A PIECE OF ASS / A STATE OF GRACE
In November 1972, Elektra Records executives held a listening session for No Secrets at their swaying skyscraper offices in New York. “The Right Thing” started the album, with Carly’s piano figure and a swaying rock song supported by congas, strings, and luscious backing vocals—the florid template of Carly’s “sound” for almost her entire career. Sung with total conviction about choosing a man, the lyrics acknowledge that “the river”—Carly’s image for female sexuality—had been running too close to her door, making her “a little too free” with herself. Those days, the song says, are now over. Next came “The Carter Family,” a little waltz with verses about missing old friends and lovers, and especially Grandma, whose criticisms were usually wise.
The third track was “You’re So Vain.” Those in the know smiled at the sales and promotional staff’s reaction when Mick Jagger’s vocal—mixed way up for maximum effect—blasted out of the speakers. Carly’s final yell—“Yeah!”—at the end of the last chorus got an ovation. Steve Harris shouted, “Take that to the bank! You can bet the house!” The album’s first side finished with the romantic ballad “His Friends Are More Than Fond of Robin,” and then the title track, “No Secrets,” another lush rock ballad and a great song about too much information from a lover. Bright shiny strings, swooning cones of sound, and Jim Gordon’s subtle drumming added an atmosphere that would make “No Secrets” a staple of Carly’s music for years.
The album’s second side began with “Embrace Me, You Child,” the song about her confusion following her father’s early death. “Waited So Long” was a country rocker that Linda Ronstadt could have sung, if she’d wanted to tell her daddy that she was no longer a virgin anymore. (Members of the band Little Feat and its guitarist Lowell George had played on the track in Los Angeles.) The sentimental “It Was So Easy” (cowritten with Jake Brackman) was followed by the full-bore action of “Night Owl” with its sticky, Stones-y energy and Exile-style chorus. The album closed quietly with “When You Close Your Eyes” (lyrics written with Billy Mernit), a lullaby for insomniacs, cushioned by Carly’s piano and Paul Buckmaster’s moonlit orchestral sheen.
High above Columbus Circle: handshakes and backslaps all around. The Doors might be dead, but Elektra was still on fire. Christmas bonuses were safe. It was generally agreed that Mick Jagger—with his participation on “You’re So Vain” and “Night Owl”—had bestowed the Rolling Stones’ sacred imprimatur on Carly Simon. This could now translate into serious credibility with radio, the press, the retail music industry, and fandom. No Secrets was a huge step up from Anticipation, and would lead to new worlds for Carly, and then worlds beyond.
Elektra released No Secrets in late November 1972, and radio stations started playing “You’re So Vain.” The cover photograph (by Ed Caraeff) was provocative, starring Carly’s braless nipples, a floppy hat, and a fashionable pastel tote bag. Carly’s suggestive hands could have been painted by Thomas Lawrence. The album jacket projected “New Liberated Woman”—in your face. The inner sleeve featured a leg-spread, come-hither bedroom image taken by Peter Simon.
Three weeks later, her manager’s secretary phoned Carly at her New York apartment to say the album had earned a gold record for half a million units sold. Two weeks after that, in early January, both No Secrets and the single “You’re So Vain” were number one on the Cashbox and Billboard charts, outselling Joni and Linda and Carole and Barbra—and Carly’s husband. By early 1973, Carly Simon was the top female singer in America. No Secrets remained at number one for five more weeks.
Carly was in Hawaii then, on her honeymoon. Her brother photographed her—bare-breasted, lei-bedecked—with James, on the balcony of their hotel overlooking palm trees and surf riders. This photo appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone in January, when the magazine published Stuart Werbin’s long interview with the couple, done in New York the previous Thanksgiving and in two subsequent sessions. Werbin had been one of the writers given a private preview of “You’re So Vain” in Riverdale the month before. This was also the first interview James had given since the controversial 1971 Time cover story, which had embarrassed the Taylor family and turned him firmly against further “revealing” publicity.
Nevertheless, the long published text (headlined “The Honeymooners”) was unusually revealing about the newly married couple’s passion for each other. James described his feelings for Carly as “religious.” Carly described her attachment to James as “addicted.” James delivered thoughtful soliloquies on his drug use and his current life on methadone, while Carly reported her general anxiety about married life with a junkie. They discussed their hypothetical children, their difference in ages, and bickered about James’s complete (and unapologetic) lack of interest in Carly’s music. “But honey,” James pleaded, “I don’t even listen to my own music.”
James was adamant that he had been damaged by the pressure of corporate deadlines in his musical life, which had once been an escape but was now a job: “Carly and I agree that the best thing for us to do, would be to really get into our own selves, in terms of writing music—for ourselves. And trying to screen out the point of view that we’ve been more or less indoctrinated with—doing things for an audience, for record sales. Thinking in terms of singles—that sort of thing.”
The interview closed with James’s pithy observation about his feelings for his wife: “She’s a piece of ass. It bothers me. If she looks at another man, I’ll kill her.”
Before the couple would sign off on the interview, all references to Martha’s Vineyard had to be changed to “Cape Cod.” This was because some of the millions who had bought James’s albums were getting on the ferry from Woods Hole and then asking the locals where James Taylor lived. Some of them made it down his long country road. The last thing James Taylor needed to be was a tourist attraction.
In a taped interview with her brother later in January, after their return from Japan, Carly confessed that she didn’t feel driven to work, even though her record label was already talking about her next record. “No Secrets was a new direction for me, an expansion. I still need the approval, the confirmation, but right now, married to James, sometimes I think I’m in the state of grace I’ve been looking for. So, I’m not as ambitious as I once was.”
Would it be harder to write love songs now?
“I hope not. But my marriage has replaced ambition somewhat. It’s a different source of satisfaction. I’ll write different kinds of love songs now, more for myself than for the public.”
James came in the room and watered the plants. Carly asked if he was hungry and said she would make him something delicious.
“I didn’t think I would marry until I met James,” she continued when he wandered off. “And yes, it’s really interesting. We both needed the security of the other person making the commitment, in order to be ourselves…. It’s been such a relief for me. We were both surprised to find ourselves actually feeling better.”
Peter noted that a radio station in Los Angeles had started a contest to guess who “You’re So Vain” was about.
“It’s my first bitter song,” Carly said, “and I really liked writing it. I was thinking about three or four people when I wrote it, so there’s an element of vengeance. I love singing it.”
What about Mick?
“Mick called the studio. I said come over and sing backup with me and Harry. He got into it, and Harry graciously decided to bow out. Mick’s presence added a certain tension to the track that just wasn’t quite there before.”
Asked if she was thinking about new songs, Carly reiterated that she was exhausted for now. No Secrets, she said, was wrenching and incredibly difficult to make. Right then, she added, she and James were just lying low, playing possum, and working mostly at making their marriage work.
HOTCAKES
Looking back on this time and her marriage to James Taylor from the distance of the twenty-first century, Carly wrote, “Then started a long
run of hits, marriage, motherhood, stability, success and fortune. Not much is ever written about those things.”
Carly and James were now beginning their decade of living in a glamorous-celebrity-marriage-and-fame continuum. In these years they would move among New York, Martha’s Vineyard, and Los Angeles, where James usually made his albums in the late winter and spring. The summer months were usually spent by Carly on the island with their children, while James went out on the road.
In 1973, the couple moved to a house in a quiet residential block on East Sixty-second Street in New York, where Carly became pregnant in March. The Vineyard house continued as a semipermanent construction project. James and Russ Kunkel built a cabin, which was then merged into part of the house as the ramshackle structure mushroomed (very expensively) over the years with new additions, wings, guest houses, studios, barns, stables, stained glass, skylights, sunrooms, and outbuildings.
Carly enjoyed pregnancy, she told friends. She wanted a quiet life now, a middle-class life like her mother had had. She got rid of the leeches who’d been hanging around the Vineyard house, James’s old cronies, and she was hated for it. “You’re So Vain” had been the number one record in America for three weeks, but Carly now was semiretired. This was what she had originally wanted: to be a recording artist who didn’t tour or perform much in public. Her husband now needed most of her attention, especially since he had been trying to get off drugs and live a “normal” life after he returned from his Japanese tour an almost completely burnt-out case. While he and Carly were on a brief trip to Europe with friends that summer, James decided it was time to get help. When they returned to New York, he entered a private clinic. Carly, now visibly pregnant, tried to visit him every day.
James’s efforts to get off dope put a strain on the early days of the marriage. Carly did not know James when he wasn’t on heroin or methadone until she was six months pregnant, and he wasn’t easy to live with for the half year in which he was trying to quit. “It was a very hard time. He was very fragile,” Carly remembered. “It was like walking on eggshells—he was in a lot of agony. The beginning of our marriage went through a lot of pain.” Another strain was the relative lack of sales of number four One Man Dog compared to number one No Secrets. James denied it at the time, but their different levels of success bothered him. Much later, he admitted, “Yeah, it got to me—sometimes.”
Spring 1973. Carly and James were living in New York. One night, they went to see the off-Broadway production of National Lampoon’s Lemmings, a Woodstock spoof that launched the careers of young comedians John Belushi, Christopher Guest, and Carly’s old friend Chevy Chase. They didn’t know that James was one of those parodied, along with Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and others. Christopher Guest appeared as a depressed and downcast James, singing, “Farewell to New York City, with your streets that flash like strobes / Farewell to Carolina, where I left my frontal lobes.”
Later, a mortified Guest recalled, “James Taylor came to the show with Carly Simon. She was laughing, but he wasn’t. As a joke, it was a major cheap shot. They came backstage afterward, and I was kind of devastated, because he was such a hero to me. As a satirist, you’re not supposed to care about that, but I did.”
In the summer of 1973, Carly designed a circular garden at the Vineyard house. Her mother bought a house on top of a hill in nearby Chilmark with a million-mile view of the Atlantic. When James saw this, he told his carpenters to build a tower on his no-view property so he could see the ocean, too. Pregnant, with time on her hands, Carly started talking about building a nightclub on the island that would give local talent the same kind of opportunities that the Simon Sisters had found at the old Mooncusser coffeehouse ten years earlier.
While her husband was trying to stay straight, Carly was working on songs for her next record, scheduled to begin production in September. Many of the lyrics (“Safe and Sound,” “Think I’m Gonna Have a Baby”) were about the domesticity she was pursuing. (The baby she was carrying jumped inside her when Carly played “Mind on My Man.”) She also had the idea for her and James to remake the classic soul song “Mockingbird” as possibly her next single. But while she was supposed to be working on her music, Carly was distracted by the turmoil at her record label. Jac Holzman was leaving, and to Carly it felt like another paternal abandonment.
A few months earlier, Warner Communications had merged Elektra Records with David Geffen’s Asylum Records. David Geffen would run Elektra/ Asylum Records while Holzman joined Warner as a senior vice president for technical affairs (where he would do pioneering work in developing home video and cable television systems). Carly now felt like “the ugly step-daughter,” as she put it, at the new label. She and the newly signed English band Queen were Elektra’s major assets. Asylum had a powerhouse talent roster that included the Eagles, Neil Young, Jackson Browne, and Bob Dylan. Joni Mitchell was Asylum’s reigning queen, and Carly realized that her position would always be secondary to Mitchell’s at the new company. Elektra’s roster was now drastically trimmed, and some of the executives Carly had worked with lost their jobs. Even worse, it got back to Carly that David Geffen had made disparaging remarks about her in staff meetings. So began a series of business-related struggles that Carly later described as “eight months of mayhem” that would come to a head when her next record was released.
Carly made Richard Perry beg for the job of producing Hotcakes. She thought he’d been too rough with her in London, had bullied her, and she let him know she was shopping around. Perry took her to lunch at Tavern on the Green, in Central Park, in early June. She let him plead awhile, and said she would think about it. Eventually he got the job. James and Carly flew to Los Angeles in September to begin production, living in a rented house in Malibu and building the new songs at the Producers Workshop in L. A. In October, they returned to New York, and the sessions began at Jerry Ragovoy’s Hit Factory, the top Manhattan recording studio, on West Fifty-fourth Street.
From day one, they got word that David Geffen was complaining that Carly’s album was too expensive. But they plunged ahead, working with some of the top musicians in New York. James Taylor was sober now, and not a little shaky, but he played his usual deft guitar in the sessions and impressed people with how clear-eyed he looked, for a change. Also noted was the intense, familial closeness between him and Carly, like a firewall of passion around the couple.
And they worked hard on this album. It had to be better than good. Something in Carly’s voice had also changed. Her burnished low tones sounded richer and more passionate than ever. (Some fans think Carly’s singing on Hotcakes, while she was pregnant, was some of the best in her career.) “Safe and Sound” would open the album with a wordy Brackman song about incongruity and a nice Carly chorus. “Mind on My Man” was conga-flavored, with James on acoustic guitar and some great jazz players: bassist Richard Davis and Bucky Pizzarelli. Drummer Jim Keltner gave a Band-like kick to “Think I’m Gonna Have a Baby,” with its career ennui, perhaps a not-so-subtle message to David Geffen. James also played on “Older Sister,” Carly’s piano-based memory of wearing her sisters’ handed-down, patched, and rehemmed dresses. (The electric lead guitar on this and other tracks was played in New York by David Spinozza, a musician and arranger whose tasty playing was appreciated by Carly and especially James.) “Just Not True” was almost operatic, an abject love theme sung with James and illumined by Paul Buckmaster’s light-classical strings and woodwinds. This was the first time Carly had sung with James on one of her songs, and the studio staff remarked on how incredible they sounded together. The title track, “Hotcakes,” was a fragment featuring jazz-rocker Billy Cobham on drums, Howard Johnson on tuba, Bobby Keys on tenor sax, and a couple of horn players, all arranged and conducted by James.
“Misfit” was a total Richard Perry production, L. A. pop more worthy of Streisand or Dory Previn: a heavily orchestrated, hip-to-be-miserable song. Carly and James collaborated on writing “Forever My Love,” a hopeful ballad about the
ir marriage. James played on it, with his drummer Russ Kunkel and bassist Klaus Voormann flown in from London for the sessions.
The recording of “Mockingbird” was all-star, and more than captured the spirit of “Night Owl” from No Secrets. Dr. John, aka Mac Rebennack, played piano. The Band’s Robbie Robertson contributed his chicken-scratch guitar. Bobby Keys played the big baritone sax, but the tenor sax solo was done by Michael Brecker, a young jazz musician beginning to make his name in New York. The rollicking original song, a hit for Inez and Charlie Foxx in 1960, was given additional lyrics by James on the “She’s gonna find me some piece of mind” verse. When they listened to the playback at the end of the evening, Carly knew they had her next single and it was going to be a big hit.
Carly’s “Grownup” was another memory song, written before her daughter’s birth. It was as if her pregnancy were sending her back in time, distilling images and feelings from her sometimes difficult childhood. The album would end with “Haven’t Got Time for the Pain,” a collaboration with Jake, who wrote the line “Suffering was the only thing made me feel I was alive.”
Carly (writing in 2004): “Jake wrote the words of this song after experiencing Arica training, a Sufi tradition modernized by Oscar Ichazo. The song is clearly spiritual and with very little human intervention. I set the words to melody in Malibu, California, during the time just before recording Hotcakes, when I was preggers with Sal… I must say that it is one of the least interesting songs, to me, that I’ve ever been a part of. It seems trite in retrospect and the heavenly or devotional aspect of it was Jake’s trip and not mine.” (But “Pain”—perfect EST-era pop, with Paul Buckmaster’s pretty string concerto tacked on to the end—would touch a nerve in Carly’s mostly female audience, and become a crucial part of her music. Today, one still hears it played much more than anything on, say, Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark.)
More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon Page 21