Peter, Paul and Mary released their version of “Blowin’ in the Wind” as a single, and the record spent the summer of 1963 at the top of the charts. Lucy and Carly translated Dylan’s song into French as “Ecoute Dans Le Vent,” and it became an audience favorite.
So now the Simon Sisters were a high-end folk act, a savvy combo of the sensual and the intellectual, hard-wired for the college concert circuit.
Carly: “We got the name of a dressmaker on Lexington Avenue and had some matching dresses made. I had stage fright and didn’t really want to be a singer, but I did it for my sister. I trusted her judgment, so I did whatever she said, almost no questions asked. That was the beginning of the Simon Sisters.”
Lucy: “I was still in nursing school at Cornell, and Carly was at Sarah Lawrence, so at first it was just something to do on our summer vacations. We packed our things—the matching outfits—and our guitars—maybe six chords between us—and took the bus to Province town, at the tip of Cape Cod. We didn’t have much money, so we rented a room with a double bed in a boarding house on the edge of town. We proceeded to audition at all the local clubs, but got turned down by everyone. Finally we were hired to sing at The Moors, a pub whose resident folk singer had just been sent to Viet Nam. The Moors was way at the other end of Provincetown from where we were staying. So we started hitch-hiking to work in our matching dresses and peasant blouses [plus cross-gartered sandals from Greece, very fashion-forward]. Even with our guitar cases, it was sometimes hard for us to get rides. We taunted those who blew by us: ‘Ha ha, you idiots, we’ll see you at The Moors!’”
The sensational Simon Sisters caught on at the Moors. Their sexy mix of ballads and lullabies contained authentic human heartbreak and astounding close harmony, the kind that only blood relatives can achieve when they sing, ensemble. Soon the place was filled with eager young men early in the evening, waiting for the girls to go on. Lucy’s soprano was enthralling. Carly tried to lay back, a presence more muted and deferential, but her singing could be much more assertive, as if to make up for Lucy’s natural reticence.
“At The Moors, we realized we were ready,” Carly later wrote. “We had hope, harmony, and expectations.”
A New York talent agent, someone Lucy knew named Charlie Close, caught the Simon Sisters’ act in Provincetown. He worked with Harold Leventhal, who managed a stable of folkie godfathers that included the Weavers and Pete Seeger. Uncle Peter looked at the contracts and made sure the girls weren’t getting screwed, financially at least. So now the Simon Sisters had serious management, and their career began in earnest.
As the summer of 1963 went on, Carly spent time with Nick Delbanco at an old fishing camp he rented in Chilmark, on Martha’s Vineyard. The dilapidated shack was on a hilltop and looked out over Menemsha Pond and the hills, toward remote Gay Head. Carly told Nicky about the Simon Sisters’ big adventure, and Nicky, very ambitious himself, seemed both proud of her and slightly envious of her budding career. He had an idea for his first novel, he told Carly, and he was going to Europe in the fall to research and write it. An old farmhouse in the South of France was being made available through a friend of the family for Nick to write in. Nick wanted Carly to come with him, keep him company while he wrote; she could use the time to write songs on her own. Nick made the romantic Riviera sojourn sound like the lost days of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Carly told Nick that France was very tempting, but right now she was still in college and committed to this project with her somewhat driven sister, to whom the success of the Simon Sisters seemed to mean the world.
Carly’s grandmother Chebe died that summer, a real blow. Andrea Simon was renting puppeteer Bil Baird’s house on the Vineyard when she got the news. She collected Carly from Nicky’s house and together they drove down to New York for the funeral, crying the whole way.
August 1963. Harold Leventhal booked the Simon Sisters into the Bitter End, the brick-walled folk club on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. It was late summer, and only tourists were around, but the famous folkie venue still sold out almost every night. The sisters performed four sets a night in cable-knit sweaters, white pedal pushers, and flat shoes, their hair ironed straight, their lipstick matching. Soon the Simon Sisters were the Bitter End’s resident opening act, working two and three weeks straight, supporting established folk stars and rising young comedians—Bill Cosby, Dick Cavett, Joan Rivers, even the outlaw satirist Lenny Bruce. One night, backstage at the Gaslight, the basement folk club on MacDougal Street, after Woody Allen’s Brooklyn intellectual shtick had really bombed before an out-of-town audience, Lucy and Carly eavesdropped as Woody’s veteran manager coached him in timing and intonation, especially his use of hard consonants to make his points. And so the Simon Sisters were exposed to the bare bones of the New York cabaret world in the autumn of 1963. On several occasions, Andrea and Ronnie came to the Village to cheer the girls on. Nicky Delbanco came, too, as did Peter Dean. Peter Simon shot a dozen or so rolls of film with his father’s Leica camera.
Meanwhile, Carly was still trying to go to college. “We were playing the Bitter End and the Gaslight, opening for various soon-to-be-famous people. Afterward, we had to catch the last trains from Penn Station, very late at night, back to our schools. These were fancy schools, quiet campuses. The dorm mothers frowned on my late night arrivals—several times my mother had to intervene—and the professors thought even less of my overdue papers.”
Something had to give. Carly’s college days were numbered.
Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod
By the late summer of 1963, Lucy Simon felt that the Simon Sisters were ready to record. Their management agreed that the two girls had enough songs, both “trad.” and original. Charlie Close started bringing record people to the Bitter End to hear the Sisters, who were quickly signed to a two-album deal by Dave Kapp, owner of Kapp Records. Kapp also signed the Chad Mitchell Trio around then (via Harry Belafonte’s production company) and had a current pop/ R&B hit with “Our Day Will Come,” by Ruby and the Romantics, a song that Carly really loved. In “Winkin’,” Kapp heard a potential hit single that sounded like the same kind of sweet lullaby that had put “Puff, the Magic Dragon” on the charts a year earlier for Peter, Paul and Mary.
In mid-October 1963, Carly and Lucy went into the studio with thirteen songs. The sessions were produced by Charlie Close, with arrangements credited to Stuart Scharf. The girls were accompanied by two additional guitarists, a cellist, and bassist Bill Lee. Lee was a Brooklyn jazz musician who moonlighted with folk music’s elite, especially in concert settings. (He was also the father of future film director Spike Lee.) Over the course of ten days this ensemble recorded thirteen tracks:
“So Glad I’m Here” is a Peter, Paul and Mary– style freedom song, a greeting song that the Sisters would soon use to open their sets. “Breton Lullaby,” an ancient air adapted by Lucy, is a folkloric performance backlit by a dusky cello. “Delia” is an old Appalachian ballad with a jazzy bass line; the girls trade verses of this old song that had been popularized by the Kingston Trio and then done by almost everyone else on the folk circuit. The old Scots song “Will You Go, Laddie, Go” is sung a cappella with celestial harmonies; the Byrds would later record it as “Wild Mountain Thyme.” Carly’s lead vocal on “Chicken Road” sounds a slightly funky note, somewhat removed from the Sisters’ refined, chamber-folk stylings. The album’s first side ends with another Child ballad, “Once I Had a True Love,” sung by Lucy at her most feminine, and wistful.
Side 2: “Wind Spiritual,” with dueling guitars and terrific harmonies; “Winkin’” is taken up-tempo, two minutes of radio-friendly fairy-tale twinkling; “A La Claire Fontaine” is another French song in the Sisters’ repertoire; “Rise Up,” written by Lucy and Carly, has a bluesy civil rights feel. “Lorca Lullaby” features classical Spanish guitar and is a sad paean to the poet murdered by fascists in the Spanish Civil War. “Waley, Waley (The Water Is Wide)” is sung by Lucy in her virginal soprano, with cello a
ccompaniment. The final song is a saucy flamenco, “Sano Duso,” arranged by Carly and Stuart Scharf.
Having cut an album, the Simon Sisters went back to work, playing the folk circuit. They listened to their tapes and asked each other why they were so good at singing lullabies. (Eventually, over three albums, lullabies would equal a third of the Sisters’ recorded output.) “I am convinced,” Carly wrote in 2006, “that Lucy and I have a natural ability to exude that time of the evening when lulling can quiet even the heaviest of hearts. Something in our natures and history must have needed it ourselves, and so we passed it down…
“I have never put this analysis into words before, but I think Lucy and I offered this to the listener… Even when we were unsophisticated and unsure of who we would be eventually, as musicians and as people, we knew we wanted to reassure and comfort and hold the babies of the world in our voices.”
The Simon Sisters’ first album would not be released for another six months. A few weeks after it was recorded, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. At her mother’s house that awful weekend, Carly watched as the veiled, deeply shocked Jacqueline Kennedy and the late president’s brothers followed the hearse to the cemetery. Carly’s mother, distraught, said that she had a gnawing feeling that life in America would never be the same again.
Instead of returning to Sarah Lawrence after the winter break, Carly notified the college that she was withdrawing, and ran off to Europe to be with Nicky Delbanco. This was a rebellion against her family and the Simon Sisters, but Carly felt she needed to get away from both.
She flew to Milan in January 1964. There she hooked up with Nick, who had a book contract with the Philadelphia publisher J. P. Lippincott. He had been working on his novel in London and Greece since September. They went shopping, and Carly bought a Phillips reel-to-reel tape recorder so she could work on songwriting. Nick bought an Alfa Romeo sports car and an Olivetti typewriter so he could work on his book. They then drove to a tiny village called Opio, near Grasse, the perfume capital of France, where a romantic rustic cottage awaited their arrival.
Nick: “My father’s oldest friend had been the architect for the renovation for an old estate, of which we occupied the gatehouse. It was rather a classy joint. [Actor] Dirk Bogarde lived just behind. Julia Child had a house across the way. My father asked his friend, his friend asked the old lady who owned the estate, and presto—the children move in.”
Their sojourn in Grasse was supposed to be idyllic, but it didn’t quite work out that way for Carly. It was still winter, even in the South of France. The fragrant lavender plantations around Grasse had been harvested and were lying fallow, waiting for spring. The swimming pool was empty except for leaves. The old house was primitive and barely heated, with water drawn from a well. And Carly felt terrible from the beginning with various ailments, including guilt at abandoning her studies, night-time panic attacks, grief over the loss of her grandmother, and a reaction to the antibiotics she was taking, as she later told an interviewer, because Nicky had given her a sexually transmitted disease when they were together in Milan.
(“I was baffled when I read about this,” Nick Delbanco said recently, “since I definitely did not have a venereal disease in Europe, whatever Carly might have fantasized. In fact, I remained wholly faithful to her during the months I was working in London—full of a romantic notion of fidelity and lasting love. So she either contracted an infection from someone else or imagined it entirely. Over and out.”)
Carly found the adjustment to life in France somewhat jarring. She changed her style and look to resemble the popular French singer Françoise Hardy, whose picture was in all the magazines. This was so effective that when they went into the Riviera towns—Nice and Cannes—young people would sometimes ask Carly for her autograph. Gradually she and Nick fell into a routine. “We’d get up in the morning,” Nick said, “and I’d go off to one of the rooms and type, type, type. Fine, or at least I thought. But Carly was very unhappy, even aggrieved. She wasn’t sleeping well, and would shake and tremble violently, and ask me to hold her until she fell asleep again.”
Carly: “At least I started to write songs when I was living in France. At first I was sending little tapes of letters home to my family, then I began writing melodies to my own words. I was living with a novelist, in the sweetest little cottage looking over terraces of olive groves and mimosa trees coming in the windows, and he often contributed lyrics. Other times I would take a local poem and put that to music. It was the first period in my life that I set everything else aside and really tried to write songs.”
After several months in France, Carly had written four songs. “Nick chopped wood,” Carly later recalled. “I started writing songs. We drank local wine from Grasse that I’m sure they made with perfume. A village couple, Jacques and Odette, looked after us. I learned to say ‘garlic’ in French and I made suppers almost every night copying recipes from my engagement/ calendar book. This was tricky because the oven had no thermometer. I had to watch, and guess. There was no hot water and every bath had to be filled with ten pans of water heated on the wood stove. Nicky chopped more wood. We felt very groovy and entitled to be living on the cheap.”
In February, Carly and Nick drove to Barcelona. “Carly cried the whole time,” Nick said. “I asked her why she was so upset, and she went through the whole thing about Chebe being Spanish and she much missed Chebe so much, and so on.”
Today Carly sometimes ties her fragile emotionality in this period to the birth control pill she was taking, Enovid. This early contraceptive pill injected a high daily dose of estrogen into the system, with often unpredictable results for the young women who took it.
The young couple drove back to France. Nick kept typing, and Carly read Stendhal’s The Red and the Black and tried to get a tan by the empty pool. She wondered what she was doing there. The night tremors got worse, then really horrible. Odette brought Carly breakfast in bed when she felt ill. Carly got through to her mother on a neighbor’s telephone and told Andrea that she thought she was having a nervous breakdown. (“The first of many,” Carly would later write.) Andrea told Carly to come home as soon as possible and get some help. Nicky was heartbroken, but nothing would sway Carly from going home. He took photographs of Carly standing in front of their house looking downward, contemplative. He drove Carly to the airport at Nice. “It was a very hard time,” he remembered, “and I was sorry to see her go. After she decamped, I went back to Greece and continued to work on my novel.”
On the long TWA 707 flight from Paris to New York, Carly spotted Dionne Warwick sitting in first class. Warwick was one of the great pop singers of the era, whose collaborations with songwriters Burt Bacharach and Hal David had produced huge hit records such as “Walk on By” and “Anyone Who Had a Heart.” Summoning up her courage, Carly introduced herself to Warwick as a budding songwriter, and asked if she would listen to some demo tapes she was working on. Warwick said sure, and scribbled her address on a menu. Carly duly sent Dionne Warwick a tape of the four songs she’d written in France, and was disappointed never to hear back from her.
HOOTENANNY SATURDAY NIGHT
Carly returned to New York in April 1964, and the night-time shaking stopped. She began four years of costly psychoanalysis that would wipe out most of her inheritance. Partly for financial reasons, she resolved to re-form the Simon Sisters. “My sister was very irritated with me,” Carly said later, “and rightly so, because while I was gone they couldn’t promote the records or do anything. I was very torn, because I never got into the Simon Sisters the way Lucy did. But when I came back to the United States, Lucy and I started taking our songwriting seriously again.”
Lucy and Carly went back to work at the Bitter End and the other folk clubs in the Northeast. They had low expectations for their career in the wake of the Beatles’ arrival in America the previous winter, which had sounded the death knell of the folk revival. “We were clueless, and really naïve,” Lucy says. “We didn�
��t think we amounted to very much.” Carly thought they looked uncool—“like Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee”—in their matching stage outfits.
As if the Beatles’ advent weren’t enough, the March 1964 release of the album Getz/ Gilberto set off a national bossa nova craze when “The Girl from Ipanema,” with Astrud Gilberto’s soft vocals, became the coolest song on the radio in America. Stan Getz had already popularized the new Brazilian wave with his Jazz Samba album, and now his collaboration with Joao Gilberto and Antonio Carlos Jobim was the newest sound in popular music. Carly Simon was irresistibly drawn to the new Brazilian sound, an influence that would resonate throughout her career.
The Simon Sisters opened for the legendary comedian Lenny Bruce at the Gaslight in New York in April 1964. Dave Kapp told them he was finally going to release their first album, now that Carly had returned. This time around, the Simon Sisters found stage fright easier to manage. Lucy recalled that “our stage fright now worked in a funny way, because backstage Carly would be literally shaking in her boots and I was calm. Once onstage, under the lights, I’d get scared and Carly would be completely cool.”
The Simon Sisters, a monaural LP, was released in late April 1964, along with a 45 rpm single version of “Winkin’, Blinkin and Nod.” Album notes were supplied by Lee Hays of the Weavers, who noted that the Sisters were gutsy to try to break into the male-dominated folk scene. On the first day of sales, Lucy and Carly went to the Doubleday bookstore on Fifth Avenue to buy their album, and were shocked to find it had sold out. As they were leaving, they overheard the sales clerk say, “Yeah, their relatives have been coming in all day.”
More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon Page 8