by Marc Spitz
Simon was performing and touring all over the country. Backstage after a show at Carnegie Hall, she met the talented but very troubled James Taylor, who was struggling with fame and heroin addiction. Watch Monte Hellman’s existential West Coast car culture classic Two-LaneBlacktop for a taste of the quiet, haunted, all-American charisma of Taylor, who costars with Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson and the grizzled Warren Oates.
By the time she finally met Mick at the launch party for the Stones’ “Brown Sugar” single in early May of ’71, Simon and Taylor were an item. “I’d just fallen madly in love with James. Mick was married, therefore we were not in a position to have a relationship, but there was an attraction on both sides.” Enlightened “open marriage” was part of the early ’70s zeitgeist, but Simon was an old-fashioned type. “It was certainly not what I’m like at all. And not what James was like, or if he was he was careful not to tell me. I was extremely intrigued by the idea of meeting Mick Jagger and that he would want to meet me. It’s not as if I was wrestling with anything but certainly it was a feature that I was a woman and Mick was a man. That was certainly a part of it.”
Simon kept thinking about Mick in the period that followed. “It was a thrill for me to meet him. When you meet somebody who was an idol of yours, it’s hard to remember that they go home alone too.” Simon felt that she’d seen this Mick, a real guy with emotional depth, not just a symbol of the ’60s. She was determined to find a venue in which to explore this and came up with the idea to interview him and pitched it to the editor of the New York Times Arts and Leisure section. “[Section editor Seymour Peck] said if Jagger was willing, it would be great,” she told Rolling Stone two years later. “Somebody got in touch with Chris O’Dell and she got in touch with Mick, who really liked the idea. So I casually went out to L.A. and ended up hanging around there, waiting for Mick.” Simon knew O’Dell through James Taylor and found it easy to set up a meeting with Mick. A bit more difficult was actually getting him in the room. She loitered in Los Angeles for nearly a week before Mick finally rang her and said he was in town. Mick was still living in the South of France and was too jet-lagged to discuss anything besides being jet-lagged. “We talked about how we both hated airplanes,” Simon said. But there was a chemistry and the pair made plans to keep in touch.
By the time she and Mick met again, she felt they’d grown too close to entertain the idea of examining him journalistically but it would be a journalistic lyric that would bring them together and unite them for all time.
With her air of unspoiled privilege and cultural smarts, coupled with earthy clothes and long hair, Simon was an icon of early’70s femininity; smart, witty, talented, with a clear, ringing voice and a signature piano style, but most of all, a way with a pop lyric that was true, like a piece of Woody Allen dialogue: urbane affairs, deceptions, searching, vain and neurotic people with too much money and too much intelligence. Simon once opened for Woody during his nightclub years. But at heart she was a writer; a true journalist ironically; always writing, always taking detail at parties. She socialized with the elite and the glamorous but she also mentally recorded them; and by ’72, following a party among the opera-attending elite in New York City, she had the sketching for “The Ballad of a Vain Man” (a check on Bob Dylan’s 1965 indictment of a changing culture, “The Ballad of a Thin Man”). The song came together, like a great piece of writing, piecemeal over time. “There was a plot line that went through all three verses. This vain man does all these things that he can get away with. I had the chorus—‘You’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you,’ a year before I had the song.”
During a flight from Los Angeles to Palm Springs, she came up with the images of “clouds in my coffee,” the only abstract bit of “You’re So Vain.” “I was sitting with a friend of mine on an airplane—and he was looking at the view. He pointed it out to me, ‘You have clouds in your coffee.’ I was always writing down great lines, the way a reporter might.” Everything else is straight if occasionally adverb-happy reportage, and like a good journalist she never publicly revealed her source. Who, in his apricot scarf, inspired that first jot in the notebook?
Meanwhile the Stones were as shambolic as Simon was creatively on point. By the end of 1972’s North American tour, Keith had tried and failed to clean up many times. Keith has written about turning to heroin to deal with the scrutiny and glare of being a Rolling Stone, and there was more scrutiny of the band than ever before. The early and mid-’70s would find Keith visited by tragedy after tragedy, which made kicking it for good even more difficult. He had time to clean up, but his increasing discomfort with the Stones’ fame and tragic events, like the accidental overdose of Gram Parsons and the crib death of a son he and Anita had named Tara, compelled him to remain in an opiate cocoon for much of the early to mid-’70s.
The Stones, still “exiles,” moved operations down to Jamaica to attempt a new studio album (later released as Goats Head Soup) but finding the old magic became increasingly difficult. “I don’t think Mick and Keith were getting together, sitting in a room with guitars,” says Marshall Chess.
Mick would struggle with a track, only to abandon it and have Keith stagger in ten hours later, pick up his guitar, and produce a riff that would occasionally be the song’s salvation (in the case of strong new material like “Coming Down Again” or “Heartbreaker”). But too often, these songs remained in the shallow end, smack riffs with tossed-off coked lyrics. “Exile may seem flawed compared to the albums that preceded it,” Robert Palmer once observed, “but it sounds positively concise compared to the ones that followed. As Keith grew increasingly preoccupied with and sapped by his drug habit, and as Mick coped with his social responsibilities and celebrity, the Stones’ music seemed to unravel. Their next three albums—Goats Head Soup (1973), It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll (1974), and Black and Blue (1976)—are actually a single, rambling work.” When people play the resulting Goats Head Soup today (and to be sure, it divides fans; there are those who love it), they play it to achieve a groove. They seldom play it for the songs. They were not, as widely accused, sucking in the ’70s. The trilogy that preceded their Some Girls return to form sounds great today, but they’re personality records; “Stones” records. They’re great because, like certain Jack Nicholson or Robert DeNiro films, the root artist is appealing and the work of art marks a fascinating time in pop history, not because they contain, as with their late’60s run, one killer song after another. They’re The Passenger, or New York, New York, not Five Easy Pieces or Taxi Driver.
In ’73, they’d become what they were never before: a band full of rich and famous people, not playing or writing as well as they used to, but looking perfectly decadent in their floppy hats. Worse, glitter rock, reggae, and krautrock were offering critics and real music fans something genuinely new. The Motown hit factory that provided all of their early material had moved from Detroit to L.A. and now released complex pop suites that the band could no longer compete with or even hope to cover. Peers like Stevie Wonder, David Bowie, and Marvin Gaye were eclipsing them with wildly ambitious and visionary releases that the Stones didn’t even try to compete with.
“That’s it, we’ve done it,” Mick is quoted as saying at the close of the Stones blockbuster ’72 live dates. “It was definitely the most celebrated and most talked about tour ever,” says Chris O’Dell. “In some ways it was more the beginning of an era for touring. They set the bar and most bands followed. But perhaps it was the end of that crazy time. They seemed to settle a bit after that.” The prospect of having to top the triumphs of ’72 year in and out seemed like some hell ride for the pragmatic rock star. He sensed, given Keith’s wretched state, that it simply could not be done. The band that he expected to last two years had lasted a decade and would now have to alter its standards. He was about to turn a very blunt thirty. Good would have to do. He still recognized great, however, when he heard it, and found himself attracted, more than ever, to those who seemed hungry
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Carly Simon was recording her third album, No Secrets, at Air Studios in London. Richard Perry was producing. The major instrumental tracks for the album’s centerpiece, now retitled “You’re So Vain,” were finished. Perry’s friend and collaborator Harry Nilsson (Perry had the previous year made Nilsson’s baroque pop hit Nilsson Schmilsson) popped in to contribute some backing vocals to the song. Nilsson was in the studio when Mick placed an impromptu call to his look-alike. “Mick said he was in the area and I said come over. He came over very fast.” When Mick arrived and heard what Simon and Perry were up to, he wanted in and focused on Nilsson as a potential rival. “Mick does not want to let other people step on his territory,” Simon recalls. “There’s another rooster in the cage. He will come in and join the rooster and then probably oust him. God knows why I was considered the right hen to do this for.” Initially, Mick joined Nilsson and Simon, but after three takes, a frustrated Nilsson said, “You guys clearly don’t need me,” and left. “Harry bowed out,” Simon says, “probably because he wanted to have a drink or something.” Although he’s really only singing the chorus, Mick did his small part on “You’re So Vain” with such conviction that he simultaneously suggested that he knew what it was like to be both the narrator and the subject of the track. His voice mingles with Simon’s in a fashion that certainly recalls their sexual chemistry, but there’s also great empathy there. “His part is fantastic,” Simon remarks. “It’s iconic. It brings the record over the line.” Simon was so inspired by Mick’s contribution that she later rerecorded her lead vocals.
Mick isn’t credited on “You’re So Vain” and has not discussed the track. “We talked about it,” Simon says. “He thought it would be more interesting if he wasn’t credited. It would add to the mystique.” By 1972, a credit was not needed in order to inform the listener that Mick Jagger was on the track. Still, when Mick volunteered to sing backing vocals, the savvy self-promoter knew he would also be inserting his name into pop’s own riddle of the Sphinx: the “Who exactly probably thinks this song is about them?” question. “A lot of people think it’s about Mick Jagger and that I have fooled him into actually singing on it, that I pulled that ruse,” Simon told Rolling Stone in 1973. “You’re So Vain” is not about Mick Jagger. “He’s excluded as a possibility,” she tells me, simply because he is on the record. Mick is not the man in the apricot scarf. Still, a few hours in the studio forty years ago prompted millions to ask and continue to ask, “Did Simon carry on an affair with Mick?”
Bianca Jagger certainly thought so, placing a call to James Taylor the night before he and Simon were to marry and warning him, “My husband is having an affair with your wife.” All these years later, Simon has not spilled the beans about the song’s muse but swears there was no affair. “Bianca was really jealous but she had the facts wrong,” she says. “She believed there was more between Mick and me than there was. She passed that information on to James the night before we were going to be married. James was wonderful. He knew that he trusted me and trusted my version of the story. That my relationship with Mick was purely musical. Unfortunately, there was an awful mistake that I made in my life at one point when James had hurt me very much. I retaliated by telling him what was actually a lie. That there had been something going on. I used it as a weapon. I used Bianca’s story to hurt James, purely to hurt him, and when I see that in myself, when I see the fact that that kind of violence sprung from me, it shocks me and makes me very ashamed.” Still, the only funny business was . . . funny business, according to Simon. She and Mick worked on another song in the studio that night, fooling around at the piano in between takes, and nearly came up with another duet. “We wrote a song together that became a song on the Stones’ next album called ‘The Next Time We Say Goodbye.’ I thought that that was going to be a joint venture, but I’d never heard from Mick about how he’d like me to share the royalties.” The track, entitled “Till the Next Goodbye,” is credited to Jagger/ Richards. “It’s the very least I can do to thank Mick for turning what could have been an ordinary record into an iconic huge song for me over the years—so, my god, let him take all of my songs and say that he wrote them.”
“You’re So Vain” marks the first time Mick Jagger sees real musical vitality beyond the realm of the Stones. Released in early 1973, “You’re So Vain” was an even bigger hit than their own No. 1 single of ’73, the beautiful but fan-polarizing ballad “Angie.” Musically, it’s breathtaking, written by Keith, with Charlie’s gentle drumming and Mick Taylor’s evocative piano. The “vibe” is perfectly ’70s mellow gold, but “You’re So Vain,” unlike much of the Goats Head Soup, It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Black and Blue trilogy, is timeless. Kate Hudson couldn’t even ruin it serenading Matthew McConaughey in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. Commercially, it was unstoppable, topping the charts on both sides of the Atlantic and selling millions of copies and driving No Secrets to No. 1 for a month and a half. More important, it remains one of the few moments of true intrigue at the start of what Lester Bangs would come to dismiss as the Stones’ “flakey” period.
13
“The South’s Answer to the Rutles”
Let’s temporarily suspend the well-worn rock writers’ notion (examined earlier) that the disastrous free concert at the Altamont Speedway on December 6, 1969 (or even the Tate-LaBianca murders on August 8 and 9), marked the “Death of the ’60s.” Mick dispensed with it long ago, telling a journalist: “Perhaps it was the end of their era, the end of their naïveté. I would have thought it would have ended long before Altamont.” Even Sonny Barger, the president of the Hells Angels, when contacted for this book, declined to revisit December 6, 1969, dismissing it with a curt e-mail: “it’s just too stupid.”
This isn’t an attempt to be iconoclastic or dismissive. The murders of Sharon Tate and six other innocents in Southern California that summer and the senseless death of Meredith Hunter were obviously tragedies, and certainly burned up a lot of utopian energy, leaving in its place fear and confusion, and, worse, cynicism and selfishness, but a tragedy alone cannot truly put something so sinister to rest. It would take a comedy to truly finally allow us all to move on. And so I suggest to you that the 1960s truly ended on the evening of March 22, 1978, at 9:30 p.m., when NBC first broadcast The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash in prime time.
A full-length spin-off of a sketch that began on Monty Python cast member Eric Idle’s solo BBC comedy series Rutland Weekend Television three years earlier, All You Need Is Cash neutralized both the naïveté and the hauteur of the youth-quaking generation with one brutally witty punch line after another. This was a different kind of acid.
It was born, of course, from the first of many powerful waves of ’60s nostalgia. “What spawned the Rutles was the fact that somebody was offering the Beatles a colossal amount of money to get back together,” says Python-affiliated songwriter Neil Innes (aka Ron Nasty, the “John Lennon” of the group). “It was getting so silly that something silly needed to be done; the moment was right.”
On the April 24, 1976, episode of Saturday Night Live, show creator and producer Lorne Michaels offered the Fab Four a check for three thousand dollars to reunite.
“Here it is right here,” he deadpanned sincerely. “A check made out to you, the Beatles, for three thousand dollars. All you have to do is sing three Beatles songs. ‘She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah.’ That’s a thousand dollars right there. You know the words—it’ll be easy.” People didn’t want to let go. Michaels’ generation were straining to move on into the new. When Eric Idle hosted S.N.L. for the second time on April 23, 1977, and he brought Innes in as musical guest, debuting the Rutles’ “Cheese and Onions” as well as some skits from Rutland Weekend Television, “the mailbag was huge. People sending in albums with Beatles crossed out and Rutles on it—so really the public at large were ready for a joke.”
All You Need Is Cash (the title alone indicates that some much-needed wound licking has begun) was shot in the summer
of 1978. Nearly a decade removed, nobody wanted to get past it more than the people who made the myths themselves: the ’60s icons, trying like the punks to make new music themselves, to finally move ahead.
“George was the one that wanted to put the suit in the cupboard,” Innes remembers. George Harrison worked closely with Idle and Michaels on the Rutles film, and his involvement brought perhaps the biggest ’60s icon to the mix.
Codirected by and starring Idle, and featuring uncanny Beatle-style parodies by Neil Innes:“Ouch” for “Help”
“Piggy in the Middle” for “I Am the Walrus”
“Let’s Be Natural” for “Let It Be”
