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.
The Beatles arrival in the States in February 1964 looks like the match that lit the youth revolution - the moment when popular music shifted from a commercial diversion to a conduit for social change, in one great lovefest punctuated by Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! But those early Beatles were actually somewhat frostily received by young self-defined sophisticates. The peers of Carole, Joni and Carly had already staked out a "higher" musical loyalty - to Dylan and Baez - to Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles.
Page 175 - The Beatles meet their idols: Goffin & King
Carole and Gerry were the objects of the Beatles' fascination. "In England, Goffin and King were huge - they were legends," says Peter Asher. "We were crazy about them. We didn't know who they were, just the names. But they wrote all the song we loved - 'Crying In The Rain'; we were huge Everly Brothers fans.
Well before their stardom, the Beatles had covered Carole and Gerry's songs; Will You Love Me Tomorrow, Take Good Care Of My Baby and they had just recorded Chains on their debut album. Peter Asher recalls: "When the Beatles first came to America, that's who they wanted to meet: Goffin and King."
Al Aronowitz ferried Carole and Gerry to the Beatles' suite at the Warwick Hotel. "John made come-ons to Carole,' Gerry later said, 'but in a kidding way." While the media and teenyboppers lusted for John and Paul, it was Carole King from Sheepshead Bay upon whom their idols showered awe.
Page 176 - Aronowitz coaches Gerry
Al Aronowitz had a knack for befriending musical legends. Bob Dylan wrote Mr. Tambourine Man at Aronowitz's house: "sitting with my portable typewriter at my white Formica breakfast bar in a swirl of chain-lit Camels cigarrette smoke, his bony, long-nailed fingers tapping the words out and playing Marvin Gaye's Can I Get A Witness over and over for inspiration." the journalist recalls in his memoirs.
Aronowitz's friendship with Dylan and his keys to the kingdom of "deep" songcraft made him a kind of life coach for Gerry. Aronowitz used drugs to help push Gerry out of his three-minute wonders to the Other Side.
Page 179 - Tomorrow Records meets The Myddle Class
Carole, Gerry and Al Aronowitz formed a partnership, Tomorrow Records, to try and write and produce Beatles and Dylan-sounding music from talent that Aronowitz would scout for them. He found a young group that high school and CYO dances called The Myddle Class. It featured a brilliant guitarist, Rick Phillip, a gifted singer and writer, Dave Palmer, and a handsome but moderately talented bass player, Charlie Larkey.
Page 184 - The music of San Francisco
The movement started in San Francisco. Its psychedelic culture seemed to have popped out of the oven fully baked one magical day, with the same suddenness as the Beatles-borne British invasion. With the graphic designs of the suddenly flowering posters for the Fillmore and Avalon Ballroom rock concerts, for Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, the Sopwith Camel, Big Brother and the Holding Company and assorted musicians who had mystically synergized a sensual, LSD-heightened hard rock, the style was baroquely feminine in the extreme - everything swirled or sinewed.
Page 188-89 - Monterey Pop Festival 1967
At the Monterey Pop Festival the Mamas and the Papas were passing the baton to Big Brother and the Holding Company's Janis Joplin. The festival which featured Jimi Hendrix's first filmed guitar immolation, drew a glamorous young elite that seemed to have just materialized one day.
Laura Nyro performed, while the exact setlist for her is unclear, her Stoned Soul Picnic was hailed by Steve Katz with "That should be the National Anthem", while Stephen Sondheim declared: "In ecomony, lyricism and melody, it is a masterpiece." Joni considered Laura Nyro her only female peer, and Carole's hits had influenced Laura, just as Carole would be influenced by Laura's first album.
In the spring of 1967, if you walked down the street as the Young Rascals' Groovin' drifted from one of the brand new head shops, you had to agree with that dreamy song: there wasn't "anything that's bet-ter" than this golden moment.
Page 190 - Natural Woman
Though Carole and Gerry's marriage was crumbling, they would be awarded entrance into the new Dylan and Beatles led form of music by way of their Wasn't Born To Follow, a folk-rock-like melody with airly poetic lyrics. It attracted the hipness-gatekeeping Byrds, who eventually chose to record it.
Gerry had run into Jerry Wexler one day, and from his limousine window Wexler had shouted: "You and Carole should write a song called 'You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman.'" A few weeks later the pair showed up at Wexler's Atlantic office, he recalls, "they said, "Here's 'Natural Woman.' You told us to write it.'" Carole sat down at the piano and played it. Wexler recalls, "I thought - Oh, my God, is this wonderful or what?! It was a hit, I knew it."
Wexler wanted to get it to Aretha Franklin. She had been dubbed the Queen of Soul, largely as a result of her biggest hit to date, Chain Of Fools. which was tweaked by a Brill Building touch: Ellie Greenwich, who with her husband, Jeff Barry, had written Da Doo Ron Ron and Leader Of The Pack - she added the irresistible "chain, chai-ain, chaiiins in the background.
The Queen not only recorded and released it, but the song has become part of Aretha's persona, a product of her soul. For young women in the fall of 1967, Natural Woman was a watershed - a hymn to female sexuality right after the summer of love.
Page 195 - Carole King moves to Laurel Canyon
Living in California, and especially in Laurel Canyon, Carole said, around that time, "enabled me to take things as they come a lot more, without going into the type of thing that many New Yorkers will do, and as I used to do: intellectualizing everything saying, 'Why did I do this?' and 'I wonder what he meant by that?' You just don't get into that out here." "But I was so much older then; I'm younger than that now," the Byrds had sung, interpreting Dylan's My Back Pages. Like the song's narrator, Carole was dusting off the premature responsibility she'd rolled into at seventeen.
Page 201 - Carole records new album as "The City"
The four of them - Charlie Larkey on bass, Danny "Kootch" Kortchmar on guitar, Carole pumping the piano, Jim Gordon on drums - put a sophisticated gloss on a raft of new Carole-Gerry songs, three Carole-Toni songs, and two songs Carole wrote with Dave Palmer.
During the sessions that led to The City's album, Now That Everything's Been Said, "Carole would sing or play parts to Charlie and me", Danny has said, "and once we got it right, we could hear how great this record was going to be."
Page 202 - A Man Without A Dream
The album's most compelling cut was A Man Without A Dream, with Danny singing Gerry's lyrics ("It was such a good song," Danny says, "even my singing couldn't diminish its power") and with Carole's melody echoing the infectious plaintiveness of Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions.
Now That Everything's Been Said was the first album Danny had ever played on, so it seemed like a big accomplishment. But meanwhile, over in England, Danny's friend James Taylor was one-upping him.
Page 203 - James Taylor meets Peter Asher
Once in London, James dug into his jeans pockets and pulled out an address that Danny (Kortchmar) had given him: that of singer and Beatles intimate Peter Asher. Danny had met Peter several years earlier, when Danny's King Bees were touring with Peter and Gordon, Peter's duo with Gordon Waller.
Peter beheld, at the front door of his London maisonette, not Kootch, but Kootch's friend - a handsome, rangy young man bearing a demo tape. James Taylor would be the first non-Beatle produced on Apple Records.
Page 205 - Fire and Rain
Now, in the summer of 1968, in London, James and Margaret welcomed house-guests - Joel and Connie O'Brien and Richard Corey - bearing unhappy news. There was a girl, Susan Oona Schnerr, from Long Island, whom they all knew. James had had a brief romance with her when both were psychiatric patients at McLean: James and Joel had hung out with her in the Village during their Flying Machine and scag-shooting days.
The severe depression that had landed her in McLean had over the years gone unabated. Susie Schnerr had killed herself, by overdose. Joel, Connie and Richard had known this for a while, but had not told James because they thought it would dampen his spirit at a critical moment: the acquistion of his record contract.
James absorbed the shock of the news. Then, in a brooding, reflective mood, he used the unsettling fact that they'd delayed telling him to craft the opening bars (changing "Susan" to "Suzanne" for rhythm) - "Just yesterday morning they let me know you were gone.....". He called the song Fire and Rain.
Page 274 - Joni Mitchell's first album - Song to a Seagull
Joni recorded her first album, Joni Mitchell, which, in subsequent pressings, came to be known as Song To A Seagull, in the first weeks of 1968. David Crosby had himself named producer of the album; Joni termed him its "conservationist" because he held the line against those who might complain that as she put it, she'd "had a whole paintbox and used only brown." In reality Joni was in control of her product, an unusually nervy move for a newbie on her maiden voyage with a major record label. She kept the album acoustic and intimate: just Joni and her guitar and piano. The album may have suffered from the spareness, for it had an astringent forlornness and never got past #189 on the Billboard chart.
Page 275 - Veiled Snippets of Joni Mitchell's life
The songs introduced listeners to veiled snippets of this still very unknown singer's life. In "Part One [A side]: I Came to the City" there unfolded, in this order, her marriage-gone-wrong to Chuck in I Had A King; her affair with Michael Durbin in Michael From Mountains; the joyous Night In The City, her touche' to the small-minded moralists who'd looked on the Yorkville folksingers (including that poor, pregnant one) as degenerate hippies; and, finally, with Marcie and Nathan LaFraneer, her testimony to the trials of a young woman alone in Manhattan.
She named the B side "Part Two: Out of the City and Down to the Seaside," making her meeting of David in Florida into a kind of deliverance - which, in career terms, it was. Cactus Tree is the stem winder on that side.
Page 277 - Graham Nash is warned
Graham Nash was, as he says, "a poor man's son," from Blackpool, England. When he was fourteen, he'd wanted nothing more than to use his voice and guitar to make others feel like he felt when he listened to the Everly Brothers. He and his friend Allan Clarke had formed the Hollies and, with the group, were part of the British Invasion. Bus Stop and Carrie-Anne were more-than-likable hits - the former, dark; the latter, fetching - in 1966 and 1967, the twilight of formula English pop.
Knowing they'd be in the same city, David Crosby had given Graham (they'd met through Cass Elliot) advance word on Joni. "He'd said, 'Watch out for this woman' - in a good way, that she was very special and very beautiful," Graham recalls.
Page 278 - Graham Nash was smitten
Joni wooed the already smitten Graham with her songs. "She played fifteen songs, almost her entire first record, and a couple of different ones, too," Graham says. "By the time she got through Michael from Mountains and I Had A King, I was gone. I had never heard music like that."
Graham returned to England, but on the basis of transatlantic counsel from Mama Cass, he began thinking of quitting the Hollies, moving to L.A., and trying to launch himself as a solo act. He had already written the bouncy, quite wonderful Marrakesh Express.
Page 279 - Joni Mitchell opens her home
In July, Graham moved to L.A. and moved in with Joni at her new house in the Canyon, a romantic aerie home with wide plank floors, broad-paned leaded windows, and wood-beamed ceilings at 8217 Lookout Mountain. "We were pretty much terrified of a deep relationship," Graham says, but they slipped into one anyway.
One night, shortly after Graham moved in, David Crosby and Stephen Stills came over to Joni's. The ex-Byrd and the Springfield member had been spending days writing and singing together. For all his rock-bad-boy panache, David was a folkie at heart; his bottom tenor was luminous. As for Stills, it was his scratchy, bluesy voice that had made the Springfield's For What It's Worth a radical political battle cry.
Page 280 - Crosby, Stills and Nash harmonize
Stephen had penned a song, You Don't Have to Cry, for Judy Collins, whose high-powered career was pulling his macho nose out of joint. "In the morning, when you rise," the song asked, "Are you thinkin' of telephones / And managers and where you got to be at noon?" (Stills's Suite: Judy Blue Eyes would be his swan song to her.)
Both Crosby and Stills had heard kudos for Nash's high harmony, but they'd never tried to sing with him. Sitting around Joni's living room, getting high, Stills and Crosby sang the first bar of the new song: Crosby the tenor, Stills the alto. Nash asked, "Would you sing that again?" Stills and Crosby repeated the bar. Nash listened intently and then chimed in, producing a straining, poignant slightly sour top note that lifted the song to an ecstatic new dimension. "All four of us - the three of us fellows and Joan - knew! It was a truly amazing moment," Graham recalls.
Crosby, Stills and Nash would become a phenomenon - three stars of three different groups, each contributing beautiful songs (Stills's two for Judy Collins; David's rich-hippie dreamscape Wooden Ships and his elegy for Bobby Kennedy's murder, Long Time Gone; Graham's Marrakesh Express and his ode to his domesticity with Joni, Our House) to their eponymous album, sung in their piercing harmony.
Page 281 - Joni Mitchell writes about her old man
Joni and Graham would race each other to the piano after morning breakfasts at Art's Deli in Studio City. "It was an intense time," Graham has said. "Who's going to fill up the space with their music first? We were two very creative writers living in the same house, and it was an interesting clash: 'I want to get as close to you as possible.' 'Let me alone to create!'"
Those songs of Joni's that are clearly or presumably about life with Graham reflect that push-pull of intimacy, in lyric styles ranging from the biblical reference ("He would read to her / Roll her in his arms / And give his seed to her," in the achingly lovely Blue Boy"), to Nashville-worthy wit ("But when he's gone, me and them lonesome blues collide / The bed's too big, the frying pan's too wide." in My Old Man").
Joni did not tell Graham about her baby right away. "When you're wooing a new lover, you don't say, 'By the way, I've got this kid I gave up for adoption.'" But when she did broach the subject, she spoke of the pain of the "shame and guilt" and of the "rejection" she knew she would have faced from her parents had they known about the birth. Joni began to spot her daughter at music festivals. "At concerts, she would see a little girl's face, and she would wonder," says a friend.
The first Kelly sighting was at the Big Sur Folk Festival. "We thought we saw her daughter," says Graham. "There was a sound check before dinner. We lined up to get our food. And I remember this young-eight or nine-year-old blonde girl in line, waiting to go to dinner. The little girl said, 'Who are you?' Joni said, 'I'm Joni Mitchell.' And the little girl said, 'No, you're not; I'mJoni Mitchell.' And then Joan looked at me - it was one of those strange, Twilight Zone things - and then the little girl disappeared.
Page 285 - Joni Mitchell's Clouds
Joni began work on her second album, Clouds, in early 1969. The confrontational self-possession was almost groundbreaking, "almost" because, by now, Laura Nyro had raised the bar for female confessional songwriting. Her Eli and the Thirteenth Confession and imminent New York Tendaberry were tender, frantic operas, full of leaps and hints and dream shards.
Two of Joni's songs on Clouds were for Leonard Cohen - That Song About The Midway and The Gallery. She added her most iconic songs - Chelsea Morning and as last track Both Sides Now. Her mournful Songs For Aging Children would soon be included in the Arthur Penn-directed antiwar film version of Alice's Restaurant.
Page 286 - Joni Mitchell meets James Taylor
A Carnegie Hall concert on February 1, 1969, announced Joni as a celebrity. At her next concert, in Cambridge a month later, a lanky, handsome unknown, with deep-set eyes, long brown hair, and a thin moustache opened for her. He played a song he'd written, Something In The Way She Moves, and when he got to the words "my troubled mind," his nasal-voiced melancholy hinted at a real troubled mind, though his well-bred manner belied all his brooding and slumping. His name was James Taylor, and he was back in America, after making his first Apple album. James came back to Joni's dressing room and said hello. But she was involved with Graham Nash, and he with Margaret Corey.
Page 288 - Joni Mitchell and the boys ready for Woodstock
Crosby, Stills and Nash had cut their album, and the atmosphere in the studio had been giddy. "It was scary; once we knew what we had, you could not pry us apart with a crowbar," Crosby has said. "Joni was one of the boys," Graham says. "She would have picked up a basketball and shot hoops. It wasn't that we were in a club that she needed inviting to. It all came naturally."
In mid-August, Joni and Crosby, Stills and Nash (now with Neil Young) flew to New York to appear at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, and for her booking on the prestigious Dick Cavett Show the night after the festival. By now she had opened for the boys at several packed concerts, and the huge fan reaction had proved that three (now four) male rock stars were exponentially more charismatic than one female folksinger.
Woodstock would feature the most glamorous top acts: Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Richie Havens, Jimi Hendrix (who would close it with the most dramatic Star-Spangled Banner), and many more.
Page 290 - Joni Mitchell writes Woodstock
As Joni, Graham, David, Stephen, and Neil were preparing to fly to New York, the Bethel town elders and Yasgur's neighbors were angrily hectoring Yasgur to give back the money and keep the hippies from over-running their orderly town. But Yasgur held firm to his agreement, even as reports shot through the news that 800,000 people - sixteen times the original maximum estimate - were on their way there.
Joni wanted to perform, but Elliot and David Geffen were fearful for her safety. Besides, even if she got to the festival safely, would she get back in time for the Cavett show, the next night? The festival had already started; the round-the-clock performances were a half day or more behind schedule; traffic was blocked for twenty miles; many festival goers had left their cars on the highway or sides of the streets and were walking. The stars were being airdropped in by army helicopter.
The boys hired a small plane to fly them into the festival; Joni went to Geffen's apartment and watched it on TV. "The deprivation of not being able to go," she has said, "provided me with an intense angle on Woodstock." That longing showed up in the song she wrote.
Page 293 - Someone's Old Lady
Back in L.A., Joni opened for her boys at the Greek Theatre. The Los Angeles Times critic called Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's performance "a triumph of the first order" and said that Joni Mitchell's performance had been "overwhelmed" by theirs. She may have been beginning to wonder: What was the price of being someone's old lady?
Many young women (especially, it seemed, in Laurel Canyon) personified a glamorous new femininity - a kind of arty - sensual, esoterically spiritual chick for whom the coolest men had lust and awe for. There was Annie Burden, Trina Robbins and Estrella Berosini who Joni turned into her Ladies of the Canyon, according a verse to each.
On the other hand, medieval courtliness had its blowback: When you were someone's old lady, a piece of you belonged to your old man - and he was always coming out ahead, because he wasa man. David Crosby was madly in love with Christine Hinton again; he elegized her as Guinnevere (though one chorus of the song had been written for Joni), but still, he dominated her. Before long, Joni would muse aloud to a confidant: was she an artist - or a Crosby, Stills and Nash groupie?
Page 295 - Tragedy strikes Joni Mitchell's circle
September 30, 1969, the day that Crosby, Stills and Nashwent gold - tragedy struck their circle. Christine Hinton got behind the wheel of David's VW bus to take her two cats to the veterinarian. As she maneuvered onto the highway, one of the cats escaped the arms of her friend, who was sitting in the passenger seat. The cat pounced on Christine, sending her into a collision with a school bus; Christine was killed.
"Want to go sailing?" David asked Graham. Christine had been cremated, and David wanted to toss her ashes into the ocean from the deck of the Mayan. "I had never been sailing in my life," says Graham, "but I knew David was fragile and decided to stick close by him." They flew to his boat in Fort Lauderdale and planned on sailing it back to L.A.
Joni boarded the Mayan in Jamaica. Also aboard was folksinger Bobby Ingram and his wife Ronee Blakley. Ronee was a girl from Idaho who, on the strength of hearing Joan Baez's Barbara Allen, had bolted for a creative life in California. The trip was like the group's song Wooden Ships come to life - hippie superstars huddled together, alone of the vast sea with their dreams and their body heat.
Page 297 - Ladies Of The Canyon is released
Ladies of the Canyon was released in March 1970, and it was shot through with idealism and idealization. Henry Lewy again engineered the spare album (with Joni actually in charge), which contained the title cut, and her two odes to Graham - Willy (but with the roles reversed: in the song, the woman is the needier partner) and the haunting Blue Boy. Conversation and The Arrangement - as literate as Sondheim, as so many of her songs seemed to be - both describe a sensitive girl's affair with a prosperous man who has a superficial wife. For Free, puts a halo on the shabby "one-man band by the quick lunch stand" while Joni guiltily notes musical fame.
Joni's big hit from this album (only one of four Top 40 hits in her career), Big Yellow Taxi, was written during her and Graham's trip to Hawaii. "They paved paradise, put up a parking lot" was Joni Mitchell at her Tin Pan Alley best. Woodstock, her lovely Rainy Night House for Leonard, and her tuneful Morning Morgantown - quaint Canada Joni - round out the album. The last cut is The Circle Game, finally recorded in her own voice.
Page 301 - Nash gets a telegram from Joni Mitchell
A few days later, Graham Nash was laying a new kitchen floor in the Lookout Mountain house when the doorbell rang. It was Western Union. Joni's old man took the telegram from Greece, tore it open, unfolded the piece of paper with its pasted strips of jagged type, and beheld a single sentence: "If you hold sand too tightly, it will run through your fingers." Graham's heart sank. "I knew right away - it was over."
That night, Graham sat down at Joni's piano and wrote Simple Man, with straightforward lyrics: "I have never been so much in love and never hurt so bad at the same time." In answer to the worry (and accusation) that Joni had voiced, he said "I just want to hold you, I don't want to hold you down." But perhaps at this time in her life Joni Mitchell was simply unholdable. And that was a new thing for a young woman to be.
Page 302 - Joni Mitchell escapes fame in a cave
Joni moved into Cary Raditz's cave in Matala and stayed for five weeks, feeling the addictive infactuation with the primitive hippie expat life. "To me it was a lovely life, far better than being middle-class in America," she would later tell an interviewer. Of her enthrallment with him, Cary says, "You'll have to ask her why she was attracted to outlaws." She cheerfully acknowledged (in Carey and California) that he was "a mean old daddy," and a "red red rogue," and "the bright red devil who kept her in that tourist town."
Page 303 - Joni Mitchell jams with Taj Mahal
Joni was the guest of some of these "pretty people", and, with them, she "went to a party down a red dirt road," where, even in their rusticated otherwordliness, they were reading Rolling Stone and Vogue to stay connected to their publicity. But it was through sheer serendipity that she stumbled upon Taj Mahal (whose Corinna was the second most played song on the island that season). Hearing what she though was Taj Mahal's record wafting from inside a stone finca, she knocked on the door - and there he was, in the flesh.
They jammed together, and she would pay him homage in A Bird That Whistles on her 1988 Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm album.
Page 304 - Joni Mitchell and James Taylor begin a romance
In late July, Joni returned to Mariposa. The festival's steely director Estelle Klein had also managed to lure James Taylor to the event. James was now a star, on the basis of his second album, Sweet Baby James, and its hit single, Fire and Rain.
Joni had met James briefly the year before, in Cambridge, but now at Mariposa they began a romance. Peter Asher, who was there with James, thought the pairing inevitable, and so did others. "I think they saw a lot of themselves in each other" is how drummer Russ Kunkel puts it. "Both singer-songwriters, tall, handsome/beautiful, soulful, and talented."
The idea of Carole King casting herself as a "singer-songwriter" may have been sparked in earnest a year earlier, in the summer of 1968, when Carole first met with Lou Adler. Lou had remembered how, in the early 1960's, people in the industry loved Carole's demos so much, "I'd loan them out - and never get them back," he says. "One of the first things Lou did was give us a copy of Laura Nyro's first album, More Than A Discovery", says Charlie, "and we took it home and listened to it a lot."
Like Carole, Nyro was a young outer-borough woman writing her own Broadway - and pop-soul-influenced songs and singing them, accompanying herself on the piano rather than on the now fashionable guitar. As a teenager, Nyro's a capella group had sung the hits of the Chantels and the Shirelles, including Will You Love Me Tomorrow, which she would eventually cover; and songs on Nyro's first album, like Wedding Bell Blues and Sweet Blindness hint at Carole's influence on her.
Page 309 - Carole King plays for James Taylor
The news in Carole's crew was that Kootch's friend James Taylor had arrived in L.A. to record his second album, Sweet Baby James. Peter Asher asked Carole if she would play piano on James's new album, since James had loved the great Carole-and-Gerry hits. Carole hardly had to be persuaded; she'd heard James's Apple album and she was a "huge James fan", says Peter. After three rehearsals, she and James formed, as Charlie puts it, a "musical mutual admiration society."
James didn't just want Carole to play on his album, which she did; he wanted her to tour with him. "Carole had terrible stage fright; she was very insecure onstage," says Danny. She would have said no to others, but she couldn't refuse James.
Page 311 - Carole King performs on stage
Carole got a taste of performing on the road with James Taylor. She played piano for him, an anonymous band member. "Then James would bring her on stage and introduce her as the 'legend' who wrote Loco-Motion and Natural Woman," says Danny, "and you could see his fans going: 'She wrote that? No way!". The skepticism-turned-excitement spurred her on. "Yeah, they're my songs!' She had no problem after that."
But sometimes those performances became a humiliating trial by fire. As spring 1970 turned to summer and James became more of a phenomenon and a heartthrob (Fire and Rainwould reach #3 in August), his fans were not in the mood to put up with any interloper. "They'd boo Carole; they want to hear James," says writer Susan Braudy, who was along for many of the concerts. "But Carole would sing and play - Up On The Roof and Natural Woman - over the booing." As Joni had found with Crosby, Still and Nash, it was hard - so far, at least - to beat the power of a male superstar.
Note: Unable to locate a video of Carole singing with James in 1970 - this is one year later.
Page 311 - James Taylor superstar
By mid 1970, James Taylor was becoming a superstar. Touted a "new troubadour," he was a hauntingly romantic figure with stringy, uncombed hair, penetrating eyes under thick, straight brows, and handsome, patrician features - the whole look calling more to mind an anguished Civil War deserter than a contemporary rocker.
The effect was compounded by his brooding, tender, somehow classically American songs (his inclusion of Oh, Susannah on Sweet Baby James seemed natural, as if it extended a lineage, some of which - Rainy Day Man, Sweet Baby James; eventually You Can Close Your Eyes; later, Walking Man, Shed A Little Light, and Shower The People - contained a piercing, life-affirming sweetness. For all his shambling disaffection, there was a rock-ribbed dignity to him - a whiff of the modern-day Gary Cooper.
Page 313 - Joni Mitchell and James in New Mexico
In August - Joni flew to Tucumcari, New Mexico, where James Taylor was filming Two-Lane Blacktop. He'd been calling Toni Stern "Mama" when he'd gotten the role; now Joni was his old lady. On the set Joni knitted him a sweater vest, which he took to wearing constantly. He clearly seemed in love with Joni, Susan Braudy says, but later Joni would tell three confidantes that, as one puts it, "he was always judging her harshly; it was almost intimidating." "Joni said he was very critical of her all the time - and she couldn't take it."
Joni seems to have written This Flight Tonight about that time in New Mexico. Her "gentle and sweet" lover hurts her with 'that look, so critical," but she regrets leaving almost as soon as the plane takes off. She replays a tender moment of their watching a star in the sky between the movie set trailers and wants the pilot to 'turn this crazy bird around" so she can return to him.
Page 314 - Joni Mitchell and James Taylor in England
Joni joined James Taylor for a couple of months in England at the end of the summer. Peter Asher lived with them in a London flat. "I have a distinct memory," Peter says, "of listening to Joni play Blue, which she'd just composed on the piano." Asher thought the song (which Rolling Stone's Timothy Crouse would call beautifully mysterious and unresolved) was extraordinary. (Its references to a drug addict's "needles" and Joni's proffering a seashell to her lover - John Fischbach remembers Joni giving a seashell to James one evening in L.A. - make it fairly clear that Blue is about James.) Joni also played her newly composed A Case Of You on the dulcimer - "I thought it was just a masterpiece," Peter Asher says.
Page 315 - You Can Close Your Eyes
Joni and James's mutual infatuation was evanescent when they performed at London's Royal Albert Hall on October 28, 1970. James introduced Joni's songs like a prep school boy awed by his slightly older, more accomplished girlfriend. As Joni and James tuned their guitars, their talk seemed coyly double-entendred ("Ready when you are, James," she said; "I know....," he answered, to laughter from the audience). And when he thanked the cheering audience by saying, "You're too kind," he drove home the source of his appeal: those upper-crust manners juxtaposed with the brooding-junkie pathos. They performed a heavenly duet on You Can Close Your Eyes, which James was said to have written for Joni.
Page 316 - Carole King records a solo album
John Fischbach and his friend Andrew Berliner had built their studio, Crystal Sound, and, says John, "I said to Carole: Why don't you be a singer-songwriter like James?" John's suggestion, of course, was something Carole had already been discussing with Lou Adler. Carole recorded the album which was forthrightly named Writer.
Most of the songs were Carole-Gerry compositions. There are outright rockers like I Can't Hear You No More and the album-opening Spaceship Races. Goin' Back, with its Byrds-friendly bridge, essentially describes, through her ex-husband's words, Carole's last three years, morphing from a mah-jongg-playing, tract-house-dwelling Cadillac driver to a jam-session-ing, India-trekking Canyon chick. Eventually is Carole and Gerry's hymn for Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. The album closes with Carole singing Up On The Roof. While the other tracks have a garage band feel, in this one alone Carole and her resounding, confident piano stand at the center of the universe, pointing to the approach she will take next.
Writer was almost as much of a failure as Now That Everything's Been Said had been.
Page 323 - Carole King writes the songs for Tapestry
At some point in the summer and fall, Carole began doing something new: writing whole songs - melody andlyrics. She was becoming spiritual; her classes at Swami Satchidananda's Integral Yoga Institute, coupled with trip to India, had led her to meditation. The songs trace the course of this once conventional young woman's adjustment - with anguish, awe, and finally joy - to the new life she has made, and they celebrate in integrity of improvised "families."
In Tapestry - melodically, a Broadway-tinged story song - the narrator is a young woman looking back on an eventful past ("a tapestry of rich and royal hue").
So Far Way is the first of three songs that puzzle out a new idea of "home". She has moved clear across the country as if it were no big deal, but in 1970 people are really just two generations away from travel by animal cart. If you ask the song's question ("Doesn't anybody stay in one place anymore?") at face value, it sounds like the kind of quip uttered by common-sense housewives in Carole's childhood neighborhood.
Home Again make the same point, but more worriedly, yet Way Over Yonder seems to say: yes, a crew of renegades from dysfunctional traditional homes cancreate its own nurturing community. You've Got A Friend is a vow of loyalty, leaving no question as to the salience of post-traditional ties.
Page 324 - You've Got A Friend
Although Toni and Cynthia weren't crazy about You've Got A Friend, it did have one big fan, who accurately took the measure of its appeal, and for good reason: his own meaningful friendship with the writer. When James Taylor heard the song (which Rolling Stone's Landau would later deem "perfection"), he loved it so much that he said, "Damn! Why didn't I write that?" (He would end up recording it; it would be his only #1 hit.)
Page 325 - It's Too Late
As for the song that would be the album's monster hit: though Toni often agonized over lyrics (as Gerry had), "I wrote It's Too Late very fast, in a day," she says. Toni pointedly say that she wrote the heartfelt lyric after her love affair with James Taylor was over (he'd gone on to Joni), but then she carefully adds, "I won't say who It's Too Lateis about - I don't kiss and tell." Whoever inspired it, the lyric expresses a blithe woman's depressed, embarrassed realization that a romance she'd secretly banked on is over. On the surface she's shrugging and cool - the two of them "really did try to make it" - but the insistent internal rhymes ("inside," "died," "hide") trumpet her hidden emotion.
Page 327 - Carole King's Tapestry Soars
Tapestry was recorded in January 1971, released in early February and by June had sold a million copies. The single released from it - It's Too Late, backed with I Feel The Earth Move - hit the #1 mark, staying there for five weeks. Earth Move got almost equal airplay; both sides were hits. In July, It's Too Late went gold, and James Taylor's version of You've Got A Friend hit # 1. By now Tapestry has become the # 1 album in America; it would stay in that position for fifteen weeks.
Cynthia Weil puts it this way: "Carole spoke from her heart, and she happened to be in tune with the mass psyche. People were looking for a message, and she came to them with a message that was exactly what they were looking for, were aching for."
Page 329 - Joni Mitchell records Blue
Recorded in March 1971, when Joni Mitchell was at her most vulnerable, Blue was the album to which, appropriately, she entrusted the song she had withheld for so long, Little Green. The song is so deftly coded, in its love and relinquishment are crystal clear even while the subject is inscrutable.
Joni's Blue was in every way the counterpoint to Carole's Tapestry. Whereas Tapestry was created in a sense of communality, Blue was recorded in almost utter privacy - so "transparent" was Joni now that "if you looked at me, I would weep; we had to lock the doors to make that album." Nobody was allowed in except the backup musicians, who included Russ Kunkel, Stephen Stills and James Taylor.
Page 330 - Joni Mitchell's Blue is released
Blue was a more moderate success than Tapestry (it peaked in the Top 20 in September) but accorded Joni legend status in the rarefied world of her musician peers. After hearing that album "people were throwing themselves at Joni's feet; nobody didn't think she was fucking brilliant," says Leah Kunkel.
Indeed, Kris Kristofferson, who had just given Janis Joplin her post-humous # 1 hit Me and Bobby McGee says, "I was in awe of Joni from the I met her (at the Isle of Wight concert); I thought at one point she was Shakespeare reincarnated." Kris was so struck by the vulnerability of the songs of Blue, he urged Joni: "Please! Leave something of yourself." Danny says, "People used to burst into tears when they'd hear it; they couldn't get through it." And Russ Kunkel says that he and others had come to believe, on the basis of that album, that "Joni was as distinct a woman performer as Jimi Hendrix was a male performer and her effect on the music scene was as bold. When I heard the songs of Blue, it was the same as hearing Hey Joe or Purple Haze."
Page 334 - Joni Mitchell - For The Roses
Joni bought acerage in British Columbia, north of Vancouver, and helped build a stone house in the woods, overlooking Half Moon Bay. It was here that she would write the songs for her next album, For The Roses. Five of the songs were about James Taylor. For The Roses, takes musing account of his celebrity: she remembers how it was at the beginning; he'd slump in that way he had that, Kootch had said, made every woman fall in love with him. In See You Sometime she describes James as famous and in demand, but reminds him that she had fame first ("I tasted mine"); he had been awed by her. In Lesson In Survival, she complains about how James's "friends" protect you [and] scrutinize me" as she sank into the "damn timid" pose that was "not at all the spirit that's inside of me." Blonde In The Bleachers gives his fame the same who-wants-it? treatment that Cole Blue Steeland Sweet Fire darkly gives his addiction. With these five songs, protesting too much was Joni's best revenge; she was getting James out of her system.
Let The Wind Carry Me describes her ongoing struggle with her judgemental mother, "Mama let go now" she pleads. In Woman of Heart and Mind, she uses herself (and her secret relinquishment of the baby) to issue feminism's essential statement, a woman is whole by herself.
Page 337 - Carole King records her third album
Shortly before Molly's birth, Carole recorded her third album, Music, with Charlie, Danny, Joel, Abigail, Ralph, and James Taylor joining in again. On the cover, she's photographed smiling (her face, pregnancy-plump), granny-dressed, and shoeless at her grand piano in her Appian Way living room. Music was released at the end of 1971 and immediately rose to the top of the charts, reaching # 1 on New Year's Day 1972; its buoyant Sweet Seasons, written with Toni, became a Top 10 hit.
It's Going To Take Some Time, portrays a woman who knows she's messed up a relationship, has to learn to master the art of compromise, and is on to the next. The album's full of homage-paying - Carry Your Load channels Laura Nyro; Brother, Brother, Marvin Gaye. In Surely Carole attempts the blues; she scats in her remake of her and Gerry's Some Kind of Wonderful, she morphs into a piano bar busker on Music.
The most evocative cut is Song Of Long Ago, has a James-inspired melody, and James's la-la-laaaas -sounds like it belongs on Tapestry. Such comparisons would become her nemesis.
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.
Early in Carly's pregnancy, James entered treatment, and Jessica remembers Carly "going to visit James in rehab, realizing the depth of his problems and having to come to that understanding" that she had married a drug addict. Still, she was strong and nurturing; as someone who worked closely with James says, "Carly got James on methadone, and that was an achievement." Others, however, say that methadone would prove for him at least as difficult a habit as heroin. At the time, addiction was a sign of sensitivity and vulnerability. James Taylor had always traded on that romance.
But now there was a child in the picture. Sarah Maria (Sally) Taylor was born on January 7, 1974; James audio recorded the birth of the baby girl who would inspire him to write a song named for her. "Carly and James were both so happy, Jeanie Seligmann remembers.
Hotcakes, Carly Simon's ode to this season of contentment, had been recorded late in her pregnancy. Released days after she gave birth to Sally, it sold nearly a million copies, peaking at # 3. The album featured Carly and James having great fun with Charlie and Inez Foxx's rocking version of Mockingbird.
Page 442 - Carly Simon releases Hotcakes
Hotcakes's Top Ten single, Mockingbird, was a smart way to have their cute couplehood both ways (wisely, they turned down starring roles in a remake of A Star Is Born), and the song became a staple of their joint appearances, with Carly jumping all over the stage with gawky abandon.
The jaunty, ragtimelike Older Sister was another one of Carly's songs about the sisterly awe and competition that had marked her childhood, as was the more darkly autobiographical Grownup, about her inability to grow out of the insecure little girl. Praising the album for being "not deep but...honest," Jon Landau in Rolling Stone wrote: "Carly Simon never apologizes for writing about herself or her well-to-do background that has been so gratuitously criticized."
Mind On My Man was as smooth a standard as any her friend Jonathan Schwartz would spin. "He's a gentleman lost at the fair / He's a lotus that opens and closes, notice he won't always let me in": she locates James. The album's hit single, Haven't Got Time For The Pain ( # 2 in the adult contemporary market) underscored her current life: Enough self-obsession already! Think I'm Gonna Have A Baby, introduced in this most urban but visceral of writers what would be her affecting motif: the idea that a woman - fluid, absorbing, eternal - is a "river."
Page 443 - World's Greatest Musician
Six months after Hotcakes and Sally were born, James released his fifth album, Walking Man, his first without Peter Asher, Kootch, and others in their recording family. Despite seven weeks of promotional touring (and the achingly lovely title song), it sold surprisingly poorly, ending up as his lowest-selling album. When Carly had had her double # 1 with No Secrets and it's You're So Vain, James's almost simultaneously released One Man Dog had peaked at # 4, its single Don't Let Me Lonely Tonight at only # 14. So now Carly had two albums and several singles that bettered her husband's - and handily. "And not only were Carly's doing better, but their albums were always released at the same time," Arlyne Rothberg laments today. "You have to think back and say it was bad planning on everybody's part, including mine."
The disparity was "hard" on Carly's marriage, Arlyne says. "We hadn't come that much into female liberation - not that it's even easy today." Steve Harris recalls that now, during James's solo performances (he toured all the time, whereas Carly had stopped touring), "People in the audience would cry out, 'Where's Carly? Where's Carly?! Sing Mockingbird! I don't know if James liked that." Arlyne says that Carly "always, always minimized her success in front of others, especially when James was around." "She would never take a compliment without saying, 'I'm married to one of the world's greatest musicians,'" says Jessica.
Page 446 - Carly and James record in L.A.
The young family moved to L.A. for a few months so James could record his sixth album, Gorilla (its title track named when James, after a fight with Carly, went to the Central Park Zoo, saw a gorilla, and imagined that that's how his angry wife viewed him).
Carly was recording her fifth album, Playing Possum in L.A. at the same time. During a photo shoot at Norman's Seeff's studio in L.A., Carly took off her dress and started dancing around in a little black teddy and knee-high black boots. When she and Arlyne Rothberg (her manager) saw the contact sheet, they both zeroed in on a profile shot of her: she was on her knees, with her long, muscle-thighed legs apart, and her fists clenched at the side. It seemed as if she had nothing on under the teddy, which stopped mid-buttock. It was an image of a beautiful, half-undressed, erotically charged young woman. In 1975, it stood to be the most explicitly sexual photograph ever chosen for the cover of any woman's album.
The new mother and "erudite Simon & Schuster heiress" Carly Simon would use such a photograph caused a sensation; Sears Roebuck (the Wal-Mart of its day) banned the album from its stores. Perfect strangers came up to Carly and told her she was obscene and disgusting. But the album cover sent a welcome signal in that winner-take-all feminist moment.
Page 446 - Playing Possum
Cueing off on the album's unavoidable talking point - its cover - Stephen Holden said that Playing Possum was a "celebration of the body at play". In Rolling Stone's Ben Fong Torres article, Carly said "Being attractive sexually is not something which I feel guilty about or embarrassed by in any way. I feel that it's great. I felt very sexy when I wrote most of the songs" on Playing Possum.
An unmelodious gimmick song about a kind of precursor to "vogueing," Attitude Dancing, was released as a single but it made a disappointing showing, peaking at # 21. After The Storm takes on the impact of sex after an argument, from stimulation to appeasement. In the traditional, folky, Look Me In The Eyes - with its delicate melody and celestial chorus - she's rubbing a lover's "limes" all over her body and "climbing on you like a tree." The song's hook - "but I beg you when you love me, look me in the eyes" - poignantly joins the sexuality to intimacy.
The album's controversial single was Slave. The song was Carly's way of lamenting that, despite the rhetoric of feminism, acculturation and psychology were hard to change:
I worship your opinions And I imitate your ways I try to make you grace me With a word of praise
However much I tell myself That I'm strong and free and brave I'm just another woman Raised to be a slave
In retrospect "Slave" is aprocryphal. Even decades after she and James divorced, Carly Simon's inability to stop loving James - her involuntary fixation on their time together - is right up there with her great generosity, her sophisticated wit, her almost dangerous candor, and her joie de vivre as one of the most noticeable things about her. "James!" she exclaims in an e-mail. "What a clenched fist of hard love!". For years, with a few exceptions, he has declined contact with her..."There is no exit from that silence," she says.
Page 449 - How Sweet It Is
This time around, James Taylor's Gorilla and Carly Simon's Playing Possum were more evenly matched in sales, and James's hit from that album - the delicious How Sweet It Is (to Be Loved by You), which was a remake of Holland-Dozier-Holland's Motown hit for Marvin Gaye - shot to # 5. "There have been moments of terrible friction based on who is bigger on the charts," Carly admitted a few years later, "and it's more comfortable if James is more successful than I am."
At the same time, Carly controlled most of their day-to-day life. "He completely went along with her life," says Jake. "That's the thing with a junkie: They've got a secret; they've got a little other life - that's what they control. But their outward life, they give you to control." The men around Carly saw her changing. "She went into this myth of being a wife and mother so strongly, even when James was on the nod," says Jake. On James's tour of Japan, Russ Kunkel recalls, "Carly came along and she was like anybody's wife."
The early to late-middle 1970s was one of the worst times to be married to someone with an addictive personality. Hard drugs, especially cocaine, were now considered "recreational," and celebrities were always plied with them. "James would get a lot of free dope because people wanted to spend a little time with him and that was their ticket to an hour or two," Jake says. Carly was at a loss for how to help James. "She'd find the dope and flush it down the toilet," says Jake. Carly says, "I lived in a state of fear for years. Addiction really takes over everything, and we were in its power. When James walked in the door, I was overly sensitive in examining his expression, examining the size of his pupils, looking for evidence. I thought I could actually stop his addiction. Who was I kidding?"
Page 453 - Another Passenger
While trying to rescue her husband and caring for Sally, Carly continued to write and record. She put her complaints about James's absent parenting and their fights over the parental double standard into the sarcastically sweet-sounding Fairweather Father (in the liner notes, she denied the song was about James) for her 1976 Another Passenger album. Carly had a hit with a Michael McDonald song, It Keeps You Runnin', and its Libby celebrates her new close friendship with songwriter Libby Titus, "a charming, funny, vivacious hell of a woman," as Danny Kortchmar describes her.
The demureness of the photos (emphasizing Carly's face and long legs) for Another Passenger was due to the face that she was pregnant through much of 1976. On January 22, 1977, she gave birth to a son, Benjamin Simon Taylor. The focus of Carly's worried vigilance shifted off James's physical signs and onto the baby's: Carly felt sure that something was wrong with their son. "He was hardly a sick-looking child, but he would run these high fevers; Carly would have to put him in a tub to get them down," says Arlyne. "All the doctors were saying, 'There's nothing wrong with him, there's nothing wrong with him,'" but she continued to take him to doctors. "She persisted; she was a mother possessed."
Page 455 - Boys In The Trees
Carly's seventh album, Boys In The Trees, produced by Arif Mardin, was released in June 1978. (In the meantime, she had had a # 1 adult contemporary hit singing the Carole Bayer Sager - Marvin Hamlisch song, Nobody Does It Better, the title song of the James Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me.) Carly posed for the album cover photo, by Deborah Turbeville, sitting, bare-breasted, in an empty ballet studio, rolling a silk stocking up one leg. But she and Arlyne ended up thinking that, as Arlyne puts it, "the picture didn't lend itself to the sensationalism of have her naked" so they had it retouched to add a silky camisole.
The album, which went platinum, gave Carly a Top 10 hit with the bouncy, torch, loving You Belong To Me, which she cowrote with Michael McDonald, and which, like so many of her songs - including another on the album, In A Small Moment (and In Times When My Head, in the previous one) - was about cheating, jealousy, and temptation: the adult preoccupations she had witnessed in her childhood and which were dancing around the corners of her current life.
The title song - the reverent, eerie Boys In The Trees is one of her most personal and haunting. This new album of hers involved more of James's input than any previous one. He la-la-la'd on Boys In The Trees. Carly sang his self-mockingly bluesy One Man Woman and a disco song - Tranquilo (Melt My Heart)- that they had written together. Most affecting was their duet on the Everly Brothers' Devoted To You.
Page 456 - Handy Man
It had been a good couple of years for James Taylor. His Greatest Hits album had been released, and after moving to Columbia he'd enjoyed, in the album JT, a full-scale comeback. The rocking Your Smiling Face was his biggest self-written hit since Fire and Rain, and he had another hit in his inspired remake of Jimmy Jones's slyly boastful pop soul Handy Man. But it was not a good time at home.
Carly was still desperately searching for the cause of Ben's fevers. Because so many doctors were saying that despite the fevers, the child was fine, "even James said, 'Leave him alone!' and I could understand anybody saying that, because the doctors had been so reassuring," Arlyne recalls. "But Carly's attitude was, she was going to save that kid, no matter what! She was the best mother of anyone I knew - and that was before the parenting books; you had to do it by instinct." Carly was still breast-feeding Ben; despite Trudy Taylor's very vocal disapproval*, she would do so for three and a half years.
*Breast-feeding was still considered downscale, weird, or "hippie" in the late 1970's, especially to high-born women from a different generation.
page 459 - We're So Close
In 1979 Carly Simon wrote and recorded one of her most candid albums, Spy. Taking the fraught secrecy and erotic betrayals of her childhood (which now had counterparts in her marriage), she set out to "spy on myself." Other than a minor hit with the hard-rocking Vengeance (about a man and woman out-betraying each other) - full of her signature belting - no one seemed to notice the heartfelt album, which, in retrospect, sounds like a zero-hour bid to save her marriage. In Just Like You Do, she makes common cause with James's vulnerability - her fears and phobias the equal to his addiction - begging him "to return to that brace innocence we once knew."
Love You By Heart, which she wrote with Libby and Jake, is a plea for James to get off junk. We're So Close, which announces its significance with stark piano chords, serves up a therapy session truism with elegance and surprise. To this day, Carly believes We're So Close, through which she acknowledged her marriage's dissolution, "is the saddest song I ever wrote." "There were admissions of infidelities and things you try to do" - confessing, apologizing - "with all the amount of love surrounding it." Finally, as 1979 turned to 1980, James became involved with a Japanese dancer named Evelyne and Carly drew very close to studio engineer Scott Litt.
Page 460 - Come Upstairs
Carly Simon and vibraphonist Mike Mainieri began to write together: she the lyrics, he collaborating with her on the music. Of their efforts, collected in Come Upstairs - Rolling Stone's Ken Tucker said her "instincts are bold, but her music betrays her." Having gotten a late start on her career, she seemed to be in overdrive now, both missing and hitting. With her infectious Jesse - utilizing the full arc of her plea-to-rocking-growl range - she hit # 11, her first big score in a little more than two years. (Meanwhile, James's album Flag was going platinum due to its single of Carole and Gerry's Up On The Roof.)
Barely noticed on Come Upstairs was the song she titled James. On it her voice is so meek, she - the brassy-classy queen of indiscretion - seems to be asking permission to name him. Strikingly, she uses the same images (a seashell pressed to the ear; the younger James slumped soulfully over his guitar) that Joni Mitchell had used in her songs about him. On the strength of her hit with Jesse, Carly planned a Come Upstairs tour, pushing herself back on the road. All of this - the writing and recording, the time with Scott Litt, the James separation that wasn't a separation, the planning of the tour - was wrapped around her life's core: Sally and Ben.
Page 462 - Carly collapses on stage
In summer of 1980, before the tour was to start, came Carly's "worst day of my life." It turned out that she had been right in her insistent hunch about Ben. As Arlyne recalls, "She found a doctor who said, 'Look at this - his kidney!'" It was dysplastic (abnormally formed). "One kidney was totally diseased; it had to come out immediately. The other was partially diseased; it would be regenerated."
Ben was rushed to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital for emergency surgery. Carly waited through the surgery, distraught. James was not there. (According to Carly, James wasn't there with Ben because he was driving his girlfriend Evelyne to the airport). When James finally arrived at the hospital, he didn't go in right away. "He was sitting on the stoop outside while I was screaming at him to go upstairs," Arlyne says. Eventually, he went upstairs - but Carly couldn't get past James's absence during the surgery, and that grievous act of self-absorption became the point of no return in their crumbling marriage. James could ignore her, but ignoring Ben at his most vulnerable was unforgivable.
Carly lost twenty-five pounds from her thin frame during Ben's convalescence. In the fall, with Ben strong enough for her to leave his bedside, Carly embarked on the rescheduled Come Upstairs tour. In Pittsburgh, she seemed to go to pieces in front of the audience. Fans came up on stage to help her calm down, and she made it through the first show, "but I collapsed before the second show, with ten thousand people waiting." She cried her eyes out at the failure and humiliation.
Page 464 - Carly Simon records Torch songs
Though she was giving up on performing (at Lucy's behest), Carly continued to record. She put together an album - Torch - of classic Torch songs (adding a song of her own From The Heart) and a blues number. Mike Mainieri arranged and produced it. Its cover showed Carly in a low-cut gown, writhing in pain and longing, grasping the arm of a tall, dark - James like - man who, his back turned, is pulling away from her.
Carly took the album to L.A. in mid-1981. She tracked down Danny Armstrong, who was living there and he paid her a visit. As they talked, he saw a woman far deeper than the jaunty girlfriend he remembered. "She was so unhappy; after me, she'd been through a lot of crap. She'd changed a lot." Danny had assumed that fame had made the uptown girl more uptown; this was a reversal of expectations. She put the album on the record player. "You'll like this; it's right up your alley," she said. They listened to her sing I Got It Bad and That Ain't Good - "and," Danny recalled, "it was so good - so moving - it upset me."
Page 468 - Carly Simon's Orpheus
James Taylor and Carly Simon officially separated. The new woman in his life, who was not happy with Carly's entreaties (nor Carly with her), was actress Kathryn Walker. In 1982 and early 1983, two avoidable deaths stunned James Taylor. His friend John Belushi died of a cocaine-heroin speedball, and his acquaintance Beach Boy Dennis Wilson drowned while swimming drunk. These tragedies issued that "either I quit or die" message that Peter Asher always knew would be the only hope of salvation for James.
At almost the very time that Carly's divorce from him was filed, James checked into a detoxification clinic. Kathryn Walker helped James Taylor through it. Afterwards, James funneled his energy into exercise. "It's hard to stay sober," a friend says. "He's done an amazing job," He never relapsed.
For him to clean up so quickly and thoroughly after their divorce, with another woman's help - "this was the absolutely crushing irony," Jake Brackman says. "Carly was trying to do this the entire time she was with him, then Kathryn comes in and - boom! - he's Mr. Twelve Step." Another friend theorizes that James clearly was not prepared to walk away from drugs when he was married to Carly. Maybe there was something in the fabric of the relationship that made it hard for him to stop.
Carly released her eleventh original album, Hello Big Man - it's title tune, homaging her parents' romance - the year of her divorce, 1983. Orpheus, is one of Carly's favorites of her own songs and a personal signifier in her current life. It's an obvious melodrama, but, to her, a real one. Giving James the name of the ancient Greek poet of the lyre (and, by implication, making herself into his adored wife, Eurydice, whom he lost, tragically, twice), she sings of how James first drove her away, then when she took the bait, closed the door to their relationship and moved on, even though she was more than willing to return. Her pleading refrain - "But it was there for us...." - movingly expresses her regret for ending the relationship, a move he had essentially forced upon her by his behavior.
Page 470 - Spoiled Girl tanks
Carly Simon had her twelfth album, Spoiled Girl, pretty much mapped out when and Russ Kunkel began living together (an awkward situation as James Taylor was Russ's "boss"). Stephen Holden generously called the August 1985 release a "spicy, lighthearted romp," but Carly admits she lost her judgment when making it. Indeed, she used nine different producers, it hewed to the trendy dance music sound that was not her natural metier, and though the album may have sounded "lighthearted," she'd approached it with desperation. The album, for the most part, tanked.
Joni and Carole were in similar situations: Joni Mitchell had made, with husband Larry Klein, a synthesizer-driven album, Dog Eat Dog, which the radio stations were ignoring. Carole King made the synthesizer-driven Speeding Time with also fared poorly. All three women were past age forty.
By the time Spoiled Girl was released, Carly and Russ were officially engaged. James and Kathryn were married in December. Carly moved Russ into the romantic Vineyard home - with its beautiful fields and woods - that she'd lived in with James and which became hers in the divorce (she lives there, to this day).
Page 474 - Coming Around Again
"You do the bass part - you can do it," Russ told Carly, when she started writing her thirteenth album, Coming Around Again. He was her coach and support system (as well as, on one track, her producer). She credits Russ with returning her to her true musical self after a few years in the trying-to-be-trendy wilderness. The title song originated as an assignment: Carly would write the music for the Mike Nichols - directed film version of Nora Ephron's novel Heartburn (starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep). The song is a thumbnail autobiographical sketch, as is the lingering plaint - "I believe in love...It's comin' around again." Released as a single along with the movie, Coming Around Again hit the # 18 spot and was Carly's biggest hit in six years. Two classic Carly lust songs, Give Me All Night and All I Want Is You, became minor hits, and the album went platinum. (Note: Carly Simon filmed an exquisite full length concert - Live From Martha's Vineyard - to promote this album - now on DVD).
Just about the time, May 1987, that the album was released, Carly's relationship with Russ Kunkel had run its course. He says, "The relationship was like a cruise. It had a point of demarcation and it just ended." Carly calls Russ "absolutely precious - a pure and incandescent generous soul. He's like the most innocent Thoroughbred who doesn't want to win the race because he doesn't want to make the other horses lose."
Page 479 - Carly Simon marries Jim Hart
Shortly after the breakup from Russ, Carly took a trip to visit Jake Brackman at his new house in Hudson, New York. Upon leaving for home, Jake waited with her at the train platform where he ran into an old AA buddy of his, Jim Hart. "I introduced her to Jim as "Carly Simon". But, amazingly, Jim didn't know that Jake's friend was a famous singer. They rode together on the train and Jim told Carly about his unique biography. A romance quickly developed.
Jim held his own in Carly's high-powered social world. Jackie Onassis found him absolutely fascinating. Andrea flirted with him. Mike Nichols became his chum. ("Fake it 'til you make it." Jim says, of his ability to mix with this crowd.) And he possessed two qualities that made him a perfect match for Carly: a grandly romantic perspective and high sexuality, a combination of qualities he would later express in his dedication to her of his 2004 self-published volume of poems, Milding: "If a stallion had a goddess...."
One day in the fall of 1987 Jim called Jake, saying, "I need to talk to you - you're the only one who knows both of us. I want to ask Carly to marry me. What do you think?" Jake hesitated; then he said, in his slow, low voice: "She's the most neurotic woman in the world." He paused, then added, "But she's the only one who's worth it."
Two days before Christmas 1987, as a light snow drizzled the Vineyard, Carly's and Jim's families gathered in an Edgartown church for their wedding. "Carly looked like a Russian heroine" in her fur-cowl-necked, tight-bodiced white dress," Jim says. As the pair ferried off to their honeymoon in Nantucket, Carly's loved ones were delighted that she was happy. They hoped that this mutual caretaking would work, permanently.
