“Home Again” makes the same point, but more worriedly, yet “Way Over Yonder,” set to a deep gospel melody, the final song in the “home” trilogy, seems to say: yes, a crew of renegades from dysfunctional traditional homes can create its own nurturing community. “You’ve Got a Friend” is a vow of loyalty, leaving no question as to the salience of posttraditional ties. The arrangement Carole wrote for it opens it with the solemnity befitting a congregation’s favorite hymn. Stephanie says, “I think Carole wrote ‘You’ve Got a Friend’ for all of us.”
When Carole tried out “You’ve Got a Friend” on Toni Stern, Toni thought it was “too obvious,” and when she tried it out on Cynthia Weil, Cynthia thought it was “too long.” But Cynthia’s overwhelming feeling—while watching Carole, who was in New York on the James tour, sitting at the piano at the Mann-Weil apartment, playing the new songs she’d composed—was great surprise. “I had no idea that Carole could ever write lyrics or was ever interested in writing lyrics; it was a complete shock, because Gerry had been so powerful.” Cynthia believes that having a different kind of marriage helped make the leap possible: “Charlie was a supportive husband, instead of the one who was leading the way. Carole was able to be her own lyricist and express herself. She’d come into her own.”
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 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.)
Writer had been almost all Gerry-Carole songs, but in this new album, Carole included only one Gerry coauthorship—“Smackwater Jack,” a rocking yarn about a colorful western outlaw. She would include two songs she cowrote with Toni, both bearing the productive tension between the sometimes-sentimental pro songwriter and the cool bohemian. Carole had written most of the lyric of “Where You Lead” as well as the music, but then she got stuck. She handed the incomplete song to Toni and said: “I can’t write the bridge to this; if you can figure out the bridge, you can get credit for the song.” Toni looked over the lyrics—it was another full-throttled loyalty song but over-simply conceived*—and thought, “I would never write a lyric about a woman following a man!” If the girl was going to follow the guy, it would damn well be on her terms. Toni lay down on her couch and the words fell out: “I always wanted a real home, with flowers on the windowsill. But if you want to live in fucking New York City, honey, you know I will.” Carole cut the “fucking,” asked Lou if the “New York City” was okay (he said yes), and the song was a go.
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 says 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 Late’ is 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.
Tapestry was recorded in January 1971, when everybody had just come off a leg of the James–Carole–Jo Mama tour. “We were loose, because we’d been playing a lot, and we were looking forward to recording,” says Charlie. Carole, Charlie, Danny, Joel, Ralph, and James piled into snug Studio B at A&M Studios on Sunset and La Brea; Lou Adler had expert sound engineer Hank Cicalo on hand to crisply separate the sound of every instrument. “Lou and Hank knew just how to mic Carole,” says Toni, who arrived with her dog and watched everyone across the control booth glass for the first of the three-hour sessions. Carole handed out the charts while tending to Louise and Sherry. Ralph, for whom “little kids were like aliens from another universe,” was “impressed that she could lead a recording session and fully relate to her kids like a hands-on mom, and she didn’t take shit from them, either.” Hank Cicalo found Carole an exception to the difficult rock stars he was used to. “She knows just what she wants on a record,” he said, and when something went wrong with the equipment, “Carole [had] enough of a head on her shoulders to wait until the problem [was] corrected—she’s very professional. Best of all, she makes everyone feel at home. There’s no tension when she’s around.” “The credit for the smoothness of the Tapestry sessions goes to Carole,” says Toni. “She was singer, writer, arranger; she set the mood.”
“It’s Too Late,” “You’ve Got a Friend,” and “I Feel the Earth Move” were nailed in that first session. “Carole would suggest a couple of overdubs and she would overdub a few harmony parts,” says Danny. “‘Done!’ ‘Done!’ ‘Done!’ Snap! Snap! Snap!—three, four, times a day.” The entire album, Carole’s later overdubs and all, was completed in under two weeks. The sessions yielded what John Rockwell of The New York Times would call Carole’s “signature” sound of “consoling chords, full of homey fifths and octaves; [a] relaxed, softly rocking blend of folk music and gentle soul funk.” Her voice (which Jerry Wexler and Mike Stoller had always loved) had attained a confidence. It was strong and theatrically enunciated yet also earnest and breaking: a trusted friend, cajoling you to listen to a mulled-over insight—or a yelp of fun—in a quiet bedroom. Her inclusion of a sombered “Natural Woman” and “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” on which Joni sang background*—like “Up on the Roof” on Writer—told “serious rock” fans not only that she could join the club but that she’d always belonged there.
Just as with Writer, “we didn’t have any expectations here, either; we just wanted to play as good as we could,” says Charlie. Lou Adler alone seemed to know that this was no ordinary album, despite his trademark übercool at the session. When Danny asked Lou if he thought “It’s Too Late,” which featured his solo electric guitar vamp, came off okay, Lou allowed, “Yeah, man, it’s gonna be huge.”
This time the cover was just right: There is Carole in a nubby gray sweater and roomy blue jeans, splay-foot barefoot on her Wonderland window-seat in her unlit living room, working on her needlepoint, with her about-to-pounce cat, Telemecat, comically hogging the camera. Light pours in through the transparent Indian-fabric curtains (which she’d sewn herself), illuminating half of her unsmiling face; glinting off her rippling, frothy hair. Carole looks like the earth mother next door.
Tapestry was released in early February and started to work its way onto the radio. The first two reviews unsettled—even frightened—Lou Adler, who had silently predicted that the album would be to music what Love Story was to movies: The Long Beach Independent and another small paper had dismissed it and had complained of Carole’s “squeaky” voice. (Could Adler have been so off?) But then came Jon Landau’s long review in April in Rolling Stone.
Landau introduced Carole to the serious rock crowd. He recapped her Brill Building career, her switch to singer-songwriter, and then he puzzled out the subtle punch of her new album. There is an “area of feeling on this record that is hard to get at,” he says. “This music is not the product of someone adopting styles and then discarding them…It is an album that takes a stand.” Tapestry, he realizes as he writes, “is an album of surpassing personal intimacy and musical accomplishment…The simplicity of the singing, composition and ultimate feeling achieved the kind of eloquence and beauty that I had forgotten rock is capable of.” The closeness of the musicians registered with Landau: “Every note reminds you that [it] is not the work of pop star hacks diddling around in the studio to relieve their boredom.” He concluded: “Conviction and commitment are the lifeblood of Tapestry and are precisely what makes it so fine…Carole King reaches out towards us and gives everything she
has. And this generosity is so extraordinary that perhaps we can give it another name: passion.”
By June Tapestry had sold a million copies, and 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. “There was hardly an under-thirty soul in the Western hemisphere four years ago who couldn’t hum at least a few bars of ‘It’s Too Late,’” The Washington Post’s Alex Ward would write in 1976. (“How the fuck did you know, man?” Danny asked Lou Adler. In response, “Lou smiled and lit a joint—he just knew,” Danny says.) “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 had become the #1 album in America; it would stay in that position for fifteen weeks. “So Far Away,” backed with “Smackwater Jack,” was released as a single and peaked at #14 in October. By the end of 1971 Tapestry had sold 3 million copies and was still selling 150,000 copies a week. It would be named, by the National Association of Recording Merchandisers, the best-selling album of 1971. 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.”
There was a uniting quality to the album; it was hummed along to by working-class young marrieds pushing strollers and Ph.D.-laden back-to-the-landers, listened to by teenage girls and their mothers. Ironically, though it was the most clearly “white”-niched and non-urban music Carole had ever written, it was only through it that she got credit for how unself-aggrandizingly non-white her more commercial music had always been. Timothy Crouse made the point in Rolling Stone that “Carole King is the most [emphasis added] naturally, unaffectedly black of our white pop stars—black in her phrasing, in the feeling of the songs she composes, and in her deep love of rhythm and blues.” The crossover of the gospel-soul hitmaker to soft rock singer-songwriter was picked up on by young soul performers trying to go mainstream themselves. Of Tapestry’s impact on him as he was starting out with the Commodores, Lionel Richie recently said: “Oh, my God, please! That record was just crazy to me! It was a greatest-hits package in itself.”
Not only did it cross social class, generational, and in some ways racial lines; Tapestry became that rare thing in pop music: a perennial. It would stay in Billboard’s Hot 100 for six years and go on to sell 24 million copies worldwide.
Recorded in March 1971, when Joni 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, its love and relinquishment are crystal clear even while the subject is inscrutable. (Rolling Stone’s Crouse annoyedly declared its references so esoteric, they “passeth all understanding.”) Critics guessed, from its more conventional meters, that it had been written earlier than her breathless, stream-of-consciousness new offerings, like “All I Want,” “Carey,” “Blue,” “California,” “This Flight Tonight”—but they couldn’t know why she’d waited until right now, or why a song with a wistful adieu (“Little Green, be a gypsy dancer…”) bestowed on a mysterious person “call[ed]…Green, and the winters cannot fade her…” belonged in this album. But, of course, the long shadow of Little Green entirely underscored Blue.
Joni was in such a state of fragility when she recorded Blue, “not only did I have no defenses, but other people’s defenses were alternately transparent, which made me very sad.” Joni has described this feeling as akin to being “clairvoyant”—“…or people really tend to aggress on you when you’re weak.” Perhaps thinking of her high school poem “The Fishbowl,” she said, “It was like being in an aquarium, with big fish coming at you…It was like the scene in All That Jazz [in which Bob Fosse ‘dies’], when suddenly the heartbeat becomes dominant.” She was also suffering from a physical infection, the result of an ill-considered alliance, a rebound relationship after James. Still, says Leah Kunkel, who was present for many of the Blue rehearsals, “my impression was that Joni was raw, but she wasn’t weak. I didn’t ever think of her as a shrinking violet.”
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 (on drums and hand percussion on “California,” “Carey,” and “A Case of You”), Stephen Stills (on “Carey”), and James (on “California,” “All I Want,” and “A Case of You”). While Tapestry was an enormous commercial success, one whose own musicians, while they enjoyed playing on it, didn’t think it was such a big deal (“What did I know?” says Danny Kortchmar. “I loved the Isley Brothers”), Blue was a more moderate success (it peaked in the Top 20 in September) that 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 moment 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, while playing on the album, it was the same as hearing ‘Hey Joe’ or ‘Purple Haze.’” During the Blue sessions, “She was harder on herself than she was on anybody else; she was always trying to perfect her performance,” says Russ.
The cover of Blue (designed by Gary Burden, the husband of “lady of the Canyon” Annie Burden) was a departure from Joni’s previous albums. No Joni paintings, no esoteric feminine symbols. Rather, the cover was that of a jazz singer’s album: a blue-tinted Tim Considine* performance head shot of a passionate Joni, as if mid–torch song. Like the cover of a Billie Holiday or an Ella Fitzgerald album, it was forthright.
Tapestry and Blue provided two different views of the new freedom women were creating for themselves. While Carole had found (or remade) a “home,” restless Joni was still “traveling, traveling, traveling.” While Tapestry sprang from the life experience of a young woman who had adapted the options of a changed culture to her own life and ultimately found loyalty and creativity (and while the example of its enormous success created opportunities for other women in music), the freedom and creativity that Blue’s narrator has staked her life upon were obtained by a decision that was supposed to have been liberating but has haunted and dogged her, exacting its price. Furthermore, love—for this woman, Joni, who (male) critics duly noted was “no longer the innocent of her earlier days” (Don Heckman, of The New York Times) and who was “a freelance romantic, searching for permanent love” (Rolling Stone’s Crouse)—was not the adventure it had been a few years ago. She now knows how love subtracts from autonomy (“I love you when I forget about me,” in “All I Want”); she can recite all her faults (“Oh, I’m so hard to handle, I’m selfish and I’m sad,” in “River”); she sees through men’s bullshit (“Constantly in the darkness? Where’s that at?” in “A Case of You”); and she rues the destructiveness that’s come with her choices (“I’ve gone and lost the best baby that I ever had”); yet she so cannot escape the crazy integrity that’s behind them, her responsibility feels unbearable: “I wish I had a river, I could skate away on.”
One critic negatively prognosticated the risk in Blue’s r
awness—Heckman “suspect[ed] this will be the most disliked of Miss Mitchell’s recordings, despite the fact that it attempts more and makes greater demands on her talent than any of the others”—but women who, like Joni, had reached their late twenties eschewing commitment despite its risks found the album tremendously consoling and affirming. Decades after its release, two women fans told Joni, speaking of Blue, “You were our Prozac.” Younger women writers, in all media, would take from it a bracing lesson; the novelist-essayist Meghan Daum recently said: “If there’s anything I’ve learned from listening to [Joni] over the years, it’s that if you don’t write from a place of excruciating candor, you’ve written nothing.” Rolling Stone’s Crouse got it; he saw this “very powerful” album as a gamble, and one well taken: “In portraying herself so starkly, she has risked the ridiculous to achieve the sublime.”
Joni—who by now had the audacity to think of herself as a sacrificing artist, like her adored Van Gogh, who’d cut off his ear for truth (while Carole thought of herself as, as her then-publicist reductively put it, “a housewife”)—viewed her nervous breakdown as the price of Blue. With her trademark immodesty, she has likened Blue to a Charlie Parker “pure opera of the soul” and has called it “probably the purest emotional record that I will ever make in my life…[T]here is not one false note in that album. I love that record more than any of them, and I’ll never be that pure again.”
Since personal breakthroughs can reflect a shared mood, and since a feeling “in the air” can ballast individual psyches, it was probably not an accident that Joni was writing the songs for Blue and Carole was writing the songs for Tapestry while a demo tape of songs written and sung by Carly Simon was finally being heard by a record executive. He would take her out of the shadows and catapult her toward musical stardom at the very same moment, the summer of 1970, that the new movement, feminism or women’s liberation, was being lobbed into the public sphere. “We were already feeling like pioneers—with birth control, with psychedelics; we were already feeling empowered,” says Leah Kunkel, of women her age on the music scene.
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