Then, fortunately, Carly’s manager left town. Jerry Brandt, unburdened by any great reputation for taste, relocated to Los Angeles, giving up his management clients. It felt like another abandonment to Carly, and could have been a disaster for her career had she not almost immediately hired Arlyne Rothberg to manage her. Rothberg was a well-known New York talent manager who mostly represented comedians and actors. Her client David Steinberg persuaded her, at first against her better judgment, to take Carly on. She had met Carly a few years earlier, when Steinberg was doing stand-up comedy at the Village Gate. Arlyne had remembered Carly’s endless stockinged legs and her sultry, seductive way of laughing. So Arlyne became a trusted and loyal friend to Carly, as well as her business manager. Arlyne saw Carly through the next thirteen years of her occasionally tumultuous life.
Now there was a serious buzz about Carly. Elektra was whispering to its pet media outlets in New York and Los Angeles that she was going to be a big star. Carly slipped Simon family friend Jonathan Schwartz an early acetate disc, and Jonno started playing the album mix of “That’s the Way” on WNEW-FM, even before the single was officially released on February 15. The station was a major arbiter of taste in New York during the rock era, and telephone response to Carly’s song from its listeners was already impressive.
Rolling Stone’s first article on Carly appeared in its February 4 issue. It was written by Elliott Blinder, one of her brother’s communal farm friends (and the husband of the woman whose dress Carly wears on the cover of her album). Blinder asked about Carly’s privileged upbringing.
Carly: “All backgrounds are inescapable, and mine somehow has been frowned upon in the music business.” She described her experience with Albert Grossman, who’d told her that she hadn’t suffered enough (as if he had any idea). “It’s the old cliché, again: poor little rich girl, she doesn’t have any soul. She wasn’t in a chain gang in Alabama, or in a concentration camp. She can’t have any soul, if she grew up in a nice house in Riverdale—no matter what your parents did, that you saw them doing. [!]
“I still have ambivalent feelings about success, though. I obviously want my talents to be recognized by people other than the dear friends sitting around my living room. But on the other hand, I’ve seen what stardom can do to people—paranoia, hard drugs, mental hospitals. My main problem now (well, I don’t know if this should be getting out) is that I don’t want to travel. I’m scared to death of flying. I have horrible stage fright, and I am terrified of eating out-of-town tuna sandwiches, so I really don’t think I can discuss becoming a star intelligently.”
Carly bought a copy of Time magazine, dated March 1, 1971, because James Taylor was on the cover. Time was a major barometer of mainstream American culture, and a cover story was a huge deal. The story—“James Taylor: One Man’s Family of Rock”—announced that the loud, clamorous rock music of the sixties was passé. “Over the last year, a far gentler variety of rock sound has begun to soothe the land.” Danny Kortchmar, who played guitar in Taylor’s band, was memorably quoted: “After you set your guitar on fire, what do you have left? Set fire to yourself? It had to go the other way.” The era of seventies soft rock had officially begun.
Time proclaimed James Taylor one of the major pop innovators of 1971, his music an intimate mixture of Carolina lyricism and personal expression. Plus he’d sold 1. 6 million albums. Plus he’d just finished starring in a “New Hollywood” movie. His twenty-seven-city national concert tour had sold out. “Lean and hard (6 ft. 3 in., 155 lbs.), often mustachioed, always with hair breaking at his shoulders, Taylor projects a blend of Heathcliffian inner fire with a melancholy sorrows-of-young-Werther look that can strike to the female heart—at any age.”
The article went on to provide the anguished outlines of Taylor’s private life. “Drugs, underachievement, the failure of will, alienation, the doorway to suicide, the struggle back to life—James Taylor has been there himself.” The Taylor family’s unhappy story of dysfunction, alcoholism, and mental illness was made public, as was James’s ongoing romance with alpha songstress Joni Mitchell. Time noted that three of Taylor’s siblings had recording contracts, and mused about whether a dynasty was incipient. Taylor, readers were informed, was building a house on Martha’s Vineyard, where most of the family now lived. “It may just be,” James was quoted, “that we can’t find anything more comfortable than the time we all had there, as a family. Or maybe it was something that was never there, that we miss, and are still trying to put together.”
Around this time, Jac Holzman got a call from his wife in California. She’d been driving on the freeway when “That’s the Way” came on the radio, and she reported that she’d been so moved by the song’s emotions that she had to pull off the road. Holzman didn’t usually get that kind of passionate feedback from his wife, and he took it as a sign that the song could really move people. Elektra’s promotional people were ordered to push the single. By the time Carly returned from a winter vacation in Jamaica, “That’s the Way” was in the Top Thirty.
Steve Harris was on the phone every day, promoting the record, and he knew that in order to go Top Ten, he needed Carly in front of an audience in a major radio market. The previous summer, an unknown singer from London called Elton John had played two nights at the Troubadour in Los Angeles and, overnight, became a one-man music industry with his Band-like songs about Americana and country comforts.
Harris recalled: “I was pushing Carly. I called up Doug Weston, the owner of the Troub: ‘Who’ve you got coming in?’ He reads me off about nine weeks’ worth of bookings, and when he got to Cat Stevens I said, ‘That’s the show, Doug. I want that show.’”
Harris rang up Carly: “Carly! Carly—we’re going to play the Troubadour! You’re opening the show for Cat Stevens starting April sixth!” He told her about Elton John breaking big after playing there. The same thing could happen with her. But Carly was upset: “I was completely flustered, because it never occurred to me that this record was going to take off. I tried to tell them I really couldn’t do it, that I didn’t really want to be a performer. But they wouldn’t accept this. They thought I was just being difficult. Eventually, I got the word from Jac, through my manager, Arlyne: ‘Carly, you can’t not promote this record.’”
Steve Harris went over to Carly’s flat. She said, “I can’t go out there. I’m afraid to fly.”
“So am I,” he said.
She said, “I haven’t got a drummer.”
He said he’d get her the best drummer in L. A.
She said, “I have to have an operation.”
What kind?
“A minor one.”
“She put all these roadblocks in the way,” Harris remembered. He told her they would fly, together, loaded on valium and whiskey, and that he would hold her hand and look after her. She seemed to agree. Later that evening, she called him at home and said, “I can’t do this job without a drummer.”
Whom did she have in mind?
“Somebody who sounds like Russ Kunkel”—who was, Carly knew, on the road playing in James Taylor’s band, and thus unavailable.
Harris rang up Kunkel: “Russell, what are you doing April sixth through the twelfth?”
“Nothing. James isn’t working.”
“Great. Carly Simon.”
“Five hundred bucks.”
Harris called Carly. “I got you someone who sounds exactly like Russ Kunkel.”
“Oh… who?”
“Russ Kunkel.”
Carly screamed down the line. Then she recovered and told Harris that he’d won. “I guess I really have to do this, don’t I?”
So Carly gave in. She called guitarist Jimmy Ryan (“We have Russ Kunkel?”) and pianist Paul Glanz, and rehearsed her songs in her apartment for a month. This was the beginning of the Carly Simon Band. She tried to work out her crippling fears with her therapist, and in interviews. “What frightens me [about performing],” she said, “has nothing to do with the actual singing and playin
g. It’s got to do with the expectation, the focus [on me], the feeling of being trapped. It’s like claustrophobia, or a phobia of having to stay in one place. I feel pinned down by the lights. I can’t make eye contact with the audience. My adrenaline starts rushing, and all I can think of is, I gotta get out of here, or I’m going to die.”
Early in April 1971, Steve Harris picked up Carly and her favorite guitar in a black limo and they drove out to the airport. “So we flew,” Carly recalled, “first class, Steve and me, on valium—five milligrams for me, forty for Steve. He really was scared to fly, and wanted to just float through the ordeal. And it was very exciting, but I tried not to think about it, because it really was… very scary.”
THE TROUBADOUR
Carly had never been to Los Angeles, and remembers it was ex citing just being driven to the Continental Hyatt House on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. “It was so un-East Coast, and so dramatically far away. It was just thrilling. I started thinking, Well, I don’t have to be scared, this is a foreign land; these people won’t even speak the same language.”
Steve Harris was happily married, so he and Carly were just friends and colleagues. They shared a sense of humor, and goofed on the tacky hotel’s platform-mounted beds and plush red wallpaper. They went to the rooftop pool and ordered drinks. Carly tried to get some sun. “This was my first time on the West Coast, and I wanted everything the West Coast had. I wanted it all, including a tan. But being April, it was cold, and I couldn’t really work up any color to my New York pallor.”
Harris had with him an advance copy of Rolling Stone magazine’s review of Carly Simon. Written by Timothy Crouse (the son of Broadway composer Russell Crouse), the review positioned Carly as a poetic champion of middle-class Americana: “Carly writes songs dedicated to the proposition that the rich, the well-born and the college-educated often find themselves in the highest dues-paying brackets. Some of her songs sound like Updike or Salinger short stories set to music.”
The next day, Carly and Harris went over to the Troubadour on Santa Monica Boulevard and she had a rehearsal with Russ Kunkel: tall, clear-eyed, big heart, and big smile. He was one of the best rock drummers in the country. Carly: “He was like a demigod to me, because I was already in love with James Taylor—from a distance—and in love with that whole sound. So I was in awe of Russ, amazed to be rehearsing with him.” Carly was so taken with Russ that she happened to be sitting in his lap, seductively teasing his long, thinning hair, when his singer wife, Leah Kunkel—sister to Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas—walked into the club. Carly was out of Russ’s lap like a flash.
Carly was beset with conflicting emotions. She didn’t know how she was going to get through with preparing and delivering the six songs required of an opening act. She kept telling herself, It’s only six songs. Yet she was fascinated by her new role as a musician in a group. “I had such a wonderful band, and it all started then. I loved Jimmy Ryan so much. Russ was basically the first drummer I ever played with. The guys were so great that I started to love being around musicians, their sensibilities. This was my first real band experience. It was heavy. I loved it. That’s something I’ve never lost.”
Elektra was going whole hog. Cat Stevens was on A&M Records, and label bosses Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss had invited a starry Hollywood guest list to check out their new English minstrel, hoping Stevens could replicate Elton John’s triumph from the previous summer. Opening acts usually don’t have much technical clout, so Jac Holzman flew in to supervise the sound check personally. (Steve Harris: “I wanted him there in case there were any technical problems. Jac found romance rewiring machines as well as music and the artists.”) Holzman decreed that the club had an adequate sound system, but he still ordered Elektra’s best studio microphones sent over for Carly to use. He was relieved that Carly showed no fear during the sound check. She seemed to him like a real pro.
“We went back to the Hyatt House,” Carly recalled, “and ordered room service, the first time I’d ever had room service, ‘poor little rich kid’ that I was. I had a steak and French fries. (I was eating meat in those days.) Russ stayed with us, and we watched some boxing matches in my room with Steve and Jimmy.” Russ had just played on Joni Mitchell’s new album, Blue, along with James Taylor, who sang on some of the tracks. Russ talked about his experience with Scientology, and Carly was impressed with his very “clear” persona. Again, she said, “I found hanging out with men who were musicians or in charge of my career to be kind of heady—a new experience, the first sign of life from me that there was going to be something about it that I really liked.
“That evening was the opening, my first opening night—ever. The guys left around five o’clock, so I could get ready. Steve Harris said he would pick me up at seven.”
When Harris arrived, Carly was shaking, undergoing a massive anxiety attack. “She was trembling like a kitten; she couldn’t focus, she was stuttering. She could hardly speak. She said it was an old problem, from her childhood.” But she was dressed to kill, in a flowing dress and cool boots, her hair long and shag-cut in the rock star style of the day. Carly trembled all the way to the club, shook while tuning up in the dressing room, hardly made eye contact with the band, who knew what was up but tried to be cool about it. Carly asked how many people were out front, and was told the place was sold out. Cat Stevens was a huge draw, with his heathery singing voice and sweet little songs that could be sung in a twee English nursery. Leon Russell was out front. So was Randy Newman. And Joni Mitchell with James Taylor in tow. Jack Nicholson. Carole King was a maybe. Elektra’s publicists had placed a rose on every table, with a note: “Love from Carly and Elektra.” She thought that was a nice touch.
Carly was in a state. She asked Steve if she could go down and talk to the audience, kind of make friends. “No, you can’t.” Could they go for a walk? “Yes, we can.” Harris walked the quaking Carly down the stairs, past the Elektra staff waiting to support her, and out the front door. Carly looked so upset that some thought she was leaving for good. They returned through the back door. Carly told Harris: “After the show, if Jac Holzman comes backstage and tells me how wonderful I am… I’ll know I failed. I’ll know he’s faking. I don’t want to hear that, Steve. ‘Carly, you were just fabulous.’ Don’t let him come back and say that to me.”
And then it was a walk out into the colored lights and: “Ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm Troubadour welcome to Elektra recording artist Carly Simon.”
Applause. Carly sat down at the piano, nodded to the band, and went into the first song. The studio microphone produced a vocal tone that someone described as “aqua-luna—moonlight on the water.” Later, Carly told an interviewer what happened next: “I only had to do my six songs. I found myself singing and playing the piano, but the microphone kept slipping away as I was singing into it. It kept veering off to the left, and I’d follow it and, still playing the piano, swing it back in front of me like a typewriter and start again, and then it would go further and further to the left, and the audience was watching me do this. No stage manager, no Doug Weston, no Steve Harris or anybody came up and tightened the mike…. But this preoccupied me so much that it preoccupied me right out of the fear, because I was too concerned with the mechanics of this microphone slipping. It was actually a wonderful thing, a little angel to distract me so I wouldn’t be afraid.
“So I did six songs, and ‘That’s the Way I Always Heard It Should Be’ was the encore. The band was great. That’s what happened.”
There was long applause, and flowers in the dressing room. Jac Holzman came back and, of course, said, “Carly, you were wonderful, and we’re behind you one hundred percent!” She looked—daggers—at Steve Harris, who headed downstairs to handle the press. When he ran back upstairs to the crowded, smoky dressing room, James Taylor was sitting on the floor talking to Carly. His little sister, Kate Taylor, a beauty of twenty-one, was sitting next to him. James was wearing an old suit jacket over wide-whale cordur
oy trousers held up by suspenders, very rural-looking, his hair hanging below his shoulders. James had come to say hello to his drummer, and explained to Carly that the reason he wasn’t working that week was because he was helping sister Kate with an album she was making for Cotillion Records. Russ had told James that he was working with this new girl singer called Carly Simon and that he should come by the Troubadour to see the show.
James was very shy, and mostly kept his eyes averted, but he surprised Carly by reminding her that they had previously met on Martha’s Vineyard a couple of summers before. “We passed once in the driveway of my mother’s house,” he told her. “Your brother and you were going to talk to my brother Livingston about a job you were going to do together. I passed you, and said hello. And Peter said hi and introduced me to you. And then I left.”
Steve Harris looked on. Carly and James were locked into each other, amid the bustle of the room. James was telling her about the house he was building on Martha’s Vineyard, while his girlfriend Joni Mitchell was downstairs listening to Cat Stevens sing “Peace Train.”
“They were having this fabulous conversation,” Steve said. “I can see the sparks are flying.” Meanwhile, there was a noisy bunch of young kids from the first show, and they’re calling to Carly from the alley behind the club. So Carly took her guitar and opened the window and played another song to them from the fire escape. Then Joni Mitchell arrived to drag James away, and the moment was over.
Steve: “At that point, I guess, Carly was feeling no pain. She looked over at the musicians and said, ‘Well, guys, we’ve got a second show to do.’”
The Carly Simon Band persevered for the three-night stand, two sets a night. Two girls, Hilary and Molly, teenage fans from the first show, started coming around with brownies and other stuff for the sweaty band while they hung out between shows, and the guys were pleased to have (platonic) groupies of their own. Carly also had a few L. A. dates (mostly lunch) with the successful physician/ novelist Michael Crichton, whom she dubbed “Big Boy” because he was six foot four.
More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon Page 14