Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

  Carole wrote six of the songs wholly herself, and these are strikingly, if casually, confessional. In the scatting “Bitter With the Sweet,” she grumbles about the invasion on her time and privacy; in “Goodbye Don’t Mean I’m Gone” (with twangy country interlude) she unapologetically tells old friends that her inaccessibility isn’t swelled-headedness;* rather, “It’s all I can do to be a mother.” “I Think I Can Hear You” expresses her belief in a deity, likely reflecting her devotion to Swami Satchidananda;* “Stand Behind Me” describes her resistance to the “blind[ing]” “dazzlement” of her shocking fame, and her reliance on her loved ones. But it was the more polished “Been to Canaan” (named for both the biblical land and the Connecticut town in which she and Charlie had just bought a farm in order to have a base near their families, which they rarely used), featuring its bounce-as-you’re-driving hook “been so long…”—that became the album’s Top 10 hit. Still, Charlie remembers something about its recording that underscored their no-win situation. Long after the track was cut, “she and I were talking and she said she had been a little disappointed in my bass playing on it but she hadn’t said anything [during the session], and [when we talked about it later] I thought: That was the best I could do. I thought it was a good track at the time. I hadn’t realized she wasn’t completely satisfied with it.” Carole was not only the star and the breadwinner but also her husband’s boss—the highly seasoned arranger, pressured to prove that Tapestry wasn’t a fluke. Choice: Lean on your bass player (dominate your husband) to get the most out of the money track? Or don’t push him, don’t humiliate him, and risk less of a hit? Men in Carole’s position didn’t have that problem.

  After Rhymes & Reasons, Carole tacked from the ruminatively personal to the sociopolitical. Fantasy is a pop opera explicitly remining those issues (race, poverty, longing) that she and Gerry had had to tiptoe around ten years earlier. Carole wrote all the songs herself and sings in the personae of society’s underdogs: a black man struggling for pride, a welfare mother fighting for dignity, a deflated white housewife, a young pregnant woman whose man has fled, a barrio Hispanic, and so on. Fantasy was a “concept” album, the tracks bleeding into one another much in the manner of Marvin Gaye’s brilliant What’s Going On, of two years earlier, and with a sound that echoed (the insuperably humane) Curtis Mayfield’s recent Superfly soundtrack. The fluid-track sound would also prefigure the looming pop music trend: disco.*

  The album, with its one hit, the peppery Spanish-language “Corazón,” was released in June 1973 and promptly went gold. But artistically it didn’t touch the Tapestry bar, and her once greatest champion seemed the most keenly disappointed: the L.A. Times’s Robert Hilburn would eventually write that her two post-Tapestry albums, “while…polished and nicely crafted, sounded so much alike to most critics and fans they could barely suppress the yawns when talking about them.” The New York Times’s Lorraine Alterman called Carole’s attempts to highlight the plight of disadvantaged women laudably feminist but warned of the dangers of inflated expectation (Fantasy had been pre-touted as a “masterpiece”). “Though her more ardent followers think of her as a genius,” Alterman wrote, “King is really a skilled writer of popular songs, but”—unlike Joni, Alterman made clear—“she doesn’t possess that bold leap of the imagination that transforms craft into art.” The Chicago Tribune’s Lynn Van Matre’s irritated reaction to Fantasy seemed to bear out Alterman’s warning about the dangers of oversell: Carole’s voice, Van Matre griped, was “slightly appealing rather than good,” “thin,” “occasionally even whiny,” and her lyrics were “often cliché.”

  Turning her thoughts to a next album in 1974, Carole came to terms with her stretched limits: she had written all of Fantasy by herself, had just finished an exhausting tour, and she and Charlie just found out they were going to be parents again. She needed a cowriter to relieve some of the pressure. She turned to ex–Myddle Class member Dave Palmer, whose ex-wife Sue had been her best friend in New Jersey and then Gerry’s girlfriend in California. Dave had been the vocalist for a new band led by two edgy ex-Bard students, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, who named their group for the dildo in William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch: Steely Dan. Dave sent Carole and Charlie a prerelease copy of the Dan’s Can’t Buy a Thrill, and Carole knew it would be huge.

  When Dave lost his job with the Dan (it was decided that Fagen’s own angst-filled voice best expressed his and Becker’s compositions), Carole contacted Dave about collaborating. One of the first lyrics he sent her was a smartly internally rhymed piece about a person coaxing a saxophonist, “Jazzman, take my blues away,” which Carole set to an urgent, rocking melody. “Jazzman” would hit #1 and become the second-biggest single she ever recorded (“It’s Too Late” being the first). Dave and Carole ended up writing the whole album, which would be titled Wrap Around Joy, together. Midway through, Carole paused to have her baby—a boy!—joyfully welcomed by Charlie and her family of daughters. They named him Levi for Charlie’s great-uncle (though the Four Tops’ lead singer, Levi Stubbs, constituted additional inspiration for selecting the name).

  In addition to the hugely successful “Jazzman” (which earned Carole another Grammy nomination), Wrap Around Joy yielded a second hit in “Nightingale,” on which Carole’s daughters Louise and Sherry sang backup. But the fact that none of these songs were wholly written by Carole (or with a collaborator—Gerry or Toni—with whom she’d had a deep, prior fit) put it somewhat at a remove from the soul-baring arc of Tapestry and its two offshoots. (The exception: “Change in Mind, Change of Heart,” featuring graceful, contemplative lyrics and Carole’s wistful delivery and gospel piano chords.) Carole seemed to have been consciously trying to create a crowd pleaser, and by some accounts she succeeded. “I know you’re going to be skeptical,” Robert Hilburn backhand-complimented, “but Carole King really does finally have another album you’re going to like…her most fully satisfying work since Tapestry.” But Rolling Stone’s Jon Landau, whose startled enthrallment with Tapestry had started it all, ended his trying-to-love-it review by putting his finger on Carole’s gathering dilemma: “King…[is] forced to live in [Tapestry’s] oppressive shadow.”

  Stepping off the outdo-or-at-least-equal-Tapestry treadmill, Carole collaborated with seventy-year-old Brooklynite Maurice Sendak on his animated children’s TV special, Really Rosie. Sendak, whose sweet, fanciful (and genially perverted) children’s books, such as In the Night Kitchen, were beloved by progressive parents, had created a nostalgic cartoon opera about the spunky girl he’d glimpsed through his Sheepshead Bay window as a young man. Plunging herself back into her girlhood world, Carole delivered a soundtrack full of bulabasta brio, ethnic shtick (including a chorus of “oy vey!”s), and piano pounding on songs with names like “Chicken Soup with Rice,” “The Ballad of Chicken Soup,” and “Avenue P.” The New York Times’s John Rockwell, having joined the chorus in feeling that her post-Tapestry albums had been “something of a letdown,” seemed relieved to be able to rave again: Really Rosie was “absolutely delightful.”

  In 1975 Gerry and Carole once more sat down to write together. Gerry says that Carole wasn’t emotional when they were married, “but later she was—later we would get together and talk about old times and she was very emotional.” Judging from the poignance of the songs they produced now—especially the wistful, elegiac “High Out of Time,” which stands as one of their best songs ever—this might well have been the period he was referring to. Carole had reason to be emotional; her marriage to Charlie was crumbling. They had rented a summer house in Malibu, but she ended up living there alone with the girls while he quietly rethought his future. (Charlie left music briefly to try his hand at acting, then to work for an aerobatic airplane dealer—and, in short order, as an aerobatic pilot and flight instructor.) The dissolution of her second marriage led Carole to the tender and unusually personal “Only Love Is Real,” in which she invoked “my son and daughters” and expressed regret that she hadn’t ha
d the wisdom to have “spared” someone, presumably Charlie, from “giving your youth to me.”

  Recorded at the end of 1975, and graced by collaborations with Gerry, Thoroughbred would be the first solo album she made without Charlie, and her pressing, questing voice seems to be searching the room for that missing comfort. It’s as if the tracks (with background help from James Taylor, plus David Crosby and Graham Nash, rendering “High Out of Time” celestial) are saying, Here I am, single again, with four children, adjusting the things that matter to this behemoth: fame; what is next for me? Aptly, Rolling Stone’s Stephen Holden, hearing the emotion packed into every chord and syllable, called Thoroughbred, which was released as the year turned, Carole’s “finest album since Tapestry”—which was then in its fifth year in the Top 200. (Other critics, however, angrily accused her of coasting. The Washington Post’s Alex Ward thundered: “For King to wait two years and then come out with more of what we’ve heard before…strikes me as not only unimaginative but also a bit smug.”)

  Carole closed Thoroughbred with an optimistic rouser, “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine,” which she wrote alone. The song’s attitude essentially predicted her first six months of 1976. She had a romance with a lothario of the Canyon and prince of the Troubadour’s bar, singer-songwriter J. D. Souther (who’d also had a brief romance with Joni and a long relationship with Linda Ronstadt). She and Stephanie Magrino Fischbach (who was now separated from John) spent the summer of 1976 on the beach with their kids. One day they ran into Bob Dylan’s wife, Sara. When Sara heard that Carole was getting a divorce, she wailed: “I want a divorce, too! I have five kids with this man!* How do you get one!?” (The Dylans divorced a year later.)

  But the lighthearted ease of the summer was not to last.

  “Hey, you smoke cigarettes?” the twenty-year-old “trusty” (that was the prisoner whom the wardens at Idaho’s Bonneville County Jail* trusted to take dinners to fellow inmates) asked the new teenage inmate, one day in 1967. “Sure,” the inmate, fifteen-year-old Randy Stone, answered. Stone had been arrested for breaking into a train and stealing 150 cases of beer, sentenced to probation, and had broken probation. That’s why he was locked up. The “trusty” was Richard Edward Morrison Evers,** a handsome, blond twenty-year-old who’d pleaded guilty to forgery a year earlier and had been sentenced to four years. Even though Evers was risking extra jail time by distributing contraband to a minor, he pushed seven smuggled cigarettes under Stone’s cell door. He was proud to be a troublemaker. As his future wife would put it, it was Rick Evers’s style to refuse to “blindly accept” the “choices” that authorities doled out to him “as his only choices.”

  Even by local standards, Rick Evers was a “scrapper,” his friend, professional cow herder Bruce Stanger, recalls. “He scrapped over girls; he scrapped over cars; he scrapped over horses. Guys in Idaho scrapped, but Rick scrapped a lot.” He’d grown up “rough and poor,” Stanger says. “I don’t think his dad was in the picture much. His mom was a waitress for a while.” He was a high school dropout who’d spent some of his teen years in St. Anthony’s Reform School, a juvenile detention facility in his native Idaho Falls. When he was arrested for the forgery, he’d listed his profession as “radio announcer”; he had a gig at a local station.

  Rick was released from jail in late 1967 (and granted final discharge in March 1969); Randy Stone was out, too. A year after Rick cleared his sentence, he went to work for Randy at a Boise head shop Randy had opened called Head Quarters. By now Rick—his hair shoulder length, and customarily dressed in bellbottom pants and buckskin shirt—had become the devotee of a hippie spiritual group heavily sprinkled with Native American lore, led by a Denver lay preacher. Like many locals, the religionists—not without reason—believed not only that the nearby desert town of Arco was radioactive (there had been a fatal nuclear accident at the Arco-based Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, INEEL, in early 1961) but also that dangerous nuclear experiments were still going on there and, most exotically, that INEEL workers had tapped into a secret network of ancient subterranean Indian lagoons that could transport a south Idahoan, underground, from Idaho Falls up through Washington and out into the Pacific Ocean.

  With its spectral deserts (with such names as Craters of the Moon), majestic mountains, real and imagined underground lagoons, and nuclear myths and perfidy, southern Idaho was a mystique-laden place, and Rick took on his own aura of vague mysticism. But becoming a hippie hadn’t calmed the explosive frustration he’d had throughout his young life. Postjail “Rick was a tough guy,” Randy Stone, today a house builder and a gemsmith, says, “He was known for breaking a few jaws. He had a part there where he could snap. In fact, I got popped in the mouth by him once. We got into an argument about something stupid and he popped me so hard, all’s I saw was black. It was a pretty tough punch. Right after that he split.”

  In the way that some young Idaho women taxonomized their males—dividing them between “cowboys” and “mountain men”—Evers was the latter. As one native Idahoan, “Cassie” (not her real name), who knew Rick well, puts it, “Cowboys are more ‘yes-ma’am’: eager-to-please and charming to women, but in a strong way. Mountain men treat their women like squaws: ‘Help me pack my gear! Haul some more wood in the house ’cause I’m busy hunting elk.’ Not that they aren’t charming and wonderful in their own way, but” mountain men like Rick are more difficult, Cassie says.

  In the early 1970s Rick Evers was at the center of a small group of Idaho hippies, young people who didn’t have to go “back” to any land. They’d grown up amid the state’s eighty majestic Ponderosa pine–filled mountain ranges dotted by hidden hot springs and creeks that meandered into rainbow-hued sage-and-alfalfa beds. “Rick was our leader,” Cassie says, of the small group of friends gathered into a commune. “He had a stubborn streak and an anger—you didn’t want him to get mad—but he was very handsome and he was intuitive and he was brilliant and he was wise and he had charisma. He was a sort of guru—he could go right to the core of a situation and be instrumental in making sure that people were happy and that their needs were met.” Cassie pauses, then she adds, as if the point was missed: “Rick was our king.” Says Roy Reynolds, a cow herder and artist and friend of Rick’s, “He was a hippie—unlike a lot of cowboys, I had hippie friends. He had been in trouble all his life; he had some trouble with dope, but when he was straight he was one of the sweetest people I knew—an absolute angel. And he looked like an angel. And,” Reynolds adds, “Rick needed love.”

  By the mid-1970s Evers had gotten his girlfriend pregnant; she left him and moved with their young son to Hawaii. He started hand-tooling leather goods and fringed buckskin jackets, and he fancied himself a guitarist and songwriter. “He did have capabilities and talents,” says Bruce Stanger’s brother Mike, a musician and artist. “He could make leather goods and he was into music; he was a hummer and a strummer. But Rick’s best talent lay in quiet, timely self-promotion—he was the ultimate wannabe.”

  Around the summer of 1976, Rick spent six weeks on a spiritual retreat in the mountains outside Boise. “He went there alone, with nothing but the clothes on his back—wandering around, adventuring,” Cassie recalls. Shortly after that rite, he packed up his leather goods and guitar and took off for L.A. to seek his fortune.

  Serendipity struck. “Rick was stranded on the sidewalk of Wilshire Boulevard,” Roy Reynolds says, “and he was wearing a beautiful coat he had made and carrying a load of leather and furs. The Eagles happened to be driving down Wilshire and they spotted him.” Led by Michigan boy Glenn Frey and Texan Don Henley, the Eagles were not an organic but rather an evolved-in-L.A. group of talented, connected country rock musicians from different disbanded groups whose focal point for years had been the Troubadour’s bar. Their at-home-in-Death-Valley image (and bleating-lost-boy-in-expensive-boots sound on “Hotel California,” and “Take It Easy”) had become era-definingly successful. “They liked Rick’s coat,” Roy Reynolds cont
inues, “and so they picked him up and took him to a Hollywood party.” Maybe Evers seemed like a real cowboy to these pseudo-cowboy millionaires.

  Carole had come to know the Eagles through her romance with their close friend J. D. Souther; she was at the same party to which Rick Evers had found himself invited. The superstar and the hitchhiker were immediately attracted to one another. He was undeniably handsome, with his shoulder-length flaxen hair and strong, even features. According to the account Rick gave to a friend, as he and Carole started talking, they both confided that they’d been celibate for a while; then Rick suggested they go back to her house “and be celibate together.”

  And so it began. “Carole and Rick fell madly in love with each other,” says Roy Reynolds, who became one of the closest witnesses to the relationship. “They both had been lonely, and they just…found each other.”

  During their first enraptured weeks together, in what Carole later called “a celebration of our heart-space,” they cowrote a song called “Wings of Love,” a solemn, over-the-top-romantic ballad about being filled up with a love so deep its “truth” “makes the kingdoms ring.” In the song’s excruciating earnestness and heightened emotion are hints of a woman losing a grip on judgment and of a man, perhaps, whose intense romanticism so contrasts with his rough-hewn machismo that, in the right eyes, he is spellbinding. In a nod to their overcoming the vast difference of their backgrounds, the song invokes “rainbow people” who “build bridges of life that blend our hearts.”

  Rick moved in with Carole and the children, and both her puzzled friends and his tried to analyze the heated situation. “He was a diamond in the rough, and I don’t know a woman who can resist a diamond in the rough, somebody who’s ‘worth saving’” is how Roy Reynolds saw it. “Rick Evers was sure different from those nice Jewish boys from New Jersey,” Danny Kortchmar muses. “It was a big stretch—this guy from the Rocky Mountains who’d had a rough life.” Mike Stanger agrees: “I’m sure Rick was a romantic creature to Carole. Was he using her? Well, it was probably mutual. They weren’t really using each other, they were just filling each other’s needs. Rick was [eventually] getting a lot of money”—Randy Stone remembers that he started driving around in an Excalibur—“and Carole was getting a new life.” Indeed, they began traveling to Idaho, whose wild magnificence Carole was falling in love with along with the man who was introducing her to it. People in L.A. saw Carole becoming besotted with Rick. “You would see her perform,” recalls one man on the scene who watched her with David Crosby and Graham Nash, “and he would always be right offstage in a place where she could see him.” There was “an almost Rasputinesque, unhealthy magnetism where…you’d feel, Carole, are you sure you know what you’re doing here?” (“He just got ahold of me” is how she would describe her infatuation much later to the wife of a close bandmate.)