With a tremulous voice that few but Neil Young could equal, twenty-two-year-old Stevens (real name: Steven Demetri Georgiou) was the British-raised son of a Greek Cypriot father and a Swedish mother. Dark, hirsute, and handsome, he had become an adulated star (he was an “exceptional singer…without question a serious, original artist,” raved the L.A. Times’s Robert Hilburn) by way of the catchy but patronizing (a young man is telling his ex-girlfriend to be careful) “Wide World,” from his Tea for the Tillerman. He would eventually have a second hit in the exquisite “Morning Has Broken.”
After nailing the deal (“I don’t remember the details, but Weston probably wanted custody of Carly’s firstborn child—that’s what he was like in those days”), Steve called Carly and said, “We’re going to the Troubadour, on April 6!” The single was now at #25.
“I was completely flustered,” Carly remembers. “It had never occurred to me that the record was going to take off.” Steve went over to Carly’s apartment and tried to soothe her over the obstacles: one, her fear of flying. Steve said he, too, was afraid (this was true)—they’d attack it with Valium and cocktails. Next, Carly’s lack of a drummer she liked. In a sheepish effort to nix the date, Carly said she wanted a drummer who sounded “exactly” like Russ Kunkel—she knew, because she’d been “following James’s career with a fine-toothed comb,” as she puts it, that Kunkel was off touring with Taylor (with Carole and Jo Mama) and wouldn’t be available.
Steve outwitted her. He called Kunkel and booked him on April 6 for $500.
After a long pause, Carly whispered, “Now I guess I have to do it.”
In March, the L.A. pop music community received enthusiastic advance word of Carly by way of an article, headlined “Carly Simon Has Impressive Album,” by Robert Hilburn. “Ever so rarely an album by a new or virtually unknown artist arrives with little or no fanfare that turns out to be one of the classics of the year,” Hilburn opened, in the L.A. Times. “In 1971, it may well be Carly Simon.” He grouped her as “one of those individualistic singer-writers that one almost instinctively associates with such artists as…[Randy] Newman, Laura Nyro, and Joni Mitchell.” He was struck by her “strong, always vigorous point of view,” and he analyzed her single: “Miss Simon (and cowriter Jacob Brackman) gives a rather stinging picture of the whole courtship/marriage attitude. She opens the song by painting a rather somber, tragic forecast for the marriage potential…then…concludes [the song with] the almost inevitable resolution, based on family expectation and emotional fatigue, to proceed [with the marriage] anyway.”
Russ Kunkel told his new friend James Taylor about the gig; Taylor, who may have remembered Carly and Lucy from the Mooncusser in the Vineyard, said he’d catch it.
Carly and Steve flew out to L.A. several days early, alighting amid the palm trees. The young woman who’d lived in France and traveled to England was amazed at how “provincial” she was—how “backward in terms of my expansion into the world; this was a whole new world for me—how could I have lived that long and gone nowhere?”
By now, the fever of having a hit record and an engagement at the top rock club in L.A. was hitting her. At a dinner party she met towering Michael Crichton, a.k.a. “Big Boy.” “She went out with him a couple of times before the gig,” Steve says, “so we were having a great time and the idea of performing was somewhere in the back of her mind.” She fell in love with her future at the Troubadour rehearsal, fell in love with the idea of having her own band: bass guitarist Jimmy Ryan, pianist Paul Glanz, and drummer Andy Newmark would stay with her. Rehearsing with Russ Kunkel in the darkness of the Troub, “I was in awe of him,” she’s said. (Leah Kunkel arrived and saw Carly sitting on her husband’s lap. Leah recalls reaching out to shake Carly’s hand “and say[ing]: ‘I’m Leah—Russ’s wife,’ and off his lap Carly came.”)
The Cat Stevens–Carly Simon shows were sold out; “all of rock aristocracy was coming,” Steve Harris learned from Doug Weston. All day, Arlyne Rothberg and Steve were enmeshed in “high drama,” Arlyne recalls. Was the stage-terrorized Carly “going to make it” onto the stage? “Steve was calling every few minutes” with updates on how he was staving off her meltdown. Carly trembled and stuttered through the day, but sailed through the performance, and then met James Taylor backstage.
When Danny Kortchmar learned that Carly Simon was a rising star, he thought: Of course she and James will end up together; it wasn’t a matter of if but of “What took you so long?” But tonight was not yet their time.
The next morning Robert Hilburn gave Carly shared billing with headliner Stevens in his glowing review in the L.A. Times, calling them equally “extraordinarily gifted,” predicting that Carly was “destined” to be “acclaimed” and that “[a]s a singer and writer, she has exceptional skills. She’s not just a newcomer who is promising; she is, after just one engagement, a new artist who has arrived.” In his Rolling Stone review of her album, published almost immediately after the Troubadour engagement, Tim Crouse defended Carly against class-bashing critics like Robert Christgau of The Village Voice. Christgau had been pleasingly riveted by the anti-marriage radicalism in “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be” until he learned of Carly’s background; then he deemed her voice “pure ruling-class honk.” The “Updike or Salinger short story”–like songs “strike close to a lot of middle-class homes,” Crouse said, and are essentially “dedicated to the proposition that the rich, the well-known, and the college-educated often find themselves in the highest dues-paying bracket.” More, her own feeling that her true self could best come through her own songs was justified; Crouse correctly perceived that Carly was “passionately romantic and cynically realistic” at once.
The Troubadour shows helped catapult “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be” into the Top 10; it would stay in the Top 40 ten weeks. Carly Simon would end up selling 400,000 copies.
When Carly flew back to New York, Cat Stevens did too, and he asked Carly out. On the appointed night, she waited and waited, as she had for Robbie Robertson. Cat, who had recently been involved with Andy Warhol actress Patti D’Arbanville, was late. When he did finally arrive, “I was sitting on my bed and really nervous, because we hadn’t officially had a date yet. And I picked up my guitar and I tuned the low E string down a whole step to D, and I wrote a song for him, because I was so excited and nervous to see him, and I’d been wasting so much time” on those feelings. Echoing the rhythms of Cat’s own songs, she wrote “An-ti-ci-pa-tion / An-ti-ci-pa-a-tion / is making me late / is keeping me wai-ai-ai-ai-ting.” “I wrote the whole song in fifteen minutes,” she says.
Cat Stevens reminded Carly of William Blake—“he was extremely airy in that Blake way, and spiritual.* And he would look at me and it would be dazzling, the reflection of all things miraculous. He was amazing; sometimes we would sit on his bed for hours; he’d be watching TV and playing the guitar and looking at me at the same time—he could multitask.” A person close to Carly at the time adds that Cat was “confusing to Carly—there were girls and boys” in his world. He remembers wondering: Was Cat gay? (“But isn’t everyone just a little bit gay?” Carly says today, remembering his sweetness.)
Meanwhile, people had been talking about Carly’s physical resemblance to Mick Jagger, so she thought it would be fun to interview him. Seymour Peck, the editor of The New York Times’s Arts & Leisure section, encouraged the idea. Carly called Jagger in the south of France, just before his May 12 marriage to his pregnant fiancée, Nicaraguan beauty, Sorbonne student, and recent girlfriend of Michael Caine, Bianca Pérez-Mora Macías. Carly recalls that she and Mick casually flirted through the interview, each saying they’d “really love to meet” the other. The Stones’ Sticky Fingers had just shot to #1 in Billboard, and here was Mick Jagger, the sexiest rock star in the world, ingratiating himself to her. It was a little heady. “Carly was trying to figure out her place in all this,” says Jake Brackman. “Was she in this celebrity world? It wasn’t so long ago t
hat she was in the Letters department of Newsweek.” (In fact, while Carly’s first album and performances were being positively reviewed, residents of central Massachusetts could also hear her, on local radio, singing the jingle she’d written for Worcester Savings Bank.)
The headiness continued. On May 21 Carly opened for Kris Kristofferson at New York’s Bitter End. “And this was when Kris was the most beautiful man,” says Ellen Questel, who was in the audience, “with that curly hair, and wearing that deep-V-necked semisheer white Indian shirt.” Kristofferson was smitten by Carly when he glimpsed her as they’d both exited their adjacent dressing rooms. “So I went out front to watch her, and I was just knocked out,” Kristofferson says. “She was beautiful. She had this off-the-shoulder kind of peasant blouse on, and she was playin’ the guitar and singing her heart out. Her songs were great, and she seemed totally confident. She was pretty hard to resist.” Jake, who was standing next to Kristofferson at the time, heard him mutter a remark about his lust for Carly “which,” Jake says, “is definitely not for publication.”
Kristofferson, thirty-five—Rhodes scholar, ex-army pilot—had been hailed ten months earlier by The New York Times as “the hottest thing in Nashville” and the voice of “the new Nashville.” He had been having, as he puts it, a “roller coaster” of a year. “It was heaven in one sense, because after struggling for five years, I got my foot in the door.” After haunting the Village clubs with buddies Shel Silverstein and Bobby Neuwirth, he had finally become a sensation, giving his mentor Johnny Cash a hit with his “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” Sammy Smith a hit with “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” and his close friend Janis Joplin a #1 hit with “Me and Bobby McGee,” among others. But the overdose deaths of Joplin (who’d been enamored of him; they’d traveled together much of the last year of her life) and his new friend Jimi Hendrix had emotionally thrown him. During the subsequent months, “I worked solidly either in film”—Dennis Hopper’s (disastrous) The Last Movie et al.—“or on the road,” he says, trying to avoid his grief, anger, fear, and exhaustion. When he appeared as a headliner at the Bitter End, he was only sober when he had to be, which meant, not a whole lot of the time.
After Carly’s set—in which she sang the new song she’d written for Cat Stevens without acknowledging its inspiration (it was then called “These Are the Good Old Days”)—Kris brought Carly out to sing duets with him. Everyone in the audience witnessed their chemistry. “It was a full-blown version of seeing her onstage with Timmy Ratner in Girl Crazy,” says Ellen. Arlyne recalls, “It was just romantic as hell. He was gorgeous. He was a vision. I remember”—later on—“seeing him coming up Carly’s stairs, all in chamois, with the guitar, and I was: Oh my God, I’ve never seen anything like that! With all that charm!”
After they took their bows, Kris and Carly went back to his suite at the Gramercy Park Hotel. He began writing a growling, lusty song for her, “I’ve Got to Have You,” and they embarked on what would be a summer-long love affair. So recently an office worker, camp counselor, and jingle writer, Carly would marvel, “‘Kris Kristofferson likes me!’” Steve recalls. “She loved it that he knew Dylan; that, through him, she met musicians and was treated like a fellow artist. We’d walk down the street and she’d say, ‘People are saying hello as if they recognize me’ and I’d say: ‘They do recognize you, Carly.’”
The next week Carly opened for Cat Stevens at Boston’s Symphony Hall. Kris sent her roses before the show (though it was Cat with whom she’d rendezvous afterward). Carly would fall hard for Kristofferson, but the relationship would prove challenging. “Kris was an alcoholic at the time,” Arlyne says, “but Carly, with her sense of humor, could see the ludicrousness in her situation,” attempting emotional intimacy with him. As Kris got drunker and drunker, Carly would file phone dispatches with Arlyne. “She’d call me and say, ‘Just as I was telling him about my life and my problems, he fell asleep!’” And Kristofferson could be gruff. Flying back to New York from a performance in Delaware, “Carly was scared to death on the airplane,” Kris recalls. “Oh, man, she almost got sick from it. I don’t think I was a help in any way—I said, ‘Buck up! Get tough.’” Looking back on the romance, Kris says, “I was pretty self-absorbed in those days. Carly was funny and really smart—she had more brains than I did. I have a hard time now believing she tolerated my company.”
Still, he dropped her. After that bumpy flight back from Delaware, “Kris didn’t want to see me for a while,” remembers Carly. Jake says, “The romance was a bigger deal for her than it was for him.” In subsequent months, Kris became involved with his next co-performer, Rita Coolidge, and when he brought Rita out to do closing duets, Carly was hurt “that she slipped into my shoes so easily. I thought, ‘Oh, God, we’re completely interchangeable here.’” (Kristofferson and Coolidge were married in 1973.) Ellen Questel says: “I can’t tell you how very often I’ve seen it that the expectation Carly has had about somebody has not been reciprocated. I’ve seen this over and over and over. She’s not without humor and wit about these things. I don’t want to portray her as a defenseless babe, because she’s not, but I wish I’d seen it less.”
Throughout the romantic whirlwind, Carly continued to write new songs—not just “Anticipation” about Cat but “Three Days” about Kris. The intensity of her feeling for him is reflected in the first lines, “If I have known you only three days, then how will I remember you in ten?” and in the image of two shining stars crisscrossing the heavens on their way to opposite bookings—one to L.A., the other to London.
Meanwhile, Carly was off to London to record her second album, Anticipation. Jac Holzman chose Cat’s own producer, Paul Samwell-Smith, to produce it with a “softer but solid” sound. “Carly is one of those artists whose incandescence burns brightest with a new producer for each album,” Holzman has said. “After they have squeezed the juice out of each other, it’s on to the next, rather like a holiday romance, which in some cases I’m sure it was.” It was, with Samwell-Smith; he and Carly became lovers.
Along with her songs to Cat and Kris, Carly interpreted Kris’s song to her, “I’ve Got to Have You,” to end the album; Rolling Stone’s Stephen Davis opined, “When Carly moans, ‘I can’t help it…I’ve got to have you,’ we’re being shown something so primal and so private that it takes your breath away.” The album, which Carly dedicated to Steve Harris, was spare—just Carly and her band: Glanz, Newmark, and Ryan, with Cat helping out on some vocals. Today Carly says she loved recording it, though, during the course of recording, Steve remembers that there was angst between Carly and her lover-producer. Still, Anticipation was a more confident effort than Carly Simon. In it are the beginnings of what would be trademark Carly touches—her lusty belting on “Anticipation” (its reviewer-dubbed “dazzling, can’t-put-down refrain” has an all-out, drum-heavy rock arrangement, with suspended time between drumbeats that perfectly mirror the suspended time she was singing about); her sarcastic takedown of an arrogant man in the bongo-syncopated “Legend in Your Own Time”; her tremulous vulnerability in “Our First Day Together,” which featured what The New York Times’s Don Heckman would call “a remarkably sophisticated melodic structure”; and the operatic emotion in “Share the End,” with a moving, anthemlike quality that would be most fully realized, years later, in her Academy Award–winning “Let the River Run.” “Summer’s Coming Around Again” paid homage to Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “The Girl from Ipanema.”
The blue-tinted cover of Anticipation shows Carly in a sheer, butterfly-winged top over a shimmery skirt, holding open both sides of a formal, wrought-iron gate. Her long legs are wide apart, and, all the way from hips to boots, they’re visible beneath the fabric.
Anticipation was released in November 1971. The title song remained in the Top 40 three months; the album sold 400,000 copies in the first four months, stayed in Billboard’s Hot 100 for thirty-one weeks, eventually selling over half a million copies. Carly headlined at the Bitter End on
December 18. Don Heckman had, three months earlier, written an impressed review of Carly’s originality: “In Carly Simon’s music one hears…the folk experience…synthesized through the consciousness of an enormously eclectic musical point of view, and shaped and molded by an esthetic that recognizes none of the traditional boundaries between pop styles.” Now he raved about the “explosive” new singer-songwriter’s performance:
In the eight months or so since the release of her first recording, Miss Simon’s brightness has been dramatically increasing in magnitude. After hearing her Thursday night I’d say, good as she is already, her talent…is still growing.
Miss Simon does everything superbly. Her voice is rich and full and versatile enough to go from high, pure, vibratoless head tones to deep, tigerish growls. She plays guitar so unobtrusively that it would be easy to overlook her unusual dexterity on the instrument. And tying her many gifts together is the electric presence of a born performer—the almost unconscious command of a stage that comes as naturally to her as walking.
Her older songs—“That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be,” “Anticipation”…—are familiar enough, but the new ones suggest an admirable broadening…She’s flying high now. High and far.
She was flying high romantically, too. On November 9 she’d attended James Taylor’s concert at Carnegie Hall. Jo Mama was opening for him (Carole was home, awaiting the December birth of Molly). Joni and James were no longer a couple, and James’s lawyer, Nat Weiss, offered to take Carly backstage to say hello to James. Danny Kortchmar and James’s bass player, Leland Sklar, saw Carly wielding her charm. “They pegged it,” says Abigail Haness. “Danny and Lee looked at each other and said, in unison: ‘Mrs. Taylor.’” Aside from being some few years older than James, “Carly is so much more sophisticated than James,” Abigail continues. “She knows how to work a room, while James lifts his shoulders and puts his hands out in that ‘I don’t know, life just happened to me…’ wingspread. Carly certainly didn’t try to dupe him, but she knew what she wanted.”*
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