“In the case of Marvin Gaye, I went into his dressing room to ask if he wanted something to drink, and he said, ‘Can you please stick out your tongue for a minute?’ So I stuck out my tongue, and he grabbed it with his mouth… I couldn’t release my tongue for a while, because he was sucking so hard—an experience never to be forgotten. I was so naïve, really; essentially puritanical like my father, so I was confused by Marvin’s behavior.”
Meanwhile, sensational sounds were beaming in from California. The Doors, from L. A., were dominant with “Light My Fire.” Jimi Hendrix, a new guitar warlock out of London, literally was on fire. The San Francisco bands—the Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother—were changing popular music. Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick and Janis Joplin of Big Brother and the Holding Company were proving that women could more than hold their own fronting a modern rock band. Carly found this encouraging.
Her sister Lucy married Dr. David Levine in March 1967. It was a low-key wedding, held in the sunroom at Riverdale, with only family present. After the ceremony, the Simon sisters repaired to Joanna’s apartment on East Fifty-fifth Street and opened some champagne, without their mother.
For Carly, her sister’s marriage coincided with an onset of fears and phobias. She could hardly explain it to her therapist, but she knew she felt weird, as if she’d lost her best friend and protector. She kept telling herself that she didn’t want to be “in show business,” but that she was somehow, irresistibly, perhaps fatally, attracted to its dangers. Her image of herself was as a songwriter who recorded her own music, but not a performer who put herself on the line, every night, for her audience. That was more stress than she could imagine.
Summer 1967. Carly wanted out of the city, and took a job teaching guitar at Indian Hill, an upscale arts camp near Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Emanuel Ax ran the chorus. Andrew Bergman did drama. Carly loved the piney woods of the camp, and spent the summer walking around barefoot. Her campers, boys and girls, totally adored her. One was Ellen Epstein:
“I was fifteen years old, from New Rochelle, when I went to camp and Carly Simon was my counselor. She took me under her wing, taught me a lot about the guitar—it was totally thrilling. She was this totally attractive and sparkling presence, and everyone wanted to be around her. She molded the camp rock-and-roll band—Lust 4 Five—around her music [including a young piano player named Billy Mernit]. She was always working on new songs, especially one called ‘Secret Saucy Thoughts of Suzy.’ We spent that summer working on my solo showcase for the talent show, an arrangement of ‘The Water Is Wide’ that Carly wrote for me to sing. I loved Carly so much that when camp was over my parents engaged Carly to give me private guitar lessons that branched into things like wardrobe and even cooking. Carly Simon could make a mean chicken fricassee. Then she fixed me up with her brother, who became my boyfriend, and so we were like family in those days.”
Indian Hills’s star counselor arrived a few days late. His name was Jacob Brackman, and he taught writing to the more literate campers. A 1965 Harvard graduate, he was an ambitious young film critic who contributed to Esquire and other hip periodicals. He also was just about to publish a major article in Playboy on the insurgent underground press. Jake Brackman was coolness personified, and at first he proved resistant to Carly’s charms. Jake had a girlfriend, and Carly was in the midst of a flirtation with one of her young music campers. But gradually Carly won Jake over: not with sex, but with her humor and wit. For Carly, it was an incredible blessing that she was not physically attracted to tall, handsome, charming Jake Brackman. She loved Jake for his mind; she knew his talent and sensibility might be able to supply lyrics for the melodies that were coursing through her musical soul. She was able to confide to Jake in a way that previously had been only for her lovers. Carly and Jake formed an unshakable bond at Indian Hill during the summer of 1967, a meeting of the minds that would be crucial for both their careers in years to come.
Jake Brackman was a big hit in Riverdale when Carly brought him home in September. Her mother liked him, and he fit right into the Simon family circle. Lucy: “I think that Jake reminded Carly of Willie Donaldson—someone smart, witty, very sophisticated. We knew at once that they could make a great team someday.” Beginning that autumn, Carly started hanging out with Jake and his hip friends. Jake was an aspiring screenwriter, and in his apartment she met the young director Terry Malick, actor Jack Nicholson, the brilliant Czech émigré director Milos Forman, and other up-and-coming people in the arts. In Jake’s pot-smoke-filled living room she played her guitar for Jerry Brandt, a young promoter (married to actress Janet Margolin) whose interests spanned New York’s teenage nightlife and Andy Warhol’s avant-garde extravaganza Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Brandt was interested in Carly, and told her to write some new songs and make a demo recording. Maybe they could do something together, someday.
PLAY WITH ME
After camp, in the autumn of 1967, Carly worked at Newsweek magazine as an editorial assistant. She also began a career in the jingle business, writing pithy commercial ditties to order. She contracted with an agency whose clients included cosmetic firms, candy companies, car dealerships, and some banks in rural New England. Some of the most talented musicians in New York worked in these Midtown Manhattan jingle factories, churning out commercial music for hire. In the jingle studios, Carly worked among famous stars such as Ron Carter, who played bass with Miles Davis; and singer-songwriter Jake Holmes, whose songs, such as “I’m Confused,” would be appropriated by Led Zeppelin. In this period, Carly wrote and recorded jingles for Chevrolet, J. C. Penney department stores, and a New Hampshire bank, among other clients. This was an education for her, a stark look at music as a “commodity”—something to be written, recorded, broadcast, and then thrown away. Carly: “The good side of the jingle experience was that it gave me a discipline I’d never had before. It put my head on a totally different plane, having to think about tomato ketchup for a week. The bad side was having to find music for things like fabric softeners. My I. Q. took quite a dip in that era.”
As 1968 dawned, Carly kept working on her own material. One of the jingles evolved into a new song, “Summer Is a Wishing Well.” Another, called “Play with Me,” impressed her friends, so Carly cut a demo, produced by John McClure. Carly: “I was writing songs and sending them to people I admired in hope that I could make some money from the publishing. My mother had a strict attitude toward allowances—none. I sent my songs to Dionne Warwick, whom I’d met; her collaborator Burt Bacharach; Cass Elliot [of the Mamas and the Papas]; and Judy Collins, one of my heroes. I never heard from any of them until years later, but never anything about my songs.” A tape of “Play with Me” was also sent to record producer Jerry Ragovoy, who had the best ears for new talent in the music industry. He heard a typical Simon Sisters lullaby, offset by coy sex kitten lyrics, and it just didn’t work for him.
He asked Carly to stop by the office. He told her he loved her voice, “but I just don’t know who you are—musically. A country singer? A folk singer? A jazz singer? A rock-and-roll singer? I don’t know what I could do with you.”
Carly crossed her long, miniskirted legs, and said, “Jerry—isn’t that kind of exciting?”
Ragovoy passed.
“My high hopes for this song were… dashed,” Carly said later.
Indeed, in this era, Carly’s new music had outrageous competition. Joni Mitchell’s album Song to a Seagull featured gems such as “Night in the City” and “Cactus Tree.” Laura Nyro’s album Eli and the Thirteenth Confession was a staple of the new “progressive rock” FM radio (in stereo sound) format. Carly’s disc jockey friend Jonathan Schwartz was playing both Mitchell and Nyro in heavy rotation on New York’s premier radio station, WNEW-FM. Judy Collins was at the top of her game, featuring the songs of Leonard Cohen on her new album, even charting with a hit record of “Who Knows Where the Times Goes?” Carly could only hope, somehow, to break through the heavy new female talent that seemed t
o be blocking her path. At the same time, she enrolled for a term at the Juilliard School of Music in New York, to learn how to annotate the intriguing new melodies she was hearing in her head.
In this period, she began dating Milos Forman, whose film Closely Watched Trains had established him as a star of the New Wave of European directors. “He put me in his movie Taking Off, starring Buck Henry. The film was about a series of people doing auditions, and I was only one of them. I was appalled when I saw it, because I looked so goony, and so gawky. Oh, God! I suspect I had a certain energy that he liked, but it wasn’t a big part at all.”
This was after the 1967 “Summer of Love,” and like most young people, Carly threw herself into the river of so-called free love that energized the American sixties—now seen as a historic two-decade window of sexual promiscuity that occurred between the advent of the birth control pill and the scourge of AIDS. Carly climbed through this window along with the rest of her generation; the mores of the day were almost such that it was poor manners not to go to bed on the first date. “I still had a hard time sleeping alone,” Carly recalled, “so I never did. There was no reason to…. I always had these constant, random thoughts about sex when I was in my twenties, thoughts that made you want to get into bed with just about anyone.” Andrea Simon sagely advised Carly that she should be in love with every man she slept with; the result was that Carly convinced herself that she really was in love with all of them.
In the spring of 1968, Carly contributed a song she’d written to a private foundation project that matched local rock groups with the classical music community. A band called Elephant’s Memory was chosen to play her song at Carnegie Hall. Like many new bands, they were integrating jazzy horns into the basic rock band mix, a wave that was sweeping the music scene at that point. At first there was a rapport between Carly and the band, and they asked her to be their singer without an audition. Carly signed some papers, and the new-look Elephant’s Memory played some gigs around New York, sometimes opening for Al Kooper’s new horn-based group, Blood, Sweat and Tears. Carly was joined onstage by a male vocalist for a few shows, but then he got fired. “I hated the gigs,” Carly later wrote. “We played clubs where they smoked dope and cigarettes at the same time. I couldn’t hear myself and I kept losing my voice.” After a few weeks the band—most of them living in the poverty hole of the Lower East Side—began to resent Carly’s uptown polish and attitude. They thought she was spoiled and uptight. She didn’t want to rehearse in their grungy, slumlike studio. They told her that if she wanted to be in the band she had to get off her fat ass and help them haul their speakers. (Carly: “I did have a fat ass, by the way.”) Tensions finally blew up at the club Wheels, when the band was rehearsing for the night’s gig. The seven musicians verbally beat Carly up, and she went home and let the band go on without her that night. That was effectively the end of Carly Simon as a band singer. (A few years later, Elephant’s Memory worked with John Lennon when the former Beatle moved to New York. They also tried, without success, to sue Carly for songwriting royalties after she had hit records in the 1970s.)
Midway through 1968, Carly quit her jobs and renewed her crusade to get back into the music business. She asked her brother for a loan, to build a war chest for a signing campaign to land a recording contract, but Peter Simon turned her down, very reluctantly. “It wasn’t like I was rolling in money,” he says. “Neither my sisters nor I had that much to spare.” Carly’s mother loaned her some money instead. That’s when she met Dan Armstrong.
Armstrong was the premier electric guitar merchant in New York. His shop, Dan Armstrong Guitars, on West Forty-eighth Street, featured the choicest vintage Telecasters and Gibson SGs, and was the one-stop repair shop in the city. Eric Clapton jammed with Danny in the back room when he was in town. Danny kept the store open late for Jimi Hendrix, who liked to come in around midnight. As a luthier, a maker of guitars, Dan was the hottest guy in the business. In that year, 1968, he designed a new line of bass guitars for the Ampeg corporation of New Jersey; these were luminous instruments built from clear, see-through Plexiglas; guitars that soon became famous for their excellent electronics, interchangeable pickups, and an arsenal of long, sustained notes reverberating through the unusual plastic bodies. Soon Jack Bruce of Cream was using a Dan Armstrong bass guitar, and was soon followed by every other rock bassist who could get his hands on one of Danny’s prized instruments.
Dan Armstrong was ten years older than Carly, was breaking up with his wife, and was the father of four children. He had long hair and a bushy mustache that reminded Carly of Clark Gable as Rhett Butler. “He was such a comely guy, when I first met him in his guitar shop.” Carly had brought her Martin guitar in for some repairs. He knew her as the singer from Elephant’s Memory, but she identified herself as a Juilliard student.
Over time, Carly got to know Armstrong as a keen musician, totally arrogant, highly opinionated, and a bit of a Neanderthal, with arms too long for his body. But there was a real spark between them, and Carly and Danny went at it like a pair of tigers, making love in cars and outdoors, most memorably under the arches of Central Park’s bridges. He dared her to make love with him in a taxi, and she went for it. Her family liked him but thought he was too far beneath Carly, socially—which was true. He also didn’t think much of her music (except her singing), told her she would be much happier if she forgot about a music career, and generally played her chronic low self-esteem like a violin.
“Danny was a real trip,” Peter Simon says. “He was basically a good guy, and I liked him in part because he had, by far, the best marijuana in New York; in fact, the best I’d ever had up to that point. That summer of ’68, for me, will always be ‘The Summer of Danny’s Pot.’ My girlfriend Ellen and I double-dated with him and Carly a few times, and the thing I always noticed was that Danny could have treated Carly with a little more respect. He was a guy who had to be the god of his household, always had to have the upper hand in everything.” With a less-than-supportive boyfriend, Carly often leaned on Peter that year, sometimes asking him to accompany her to stressful auditions and jingle recording sessions.
Her affair with Dan Armstrong lasted almost two years, some of it spent in his squalid apartment above his guitar shop after he moved it to LaGuardia Place in Greenwich Village. She was mis erable through most of it, her ambition thwarted, her boyfriend an egocentric blockhead with zero interest in seeing Carly Simon succeed.
FEAR OF FLYING
In 1969, Lucy Simon was pregnant with her first child and music was pouring out of her in a torrent of quarter notes. She was setting poems to these melodies, using words by William Blake, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, and Longfellow, among others. Lucy was offered a recording deal with the Columbia Children’s Record Library. Thus were the Simon Sisters reborn, temporarily, in 1969.
Carly and Lucy cut eleven songs with arranger/ conductor Sam Brown early in the year. “Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod” reemerges in a folksy banjo arrangement and leads off the album. The rest of the songs continue in the Sisters’ chamber-lullaby vein and are mostly vehicles for Lucy’s maturing soprano. Carly is heard best on “The Lobster Quadrille,” and especially as a solo presence on “A Red, Red Rose,” set to the verses of Robert Burns. (Dan Armstrong was at the “Rose” session and suddenly realized he’d been wrong about Carly. Her soft, dusky phrasing caught up with him, and he finally got it—that his girlfriend could be an important star someday.) The new album would be released later in the year as The Simon Sisters Sing The Lobster Quadrille and Other Songs for Children.
One night Carly and Danny walked into Joanna’s darkened apartment. Suddenly the lights came on and Joey’s boyfriend, ballet star Edward Villella, began leaping around the living room wearing only a tiny sock over his privates. This turned out to be a “ball warmer” Carly had knitted for Danny; she’d persuaded Villella to model it for him as a kind of cosmic giggle.
It was around this period that Carly borrowe
d some money from her mother and rented her first place alone, a sunny one-bedroom flat on East Thirty-fifth Street, not far from the new Murray Hill digs of her now-inseparable friend and cowriter Jake Brackman. Andrea Simon drove in from Riverdale, scoured the apartment, put fresh paper in the kitchen drawers, and changed the locks. Carly Simon now had her own home, at last. Dan Armstrong was getting the uneasy feeling that his days in Carly’s life might be numbered.
Lucy had her baby, a girl named Julie, in June 1969. Carly was overcome with mixed emotions as she stared at her niece through the thick window of the maternity ward. She decided to write a song called “Julie Through the Glass,” about how much this moment had moved her. She felt so confused. On the one hand was a desire for a family and the stability that Lucy had with her husband. On the other was her yearning for artistic recognition and a career. Meanwhile, her louche boyfriend was dealing kilos of marijuana out of her apartment, and he already had a bunch of kids. Carly began easing away from Danny that summer, when man walked on the moon for the first time. She now spent more time collaborating with Jake, trying to get something going with a new melody she was working on.
More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon Page 11
