - singing both songs "with demonic energy", Jeanie recalls, "but like a grown-up, despite the fact that she was missing two teeth."
Page 92 - Down By the River Side
One of Carly Simon's crazy uncles - Uncle Peter (aka Snakehips Dean) would lead everyone in camp songs like Down By The River Side during some of the Simon's musicale nights.
Page 94 - 95 - Carly's first boyfriend soundtrack
It was during the first weeks of her romance with Timmy, that Ellen saw Carly sitting on the school steps, playing and singing When I Fall In Love with such feeling, especially on the "It will be for-ev-er." Ellen realized something that decades of being close to Carly has cemented: she was uncommonly, almost dangerously, romantic.
During her sophomore year, Carly Simon acquired her first real boyfriend, Tim Ratner, and their romance bloomed during her high school's production of Gershwin's Girl Crazy (featuring Embraceable You and I Got Rhythm).
Page 96 - Carly Simon finds her voice in folk music
Visiting Carly often at the Stanford house over the summer of 1959, Tim Ratner saw the complexity of her home life - the "highly matriarchal atmosphere, the strong older sisters, a mother both very organized and also cut off and not available, a father growing progressively less functional." Ronnie's relationship with Andrea was never explicit, "but any observer could tell what it was. There was sadness for Carly. A few years later I'd hear the Beatle's She's Leaving Home and think it captured the sadness I felt in Carly".
Note: The Beatles do not make their songs available for download from their own albums.
Tim went off to Dartmouth in the fall of 1959, Carly began to play the guitar in earnest, finding her voice in the folk music whose popularity had, in a year's time, swept like a brushfire from college to high school. Now the sounds of "John Henry" were more likely to be heard than When I Fall In Love. Carly loved Odetta and wanted to sing like her.
Page 97 - The Simon family scene
Nick Delbanco entered the Simon house and took in the scene: the "stony-faced" infirm Richard Simon, sitting "in an armchair....wearing pajamas and a bathrobe, hands folded in his lap." The evening family recital, around the grand piano, was about to begin. Like other visitors, Nick watched, that night and subsequent nights, the performing Simon girls (Joey, Lucy, Carly) offering show tunes, operetta, opera, folksongs, torch songs, the blue. The three girls took turns singing in duets and trios. Then a guest would play Chopin or Lizst and Carly would return to to my side." eliciting praise. "She was perfect, better than ever, the best. Play 'John Henry' again, I would ask her, or Danny Boy." She obliged, in her "deep, strong, throaty voice" with "erotic abandon."
Carly unfurled her ample insecurities at Nick - "She had the remnants of a stammer and forthright anxiety," he would later write. "She said that her family left her feeling insecure, unloved, and that her comic antics were a ploy to gain attention....She had clamored for applause...to make her father smile at her." Her father's infirmity felt like a "reproach to her."
On July 30, Richard Simon suffered a fatal heart attack. "I showed up at Carly's father's funeral, and that's the first time she took me seriously," recalls Delbanco. "It was a dark and complicated time for her." Soon enough Carly and Nick were locking themselves into attic rooms in the secret-filled house.
Page 98 - Carly throws herself into folk music
1960 - Fueled by the pain of her father's death and the blush of new romance with an intense young writer (Nick Delbanco), Carly threw herself into folk music - Odetta, Baez, Ian and Sylvia, Cynthia Gooding. She wrote songs, once attaching the Robert Burns poem "Ye Flowery Banks" to the ever-romantic melody of Greensleeves. She loved the 'bonnie, bonnie banks' songs and the 'turtle dove' songs.
"Girls identities were very much about the man you were with," recalls Carly's best friend, Ellen Wise Questel, who went off to Sarah Lawrence , along with Carly. These Riverdale girls were expected to finish college before getting married, and not to have children immediately. However, adds Ellen, "If there was one women's college that got the few women who didnot think in a conventional way - who believed in their own talent and expected to be artists in their own right - it was Sarah Lawrence."
"We were all boy crazy," says Lanny Harrison. "We would go down to parties in New York - parties near Columbia, parties in the Village, wherever we heard there were parties - and dance till we dropped, to Johnny Lee Hooker, to Motown and to bluesy folk artists like Jesse Fuller and Reverend Gary Davis. Then we'd climb over the wall and sneak back, long after curfew."
Page 157 - Carly emulates Judy Henske
Carly was one of two folksingers on campus at Sarah Lawrence. She was also beginning to admire Judy Collins, the former pianist who'd switched from piano to guitar and had just released A Maid of Constant Sorrow in the mold of Joan Baez singing Child Ballads, and especially Judy Henske who'd sung with the Whiskey-Hill Singers and opened for Lenny Bruce before becoming a solo act.
Carly heard in Henske's belting voice a hint of her own potential. "Henske was just kind of solidly earthy - amazing." Carly felt, especially on Wade In The Water. Over the next few years, Carly "emulated" her and "copied her songs," which alternated a folk repertoire with the art songs of Jacques Brel.
Page 159 - The Simon Sisters perform
During the summer of 1962, Lucy Simon proposed to Carly that they embrace the idea Uncle Dutch had originally suggested and form a sister singing duo. Lucy worked up a folklike arrangement for the nursery rhyme Wynken, Blynken and Nod by Eugene Field.
With this and a few other self-written songs under their belts, "we said, 'Let's go to Provincetown!' - with one guitar," recalls Lucy. "We had little matching red dresses and matching red heels. We roomed in a rooming house for $50 a week and went around to various bars, calling ourselves the Simon Sisters.
Page 167 - The Simon Sisters record a 2nd album
Wynken, Blyken and Nod was proving to be a surprise hit - quickly climbing to #76 on the Billboard chart. Lucy had talked Carly into dropping out of Sarah Lawrence before the start of her junior year so the Simon Sisters could gain a following through touring.
Carly spent time in France with her boyfriend Nick Delbanco, and met Dionne Warwick on her flight home. Dionne's Walk On By had just become an enormous hit. Carly approached the singer and gave her a tape of one of the songs she'd just composed. It would be the beginning of many such fruitless solicitations.
Carly and Lucy recorded a second Kapp album, Cuddlebug, that featured a song of Carly's, Pale Horse and Rider, which one reviewer called an "Ian-and-Sylvia-like-up-tempo troubadour gallop", along with folk standards like Motherless Child, Turn, Turn, Turn and a French version (Ecoute dans la Vent) of Dylan's Blowin' in the Wind.
After Willie Donaldson broke up with her, Carly was on her own - not least of all emotionally. Carly moved in with her older sister Joey, paid Joey rent, and obeyed Joey's many exacting rules. For example, she had to stay inside her bedroom with her door closed whenever Joey entertained men in the living room.
"Joey was the royalty and Carly was the court," Ellen says. Leaving college to tour with Lucy, being jealous of Lucy's effect on Willie (and Sean Connery), taking a backseat to imperious Joey: the abiding role of her older siblings in her life - the maypole-twirl of their preening, jostling, scheming, confiding, now-maturing sisterhood - would later lead Carly to write a string of songs ( Older Sister, Boys In The Trees, Two Little Sisters ) exploring the relationship so central to her identity.
Page 252 - Carly and the Deacon
Carly was brought to Albert Grossman's attention (Bob Dylan's manager). He wasn't averse to proffering a version of the casting couch to women singers (at a time when the negative notion of sexual harassment didn't exist). As Carly put it: "Grossman offered me his body in exchange for worldly success. Sadly, his body was not the kind you would easily sell yourself for." Carly declined; Grossman apparently didn't hold the rejection against her.
Grossman wanted to develop Carly as a star. He had the idea of an act called Carly and the Deacon, pairing her with a black male singer. When the desired "deacon", Richie Havens, declined, that idea was dropped, but Grossman still set out to produce an album for Carly.
Page 253 - I'm Not That Hungry
In July 1966 Bob Dylan and Carly Simon met in a cubicle in Grossman's office. There Dylan rewrote, for Carly, some of the words of Eric Von Schmidt's Baby, Let Me Follow You Down, the anthem of the Cambridge folk scene popularized by Dave Van Ronk in the Village coffeehouses.
Carly was struck by how "out of it" Dylan was during the session - he was "very, very wasted." But Carly continued to work daily for weeks on the album - recording the Von Schmidt song and others - with a group of tremendous musical talents just coming into their own: Paul Butterfield and, from the group the Hawks - soon to be renamed The Band - Levon Helm, Rick Danko, and Robbie Robertson.
The tracks of her album had to be mixed, and that was the job of sound engineer Bob Johnston. But Johnston held off - instead, dangling a quid pro quo: sex for sound-mixing. "If you're nice to me, I'll make you a nice record," he told Carly with casual impunity. "It was amazing to actually hear it coming out of somebody's mouth," Carly recalls. "I stood very calm, and said, 'I'm not that hungry.'" Johnston paid her back by refusing to mix the tracks and by bad-mouthing her to Grossman. "Whatever Bob said to Albert, I was shelved," she has said. "This was the end for me for a very long time. I was frozen."
Page 257 - Live From The Bitter End
Carly left her job as a secretary at Newsweek and found a job as a backstage handler-hostess for the talent on a new TV show, Live From The Bitter End. The show was televised from the Bleeker Street rock club that was right next door to the Dugout and the Tin Angel, where Joni would soon be hanging out.
Carly dropped the role of budding songwriter. "I didn't try to sell my songs. I took care of Marvin Gaye and the Staple Singers and Redd Foxx and the Chad Mitchell Trio and Peter, Paul and Mary. I brought them tea and honey and cough drops." One night, when Carly asked Marvin Gaye if he wanted anything to drink, he told her to stick her tongue out. She obeyed and found herself in the midst of a soul kiss. "I couldn't release my tongue for a little while, let's just say that," she's recalled. (Forty years later she'd rate Gaye's Sexual Healing as one of her ten favorite songs.)
Here is Marvin Gaye singing on the TV show "Live From The Bitter End"
Page 260 - Long Term Physical Effects
Carly's crowd, like everyone's crowd, was living the stoned life now. "Those were crazy, heady, exciting times - no rules and no consequences," recalls Ellen. Carly was intermittently trying to place her songs as well as looking for jingle-writing gigs. Ellen's brother came up with a chicken nuggets idea, a precursor to the McDonald's gold mine, which he wanted to market to dope smokers; Carly wrote a jingle with the hook "Long-term physical effects are not yet known," implying that the nuggets were psychedelic. Neither nuggets nor jingle got off the ground until Milos Forman cast Carly in his movie Taking Off, where she sings a portion of the song.
Page 261 - Carly Simon joins Elephant's Memory
At some point in 1968, Carly contributed a song she had written, based on a Brahms melody, to a project sponsored by the New York Symphony Association, through which rock groups would collaborate on classical music. A pop-rock group called Elephant's Memory was chosen to play her song at Carnegie Hall. The band needed a female singer; Carly was signed without even an audition. It was a match not made in heaven.
The jazz-flavored group, which consisted of what Carly has recalled as "very New York street-smart jazz hip people" took an instant dislike to Carly. Though they liked her singing and her animated stage presence fine, and they approved of the songs she'd written enough to continue to play them (Summer Is A Wishing Well, in particular) they were not going to give the "uptown girl" a break. They pretty much said, "Get off your fat ass and help us carry our speakers."
Note: After Carly left the group they were forced to rewrite the lyrics she'd written to 'Summer..." so that they could use the tune on their debut album. The song was retitled Crossroads of the Stepping Stones. There are no recordings of Carly singing with band.
Page 262 - Dan Armstrong Guitars
Among the clubs Elephant's Memory played was the Scene, with a house band led by a longish-light-brown-haired, mustachioed young guitarist named Danny Armstrong. Danny thought Carly was "a good singer, very musical, and she had all kinds of sex appeal."
Electric guitars were Danny's life. The previous year he had opened Dan Armstrong Guitars, on West Forty-eighth Street, and his timing had been dead-on - he captured an exploding market. As he immodestly put it, "I was the first and [ at the time ] only electric guitar specialist in the world, and I knew every big-time guitar player in the world - I just plain owned New York at the time." When Cream came to town to play concerts featuring their haunting underground hit White Room, Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce would sit with Danny in the back of the store, the three playing riffs - and, according to Armstrong, "Clapton only knew one way of playing blues riffs and I knew twenty."
Page 264 - I'm All It Takes To Make You Happy
One day in 1968 Danny looked up from his desk "and in she strolls, a nice-looking lady in an orange, pink and yellow dress. Certainly vivacious. Lots of charm. Big smile. Carrying a guitar that needed work." He recognized her as the Elephant's Memory singer.
"To her, and to me, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, and Odetta, were the only singers that counted. She said she wished that she could sing like that, but she knew she never could." Still, he noticed, as Nick had: "Carly always wanted to be a celebrity."
"We definitely fell in love," Danny said, and Carly agrees: "I really loved him." One day when they were driving, Danny turned to Carly and said, "You're all I need to make me happy." She picked up her guitar and started to turn it into a song.
Page 268 - Carly Simon shifts focus
In early 1969, the focus shifted, from Carly and Danny to Carly and Jake Brackman - from Carly the available girlfriend to Carly the songwriter and potential performer.
"During this period "Jake and I became inseparable," Carly has said. Carly had had years of talking to therapists about her childhood. Now she shared the stories with Jake, and to his fresh ear the "rich girl's problems" that had been deemed meritless by the reverse-snobbish times achieved a universal poignance. An image stayed with Jake: Richard Simon, in failing health, silent in the dark; Carly yearning for his attention.
One day Carly handed Jake a notated melody she had written months earlier but for which she couldn't come up with lyrics. Thinking of what Carly had told him about her father, Jake wrote: "My father sits at night with no lights on / His cigarette glows in the dark."
Page 270 - My Luv Is Like A Red, Red Rose
Danny could tell their romance was "thinning out," but the man who thought himself a more accomplished electric guitarist than Eric Clapton couldn't quite accept that he might not be the one to end it.
Still, one day, at a recording session with Carly, he couldn't escape the conclusion that his sexy rich dilettante lover had a striking talent. For an album that Lucy and Carly were making, TheSimon Sisters Sing The Lobster Quadrille and Other Songs for Children, Lucy had set classic poems - by Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson, and others - to music, among which was Robert Burns's My Luv Is Like A Red, Red Rose. When Carly took the microphone in the studio and sang, "My love is like red, red rose that's newly sprung in June....," Danny thought, "She sounds like an angel." (So moved was he by what critics have called her "low, earthy, and subtle" voice on that song that for decades he "heard" her singing it).
This much-sought-after set of songs by The Simon Sisters has just recently been released on CD. Previously released on LP under the titles The Simon Sisters Sing The Lobster Quadrille And Other Songs For Children in 1969 and The Simon Sisters Sing Songs For Children in 1973.
In the spring of 1970, Carly's friend Jake Brackman had an idea: he would find Carly a manager. He introduced her to Jerry Brandt who said "I'd love to manage you and I'd love to put up money for you to do a demo," Carly accepted on the spot. She recorded Please Take Me Home (to bed) With You (never released), and Brandt took it to Jac Holzman, founder and president of Elektra Records. The tart strains of Carly's demo made him sit up straight. He thought: She's wonderful. Her voice had a "a toughness and sinewyness." Holzman wanted Carly to record the songs of Tim Buckley, Tim Hardin and Donovan. He didn't see her as a writer.
Carly set out to prove Holzman wrong. "I wanted to be a writer more than anything else." By now she was "already in love with James Taylor from a distance - that whole sound," she's said. James's drummer on Sweet Baby James, Russ Kunkel, was "a kind of demigod to me," and "in my mind I fashioned myself like a Carole King. So I just went about my business, writing my own songs," ultimately convincing Holzman that they were worth recording.
Page 344 - Carly Simon becomes a singer-songwriter
The songs she was writing reflected her playfulness, vulnerability, and romanticism. In Alone- she's reassuring a love, "It's not to leave you that I'm goin'"; rather, she wants to revel in the "ache" of solitude and memory, an odd need that her sensual voice makes believable, with asymmetrical phrasing and unexpected harmony.
Reunions, with its stately Broadway-revue-like melody, is one of the most undiluted of those upper-middle-class slices of life that would become her trademark. Her elegant lyrics about the tension between a group of old friends - "wind blows through thin smiles / Someone made a wrong turn / missed a joke by miles" - redeems if for even the staunchest reverse-snobs. Another wistful art song, The Best Thing, regretfully mulls the loss of a man of a different background: "I was his foreigner and he was mine."
But of those songs Carly brought to Jac, the one he was most riveted by was That's The Way I Always It Should Be, which she'd written with Jake. "Everyone at Elektra argued that is was too complex, blah, blah, blah...'it's' not going to be played on Top 40 radio,' and all that was true at the time," Holzman says. "Still, that didn't mean it couldn't be a first." Jac knew this was the single; it was a signature song: it conveyed who Carly was.
Page 349 - Carly Simon records her 1st album
Holzman decided that Jimi Hendrix's record producer, Eddie Kramer, was the tough producer Carly's tough voice required. "Eddie was skilled at creating a rich, fat sound, each instrument or voice being heard with its proper weight," and that's what he wanted for Carly's debut. The began recording in late fall. Carly and Kramer fought over the arrangements of the album; Holzman stayed away for a while - "Let them duke it out" was his philosophy. He entered the studio only when he had to, to make sure the production was "full and clean; you had to hear all the nuances. With Carly, that was the critical part."
The album added three non-Carly-written songs: Dan, My Fling, a Jake Brackman-Fred Gardner collaboration (based on Gardner's civil rights song, Ruth My Truth), which Carly used as a vessel for her aching regret over breaking up with Danny Armstrong; Mark Klingman's Just A Sinner, which presented Carly at peak belting form; and Buzzy Linhart's The Love's Still Growing, whose plaintive toughness matched her voice.
Holzman had designer Bill Harvey give the album cover "a soft, matte finish, a mark of substance and quality." The photo showed Carly is a tight-bodiced, antique lace dress with lace curtains behind her - her head, to use how own later words, "strategically dipped" on one palm; her legs, as Holzman pointedly put it, "gloriously akimbo". The implication of wide-open thighs under a decorous dress was the first of a sex-teasing leitmotif in every one of Carly's early albums.
Page 351 - Carly Simon opens for Cat Stevens
The single and the album could not languish; both had to be promoted. Jac insisted that Carly commit to a performance engagement. This prospect terrified her. She'd wanted to be a songwriter more than a singer so that wouldn't have to perform. Holzman's A&R man, Steve Harris, took over and booked her for three nights, starting April 6, opening for Cat Stevens at L.A.'s Troubadour.
Cat Stevens had become an adulated star by way of the catchy but patronizing ( a young man is telling his ex-girlfriend to be careful ) Wild World, from his Tea For The Tillerman. He would eventually have a second hit in the exquisite Morning Has Broken.
The single was now at #25. "I was completely flustered", Carly remembers. "It had never occurred to me that the record was going to take off." In a sheepish effort to nix the gig, Carly said she wanted a drummer who sounded "exactly" like Russ Kunkel (she knew he was touring with James Taylor and wouldn't be available). Steve outwitted her. He called Kunkel and booked him on April 6, for $500. After a long pause, Carly whispered, "Now, I guess I have to do it."
Page 353 - Carly Simon shines on stage
The Cat Stevens - Carly Simon shows were sold out; "all of rock aristocracy was coming," Steve Harris learned from Doug Weston. All day, Arlyne Rothberg and Steve Harris were enmeshed in "high drama," Arlyne recalls. Was the stage-terrorized Carly "going to make it" onto the stage? "Steve was calling every few minutes" with updates on how he was staving off her meltdown. Carly trembled and stuttered through the day, but sailed through the performance, and then met James Taylor backstage. But tonight was not yet their time.
The Troubadour shows helped catapult That's The Way I Always Heard It Should Be into the Top 10; it would stay in the Top 40 ten weeks. Carly Simon would end up selling 400,000 copies.
Note: This video is not from the Troubadour, but is from the same time frame.
Page 353 - Carly Simon's late date
When Carly flew back to New York, Cat Stevens did too, and he asked Carly out. On the appointed night, she waited and waited, as she had for Robbie Robertson. Cat, who had recently been involved with actress Patti D'Arbanville, was late. When he finally did arrive, "I was sitting on my bed and really nervous, because we hadn't officially had a date yet. And I picked up my guitar and I tuned the low E string down a whole step to D, and I wrote a song for him, because I was so excited and nervous to see him, and I'd been wasting so much time" on those feelings. Echoing the rhythms of Cat's own songs, she wrote "An-ti-ci-pa-tion / An-ti-ci-pa-tion / is making me late / is keeping me wai-ai-ai-ting." I wrote the whole song in fifteen minutes," she says.
Page 354 - Carly Simon interviews Mick Jagger
Meanwhile, people had been talking about Carly's physical resemblance to Mick Jagger, so she thought it would be fun to interview him. Seymour Peck, the editor of The New York Times's Arts & Leisure section, encouraged the idea.
Carly called Jagger in the south of France, just before his May 12 marriage to his pregnant fiance'e, Nicaraguan beauty, Bianca Perez-Mora Marcias. Carly recalls that she and Mick casually flirted through the interview, each saying they'd "really love to meet" the other. The Stones' Sticky Fingers had just shot to # 1 in Billboard, and here was Mick Jagger, the sexiest rock star in the world, ingratiating himself to her. It was a little heady. "Carly was trying to figure out her place in all this," says Jake Brackman. "Was she in this celebrity world? It wasn't long ago that she was in the Letters department of Newsweek.
Page 355 - Carly Simon opens for Kris Kristofferson
The headiness continued. On May 21st, Carly opened for Kris Kristofferson at New York's Bitter End. "And this was when Kris was the most beautiful man," says Ellen Questel, who was in the audience, "with that curly hair, and wearing that deep-V-necked semi-sheer white Indian shirt." Kristofferson was smitten with Carly when he glimpsed her as they'd both exited their adjacent dressing rooms. "So I went out front to watch her, and I was just knocked out," Kristofferson says. "She was beautiful. She had this off-the-shoulder kind of peasant blouse on, and she was playin' the guitar and singing her heart out. Her songs were great, and she seemed totally confident. She was pretty hard to resist." Jake, who was standing next to Kris at the time, heard him mutter a remark about his lust for Carly "which," Jake says, "is definitely not for publication."
Kristofferson, thirty-five - Rhodes scholar, ex-army pilot - had been hailed by The New York Times as "the hottest thing in Nashville." He had been having, as he puts it, a "roller coaster" of a year. Johnny Cash had a hit with his Sunday Morning Coming Down, Sammy Smith a hit with Help Me Make It Through The Night, and his close friend Janis Joplin a # 1 hit with Me and Bobby McGee, among others.
After Carly's set, Kris brought Carly out to sing duets with him. Everyone in the audience witnessed their chemistry. After they took their bows, they went back to his suite at the Grammercy Park Hotel. He began writing a growling, lusty song for her, I've Got To Have You, and they embarked on what would be a summer-long love affair.
Page 357 - Carly Simon records 2nd album - Anticipation
Throughout the romantic whirlwind, Carly continued to write new songs - not just Anticipation about Cat but Three Days about Kris. The intensity of her feeling for him is reflected in the first lines, "If I have known you only three days, then how will I remember you in ten?" and in the image of two shining stars crisscrossing the heavens on their way to opposite bookings - one to L.A., the other to London.
Carly was now off to London to record her second album, Anticipation. Jac Holzman chose Cat's own producer, Paul Samwell-Smith, to produce it with a "softer but solid" sound. "Carly is one of those artists who incandescence burns brightest with a new producer for each album," Holzman has said. "After they have squeezed the juice out of each other, it's on to the next, rather like a holiday romance, which in some cases I'm sure it was." It was, with Samwell-Smith; he and Carly became lovers.
Along with her songs to Cat and Kris, Carly interpreted Kris's song to her, I've Got To Have You, to end the album. Anticipation was a more confident effort than Carly Simon. In it are the beginnings of what would be trademark Carly touches - her lusty belting on Anticipation (its reviewer-dubbed "dazzling, can't-put-down refrain" has an all-out, drum-heavy rock arrangement, with suspended time between drumbeats that perfectly mirror the suspended time she was singing about); her sarcastic take-down of an arrogant man in Legend In Your Time; her tremulous vulnerability Our First Day Together and the operatic emotion in Share The End.
Anticipation was released in November 1971. The title song remained in the Top 40 three months; the album sold 400,000 copies in the first four months, stayed in Billboard's Hot 100 for thirty-one weeks, eventually selling over a half a million copies.
Page 365 - Carly Simon and James Taylor fall in love
Carly Simon was flying high after the success of Anticipation and romantically too. On November 9, 1971 she'd attended James Taylor's concert at Carnegie Hall. Joni and James were no longer a couple, and James's lawyer, Nat Weiss, offered to take Carly backstage to say hello to James. Carly offered, "If you ever want a home-cooked meal..." and James replied, "Tonight." "From that night on, we never spent a night apart from each other," Carly says - at least when they were in the same geographical location, which now was most of the time. "All that" romantic activity of Carly's "kind of stopped on a dime, with James," says Jake Brackman, "with a little bit of overlap." (See book for overlap details that include Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson and more about Carly and James' romance). Carly and James traveled to Martha's Vineyard to be together in the house he was building, where things turned very serious, very quickly between them.
Carly was now writing songs for her third album, No Secrets. The Right Thing To Do, with its fetching melody, is explicity about James. In it, Carly is both the romantic, stubbornly looking past her man's serious drug problem, and the realist, shrewdly assessing her fading value in the sex-and-love marketplace: "And it used to be for a while / That the river flowed right to my door / Making me just a little too free / But now the river doesn't seem to stop here anymore."
Page 366 - Carly Simon writes You're So Vain
Jac Holzman arranged for Carly Simon's third album to be produced by Richard Perry, who had most recently produced Harry Nilsson. Carly came to see Richard at his Laurel Canyon house in May of 1972, bearing a song she had just written, the gentle, somewhat folkie Ballad Of A Vain Man (she'd loved Dylan's Ballad Of A Thin Man).
The song had come together in four separate parts. First, she'd sketched out in her journal the beginning of a song called Bless You, Ben (using the same melody as You're So Vain). Then, on a flight from L.A. to Palm Springs, she'd added another, totally unrelated line to her journal when her seat mate, musician Billy Mernit, looked into the cup on his tray and said, "Doesn't that shape look like clouds in my coffee?" Thirdly, at one point when she was feeling vengeful about the men who'd emotionally laid her low, she'd scribbled another: "you're so vain, I bet you think this song is about you." Finally, everything came together at a party in L.A. A man she knew walked in, with a certain attitude, "and I said to myself, This is exactly the person that you're so vain is about.
The song reflected her belle-of-the-ball year and a half, which had negatively affected her self-esteem more than it seemed on the surface. Carly had belt-notched all those coveted hotties - Cat Stevens, Kris Kristofferson, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Mick Jagger, not to mention the unfamous ones (and her truly loved James Taylor) - and with her "extreme intelligence and worldy wit," Ellen observed, she had enjoyed the party. Yet, Ellen adds, "I don't think she knew how to do it from her heart." Jake agrees, "Those were all wrenching emotional affairs for her." Sexual revolution or not, she'd felt used. "And this thing that Nicholson and Beatty had, where they find a new girl and then they want to share her as a male bonding thing, that passed-on feeling [translated to]: "You gave away the things you loved, and one of them was me..." (See 2010 article by Sheila Weller about the invalid rumor that David Geffen was the subject of You're So Vain).and Carly's direct response denying the Geffen rumor.
As Carly sat down at the piano and started playing Ballad Of A Vain Man, Richard Perry grabbed his bongos and started "banging them up to a thunderous crescendo," he recalls. Sure enough, inside the gentle folk song was a full-blast rocker. "Just listening to this song for the first time, I thought, Oh, my God - what a hit this is! he says.
Page 368 - The making of You're So Vain
Carly Simon flew to London in the middle of the summer to record No Secrets. James Taylor joined her after finishing a round of political fund-raisers with Carole King for George McGovern's presidential bid. Warren Beatty organized the concerts and James's participation came as a favor from Carly to Warren.
Over the course of their week working on the track for You're So Vain, Richard Perry says, "anyone who heard that record would giggle, because you knew it would be a massive hit. Of the several providential touches that made people feel that way, the first was Mick Jagger's walking into the studio one day, at Carly's behest, to sing backup vocals on the chorus. Perry was delighted and stunned. "It was the peak of the Rolling Stones' success and Jagger never did anything like that" - but there he was, adding his unmistakable cracking voice to Carly's sarcastic "Don't you, don't you, don't you?"s.
The next key moment in the making of the record was when bassist Klaus Voormann, warming up his fingers by doing a fast brush of the strings - Perry seized on that ominous-sounding, minor-mode accidental lick and had Voormann repeat it for the song's introduction, over which Carly whispers, "Son of a gun." Finally, when everyone thought they had the track nailed, Perry still felt "it wasn't 100 percent"; so he brought in drummer Jim Gordon at the last minute. Perry knew - "This is the one. This is the record we've been dreaming about."
Page 372 - Carly Simon and James Taylor marry
After recording No Secrets, Carly returned to New York with James. "Mick and I had spent time together" in London, she says (while denying there was an affair between them), "but I really didn't want to be with anybody but James." On November 1, the phone rang in Carly's apartment. It was Bianca Jagger "and she said to James, 'You know my husband and your fiancee' are having an affair',Carly recalls, "and James said, 'That's not true'; he defended my integrity so beautifully," Carly says that she and James had, some days before the phone call, planned to marry quickly, but she also says, "There's nothing that gets men so crazy as other men pursuing their women. Boy, did we decide fast!"
On November 3, 1972, hours before James was to appear at Radio City Music Hall - an extremely minimalist wedding ceremony was held in Carly's apartment. The only guests were Andrea Simon, Trudy Taylor and Jake Brackman, who served as best man to bride and groom.
Later that night, James told his Radio City Music Hall audience that he had just married Carly Simon. Cheers went up. A midnight party followed. Radio deejays announced the marriage - the first between two rock stars - as if it were a union of royalty.
Two months later, Carly and James were the subject of a ten-page Rolling Stone interview, in its January 4, 1973, issue. James Taylor was remarkably open, declaring "Carly and I are in love with each other" and revealed that they'd already named what he called their "hypothetical children" Sarah and Ben. (Admissions like this, by the hard-drugging James was startling. Male rock stars weren't supposed to be romantic and domestic; this was girl stuff). Carly expressed her concerns about gender politics, and expressed anxiety about 'What if she surpassed him?' The much-buzzed-about No Secrets and the meteoric You're So Vain were about to be released. So were James's less promising One Man Dog and it's single Don't Let Me Be Lonely Tonight.
Page 373 - You're So Vain is released
You're So Vain struck like a brick through a window. The star power that early listeners had heard in the song came through to critics and fans alike. Ellen Willis wrote in The New Yorker, that this was "a great rock 'n' roll song." Willis likened the lyrics "inspired sloppiness" to Dylan's, and she loved the "good-natured nastiness" of Carly's delivery. The song's humor made its feminism an easily swallowed pill, but in the long run it was that aspect of the song that would endure: fifteen years later Stephen Holden would credit the "magnificently vulgar pop masterpiece" with "asserting a new balance of power in male-female relationships."
You're So Vain hit # 1 as soon after it's release as a single could. The Right Thing To Do and We Have No Secrets also became hits. The album No Secrets also hit # 1, a rare double jackpot. Carly now had the success that no one would have predicted for her three years earlier. Now, as she neared thirty, it was time to have that little Ben or Sarah.
This was 1956. Mr. and Mrs. Ricky Ricardo had separate beds on I Love Lucy. Dissemination of information about birth control to married women was a crime in some states. Every word of Seventeen magazine was vetted by a pastor. In garment factories, union inspectors checked skirt lengths before job lots were shipped to department stores. Elvis may have been singing, Jack Kerouac writing, and James Dean's movies still being shown even after his fatal car accident, but there were few female analogues. Doris Day pluckily kept wolves at bay; the Chordettes crooned like estrogened Perry Comos. 
"The first song I'd like to do is a song about when a man becomes so involved in almighty liquour that he begins to think of it as a woman," she said, with a smile in her voice. "And he calls his bottle "Nancy Whiskey." Her real name was Roberta Joan Anderson, and her family hailed most recently from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. She had come to Toronto several months earlier, taking the train across the prairie with her art school boyfriend. Then he'd split, leaving her a painting of a moon as a goodbye-and-sorry-I-got-you-pregnant gift.
