Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (48 page)

Carly's persona—sexy
and
uptown hip—also matched the moment. Between the fiercely anti–“sex object” early feminism and the so-called padded-shoulder “power suit” feminism of later years lay that glamorous little wedge of early 1970s when feminism had an in-your-face sex-focus and a Manhattan-cocktail-party panache.

First, the sex part: Ingrid Bengis's
Combat in the Erogenous Zone;
Erica Jong's erotic
Fruits & Vegetables
and ribald super–best seller
Fear of Flying
(with its famous “zipless fuck”); “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” by Anne Koedt; “The Politics of Orgasm” by Susan Lydon; Ellen Frankfort's
Village Voice
columns-turned-book,
Vaginal Politics;
Shulamith Firestone's
The Dialectic of Sex;
Kate Millett's
Sexual Politics;
the swaggering lustiness of Amazonian Germaine Greer (despite her book's title
The Female Eunuch
); lines like “My sexual rage was the most powerful single emotion in my life” in Kempton's
Esquire
essay—sex-forwardness
sold
the women's movement in those years, when the shedding of “hang-ups” was a political mission, “promiscuous” was as reviled a word as “nigger,” and monogamy was something good people didn't “believe” in. (Carly makes the
sotto voce
quip women her age often share in these long-AIDS-sombered times during which the word “slut” has slipped back into usage, “
Young
women have no idea what it was like in those days…” And, in Lesley Dormen's novel,
The Best Place to Be,
late-fiftysomething narrator Grace Hanford says, of the very early 1970s, “Those were the days when you slept with every man who so much as caught your eye across a party.”) That lack of apology about sexuality gave the movement its boldest victory: January 1973's U.S. Supreme Court decision in
Roe v. Wade,
which made abortion on demand legal.

Then there was the chic. The almost–50 percent Seven Sisters alumna-staffed
Ms.
magazine—which included many extremely
un-
dowdy editors (
Vogue
-stylish Ingeborg Day, who also wrote dark erotica, and edgy fashion editor Mary Peacock are just two) and famous editors (Gloria Steinem)
*
and editors on the cusp of fame (Alice Walker edited there just before she catapulted to renown via
The Color Purple
)—had so much glamour that Robert Redford actually kept a secret office within
Ms.
's suite. Feminist editors of that era might have expressed a preference for, say, Billie Holiday over the music of a white publisher's daughter, but it was the publisher's daughter whose life and issues more closely matched most of their own. And beyond the reverse snobbery of liberal-political Manhattan, Carly's example was less ambivalently welcomed. “Women adored her,” says Arlyne Rothberg, who quickly took over as her manager from Jerry Brandt, and who would notice, over the years, that when a newborn girl was given the name Carly—virtually unheard of before 1971—“it was usually the mother who had chosen it.” “Women looked at her and said: ‘Oh, you can be gorgeous and smart and educated…
and
be a rock star?'”

Lucy Simon had sensed, when they were retiring their duo in 1966, that Carly's lower-register voice would be commercial—and by late 1970 that voice had ripened to a confounding richness (it could bleat
and
purr at the same time) that mirrored Carly's fluid looks. (When Holzman's A&R man Steve Harris first met Carly, “there was something about her [face] I couldn't put my finger on,” he's said.) The voice Holzman thought “tough and sinewy” was called by one reviewer “poised and dusky,” and “lightly cutting” and “almost harsh” by
The New York Times
's Mike Jahn, who added that it brought “a breathtaking note of anguish” to her “pastel” scenarios and “combines” with her pronounced femininity “to cause in the listener a wonderful fascination and curiosity. She strikes several emotions at once and makes them feel glad to be struck.” Stephen Holden, writing in
Rolling Stone
(he would later move to
The New York Times
), praised her “radiant vocal personality,” adding, with faint-praise-turned-f: “She has the whitest of white voices and uses it well, singing full throat with her faultless enunciation. Her almost literal note-for-note phrasing of songs is uniquely ingenuous.”
People
's Jim Jerome would sum it up by calling Carly's “one of the most powerfully affecting voices in pop rock.”

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. They 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. “I don't mind if the producer and singer don't get along; typically, the fighting brings out some very good stuff; that's why I like to hide,” he says. Holzman 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. Jac Holzman was “buoyed” by the finished product. “The songs were sophisticated and openhearted, which is a rare combination. Some of the lyrics reminded me of Stephen Sondheim, with their keen sense of the crosscurrents of life and the human condition. Though Carly sang with a rock backing, her polished, well-bred voice was of a kind rarely heard in that context.”

Holzman had designer Bill Harvey give the album cover “a soft, matte finish, a mark of substance and quality.” The photo showed Carly in a tight-bodiced, antique lace dress with lace curtains behind her—her head, to use her own later words, “strategically dipped” on one palm; her legs, as Holzman pointedly put it, “gloriously akimbo,” the skirt tent-taut over the heels-together knees-out underneath. 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. Carly's face, Holzman has said, bore “a challenging look, as if she was waiting for the world to finally notice her.”

Carly Simon
and its single “That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be” were released in February, and Jonathan Schwartz did his longtime friend the favor of giving the single heavy play on his radio show. Along with Carly's sisters, he would soon be shocked at her sudden astounding fame. (Carly's reaction to Joey's and Lucy's stunned understanding that she had upturned the sisters' expected order of things? “Yes, there was guilt,” says her second husband, Jim Hart. “But let's get this straight:
First,
there was
glee
—
then
there was guilt.”) Jac's plan was to get the song to female ears. “I knew that once women heard it, we had a shot.” So he sent extra copies to the secretaries and receptionists at the radio stations. Holzman believes the record's national buzz came from them, their consciousness piqued by the new feminist spirit. By the time Carly came back from her brief vacation to Jamaica with Don Rafelson, “That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be” was #35.

The single and 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 she
wouldn't have
to perform.

Now Holzman's A&R man, Steve Harris, took over. Steve had seen Carly's face take on “a beauty [that] was completely transforming” when she'd picked up her guitar and sang, when they'd first met, through mutual friend David Steinberg. He
had
to get her onstage. Harris called Doug Weston, the owner of L.A.'s Troubadour, and got her booked for three nights, starting April 6, opening for Cat Stevens.

With a tremulous voice that few but Neil Young could equal, twenty-two-year-old Stevens (real name: Steven Demetri Georgiou) was the British-raised son of a Greek Cypriot father and a Swedish mother. Dark, hirsute, and handsome, he had become an adulated star (he was an “exceptional singer…without question a serious, original artist,” raved the
L.A. Times
's Robert Hilburn) by way of the catchy but patronizing (a young man is telling his ex-girlfriend to be careful) “Wide World,” from his
Tea for the Tillerman.
He would eventually have a second hit in the exquisite “Morning Has Broken.”

After nailing the deal (“I don't remember the details, but Weston probably wanted custody of Carly's firstborn child—that's what he was like in those days”), Steve called Carly and said, “We're going to the Troubadour, on April 6!” 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.” Steve went over to Carly's apartment and tried to soothe her over the obstacles: one, her fear of flying. Steve said he, too, was afraid (this was true)—they'd attack it with Valium and cocktails. Next, Carly's lack of a drummer she liked. In a sheepish effort to nix the date, Carly said she wanted a drummer who sounded “exactly” like Russ Kunkel—she knew, because she'd been “following James's career with a fine-toothed comb,” as she puts it, that Kunkel was off touring with Taylor (with Carole and Jo Mama) 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.”

• • •

In March, the L.A. pop music community received enthusiastic advance word of Carly by way of an article, headlined “Carly Simon Has Impressive Album,” by Robert Hilburn. “Ever so rarely an album by a new or virtually unknown artist arrives with little or no fanfare that turns out to be one of the classics of the year,” Hilburn opened, in the
L.A. Times.
“In 1971, it may well be Carly Simon.” He grouped her as “one of those individualistic singer-writers that one almost instinctively associates with such artists as…[Randy] Newman, Laura Nyro, and Joni Mitchell.” He was struck by her “strong, always vigorous point of view,” and he analyzed her single: “Miss Simon (and cowriter Jacob Brackman) gives a rather stinging picture of the whole courtship/marriage attitude. She opens the song by painting a rather somber, tragic forecast for the marriage potential…then…concludes [the song with] the almost inevitable resolution, based on family expectation and emotional fatigue, to proceed [with the marriage] anyway.”

Russ Kunkel told his new friend James Taylor about the gig; Taylor, who may have remembered Carly and Lucy from the Mooncusser in the Vineyard, said he'd catch it.

Carly and Steve flew out to L.A. several days early, alighting amid the palm trees. The young woman who'd lived in France and traveled to England was amazed at how “provincial” she was—how “backward in terms of my expansion into the world; this was a whole new world for me—how could I have lived that long and gone nowhere?”

By now, the fever of having a hit record and an engagement at the top rock club in L.A. was hitting her. At a dinner party she met towering Michael Crichton, a.k.a. “Big Boy.” “She went out with him a couple of times before the gig,” Steve says, “so we were having a great time and the idea of performing was somewhere in the back of her mind.” She fell in love with her future at the Troubadour rehearsal, fell in love with the idea of having her own band: bass guitarist Jimmy Ryan, pianist Paul Glanz, and drummer Andy Newmark would stay with her. Rehearsing with Russ Kunkel in the darkness of the Troub, “I was in awe of him,” she's said. (Leah Kunkel arrived and saw Carly sitting on her husband's lap. Leah recalls reaching out to shake Carly's hand “and say[ing]: ‘I'm Leah—Russ's
wife,
' and off his lap Carly came.”)

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 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.

When Danny Kortchmar learned that Carly Simon was a rising star, he thought:
Of course
she and James will end up together; it wasn't a matter of
if
but of “What took you so long?” But tonight was not yet their time.