She had notated the song, as she had learned at Juilliard. The melody had grown out of a freelance job, writing background music for a television documentary, Who Killed Lake Erie? She liked the song, but was completely blocked on the lyrics. She gave Jake a demo tape that had her singing la-la’s instead of words. He thought of the stories Carly had told him about her childhood, and began working with images that had stayed with him: her ailing father smoking in the dark, ignoring her. Her preoccupied mother reading magazines but not forgetting to say good night. Jake and Carly spent hours on her sofa trading lines and lyrics back and forth, deep in the throes of an intensely experienced collaboration. Jake was trying to write for Carly, as he later put it, “like a playwright writing for an actress,” using her biography as a springboard for the lyrics that would define her forthcoming career.
Meanwhile, Carly had another new song, “Rains in My Heart,” which she and Lucy sang on Dick Cavett’s TV talk show after they’d performed “Winkin’” to promote their new record. The sisters wore matching gold dresses, Carly’s offset by a pair of sexy black tights. (She also had a sore on her chin that layers of TV makeup couldn’t hide.) Carly took the lead vocal as Lucy descanted behind her, but the new song was tuneless and sad, not the kind of song to make any impact in the hot summer of ’69.
Carly and Danny didn’t make it to the Woodstock Festival in August. She saw the pictures of naked mud-smeared kids massed at a farm upstate, and decided that it wasn’t for her. Around then, she agreed to become the public face of a fast-food fried chicken company that Jake and some friends were trying to launch, but this opportunity never materialized.
Late 1969. There was a much-anticipated total eclipse of the sun in the Northeast. It was considered a special cosmic event. Carly’s younger brother and his friends were repairing to the tip of Cape Cod to experience near totality. Some of Jake’s friends were talking about chartering a plane to fly to Nova Scotia, where the observer would achieve total totality.
Carly stayed in New York, in part because she had started to see a new therapist, someone she thought could really help her find her way. The immediate symptom was Carly’s morbid fear of flying. She simply could not get on an airplane without acute panic attacks. She then explained that she felt blocked and constrained in almost every area of her life. The therapist told her he thought he could help her look at things in different ways, and that with sufficient treatment he knew she could move forward. This is what Carly desperately needed to hear, and she saw Dr. Willard Galen, on and off, for the next seventeen years.
Early in 1970, Jake Brackman got Carly together with Jerry Brandt, who was moving into managing talent. Carly played some of her new music for Brandt, who was especially interested in “That’s the Way I Always Heard It Should Be.” This song had a pretty tune and lyrics, by Jake, that expressed a young woman’s frustrations with the limited opportunities for her generation of women—highly educated and ambitious, yet expected to naturally fall into the socially correct roles of wives and mothers. The chorus went, “But you say it’s time we moved in together / And raised a family of our own, you and me / Well, that’s the way I always heard it should be / You want to marry me—we’ll marry.” It was obvious that this song could reverberate within the emerging movement for women’s rights—“women’s liberation”—and be a commercial hit as well. Brandt told Carly he was completely sure he could get her a record deal. He said he would love to manage her, and those magic words: “I’ll put up money for you to do a demo.”
Carly signed up with Jerry Brandt’s management company, and he funded a five-song demo tape produced by musician David Bromberg, a sort of protégée of Bob Dylan’s. Brandt took the tape to Clive Davis at Columbia Records, who was selling millions of Janis Joplin and Sly Stone records and was looking for the next big thing. Later in the day, Brandt told Carly that Clive had listened to the tape and then thrown it across the room, asking Brandt, “What the hell do I want with a Jewish girl from New York?”
Jerry Brandt’s next try was Jac Holzman, who’d founded Elektra Records, the country’s premier folk music label, twenty years earlier. Elektra’s roster was eclectic, from ur-folkies such as Jean Ritchie and Josh White to blues shouters such as Koerner, Ray and Glover. Elektra was big on songwriters—Phil Ochs, Tom Rush, Tim Buckley. The label had branched out to rock with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and then the Doors, whose mega-selling albums had changed Elektra from a small label to a corporation. The queen of Elektra was Judy Collins. Carly was thrilled that she might be in such lofty company.
“From the time I was in high school, all the records I liked were on Elektra. It was such an appealing label. They had artists I liked—Theo Bikel, Judy Henske singing ‘Wade in the Water.’ I loved her. And the Butterfield Band. And Judy Collins, who I admired so much. I emulated her, copied her songs. That she was on Elektra meant a lot to me. Plus Elektra had Nonesuch [the label’s classical music division], and I had a big library of Nonesuch albums. So this was great for me. Elektra had good taste, and seemed to have real values. And I’d heard that Jac Holzman was terrific, a good person.”
Jac Holzman: “Jerry Brandt, who was sidelining into management, brought me a tape and said, ‘Look, I think this girl is rather unusual. Her name is Carly Simon.’ I asked if she was one of the Simon Sisters, because one of my favorite songs was a little lullaby called ‘Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod.’” Holzman explained that he was taking his son Adam to Japan to visit Expo ’70 in Osaka, and that he would listen to the tape over there. “So I’m staying near Lake Hakone in a little inn with paper walls, sleeping on a futon; it’s four in the morning, and I haven’t adjusted to the time difference, so I slip on the Carly Simon tape and listen through headphones.” Jac Holzman loved what he heard. “So there I was in the Japanese countryside, no phone at the inn. I don’t even know how to dial a phone in this country. And I am going to lose this artist! A few days later, back in Tokyo, I call Jerry and tell him I love the tape and definitely want to work with Carly.”
Around this time, Danny Armstrong rang the bell at Carly’s apartment on Thirty-fifth Street. The door was opened by a younger guy, only half dressed—actually Kim Rosen, her brother’s best friend, with whom Carly was having an affair. Sorry, Kim said, Carly wasn’t home. Dan went back to his place and left some messages with Carly’s answering service, but his calls were not returned.
When Jac Holzman returned to New York, he played Carly Simon’s tape for his A&R staff. No one liked it. Carly: “Even though his whole staff had vetoed signing me, Jac was willing to override them. I was signed to Electra Records in 1970.”
“I’d begun therapy,” she said later, “because I was stuck. I wouldn’t fly. I was in love with a man who was degrading, and demoralizing my entire existence, but I felt I’d die if I left him. Then I went into therapy with the genius man of all time. He just moved me so fast from A to B to C… Got me out of living with Joey, where I was so aware of her as the all-powerful big sister, where I was stuck in the same family role I’d been in my whole life, where it was better to be defeated than to be successful. I moved out. I broke up with the creep, got a band together, got a recording contract, even started to fly! It was the most acceleratedly productive period… of my life.”
Part
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II
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A GIRL CALLED ELEKTRA
Sometime in the spring of 1970, Carly Simon hailed a taxi to the Gulf and Western tower at 15 Columbus Circle. She rode the elevator to near the top of the building and walked into the outer office of Elektra Records and told the receptionist that she had an appointment with the company’s president, Jac Holzman. She was told to take a seat and that Mr. Holzman would see her shortly.
She was a bit on edge because the meeting was about who would produce her album for Elektra, and it was crucial to find the right person to help choose the songs, hire the studio, find the musicians, and often arrange the actual music, and supervise the rec
ording and mixing sessions. Carly had only met Holzman when she signed the Elektra contract; this would be their first working meeting. Suddenly she felt a slight sensation, as if the floor were moving under her feet. She quickly suppressed a panic attack. Then she felt it again. Was it dizziness, vertigo?
She stood up and must have looked alarmed; the receptionist told her not to worry, because the Gulf and Western building was so tall that its upper floors actually swayed when the wind blew hard across Central Park.
Elektra Records had been founded in 1950 in the back room of Jac Holzman’s folk music record shop in the Village and had since come a long way, having sold millions of albums by the label’s rock bands, especially the Doors. As Carly was joining the company in 1970, it was being transformed from a successful indie label into a division of corporate entertainment. This happened when the three top independent labels in the recording industry—Elektra, Atlantic, and Warner/ Reprise—were purchased by the Kinney National Company, a parking lot giant run by mogul Steve Ross. Kinney retained the services of the label’s founders (Holzman, Ahmet Ertegun, Mo Ostin) and merged them into a conglomerate called WEA to compete with industry titans EMI, Columbia, and RCA. The sale of the company allowed Elektra to expand further into rock while retaining its folkish allure and its Nonesuch label, one of the first to explore what came to be called world music. Jac Holzman, who’d started as a hi-fi nut, was building a state-of-the-art recording studio for his company in West Hollywood, which he now suggested Carly might use for her first album.
Carly had other ideas and wanted to talk about them. She found Holzman sympathetic, if somewhat remote. He spoke in carefully composed sentences. He had what she called “leadership quality.” He was tall, straight, impersonal, intense. She told people he was like a machine, but with a fluid, imaginative style. He was a doctor’s son, raised in Manhattan. His social geography was similar to hers.
At first Holzman told Carly he thought she was an interpretive singer, not a writer. He gave her albums by Elektra singer-songwriters—Jeff Buckley, Paul Siebel—and said he thought she could cover their songs. He also mentioned Tim Hardin and Donovan. Carly replied that she was interested in writing and presenting her own material, and songs she was working on with Jake Brackman. She mentioned Carole King, a writer more than a performer, as a model for what she wanted to do. She told Holzman that she saw herself as a singer who recorded her songs, not as an interpreter. “If I did that kind of record,” she said later, “I’d have to go out and promote it, but I was too scared of getting on stage. I hated to do that. But I hadn’t really discussed this with Jac or with Jerry Brandt. I almost hadn’t discussed it with myself. It was just more panic.”
Then Carly told Holzman that she hated to fly, and she wanted to record there in New York.
The next item was finding a producer, and Holzman surprised Carly by suggesting she meet with Eddie Kramer, one of the top recording engineers in the business. Originally from South Africa, Kramer had distinguished himself in London working with Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, and Joe Cocker. He was currently designing a million-dollar recording studio for Hendrix in the Village, which Holzman suggested as a possible studio for Carly when the facility opened in June 1970. Kramer, Holzman told her, might be a good fit for her as well. Later, Carly said she was relieved the meeting had gone so well; she wanted to feel she had a home at Elektra, a company named after a princess who killed her father.
Carly auditioned for Eddie Kramer at Jake Brackman’s apartment in Murray Hill. Kramer had heard a cassette of her demo tape and hadn’t been impressed, but had been persuaded that she was talented and that the label would back her up. It was worth a shot. Kramer, a long-haired London rocker, was dressed in a leather jacket, a dirty silk scarf, shades, bell-bottom trousers, and scuffed Chelsea boots. Carly played him some things she was working on, and again he was less than awed—until she played “That’s the Way I Always Heard It Should Be.”
By then, this collaboration between Carly and Jake had evolved into a song of sadness and low expectations, but the lyrics were acutely personal. Carly acted out the song’s differing voices. The singer introduces her dysfunctional family, and then despairs of hateful suburbia and its conflicts. She’s under pressure to be married, but she’s a rebel, sneering at societal norms and sexual imprisonment. The passion in her wants to triumph, but by the third verse, she’s a caged bird living for her husband. The song ends in resignation and a woman’s stifled sense of self, as Carly sings, “We’ll marry,” in a regressed, little-girl voice that has forgotten the brazen alto of the verses and chorus.
Kramer sensed that this song—an ironic take on “women’s lib”—would resonate with young women, and he told her he wanted to work with her. She also played him another new song, called “Dan, My Fling.” Again, this was Jake writing the musical of Carly’s life in the form of a lusty ballad about breaking up with Dan Armstrong, and it was clear it could be a big production, possibly with orchestration, the whole deal. Kramer told Holzman he wanted to do the record, and quickly made a deal with Jerry Brandt to produce Carly, under the supervision of Jac Holzman, at Electric Lady Studios. This was the team that would make the Carly Simon album later in the year.
ELECTRIC LADY
Carly now began a somewhat frantic search for songs. She kept working with Jake Brackman on ideas. She kept trying to get Jac Holzman to accept her as a writer. “He liked my voice,” she said, “but he didn’t want to give me the gift of my own songs. But I kept inserting my own songs into the various demos until he finally said, ‘ Wow—who wrote that one?’”
Carly was listening carefully, nearly every day, to Sweet Baby James, James Taylor’s second album, a heartbroken, visionary sequence of new songs released by Warner Bros. Records in February 1970. Her brother, Peter, played it for her first, and she wasn’t sure what she felt. Then she became obsessed with Taylor’s addictive lullabies and grieving blues. Some of these new songs were indeed stunning. “Sweet Baby James” was a frosty winter lullaby, very melancholy, with a crying steel guitar. “Fire and Rain” was about mental turmoil, and death and loss by suicide. James’s voice had an endearing Carolina twang that especially touched the hearts of his female listeners, and his guitar playing as heard on Sweet Baby James was extremely masterful for someone who was twenty-one when he made this record. Carole King, a hero of Carly’s, played piano on “Steamroller Blues,” which at least showed that this melancholy prophet had a sense of humor. But even a song called “Sunny Skies” was disconsolate, because the singer was so alone in his remote, existential world.
Sweet Baby James was eventually summed up by the song “Country Road,” which describes taking to the highway and disappearing into the land. All over America young people, exhausted by opposition to war and the psychic turmoil of the sixties, were leaving the cities for communal living in the woods. It was the same with young musicians. The music of the Band and Neil Young constituted this movement’s anthems up to that time. Now hippie communes from Maine to California took up James Taylor like magic mushrooms. The album got to number three on Billboard magazine’s chart and sold around three million copies. The “Fire and Rain” single also rose to number three, an almost apocalyptic song that managed to sound soulful and important on AM car radios and the FM dial.
(There was also a critical backlash against Taylor, whom some regarded as a prophet of disengagement, a singer whose self-absorbed navel-gazing distracted his listeners from the epochal cultural energies of the previous few years. A Boston deejay dubbed him “the White Zombie” for his stoned or wooden demeanor in concert. His supporters countered that Taylor’s deeply felt songs concerning his mental state and drug use constituted a sort of unprecedented heroic candor. Both sides were probably right.)
Carly was hooked on Taylor’s album. “It actually took me three or four listenings, to get into Sweet Baby James,” she remembered, “and then there was nothing else—almost no other record—I could play. Everything else around
that theme kind of… paled.”
Around this time Carly took to the highway, heading north to Vermont, where Peter Simon and some friends had bought an old farm on two hundred acres of rolling pasture, with beaver ponds and birch trees. It was down the road from Total Loss Farm, a hardscrabble artistic commune led by the young radical editor Ray Mungo. Peter and his friends, including Kim Rosen, established Tree Frog Farm as a more upscale, Woodstockian commune that emphasized country pursuits, serious gardening (mostly in the nude), and working with animals. Music was big. James Taylor vied with Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Stills and Nash, and the Rolling Stones as the most played artist. Carly came up to the farm a few times to get away from New York and discover whether country life could do anything for her. Eventually the lure of her career always drew her back to Manhattan after a few days of fresh air.
In this era, over the course of several months in 1970, Carly was part of an intense sexual roundelay that left her spiritually exhausted and emotionally spent. This involved the production of a movie Jake Brackman had written, The King of Marvin Gardens, the story of two struggling brothers in a gritty, slumlike Atlantic City. The filming brought a crew of glamorous Hollywood types to New York, including actors Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern. The film’s director was Bob Rafelson, who had worked on The Monkees TV show and was involved with several moderate-budget collaborations with Nicholson. Now the parties at Jake Brackman’s place grew more interesting, and Carly was seen with Jack Nicholson, the hottest star in Hollywood after his star turn in Easy Rider the year before. But Nicholson had a famous girlfriend back in L. A. He gave Carly’s number to his friend Warren Beatty when the actor arrived in town. Carly grew “close” to Beatty, as she put it, for a brief period of time. When Warren returned to the West Coast, she began seeing Bob Rafelson, who needed consolation because he wasn’t getting much from the actors, who felt the script was too bleak. The filming complete, Carly went to Jamaica on holiday with Rafelson’s brother, Don. They stayed at an almost deserted resort on the island’s north coast. Carly wrote to her brother that it rained almost every day.
More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon Page 12
