Carly Simon, who now had no husband and two children to look after, was in no emotional shape to write an album of original songs, so she “answered” her husband’s record with a compilation of standard “torch” songs that was released by Warner Bros. in the summer of 1981.
Torch songs were an enduring artistic legacy of the Roaring Twenties. “Carrying a torch” for a lost lover was a “modernist” female thing, a romantic agony personified by singers such as Libby Holman (1904– 1971) who famously married the heir to a Carolina tobacco fortune and then accidentally shot him to death as he was trying to break into his own house when he’d been locked out. Torch songs were retro-noir, semidesperate expressions of female disappointment and lust, and Warner Bros. executives were understandably reticent about Carly Simon making an album of them that would be called Torch. They told Carly, “This is not your fan base. This is going to ruin your career.” But she insisted, held her ground, and recorded at the Power Station, with Mike Mainieri again producing. She chose most of the classic ballads herself, occasionally contributing new lyrics of her own. She channeled her old hero, Frank Sinatra, on songs he previously owned: Alec Wilder’s “I’ll Be Around,” and Hoagie Carmichael’s “I Get Along Without You Very Well.” Saxophonist David Sanborn’s urgent, ungentle alto sax, with a tone between human crying and a bitter sob, is the prominent instrumental voice on the album. Orchestration is back, on Duke Ellington’s “I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good” and “Blue of Blue.” Jazz players—Phil Woods, Eddie Gomez, Warren Bernhardt—are featured on “Body and Soul” and the disconsolate Rodgers and Hart classic “Spring Is Here.” Carly sings “What Shall We Do with the Child” as a guilt-provoking tearjerker. Her one original song, “From the Heart,” is about the cold war of a failing relationship, but also carries with it a flickering ember of hope. The album ends with Stephen Sondheim’s “Not a Day Goes By.” Obviously moved by the song’s sentiment—“I’ll die, day after day after day”—Carly sings in an unusual trembling vibrato, really conveying the tortured emotions of the song. The track finishes with a final orchestral orgasm, arranged by Don Sebesky.
“They were just a bunch of songs written from the heart,” Carly said later, “emotions that are easily expressed. While recording, it was rare that I got through a session without crying, because, well, they did have a lot to do with what was going on in my life at the time.” For Carly the highlight of the recording sessions was the day Stephen Sondheim came to the studio as she was cutting her vocal on “Not a Day Goes By.”
“I really love that song,” she said. “It’s from his show Merrily We Roll Along, and it’s not really a standard, but I think it should be. I’d gone to see him at his apartment and he played me some of the songs from that show. (While he was playing, I had one of my famous anxiety attacks, and to distract myself I pinched my earlobe so the pain would be converted from my brain to my ear. While he was playing “Not a Day Goes By,” blood started to fall on my crisp white shirt. He noticed it, asked if I was all right, and was incredibly kind. I suddenly remembered another appointment.) Stephen was in the studio when I recorded it. He was sitting in the control room, and I was standing in the vocal booth. I didn’t want to see Stephen while I was singing because it was too scary. So I knelt down and sang the song on my knees. When I finished, I went into the control room. Stephen was crying, with his face in his hands. I thought it was because he didn’t like it, but then he said he was crying because he was so moved. To this day, when I want to weep, I put on ‘Not a Day Goes By.’”
When Carly walked into the Midtown studio of the prominent rock photographer Lynn Goldsmith to shoot the cover of Torch, Goldsmith introduced her to a young actor, Al Corley, who had a role in the arch-seventies TV series Dynasty. Carly was attracted to the tall, very telegenic Corley, who acted as a foil when she, dressed in a low-cut, bosomy gown, was photographed clinging in evident emotional agony to a shadowy figure of a man, who was turning away from her. In another image she leans on his shoulder, clutching at him. In another, her gown is red and tossed like a matador’s cape in an arc of torrid, shameless passion. The scrawled, lipstick-red typeface on the jacket seemed to drip blood. When Torch came out in August 1981, Carly dedicated it to her parents and musical uncles, and also to Jonathan Schwartz, still her most ardent supporter in New York radio. She also made a video—the new cable channel MTV began broadcasting the same month Torch was released—where she just looks into the camera, sings “I’ll Get Along,” and really lets it rip.
Torch wasn’t a success, reaching only number fifty. Carly heard that Warner Bros. had been told by its parent company not to push the album so she would go back to writing her own material. But now she was, almost, past caring. “Regardless of how [Torch] does commercially,” she said at the time, “it is a success to me.” And later: “[Torch] was so wonderful, because I was just feeling so bad. There’s nothing more awful than to hide your sadness…. It was the summer of the breakup of my marriage to James Taylor. More emotional upheaval. They did nothing to promote it. So I had no big plans for the future anymore.”
But Carly was proud of Torch. “I thought it was lovely. Mo Austin [president of Warner Bros. at the time] said it was one of his biggest mistakes, not seeing the potential in that record, because a little later [in 1983] Linda Ronstadt came out with What’s New [also an album of older standards], and it was a huge success.” And over time, Torch became a steady-selling staple of Carly’s catalogue.
Carly Simon didn’t want to divorce James Taylor. When he didn’t return to the family after his 1981 summer tour, she issued a statement announcing the couple was separating. He went back on the road, playing concerts in Australia and Japan. Al Corley, twenty-seven, was keeping company with Carly and the kids. James gave Carly the Vineyard house in the settlement, to lessen the disruption for the children. In Manhattan, the family stayed in Apartment 6S, and James bought an apartment off nearby West End Avenue, so as to be close to the children during the school year.
Everyone was in deep shock. The children were in shreds. In the autumn of 1981, Carly tried to explain things to friends and interviewers. “There are good reasons for the decision. Our needs are different. It seemed impossible to stay together… James needs a lot more space around him: aloneness, remoteness, more privacy. I need more closeness, more communication. He is more abstract in our relationship. He’s more of a poet, and I’m more of a reporter.”
October 1981. The Rolling Stones were on tour in America. “Start Me Up” was on the radio. Mick Jagger was on the telephone, trying to get through to Carly, who was in seclusion and not returning calls. She was now writing, not songs, but prose stories. In one she describes how the endless construction and renovations of a couple’s island home is a welcome distraction from the interior tensions of their family life. And when the builders finally finish their work, the marriage is over as well; memorialized by the “white elephant”—a jumble of turrets, balconies, odd windows—the couple built together. In another story, the narrator speaks to her absent husband: “My golden daughter is talking to you on the phone, saying: ‘I love you so much. I miss you, where are you? When will you be back?’ Things I used to say to you, she is allowed to say to you. I am not. Sometimes I hear her words as my own.”
An interviewer asked Carly if she still loved James. “Oh yes,” she said. Were hard drugs the wrecker? “They were.” And she added: “I think he wanted out of the marriage for a time, as did I. I also think he made himself unattractive so I would be turned off on him. And he did succeed—for a while. I didn’t feel for him, except that I became very jealous of the girlfriend he was with.”
In December, at the end of 1981, Carly appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone. This time the story wasn’t about her music; it was about her life, specifically her “separation and likely divorce” from her husband after nine years. Carly shelters the children on the magazine’s cover, their fingers keeping her chin up. The headline: “Carly: Life Without James.”
Inside, the article was titled, “Fathers & Lovers: Carly Simon Learns How to Say Goodbye.” Journalist Timothy White had visited Carly on the Vineyard a few weeks previously and interviewed her about the Simon family and the endgame of her marriage. He noted that she had lost weight, was stammering, and seemed genuinely stricken. The article was one of the first to probe the mysteries of the Simon family romance, but without revealing its core issues. Carly’s troubled relations with her father are, for the first time, presented as a counterpoint to those with her absent husband. The rupture of the Simon-Taylor marriage was big news in 1981 America, and Tim White was trying to make sense of it for his readers.
White (who died in 2002) was known to colleagues as a scrupulous transcriber of his interview tapes, so it’s worth quoting Carly’s words to him in this period. “I think James and I learned a lot about each other. When needs are not met is when you learn about what needs are. We failed in the context of marriage, but not as people. James taught me what I needed to know about myself and him, and this made me a better person for the next person I’ll want to love. The funny thing is, if I met James now, I would know so much more, and be a better partner, but that sounds unrealistic, huh?”
The article noted the coming and going of Torch, and Carly wasn’t forthcoming about what she would do next. Her main concern was the children: getting them to school in the morning, being there in the afternoon, calming them later, when they asked her why—why?—this was happening to their family.
“I had this song [on Boys in the Trees] called ‘Haunting,’” she told the writer. “Basically, you don’t have to see someone for a long, long time for them to still be inside of you. There’s no way of killing it off; it’s a kind of obsession. And some people do have that effect on me. I have a good memory, especially for emotions. I never get over strong feelings.”
The interview was almost over as the autumn light was failing. Sally was heard crying in another part of the house. Ben needed attention in the bathroom. The writer had a ferry to catch. But Carly continued her idea. “Sometimes, in a complete relationship, feelings have a chance to die out. But if a relationship has ended prematurely for some reason, or it can’t be fulfilled for another reason, the haunting goes on, the obsessions, the dreams about the person…”
Carly stopped and took a deep breath: “… and the feeling that he is forever locked inside.”
Part
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III
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THE SOUND OF HIS VOICE
In 1982, though burdened with sadness, anxiety, weight loss, and the unwelcome return of her childhood stammer, Carly Simon decided to try to get back to work. In this she was helped by her boyfriend, Al Corley, who encouraged her and was a huge help with the children: playing their games, teaching them things, picking them up from school. Al was much younger than Carly, and consequently the relationship reminded her, somewhat ruefully, of her mother’s transgressive affair with her brother’s old tutor, also many years her junior.
Carly also looked around and saw that the music business she had grown up in was changing—fast. MTV was narrowcasting around the clock, bringing the latest talent into the cable-connected homes of affluent Americans. The new stars such as Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Cyndi Lauper would now be closer in age to their audiences; what they (and their videos) looked like, and how they moved for the camera, would now become as crucial to their careers as their music.
Around this time Carly also became interested in so-called New Age music, which appealed more to the human spirit than the heart or the groin. She was enchanted by the semi-ecstatic recordings of the Swiss harpist Andreas Vollenweider, and one day she cold-called him at home and told him she was interested in collaborating with him. He was thrilled, and Carly later helped produce his American debut at the Beacon Theater on Broadway.
In March, John Belushi died in Los Angeles of a drug overdose. Everyone who knew him was deeply shocked, none more so than James Taylor, who knew the woman—a famous L. A. heroin nurse—who had accidentally killed Belushi with an injected cocktail of heroin and cocaine. Taylor now resolved once and for all to try to free himself from addiction to heroin. He had a new girlfriend now, a strong-willed actress called Kathryn Walker, and told his few close friends she was helping him finally to get off dope.
Carly now resolved to get into making music for films. The songs could be written at home, recorded at a nearby studio, and she would only have to attend the New York premiere. There was no touring, no band to run, above all no airplanes: no fear. Carly applied herself to this, and within a few years found herself at the top of the profession, Academy Award in hand.
It started in a Manhattan studio late that spring, where Carly sang on a track called “Why,” produced by Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers, otherwise known as Chic, the era’s most sophisticated disco/ pop band. The bouncy, reggae-informed tune, written by the producers, would be featured in a romantic comedy, Soup for One, released in 1983. “I loved the groove of that song,” she said later. “I also liked that they gave me lots of suggestions on how to sing and pronounce words. I found myself being open-minded, a positive quality I’m not always associated with.”
“Why” was released as a single that autumn and got only to number seventy-two in America, but it was a surprise bestseller in Europe, a Top Ten record in England, Germany, and other countries. The song was catchy, its message sad: “Why does your love / Hurt so much?” A twelve-inch single mix was a European dance floor smash as well. Her initial foray into film music—with one of her most passionate vocals in years—provided Carly with her first big success in Europe and gave her a nice jolt of confidence as well.
Carly Simon’s next album—it would be her last under the terms of her Warner Bros. contract—was recorded at the Power Station in New York and in Los Angeles during the first six months of 1983. Producer Mike Mainieri deployed his tight circle of New York studio pros, along with three Jamaican musicians: jazz guitarist Eric Gale, the famed reggae rhythm section of drummer Sly Dunbar, and bassist Robbie Shakespeare. The Jamaicans supplied a cool reggae vibration to Carly’s polished presentation, especially on a lively cover of Bob Marley’s “Is This Love.”
The album would be called Hello Big Man, after its title song, which was a deftly (and touchingly) idealized portrait of her parents’ marriage, beginning when the dynamic young boss of Simon and Schuster first spoke to the firm’s pretty new switchboard girl. In the song, Carly erases everything but the love between Dick Simon and Andrea Heinemann, and the (wonderful) lyrics form a hopeful paean to the life they might have lived together, if destiny had only allowed them another chance. The old New York of Carly’s childhood, with its carriage rides and Saturday matinees, is the backdrop to her parents’ original glamorous romance. In her reimagining of their legend, Dick and Andrea Simon “still live in the house where we were born / Pictures of us kids / Hanging up all over the walls.” David Sanborn plays a perfect saxophone solo on one of Carly’s most vivid and mytho-biographical songs.
Epic wanted a “contemporary” sound from Carly, and so she collaborated on several new songs with Peter Wood, an English keyboardist who had worked with Roger Waters, Bob Dylan, and current MTV phenomenon Cyndi Lauper, among others. Wood cowrote (with Carly and Jake Brackman) the album’s first single, “You Know What to Do,” a slice of synth-driven eighties commercial pop that features the Police’s Andy Summers playing his trademark chiming pop-reggae guitar chords. Wood (whose main instrumental album credit was “Memory Moog”) also worked on “Menemsha,” Carly’s choral tribute to the old Vineyard fishing village where she lived with Nick Delbanco in summers past. (She had also recently bought and renovated a cottage overlooking the hamlet’s impossibly picturesque harbor, Menemsha Bite.) Carly missed terribly having her husband’s distinctive voice on her albums—it had been a vital part of her “sound” for a decade—so now she mustered as many of her children and their Taylor cousins as she could, to sing on the song’s blis
s-filled choruses. For her next few albums she would often enlist James’s three brothers (and sister Kate) to add that familial dash of Carolina twang to her songs.
The sessions’ mood of elegy and regret is continued with “It Happens Every Day,” an acoustic guitar ballad recounting an intense love not just twisted, but wrenched into a new reality. The lyrics are sorry for the spying and surveillance that turned him into a liar, a robber. But in the end, the song says, it’s just another divorce. Nothing unusual, it happens every day. (This became a key track in Carly’s career, much anthologized and loved by longtime fans.)
Then there are more songs about Carly’s husband. “Orpheus” is another cri de coeur from an anguished wife. It’s a story of a man’s doubts and lost faith(s), the Orpheus legend recounted from Eurydice’s point of view—in hell. “You said all your songs were gone / And the road back up was too long.” He couldn’t wait, couldn’t save her. But despite the hurt and the disappointment she still adores him, and always will.
James Taylor and his (much older, reputedly very bossy) girlfriend figure in another reggae song with Sly and Robbie at the controls. The girlfriend is wearing the pants in the family, and he’s asking for the keys to the car. “He asks for her permission / To get a tan / To play his hand / To blow a grand / To be a man.” Et cetera. This funny put-down of a controlling shrew then gets a subversive ride-out that seems to linger with a sexy (but wishful) satisfaction. Other tracks include “Damn, You Get to Me,” with youngest Taylor brother, Hugh, subbing for James (and sounding just like him), and another unhappy breakup ballad, “You Don’t Feel the Same.” Hello Big Man would eventually conclude with “Floundering,” a self parody of a reggae song about an insecure woman who has put herself through every (expensive) therapy, treatment, spa, cult, exercise, and rehab in the known universe: “Then she sees her Scientologist / Gets fed by her nutritionist… Anna Freud’s analyzed her dreams / And she’s hoarse from primal screams.” But in the end, she’s still floundering away, but at least she’s trying to laugh at herself.
More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon Page 29
