As this cycle of relationships petered out, Carly began working on her album. Her emotions were raw and bruised, as revealed in her letters from this period. She felt she had been passed around this group of powerful and attractive men for a couple of months (“treated like a piece of meat,” as she later described it); some of this experience transcended contemporary mores and accepted sexual behavior, and evoked in Carly a sense of embarrassment. The artistic ideas generated by the feelings were too recent to be transformed into songs for her current album, but they would have an explosive impact for her music a couple of years in the future.
Summer 1970. Joni Mitchell is writing Blue. Carole King is writing Tapestry. Carly begins recording in the new underground Electric Lady Studios at 52 West Eighth Street. Jimi Hendrix, who lives nearby, has sunk his fortune into this first studio owned by a rock star, and likes to look in when he’s not on the road. The vibe of the place is brilliant, and it is booked solid for months. (The space used to be the club Generation, where Jimi liked to jam until late. The reception area now displays a mural of a pixie girl at the controls of a spaceship.) Eddie Kramer basically built the facility from the soundboards up, and has complete run of the three recording rooms. In fact, he is also producing a band called Zephyr, in studio B, while working with Carly in studio A.
Carly brought in her songs. These were “That’s the Way I Always Heard It Should Be,” “Dan, My Fling,” and some other material she later described as only half-prepared.
“Not all the songs had arrangements,” she said later. “A lot of them were head arrangements—just get in the studio with a bunch of people and figure it out. Eddie Kramer knew all the musicians. I made some input, but I didn’t know too much about what I was doing.” She brought in Sweet Baby James and told Kramer she wanted the drums to sound like James’s drummer, Russ Kunkel, on this or that track. She said she wanted the piano to sound like the guy on Judy Collins’s record. Sometimes it felt as if she weren’t being listened to. “I felt intimidated every time I opened my mouth,” she said in 1972. “The producer also seemed intimidated by my mouth opening, so there wasn’t a very good feeling in the studio.”
At least Kramer had enlisted some cool musicians to play on the record. Paul Griffin had played piano on all the great Bob Dylan albums and would also work on the orchestrations for Carly’s record. Jeff Baxter was a hot session guitarist. Ditto Tony Levin and Jerry Jemmot on bass. Carly brought in David Bromberg and Jimmy Ryan to play guitar on various tracks.
Jac Holzman went to some of the early sessions, and things seemed to be getting on. Then he went to Europe, and Kramer had a freer hand with things such as drum sounds and orchestrations. Carly rebelled, then stopped showing up. She called Holzman, but he was out of town. His brother Keith Holzman, a competent executive, ran over to Electric Lady and mediated between Carly and Kramer, eventually getting the sessions back on track. In fact, they got so on track that the members of Zephyr noticed that they were getting the short end of the stick because Eddie Kramer was now working only with Carly. Then they noticed that Carly and Eddie left the studio together, and returned together the next day. Zephyr assumed that Carly was having her way with Eddie Kramer, “not the most macho of men,” as Zephyr’s lead guitarist put it later.
The main problem between Carly and her producer had been the drum sound. Carly, writing in 2011: “We were recording ‘That’s the Way’ at Electric Lady and I wanted to have big drums on it. Everyone disputed and disagreed. They said it was such a ballad, and they said no drums belonged on the song. But I had become addicted to the way Russ Kunkel played on ‘Sweet Baby James’ and especially ‘Country Road.’ I begged Eddie Kramer to have a drummer on the session who could hit hard. So he hired Jimmy Johnson and waited to see what the hell I meant.
“I heard the chorus with a very strong entrance and primarily tom-toms going through the entire chorus, instead of a steady snare and bass drum backbeat. I started to literally conduct the strokes of Jimmy, gesturing what I wanted from him, most likely to his utter chagrin and that of all the other drummers I have worked with since. But my Leonard Bernstein soul flowed through me as I vaulted my hair in front of my thrusting arms. I wondered what the drummer thought of this. He must have been on the verge of leaving. Who did I think I was? Where did this chutzpah come from? Can I put that on Chebe? Uncle Peter? Certainly not my father’s side of the family. Jimmy Johnson was amused. All I wanted was to be able to be brought aloft both spiritually and viscerally by the sound of the variously tuned toms.
“Eddie ended up liking it and I gave him his way on something I had been extremely opposed to: doubling my voice. I thought it was a low-class idea. I don’t know what I associated it with, but it was definitely a no-no. But Eddie had his way, as I’d had with that thrilling drum part and sound. Anyway, I was amazed to find myself, at the beginning of my career, displaying an astonishing amount of direction in the face of a producer right out of the studio with Mad Dogs and Englishmen.
(“[Drummer] Andy Newmark was to suffer on the next few albums, not to mention Rick Marotta and all the wonders in between and later on. I can’t think of a drummer I haven’t thought about sleeping with, but that’s not for publication.”)
Carly was invited to Electric Lady Studios’ official opening party on August 26, 1970, some three months after it had opened for business. Jimi Hendrix was a splendid host, as Carly noted when she saw him repeatedly escort select guests into the studio lavatory. (Carly: “I just thought, ‘Gee, he’s in the bathroom with his friends.’ I was quite naïve, and I did not understand drugs.”) The event was star-quality: Jim Morrison dropped in briefly. Yoko Ono. Some freaks from the Warhol entourage huddled in the corner. Janis Joplin came by. Johnny Winter. Mick Fleetwood. Al Kooper. Carly felt excited to be currently recording in the coolest studio in the world. Later that night, she and Kramer went to the rock club Steve Paul’s The Scene, where Jimi Hendrix jammed with Johnny Winter’s band until dawn. Paul McCartney was there with his new girlfriend, Linda Eastman, a New York photographer whom Carly had known for years. This is where she first heard the sad news that the Beatles were breaking up.
THAT’S THE WAY I ALWAYS
HEARD IT SHOULD BE
Then, three weeks later, Jimi Hendrix died suddenly in London. This caused shock and grief at Electric Lady. Early info was hazy. Jimi had been in England to play at the Isle of Wight and some other gigs. He was hanging out with a German woman, and popped some pills to turn off the adrenaline and get some rest. On the night of September 18 he choked to death. There was immediate and serious speculation that he had been murdered. He had been trying to fire his manager. To some people—those in the know—Hendrix had been worth more dead than alive.
Eddie Kramer now fell apart and required extensive hand-holding and consolation. Carly’s sessions grew desultory as Kramer turned his total attention to a quick mix of unreleased Hendrix tracks (with Mitch Mitchell) that became the posthumous Cry of Love album. Carly then broke off with Kramer, and he stopped coming to the studio for her sessions.
Jac Holzman came by Electric Lady and found Carly almost alone in the studio. She had the basic tracks for her album, which now needed to be mixed. She tearfully stammered to Jac that she didn’t want to sing in public, that she suffered from severe stage fright, and reminded him that she was deathly afraid to get on a plane. When he reported this at a staff meeting, his people told him they hadn’t wanted to sign Carly Simon in the first place. “Jac thought he’d discovered the female Mick Jagger,” one Elektra executive said, “and then she told him she didn’t want to perform. Jac was just going nuts. There was a lot of I-told-you-so over this.”
Holzman deputized his brother Keith to oversee the mixing of the album so it could be released as scheduled, early in 1971. He assigned troubleshooting Elektra executive Steve Harris to soothe Carly and win her over to performing and promoting her record. Harris had been able to “handle” the volatile Jim Morrison from time to time, and now
he would babysit Carly and try to bring her along as a responsible and committed Elektra artist.
Harris recalled: “I met Carly before she finished the album. [Comedian] David Steinberg was friends with her, and he took me over to her apartment, a lovely flat on Thirty-fifth Street, just off Lexington Avenue. When I walked in, there was something about [Carly] I couldn’t put my finger on. Sometimes she looked attractive, other times she didn’t. We started talking about the record. I hadn’t heard it. She asked me, ‘Would you like to hear one of the songs?’ She picked up her guitar and sang ‘That’s the Way I Always Heard It Should Be.’ When she started to sing, her whole face changed, and her whole manner shifted. She became absolutely beautiful, and I thought, If anything happens to this record, and if we can get her out and working in front of an audience, this is going to be just killer, and she is going to be a major star.”
Eddie Kramer was urged to return to the studio to help Carly. Then, she recalled, “Eddie and I had a serious falling out, and by October [1970] I was mixing the album by myself.”
Then Janis Joplin died of a heroin overdose.
Jac Holzman visited Electric Lady toward the end of November to review the mixed, and sequenced, tapes of Carly’s songs. “That’s the Way” now had its drum sound—the “weeping tom-tom” fills popularized by Ringo Starr, Levon Helm, and Russ Kunkel. The piano and strings were lyrical and subtle, giving a sense of mystery to Carly’s ironic take on contemporary women’s “issues.” Holzman hadn’t heard the song before. It wasn’t part of the original demo tape he had listened to in Japan. Now he quickly realized he’d heard the first honest song about contemporary middle-class female angst—and it had to be the album’s first single release.
“Alone” came next, a breaking-up song with a country music flavor spiced by a pedal steel guitar. Then “One More Time,” a foray into country-rock, Southern California style. “The Best Thing” spoke to a woman’s regret over losing a fabulous London lover—Willie Donaldson?—in a serpentine arrangement that evolved into art song, with an echoing female chorale. Hard rock ended the album’s first side, with Mark Klingman’s “Just a Sinner,” a confessional rock song with metallic guitars and an anvil chorus.
“Dan, My Fling” (written by Jake Brackman and Fred Gardner) opened side two as the second big production number after “That’s the Way.” It was presented as a lusty gospel piano ballad whose thwarted yearning is tempered with a sense of humor, since it was hard to sing “Dan, my fling is all flung out” with a straight face. Carly’s “Another Door” sounded like the Simon Sisters, a philosophical song about spiritual confusion and seeking enlightenment. Then came “Reunion,” cowritten with Eddie Kramer and Billy Mernit, who had been one of Carly’s campers at Indian Hill. Beautifully sung, with cello and harpsichord accompaniment, the song described an incomplete family circle and wrong turns on the highways of existence—a wistful, bittersweet performance that could have been on an earlier Joni Mitchell record.
The mood was lifted by “Rolling Down the Hills,” a romping hippie jingle with deft harmonica playing. The album ended with “The Love’s Still Growing,” written by Buzzy Linhart, a New York singer-songwriter, a friend of Hendrix’s, and a respected figure on the local music scene. The track was the album’s final Big Statement, echoing with muted psychedelia, Earth Day– era lyric clichés, and washes of string music.
When the listening session was finished, there was quiet in the room. Carly thought the record sounded like a glorified demo, but when she looked over at Jac Holzman, he was smiling. Elektra’s boss actually loved the record, and he told her so. Holzman later wrote, “The album was different from anything else I’d been hearing, and that buoyed me. The songs were sophisticated and openhearted, a rare combination. Some of the lyrics reminded me of Stephen Sondheim, with their keen sense of the cross-currents of life and the human condition.” He thought that, even with a rock-style backing, the polish and breeding of her background came through to him, loud and clear, and this was something she needed never to lose.
Jac told Carly he thought “That’s the Way” had to be the first single. “We didn’t know that it was going to be the single,” Carly said, speaking of her and Jake, “but Jac did. I thought it was really important that a song and a singer really match up. If the singer and the song are closely interwoven in personality and essence, then it has a chance of catching on. So I was thrilled when Jac picked ‘That’s the Way I Always Heard It Should Be,’ because that song meant so much to me. Back then, I could hardly even describe why, but Jac was really able to see it. I felt it was a smart choice, because it would be introducing me to a public that wasn’t aware of me, with a song that was unusual, that wasn’t the typical single of the day. Jac Holzman took a chance on it.”
Carly was pleased when the Elektra boss approved the final mix of Carly Simon. She was immensely relieved that she had pulled this off. “I wasn’t really prepared for it. I’d had no experience in a modern recording studio, and my producer had barely produced a record before.” Now the main work on the record was complete, with only the jacket photographs to be taken and the album sleeve to be designed. Everything would be great, Carly thought, as long as they didn’t make her go on the road to promote the record. At the time, this was her biggest worry.
So Carly took her tapes up to Riverdale and played the record for her mother. Andrea loved the music beyond belief, but had trouble expressing her admiration to her daughter. Carly’s brother, Peter, was visiting from the farm in Vermont, and he, an immense music maven and fan, was bowled over. “Our whole family was in a kind of ecstasy about how good this record sounded. Uncle Peter Dean said it was the best debut album he’d ever heard. It was an incredible time for us.” Andrea Simon did tell Carly how proud her father would have been of her singing, and especially her songwriting.
Around this time Carly was seeing a friend of Peter’s, a blond, funny British academic named David Silver. “I had been teaching in Boston,” Silver remembered, “where I also had a TV series on public television. But my marriage was going south, and I wanted to move to New York. I called Peter Simon, and he said, ‘Come meet my sister, she’ll make you feel better.’ So I showed up at the big house in Riverdale, where Andrea Simon was holding a benefit cocktail party for Robert Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney. I got there, and Carly and Peter were sitting on the front steps. She was wearing a tight-fitting blue-knit jumpsuit—the sexiest woman I’d ever met in my life. After a while we went upstairs to listen to Carly’s record. I never did get to the cocktail party that was raging downstairs.”
David was totally in love. “One day I went over to Carly’s apartment on East Thirty-fifth Street. Sunny place, chintz-covered sofas, fresh flowers. We were having tea when Dan Armstrong came over with one of his new guitars. He tried to vibe me out of the picture, but, hey—I’m the boyfriend now. We ended up jamming for three hours. He wasn’t such a bad guy actually.”
A few days later, Peter Simon drove back to Vermont, ferrying Carly and David and Peter’s enormous yellow Labrador retriever, Cosmos, in his blue Volvo station wagon. Carly brought along a wardrobe of dresses, the idea being that Peter, now a professional photographer, would produce the photo for the jacket of Carly Simon. Carly had already done a photo session with Joel Brodsky, who often worked with Elektra’s artists, but Jac Holzman and the label’s art director wanted an image that was more intimate, more feminine.
Peter recalled: “We set up a little photo studio in the living room of our two-hundred-year-old farmhouse in Guildford, Vermont. We hung an embroidered cloth as a backdrop behind an antique loveseat we had. Carly tried a lot of poses, with different dresses and shawls and wraps on this bench, but we weren’t really satisfied until Catherine Marriott, who was part of our communal family, went upstairs to fetch a dress she thought might work.” This was a long, pinkish, almost prairie-looking dress with lovely lace embroidery of flowers and vines. A few months earlier, Catherine had worn the dress to a c
ounty fair in Colorado, where she happened to be snapped by the legendary photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, an image that much later became an iconic postcard image of the master’s. “So Carly put on Cate’s dress, and accented it with a yellow knitted shawl, and suddenly we had our picture. I shot a roll of this dress, and the one they picked has the shawl off her shoulder and her legs tucked in front of her with her knees far apart. But I never thought it was provocative. It seemed to me that Carly was saying. ‘Here I am, and I want you to get to know me.’”
SETTING YOURSELF ON FIRE
So now it’s 1971 and Elektra is getting ready to release “That’s the Way,” and the label—famous in the industry for promotional prowess—starts to give Carly a media surge. She tells a reporter from London’s Record Mirror that she wants artistic satisfaction more than she wants fame. The reporter tells his readers that Carly—constantly cracking jokes—is the funniest person he’s ever met. She tells the Chicago Sun-Times that she doesn’t really care about “making it” in the music industry; that she just wants people to really like her songs. She attends Elektra’s first national sales convention in Palm Springs, California, on January 11. Elektra wanted to impress its parent company, Warner Communications, with its roster of talent, and so Jim Morrison and the Doors made a rare appearance, as well as new signings Carly Simon and Harry Chapin. Barbra Streisand currently has a number one album with Stoney End, produced by Richard Perry, someone Jac Holzman thinks would work well with Carly. But she seems determined to get the guy who produced the Cat Stevens records.
More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon Page 13
