More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon

by Stephen Davis

  But there was a strong undercurrent now, a premonition Carly had after talking with James Taylor at the Troubadour. “I had this strange, prescient, almost eerie feeling that we were going to be together. Every time I saw a picture of him, even before I met him, I’d think: That’s my husband. I’d see a picture of him with another woman, and I’d get upset. I’ve never had that with anybody else. It wasn’t good or bad, but somehow, I saw it coming.”

  Still, Carly was also enraptured by Cat Stevens. She watched his fervently performed sets several times, and became enchanted by his beautiful songs: “Moon Shadow,” “Wild World,” “Morning Has Broken,” “Into White.” “Wild World” was a hit single, and Stevens was huge on American radio. His presentation was wispy, almost feminine, light as air. When he asked Carly for her phone number in New York, she gave it to him in total anticipation.

  Carly Simon’s Troubadour shows were a smashing success. She was in instant demand for interviews and Hollywood dinner parties. She cajoled the press with humor and intelligence, charming reporters and radio deejays with jokes and offhand remarks. Photographers clambered for her, this new, sexy young woman of the seventies. The radio was playing album cuts as if they were singles. Magazines began to do spreads on Carly’s look, her songs, describing hers as a new female energy for the coming decade. Pop music critic Robert Hilburn praised her in the Los Angeles Times: “Carly Simon is one of those individualistic singer-writers that one immediately associates with such artists as Randy Newman, Laura Nyro, and Joni Mitchell.” Carly did a session with photographer Jack Robinson for Vogue, all long dresses and cross-gartered sandals, which left dents in her legs. “I dressed real hippie,” she said recently. “Still do. I wore Indian skirts, or jeans, Indian tops, long earrings, open-toe high heels. I still have clothes from those days, and I still wear them.

  “I was the new girl in town,” she said. “And you can only be the new girl in town once. I never remembered being so popular in my life as then…. It was like a swarm of bees. People invited me to their house. Men fell in love with me that wouldn’t have looked at me twice before. Songs were written about me, people at the dressing room door, flowers, drugs offered… I really felt it at Elektra. Everybody’s rooting for you, everyone’s plugging for you in a way that they never will again.”

  Now Arlyne Rothberg began to take some serious phone calls. Country music star Kris Kristofferson had seen Carly play and he wanted her to open for him at the Bitter End in May. She was invited to open for Cat Stevens at Carnegie Hall in June. Carly’s career now took off.

  Carly recalled this era with great affection: “You know, there are certain periods in your life when a lot of events come together and they influence the rest of your life. The year I met Jake Brackman was very important to me. And April 6, 1971, was a confluence of a lot of people and energies—Cat Stevens, meeting James, the success at the Troub—those three nights changed my life.”

  “That’s the Way I Always Heard It Should Be” was number twenty-five on the charts when Carly played the Troubadour. Sales continued to build over the new several weeks, and eventually the single would get to number ten with a bullet.

  SILVER-TONGUED DEVIL

  May 1971. Carly opens for Kris Kristofferson at the Bitter End, an old haunt from the days of the Simon Sisters. To Carly, Kristofferson is something else. A thirty-five-year-old former Rhodes Scholar, army helicopter pilot, and, later, a sex symbol and movie star, Kristofferson writes what Time magazine called “bluntly sexual protest songs that have made him the most controversial songwriter-singer of the day.” He wrote “Me and Bobby McGee” for his girl pal Janis Joplin, who had a national hit record with the song after she died of a heroin overdose in 1970, a month after Jimi Hendrix. Other songs included “Sunday Morning Coming Down” and “Help Me Make It Through the Night.” Tall, bearded, and craggy, Kris performed in a sexy chamois suit, leather soft as butter. He was going around the country promoting his new album, The Silver Tongued Devil and I, and he was weary and really hitting the bottle. The first night, he called Carly back to the stage after his regular set and they sang together, to the delight of the packed Bitter End. It was Local Girl meets New Nashville, big time—a sensation. The next night, they went back to his suite at the Gramercy Park Hotel and he played a new song, inspired by Carly: “I’ve Got to Have You.”

  Carly took him home another night. Kris was pretty drunk. He looked around the place: chintz-covered sofas, good furniture, flowers, and shawls. He kept repeating, “Carly,… you have… the most… beautiful… the most beautiful… kitchen.” She was telling him her life story when she noticed he had passed out. She kept calling her manager, asking what to do. Arlyne told her to let him sleep it off.

  Another night, Kris brought Bob Dylan over to Carly’s place. She wasn’t surprised that Dylan couldn’t recall their business meeting of five years earlier, in Albert Grossman’s office. Then major league songwriters John Prine and Steve Goodman turned up. Everyone got drunk. After Dylan left, Carly’s guitar got passed around, as the four songwriters tried out some new things on one another. Carly turned on her Wollensak tape machine and made a clear recording of that “magical evening with the four of us” on East Thirty-fifth Street.

  “My relationship with [Kris] was kinda stormy,” Carly said a few years later. “It lasted around six months, with like a five-month hiatus within that time. We were hot for each other, but he made me feel insecure. I always felt I could be booted out at any moment. But it probably turned out more songs than any other relationship I’d had to that time.”

  June 1971. Carole King’s Tapestry, an album about love and motherhood, is number one, chased to the top by James Taylor’s Mudslide Slim and the Blue Horizon. “That’s the Way I Heard It Should Be” is number six on Chicago’s WLS Hit Parade. (The Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar” is number one.) Carly is working on her second album, urging Elektra to hire Paul Samwell-Smith to produce it in London. Samwell-Smith had made the two recent Cat Stevens albums, Tea for the Tillerman and Teaser and the Firecat. Carly wanted his intimate sound and gentle sensibility on her record as well.

  Samwell-Smith turned Elektra down. He hadn’t liked the orchestrations on Carly Simon, and he was busy producing the soundtrack to the film Harold and Maude, with music by Cat Stevens (destined to become a cult classic). Carly told Elektra to keep trying. She had to have Paul Samwell-Smith.

  She was writing prolifically now, turning out some serious new songs. “I loved music, and I didn’t want to confine myself to one type of song,” she said. But she also realized she was working in a crowded marketplace. “You had to have a kind of signature, to have something that you’re recognized as being. So when I started to write songs, this singer-songwriter personality emerged.” Now her writing solidified into the narrative form that Carly continued to deploy for the rest of her career. The songs would almost always tell stories, usually in four verses, with the bridge before the final chorus, “like the ballads I used to sing that reach a climax around the fourth stanza.” Carly’s twist on this was an ironic turnaround in the last verse, indicating the real deal going down when all the facts are finally on the table and all pretense is useless.

  Carly also started seeing her therapist again, after a long break. She needed to get to the issues behind her stage fright. “He helped me to understand why I was like that,” she said, “but there was still this utter bewilderment, when I came face-to-face with it. Once onstage, I forgot everything I’d learned.” She was determined somehow to come to grips with her fears, no matter what it took. And when she wanted something in those days, she usually got it.

  Cat Stevens called Carly when he arrived in New York. She would soon be opening some important concerts for him in Boston and New York. She invited him to her apartment, and then was very nervous that the adorable minstrel was on his way, so she picked up her guitar, sat down on her bed, and wrote “Anticipation”—the complete song—in fifteen minutes. “I was so excited that day, w
aiting for Cat Stevens,” she recalled. “I was excited, aglow, a-glimmer, and trying to get myself to calm down.”

  Cat Stevens duly arrived with his guitar, accepted a cup of tea, and he and Carly began to sing together. Steven Georgiou was twenty-three years old, a hirsute Byronic poet with more than a touch of Mediterranean romance from his Anglo-Greek heritage. He had been a teen idol in England, then an art student, but had reinvented himself as a songwriter in the mold of the late, brilliant Nick Drake, whose whispered ballads had been stilled by an overdose of antidepressants the year before. Cat Stevens was a modern English troubadour. Some found his music and presentation overly precious and cloying, but girls loved it and were buying his records in mass quantities. The songs on Tillerman and the forthcoming Firecat completely enchanted Carly, and by the end of the evening, the anticipation she had felt at the budding friendship was on its way to consummation.

  The chorus to “Anticipation”—“These are the good old days”—was an indication of the growing confidence and assurance Carly felt. After years, decades, of struggle, maybe the tide was turning in her favor. She now knew, with a killer instinct, that this year, and the next, were going to be those she would remember for the rest of her life, as the time of her life.

  Carly Simon and her band—Jimmy Ryan and Paul Glanz, joined by drummer Andy Newmark—opened Cat Stevens’s show at Boston’s sold-out Symphony Hall in the middle of June. Their six songs went down well, and the opening notes of “That’s the Way” drew scattered applause. A few nights later, in New York, Carly would open for Cat in venerable Carnegie Hall on West Fifty-seventh Street. When she arrived backstage, there was a telegram waiting for her. It was from her sister Lucy, and it read: “SEE YOU AT THE MOORS.”

  Carly—“a little stiff, but only around the edges”—did a backstage interview with Patricia Kennealy, the editor of Jazz & Pop magazine, and admitted to severe nervousness about playing Carnegie Hall. “I like to be able to see the audience,” Carly said. “In clubs like the Troubadour and the Bitter End, I could see them, and sing to their faces and their reactions. This [big hall] is so different—a big black nothing, with red lights, and it makes a lot of noise, and you can’t see it.”

  The enormity of this concert was compounded by the presence of Paul Samwell-Smith, whom Elektra had flown in from London with the idea that if he saw Carly perform, he could be persuaded to produce her new album. He was a rock star himself, having founded the Yardbirds, a band that had replaced the Rolling Stones in London’s mid-sixties club land, and gone on to start the rock movement with their long, jamming raves. Tall and handsome, with impeccable manners, Samwell-Smith greeted Carly before the show and accepted her ardent appreciation for his production work on Cat Stevens’s records. Immediately after the concert, impressed by what he had heard, and deeply felt, he signed on to produce Carly’s next album at Trident Studios in London later that summer.

  Carly and her band took the stage at Carnegie Hall on an early summer Saturday night. The audience, described as “the Westchester– North Jersey axis” (read: suburban), was surprisingly well mannered and attentive. Carly looked ultra-svelte in a long brown dress, green suede boots, and a peasant shawl tied around her hips. With her shag-cut hair and overbite, she looked fabulous and every inch the next big rock star. The band sounded great. Jimmy Ryan played tasty guitar fills and doubled on a transparent Dan Armstrong bass. They played six songs, including the brand-new “Anticipation,” to an audience who was aware of Carly and responsive. Three songs in, Carly stepped up to the microphone and said, “You know, there’s nothing to be afraid of, in Carnegie Hall.” There was laughter. Some people applauded, including her mother and sisters, in the third row.

  Jazz & Pop: “She takes to the piano for her airplay hit, ‘That’s The Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be.’ She plays authoritative piano and exuberant, though uncomplicated, guitar. Watching her sing, head back, eyes closed, reveals the joy of the feeling of the song. The weight, of course, is the voice—clear, balanced and astonishingly strong. Not all her songs measure up, but Carly Simon could sing a shopping list and make it sound good.”

  STICKY FINGERS

  Late June 1971. Joni Mitchell’s epochal Blue album was out, giving Carole King and James Taylor (Joni’s now-ex-boyfriend) a run for their money. Joni, Carole, and James Taylor—the alpha singer-songwriters—were now Carly Simon’s competition, and she found this daunting. The Rolling Stones were, as usual, dominating the rock scene with their new Sticky Fingers album. Designed by Andy Warhol, the Stones’ album jacket featured a pair of jeans with a real fly-front metal zipper that fans could pull down, as if they were undressing Mick Jagger for a blowjob. The band’s new logo was a crimson lapping tongue. The new-look Rolling Stones were running very hot, augmented with a ballsy horn section led by the big and blustery Texan saxophonist Bobby Keys. Carly listened to Sticky Fingers with care, and read that the lovely strings on “Sway” and “Moonlight Mile” had been arranged by Paul Buckmaster. Buckmaster’s orchestrations were unusually subtle, and ultramusical, and Carly wanted to get him involved in her new album when she got to London.

  Carly wanted Mick Jagger as well. She had loved the Rolling Stones for years, and Jagger was now the major personality of the entire rock movement. If she could somehow entice him to her recording sessions in London, she felt she could get him to sing on her record, something that Jagger had never done outside his own band. Getting Mick to sing would be an incredible coup, and Carly imagined she could pull it off. She had the idea that she could meet Mick if she interviewed him for a magazine. The reviews of her Carnegie Hall concert noted how much she looked like Jagger: the cheekbones, the overbite, the haircut. Jagger was famously narcissistic; maybe he would be attracted to someone who looked a lot like him. He had just married his pregnant twenty-one-year-old Nicaraguan girlfriend, Bianca Pérez, but Carly would not let that minor detail stand in her way.

  Cat Stevens returned to England. He promised Carly he would sing on her record. Traveling with Kris Kristofferson, Carly flew to Washington, abjectly terrified of the plane crashing. On the flight back to New York, Kris became annoyed by her cringing and bluntly told her to cool it. Soon after that, he said good-bye and flew west to California. She flew east, to England. Carly and Kris’s affair had come to an end, but both had gotten some good songs out of it.

  July 1971. James Taylor’s version of Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend” was the number one record in America. Jac Holzman called Carly and invited her to a farewell dinner before she and her band left to record in London. They arranged to meet on the evening of July 4. Carly: “Jac was supposed to pick me up at the Algonquin Hotel [on West Forty-fourth Street], where I was having cocktails with [photographer] Peter Beard. But I had some kind of anxiety attack and had fainted, and was brought up to Peter’s room. A doctor came in and looked at me, and said I was okay. Jac appeared and took over. We went to a Japanese restaurant on Forty-eighth Street. I was absorbed in my own story, and went on and on about it. And eventually he said, ‘Well, I’ve had a bad day too,’ and he told me that Jim Morrison had died the day before, in Paris. He cried. I was totally shocked.

  “He was very emotional, trying to keep it together. I’d have been crumpled, and having a fit. But Jac’s emotional expression took a very different path from mine. He didn’t cancel our dinner. He stayed in control. But as much as anyone can imagine Jac Holzman losing it, or being out of control—he really was very upset—running back and forth to the telephone.”

  Holzman later wrote that sharing the news of Jim Morrison’s death with Carly Simon really lightened his load. No one knew about it yet, and he thought that he could count on her discretion. But when she got back to her apartment, Carly called Jonathan Schwartz, who was working at WNEW-FM. A few hours later, Holzman got a call from Alison Steele (“The Nightbird”), who did the evening shift at Schwartz’s station. Holzman: “Somehow, Alison had gotten my unlisted home phone number. She asked me point-blank i
f Jim was dead. I told her the truth, and asked her to play ‘Riders on the Storm.’”

  By mid-July 1971, Carly and her band were in London and working on her record. They were staying in a rented house in Camden Town and commuting to Trident Studios, down a narrow alley at 17 St. Anne’s Court in Soho. Trident had been one of the first English studios to feature Dolby sound technology and an 8-track mixing desk. The Beatles recorded “Hey Jude” there, and sent most of their Apple artists (including James Taylor) to Trident. The Stones loved the place. Singer Harry Nilsson had just finished a record there. A new rock star called David Bowie was coming in next. Between recording sessions, the musicians who worked there liked to nip over to the nearby pub, the Ship, for a pint of English ale.

  Carly and Paul Samwell-Smith clicked immediately. Slender and intense, he had just left his wife, and so, fairly quickly, his and Carly’s professional relationship took on an intimacy of its own. The sessions went well from the beginning, because this time, Carly wasn’t intimidated by her producer. He was sympathetic toward her, and his vulnerability gave her confidence. “He found a quality in me, a kind of fragility,” she remembered (wistfully) a few years later, “that has not been tapped since.”

  Carly had brought in a good collection of new songs. “Anticipation” was hopeful about an impending love affair. Paul began it as an acoustic ballad, then brought in drums (later augmented by Jim Keltner) and finished it as a rock song with its electric coda: “And stay right here ’cause these are the good old days.” It was Carly’s tribute to her moment, but it also resonated with many listeners wondering what the new decade—the seventies—would mean to their lives.