There was one more battle before the album could be released. The sexy picture of Carly on her knees wasn’t her first choice. Her bottom showed, and the scene had a sort of louche, bondage/ discipline allure. “It looks like I’m… fired up, in some vaguely sensual way,” she said. “I liked a more ordinary, mundane shot of my teeth.”
But the sexy picture stayed. The teeth were bared on the inner sleeve. “I guess it is pretty sexy,” she allowed. “If it wasn’t me, I’d probably be turned on.”
In an interview a little later, she related showing off for the camera to her childhood feelings toward her father. “I felt that clowning for him was the way I could win his love. Sometimes, with other photographers, the memory of that comes back.”
WHERE’S CARLY?
Playing Possum was released in late April 1975. By June the album had reached number ten, its highest chart position. “Attitude Dancing” didn’t hit with the disco deejays, and got only to twenty-one. Elektra next tried the brilliant “Waterfall,” which stalled at seventy-eight. Dr. John’s song “More and More” made it only to ninety-two. Then there was the minor furor over the risqué album cover.
The nationwide Sears department store chain banned the album from its shelves, which cost dearly in sales. Her mother hated it and told her so. There were even hassles for Carly in the street. She would be shopping in Saks Fifth Avenue or Bergdorf Goodman and well-dressed matrons would come up and, usually with a gloved hand on Carly’s sleeve, gently reproach her for appearing half naked on her album cover. (No one remembered that Joni Mitchell had posed naked for For the Roses.) A woman in Bloomingdales told Carly the photo was disgusting. For the first time in years, the only Carly Simon songs on the radio were oldies.
Carly, speaking much later: “You know, when I released Playing Possum, it was a flop. ‘Waterfall’ only made it to the bottom of the charts, and I was ‘over’ in my own mind. Then there was much stir over the cover. More self-loathing was mine. I didn’t understand my failure but I got over it fast, though. I was always going on to another song, because I had to. The piano was always there, and there were guitars everywhere.
“But now, today, when I listen to ‘After the Storm’ and ‘Look Me in the Eyes’ and those other songs. I’m very impressed with the musicality. I was really practicing then. I worked very hard. In those days I was—always and only—very interested in stunning James with my music. I mean, to get a reaction from him, and that was hard to do. It was good to have a competitive relationship in many ways. It just makes you better. James wrote some of his best songs during that time. He would never admit it, but he was competing with me, in a good way.” James’s best song—“Another Grey Morning”—was written around that time.
Rolling Stone called Carly’s music “shrink couch rock,” but a jiving Carly was on the cover in May, and the magazine ran a long and very positive profile of her by Ben Fong-Torres. Another interviewer asked about the song “After the Storm,” which opens the album on a subdued note, more smooth jazz than pop or rock. Carly replied, “I wrote ‘heat’s up, tea’s brewed, clothes strewn around the room…’ when I woke up one morning at 242 East Sixty-second Street, our home for four years, when Sally was sleeping beside me in the bassinet. James and I had had a terrible fight the night before that ended up in just a huge love. That’s where those feelings came from.” She went on to say that when Possum came out, she’d gotten a call from Jack Nitzsche, the great arranger who’d worked with Phil Spector and the Stones. “He said he was angry with me for the ridiculous chord changes on ‘After the Storm.’ He didn’t think a woman should be capable of that sort of creativity. It was very Beach Boys influenced, I think, even though not consciously.”
Asked about the sexy photo: “It was generally thought to be risqué and tasteless. I was a new mother! What could I be thinking?”
Carly’s husband, meanwhile, was riding high and back on top. Where Possum had flopped, James’s new album, Gorilla, released in May 1975, started selling half a million and going gold. Carly sings with James on the album’s two Top Five singles, “Mexico” and the great Marvin Gaye standard “How Sweet It Is,” and on the lullaby “Sarah Maria.” David Crosby and Graham Nash also sing on an album mostly played by L. A.-based jazz musicians. The song “Gorilla” was (also) inspired by a row with Carly in New York, while James was trying to cure himself of drug addiction. James stormed out of the house and walked up the street to Central Park to try to cool off. He went into the monkey house—“knocking around the zoo”—and started looking at a mountain gorilla. The ape stared back at JT. This, he pondered, is probably how Carly sees me.
In the summer of 1975, with James’s music on the radio all the time, Carly stayed on the Vineyard while he and the band went on the road. He changed his act, tried to lighten up and tell some jokes, and play more rhythm and blues, which he did well with a great band. He tried to stay sober, but it was hard. And his young, mostly female audiences kept shouting, “Where’s Carly?” and calling out for “Mockingbird.” James would tell them that Carly was at home with the baby, and there were often loud groans of crowd disappointment that Mrs. Taylor wouldn’t appear in the encores as she had the year before.
James’s success that year came as a relief for Carly. She told close women friends such as Rose Styron and Libby Titus that she was more comfortable when James was more successful than she. It put less stress on the marriage and left him free to write, which he often did while playing his guitar, sitting in a spare wooden corner by the fireplace in the house on Martha’s Vineyard. (Just then, James was working on two new songs: “Shower the People” and “A Junkie’s Lament,” a graphic description of drug withdrawal.)
Carly also told friends that she wanted another child.
Carly didn’t appear on Lucy Simon, her sister’s first solo album, released by RCA Records later that year, with Lucy’s songs and (heavenly) voice backed by top New York jazz musicians. The music was arty and didn’t fit the commercial formats of the day, and so was something of a misfire. The most gripping song is “My Father Died,” a stricken-sounding threnody for Dick Simon that tells the story of how he passed away in his sleep, suffering no pain, after calling Lucy and arranging to meet. It is very sad, and Carly wept every time she heard it.
The rest of 1975 Carly spent writing new material for her next album, and readying herself to work in California with a new producer, Ted Templeman, best known for his hit records with the Doobie Brothers. Carly was uneasy about this. Her manager later remembered, “Every minute of her career was drama.”
In November, Elektra put out The Best of Carly Simon, her first compilation, her greatest hits. This comprises six Top Ten singles, two lesser hits (“Attitude Dancing” and “Legend in Your Own Time”), and two album tracks, “Night Owl” and “We Have No Secrets.” Released for the Christmas market, the album reached number seventeen and then sold for decades in the multimillions because Carly would not release another greatest-hits album for twenty years.
Late in the year, the Simon-Taylor family returned to California on its annual winter migration to record new albums. They settled into a sprawling compound on Rockingham Drive in suburban Brentwood, a few blocks from Sunset Boulevard. Carly started working on her new album, Another Passenger, at Sunset Sound, about a half hour away in Los Angeles, while James worked on his, In the Pocket, at Warner Bros.’ studio in North Hollywood. Their sessions were lucrative for the local musicians, the best of whom spent the next three months shuttling between the husband’s studio and that of his wife.
Meanwhile, when she wasn’t working, Carly was learning to seriously shop. “Up until then,” she recalled,” I had an inordinate sense of guilt about buying clothes. There was embarrassment and shame at having more than my sisters—or having James think I was ‘superficial.’ Even at Hollywood parties I was still the barefoot, second-hand clothes, unmade-up frizzy-haired gypsy girl. Not until 1975 did Libby Titus, Betsy Asher, and I start having lunch in Beverly Hills
and discovering Maxfield, and buying Chloe and Armani, then dipping into Tiffany and buying sterling silver bracelets. We’d meet at the Beverly Hills Hotel and have Ramos gin fizzes and then go on the town, our Mercedes in tandem, and play dress-up. I was buying clothes and still feeling guilty about spending money that I’d actually earned myself. The guilt continued.”
ANOTHER PASSENGER
Ted Templeman, thirty-two, a staff producer at Warner Bros. Records, was friendly, young, blond, professional, methodical. He was not snorting Peru, at least not in the studio. There wasn’t much drama with him. He had helped the Doobie Brothers, who had started as a stoner/ biker band, to national prominence. He arranged for Little Feat and the Doobie Brothers to play on Carly’s record. He didn’t hear an obvious hit single in any of the songs Carly had brought with her to California, but he didn’t care. He liked her music and told her he would find something good for her. He then brought the Doobie’s lead singer, Michael McDonald, into Carly’s orbit, and this would later result in one of her best songs.
Carly was now competing for audience with the resurgent Fleetwood Mac, the English blues band that had moved to California and hired two locals, guitarist Lindsey Buckingham and his dervish girlfriend, Stevie Nicks. Their debut album with this lineup had ruled the charts in 1975 and helped usher in the soft rock era (described in the sales charts as adult contemporary). Their new album, Rumors, would soon spawn many hit singles and emerge as one of the bestselling records in history.
Carly spent the first three months of 1976 working on her material with Ted Templeman and some of the best musicians in the country. Five of the album’s twelve tracks were written by Carly alone. Her favorite was “Fairweather Father,” a pretty samba about a husband who doesn’t do diapers. The wife is desperate. Her husband is a prick who ignores her and her child. James sang on “Father,” along with Jackson Browne. (Jazz master Victor Feldman, who famously turned down Miles Davis’s offer to join his band—Herbie Hancock got the job instead—contributed the chiming marimba to the track.) Carly always said that James was not the fair-weather father of the song, but of course no one believed her.
“Cow Town” is a narrative about a real French woman (Simone Swan, the mother of Carly’s friend François de Menil) who married into a wealthy Texan family and was now living large on the range. De Menil had told Carly about her over lunch in exchange for a decent steak and a song written about him. (He also took her shopping.) The song could have been a Broadway showstopper, with its lusty chorus and with Little Feat providing the drive. (The real Simone threatened to sue Carly when the record came out, but was talked out of it. Carly: “She wanted to sue me over ‘Cow Town,’ until our mutual lawyer talked her down.”) Carly’s love for Brazilian music is again reflected in “He Likes to Roll,” with lyrics about a woman chasing a man she already owns. The track features some of the best singing on the album, with the Brazilian guitarist Laurindo Almeida contributing some tasty guitar fills. Vic Feldman adds more pastel marimba to Carly’s palette, and Bud Shank warbles on a pretty flute. One of the most difficult tracks to record was “In Times When My Head,” a song that was very important to Carly. It is a piano ballad with a confessional tone, what Carly described as “internal, difficult feelings,” a confidential message to the listener about a marriage with infidelity on both sides. There’s another man in the lyric, the “boy in the backwoods.” (What was this?) Jim Keltner plays drums, and Klaus Voormann reappears on bass. The chorus is sung by Carly with Linda Ronstadt, Leah Kunkel, and Carly’s current best friend, Libby Titus.
Libby, then in her late twenties, was a year or so younger than Carly. She had a powerfully seductive affect and became an important influence on Carly, who called her friend “Leeby.” They had met when Libby was living with Levon Helm and their daughter, Amy, who was two years older than Sally Taylor. Libby had grown up in Woodstock, the beautiful daughter of a Russian immigrant. Her milieu was Catskills bohemia, with entrée into the exclusive worlds of Bob Dylan, the Band, and Carly’s old nemesis, Albert Grossman. Libby had sloe eyes, an alabaster complexion, a head of black curls, and a lively intelligence. She’d had a son with the heir to the Helena Rubinstein cosmetic fortune when she was twenty. She left him and became close to Eric Clapton and other rock heroes. Libby had a pretty singing voice, very fragile, and she was also a talented songster, having cowritten “Love Has No Pride,” a hit record for Bonnie Raitt. Carly loved the ultrasophisticated Libby Titus so much that she wrote about her; “Libby” was the first eponymous song about a real person Carly had ever recorded. The lyrics describe a fantasy journey to Paris with Libby, complete with schmaltzy, cod Française accordions. The song assumes an intimate, sisterly friendship, with Carly confessing to Libby that she is “another passenger, guilty of your crimes.” (Insiders whispered that the song was also something of an apology for an incident that occurred the previous April [1975], when Carly and James double-dated with Libby and Levon. They were driving back from dinner, with Levon at the wheel and the girls in the backseat. They’d all had good wine. According to Libby, Carly leaned into her and, referring to Levon, whispered that he wasn’t good enough for her. But Levon heard Carly’s remark. He was mad as hell, and reportedly broke up with Libby Titus the next day.)
Three songs on Another Passenger have lyrics by Jake Brackman, again writing in the Carly Simon persona, as he saw it. “Half a Chance” opens the album, “packing your bags in a trance,” with smooth jazz, a sax solo, strings, and some passionate singing on the choruses. “Riverboat Gambler” is a piano ballad that pleads for access to a tight-hearted lover, someone like Carly’s remote and preoccupied husband. Those feelings evolve into the conflict of “Darkness ’Til Dawn” (cowritten by Van Dyke Parks). Listeners experience more marital discord here, more quarreling all night, more of Carly thinking (hard) about a lover from another era (often Dan Armstrong). Lucy Simon sings harmony on the track with her little sister.
Carly also cowrote two songs with Zack Wiesner, one of James’s best friends from the days of the Flying Machine. (Zack lived next door on the Vineyard, on land given to him by James for a song.) “Dishonest Modesty” is Carly fronting Little Feat, with Dr. John on rhythm guitar. (Rebennack was now keeping company full time with Libby Titus.) Carly’s brother-in-law Alex Taylor sings with her on the chorus. The song has critical lyrics about a selfish friend with authenticity issues. (Carly commented, with candor, much later: “It was a mean-spirited, nasty song and I was clearly jealous of the person. There is no need to reveal anyone, as the aspiration was not kind and the song is just not that good.”) Zack’s other contribution is the lullaby “Be with Me.” It is light, simple, and very pretty. James plays guitar and Carly sings. They eventually used it to close the album.
Two tracks came through Ted Templeman. “One Love Stand” is a Little Feat song, a generic L. A. shuffle that makes Carly sound like Bonnie Raitt. Michael McDonald’s “It Keeps You Runnin’” had already been a hit for the Doobie Brothers. Now Ted Templeman reframed it around a full-throated, almost operatic performance from Carly. Her version of “Runnin’” has great energy, and would be everyone’s choice for the album’s first single.
Another Passenger was finished in March 1976, around the time Carly became pregnant with her second child. The jacket pictures, taken in New York by star photographer Mary Ellen Mark, Carly’s longtime friend, were muted and demure. Carly dedicated the album to her husband. Passenger was released in June 1976, at the same time as In the Pocket, James Taylor’s last studio album for Warner Bros. Records. So, not for the first time, Carly and James went head-to-head in the commercial marketplace. (Some observers criticized the couple’s management for allowing these simultaneous releases to happen, the theory being that fans of both Carly and James might have limited resources to spend, and so would be forced to choose one over the other.) Neither album scored big. With no concerts to help promote it, Passenger got to only number twenty-nine, and the “It Keeps You Runnin’” single to
pped out at number forty-six. A Rolling Stone critic wrote that Another Passenger was Carly’s best record and added that she “conveys the monied angst of the leisured classes with moving conviction, something no one else has ever done.”
“Never before have so many women fueled the creative impulses of pop music,” opined the Saturday Review. “Of those currently in the top echelon—Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Dory Previn, Carly Simon and Phoebe Snow—Ms. Simon is the most slickly facile, and surely the most accessible to a broad audience.”
James’s In the Pocket climbed to number sixteen, his lowest-charting record since his first album. But his wonderful single “Shower the People” (with Carly’s prominent backing vocals) got to number twenty-two on the pop charts that summer, and was a number one adult contemporary hit by September.
Spring 1976. The hottest show on American television was now Saturday Night, broadcast live from NBC studios in New York. The cast of young comedians—John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, and especially Carly’s former prom date Chevy Chase—were all on the cutting edge of current satire: very sharp, keen, and funny as hell. Every week, Saturday Night showcased a musical guest. The show’s producer, at Chevy’s urging, invited Carly to play a couple of songs during one of the last broadcasts of the program’s first season.
More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon Page 23