The Three Mile Island accident remains, decades later, the worst nuclear disaster in American history. The details were not that complex. The reactor’s river-fed cooling system failed, and the plant’s Unit 2 experienced a partial core meltdown—the nightmare of the nuclear industry. The effect on Americans, especially in the Northeast, was chilling. Half the country (already somewhat unsettled by the movie The China Syndrome) felt that they had been poisoned by radiation. There was a psycho-seismic wave of anxiety reflected in the screaming headlines of the contemporary media. Carly was upset, James even more so. They wondered how they could get involved. Carly later said, “People become immune to bad news. A danger like [nuclear energy] fades from peoples’ minds unless it’s kept alive…. You think, ‘I am here. I could die from this. I could get cancer. My children could be affected, for the rest of their lives, by radiation poisoning.’ Those are personal things. I didn’t want to be scared. I wanted to stand up to them.”
Not long before the Three Mile Island accident, Carly and James were visited in New York by their guitarist friend John Hall. He was upset that a power company wanted to build a nuclear reactor on the Hudson River near his home in Saugerties, New York. Hall had been a physics major in college. He wasn’t a typical rock musician, but a professorial presence with interests in politics and science. He explained that nuclear plants created cancer-causing waste products that remained dangerous for centuries and were almost impossible to store safely. He said he was putting together a press conference with Bonnie Raitt to announce the formation of a group of artists and activists opposed to the spread of atomic energy. He also played the demo of a song he’d written called “Power,” which suggested that solar- and hydro-based energy could do the same job without poisoning the atmosphere. James and Carly both agreed to sing vocals on the song, and appear at the press conference with Hall and Bonnie.
The press conference was put together by Danny Goldberg, then a crusading New York rock-and-roll publicist. Drawn by James and Carly’s star power, a large contingent of reporters, photographers, and TV crews were on the scene. Danny Goldberg: “We were preparing the musicians for questions before letting in the media when Carly announced that her manager didn’t want her to participate.”
Carly seemed agitated. James Taylor sat impassively, eyes staring into space, as if focusing on a planet light-years away. Bonnie Raitt simply got up and walked out of the room. John Hall looked like he’d been slapped with a fish. Danny asked for the manager’s number.
Danny: “Arlyne said that Carly had a long-standing policy of not doing political events. I snapped back that Carly had already given her permission for her name to be on the media pitch and explained that there were reporters and camera crews outside. If Carly pulled out, the story will be about that and will cause more questions than if she participates. Arlyne agreed, reluctantly, to let Carly answer questions but not make any opening statement.
“At the press conference Carly was asked the first question, and she calmly proceeded to describe the cancer-causing dangers of radiation, the questionable safety features of most reactors, and the long-term storage safety issues. Overall, Carly ended up giving the most eloquent and coherent statement against nuclear power of the day. She provided all the crucial sound bites that ran on TV and key quotes for the press.”
After Three Mile Island, John Hall and Bonnie Raitt recruited Jackson Browne, Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor, and other contemporary rock stars and formed a foundation called Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE). The idea was to perform a series of benefit concerts later in 1979 to provide funding for antinuclear activists and grass-roots organizations opposing new “nukes” in rural communities. James Taylor would be back on tour that summer and signed on to play some of the shows with his band. When the MUSE concerts happened in September, Carly Simon would end up playing a show-stopping role herself.
Spring 1979. John Travolta knocked at the door of Apartment 6S one evening. He was staying in the building and wanted to meet James, who wasn’t home. (James was with his brother Alex and Jimmy Buffett, drinking to blackout every night on the Caribbean island of Montserrat.) Carly entertained Travolta instead, and the two became good friends. When his longtime girlfriend, Diana Hyland, died a few weeks later, Travolta practically moved in with Carly and the children. To friends who asked, she described Travolta as “naïve, but with this incredible street sense.”
On Martha’s Vineyard, Carly was providing financial backing for a nightclub in the scrub oak forest out by the airport, a place where bands could play and people could hang out—something that had never existed on the conservative New England island. Carly had long wanted to recreate the ambience of the old Mooncusser, where she used to perform with her sister, but she wanted the new club to be more of a country roadhouse with a bar, not a coffeehouse. Her local partners, a cook and a house painter, leased two acres from the county and built the club from scratch. A local artist painted murals. The liquor license was an issue almost until the club, the Hot Tin Roof—named by Carly after one of her favorite plays, Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof—opened in June 1979.
The Roof, as the locals called it, was packed almost every night. John Belushi was a regular presence, along with Bill Murray and other TV stars. Deejays spun reggae records when bands weren’t playing. The house drink was the Cape Codder, vodka and cranberry juice on ice with a twist of lemon. Cocaine was plentiful—it was coming in on the fishing boats from mother ships offshore—and dealt in the bathrooms. The talent booked into the club was eclectic: Dizzy Gillespie, Tom Rush, Willie Dixon, Burning Spear. One night Carly was spotted in the club’s VIP area with houseguest John Travolta, and there was a literal stampede among the patrons to get closer. The highlight of that first summer was the Jamaican reggae star Peter Tosh and his band, Word, Sound and Power. Hundreds of fans who couldn’t get tickets to the sold-out shows brought ladders and heard the music from the branches of the oak trees surrounding the club. Carly Simon’s Hot Tin Roof was a huge success and stayed in business for another quarter century.
May 1979. Spy promised to be the biggest album of Carly’s career. The timing was perfect. Her last, Boys in the Trees, had been her best selling studio album. She had a solid body of music behind her. She had worked hard and made a good record. She had starred in a sexy video to promote “Vengeance,” the blatantly commercial first single. But then nothing happened. Elektra Records’ promo people started complaining that they couldn’t get “Vengeance” on the radio. Programmers were locked into New Wave bands such as Blondie, the Police, Elvis Costello; the disco/ rock “Vengeance” didn’t fit current radio formats. Feel-good radio guys grumbled that Carly sounded too angry. No one saw the video (two years before MTV). The deejays at the Hot Tin Roof played “Vengeance” only if Carly was in the house. By the time Spy was officially released in June 1979, it was already considered a bomb, and Carly and her manager started thinking about moving to a new label. Carly felt certain that after eight years of relative success, her winning streak was over.
She took this hard. The single failed to make the Top Forty. Spy stalled at number forty-eight. She felt that she was “washed up,” as she put it to friends. A Canadian reporter came to interview her on the Vineyard the day the single lost its chart bullet, stalled at number forty-five. Carly was taking this personally, asking the reporter, “Do you think people are tired of hearing me? Tired of my sound?” The critics, looking for clues about her marriage, described the album as tedious. One feminist critic wrote, “Simon is aware of her potential as gossip fodder—remember ‘You’re So Vain’?—but she is forfeiting emotional intensity now by offering hints, rather than insights, about her marriage. Carly Simon, in her trench coat, seems more like a flasher than a spy.”
Carly remembered: “This plunged me into a major depression and a serious ego quandary. I really lost myself for a while. I thought, ‘Well, Jesus, I’m not hitting the mark, am I? Is my opinion of myself totally based on wha
t other people think? Do I even have a sense of myself?’ I was just floundering. It hit me at a time when I was almost living alone with the children, and my self-esteem was precarious anyway. And it toppled it.”
Her husband was away on tour for the whole summer, but it didn’t mean he didn’t understand her plight. “Carly’s having a rough time now,” he said to a writer. “She feels hurt and disillusioned and I don’t blame her. But there’s an attitude to adapt about this thing. It’s harder for her without many other outlets, and also feeling—as she does—much more restricted by family life and raising children than I appear to be. For me to be able to go and work helps, you see. All of a sudden, I’m valid in that context. Carly doesn’t have that access. So she puts out a record every two years, and when all of a sudden it doesn’t get the promotion she thinks it should, and when it gets reviewed totally off the wall, if that’s all she gets, that can be devastating for her.”
James was promoting his new album, Flag, whose cover depicted the nautical signal for “man overboard.” Many of the songs were confessional and angry. In one, a wife steals her husband’s drugs. In another, the husband describes the petty deceits and faithlessness in a certain marriage. (Carly sings on both of these tracks, “Johnnie Comes Back” and “B. S. U. R.”) There was no strong single, although Arif Mardin’s orchestration helped “Up on the Roof” become a minor hit, and Flag sold well, helped by James’s strong appearance on Saturday Night Live on May 12.
James wasn’t shy about his anger in interviews he gave that summer. He said the new song “B. S. U. R.” was a get-back at his wife for “Fairweather Father,” which, he said, “seemed to paint me pretty ugly.” He admitted his bad habits, allowing that his behavior was toxic, that he was poisoning himself with booze and dope. He reported that he liked to drive while intoxicated. Of his wife, he said, “My behavior threatens her. She’s always worried I might harm myself.”
James: “I feel strongly, and also Carly has recently—because of some real disappointments in her career, and also because of some disillusionment with the record business—that the main thing that gets in the way of our music and our growth is the industry itself…. Something that is successful, they want you to hold on to. I mean, they just want you to keep it coming. It gets to me.”
James was on the road and missed the party that Rose and Bill Styron threw for Carly’s birthday. She was renting a “secret house” on the water near the Styrons’ estate in Vineyard Haven, a small cabin with a couple of bedrooms and a dock for James’s boat, a place where she could get away from the armies of houseguests she invited to the island every summer. During the party, Carly showed John and Judy Belushi the cabin, and then asked the abnormally cocky Belushi a question. “I said, ‘Do you ever feel unconfident?’ And he said, ‘Never.’ And he told me that self-confidence isn’t something that you wait for. It’s something you’ve got to go after.”
Still, Carly was quite undone in those days. The failure of her album was one thing, because she could always write another. But she also sensed the impending failure of her marriage to a man she truly loved. Later on she wrote of that time: “I recorded Spy. It contained the song ‘We’re So Close,’ which to this day is the saddest song I’ve ever written. It was a song about how close you can pretend to be, when you know it’s all coming undone. How you can use excuses to make it all look okay.”
STARDUST
Late in the summer of 1979, James Taylor finished his long tour and came home to Martha’s Vineyard. As usual, the house and property were swarming with contractors. A pond was being dug, and a cobblestone drive was under way. James wanted the carpenters to build separate quarters for the dog, the pig, and the tractor, and there was talk of a windmill. For Carly, having her husband at home could be problematic. “James likes being loose and disorganized,” she said, “and it’s one of our incompatibilities. When he comes back from the road, there’s always a feeling of anticlimax, of relief, followed by: ‘ Jesus—now what?’… Sometimes he scares people, James does. Because you never know what kind of reaction you’re going to get from him. He’s very mercurial. A lot of what appeals to me in James was present in my father. Because James has a kind of aristocratic elegance, even though he has some terrible habits.”
In September, James was on the cover of Rolling Stone, with photographs by Annie Leibovitz. (One of those showed a bare-chested James carrying a half-naked Carly on his back.) The magazine’s profile depicted him watching TV with his children, bored out of his mind, and listening to the Grease movie soundtrack—a favorite of his daughter’ s—over and over. (Grease had starred John Travolta.) “It’s been devastating,” James said of family life at home. He compared his daily routine on Martha’s Vineyard to his youthful in-patient days at various high-end mental hospitals.
Both James and Carly performed at the MUSE concerts at Madison Square Garden September 19– 23. These “Concerts for a Non-Nuclear Future” were the first major rock charity shows since George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh early in the decade, and all the MUSE shows sold out. The Doobie Brothers, one of the biggest jam bands in the country, headlined two of the concerts. Bruce Springsteen and Jackson Browne, at the apex of his career, each headlined one. Other performers included James Taylor; Crosby, Stills and Nash; Tom Petty; Bonnie Raitt; Ry Cooder; John Hall; Chaka Khan; Jesse Colin Young; and Gil Scott-Heron, all singing together in various permutations over the four nights of shows. All the music was recorded and filmed, which created a hectic, hothouse atmosphere backstage. Carly appeared as “a special guest” in James’s performances, running onstage in a shimmering greenish jumpsuit and bare feet when she heard Russ Kunkel pounding the tom-toms for the intro to “Mockingbird.” Amid lusty cheering from the crowd, Carly and James danced the Lindy Hop for the movie cameras, then strolled offstage arm in arm. This always earned one of the evening’s loudest ovations. Few guessed that Carly spent the last hour throwing up in the backstage ladies’ room. Leah Kunkel wanted to help Carly, but kept thinking, “She’s a little… crazy.” But Carly recovered enough to join her husband and Graham Nash (one of the MUSE producers) for a stirring harmonic version of Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changing.” This, and “Mockingbird,” would appear on No Nukes, the all-star two-LP album released later in the year by Asylum Records. No Nukes sold about a million copies, and eventually provided some important funding for the antinuclear movement.
In the autumn of 1979, Carly and James were only fitfully living together. It was rumored they were both close to others, outside the marriage. James was drinking heavily in public and said to be using drugs in private. He went on binges, sometimes disappearing. Carly worried that he was intoxicated when he picked the children up from school or playdates. She was afraid for their kids when they were with their father. On the Vineyard, he would take off on his bike and end up at brother Alex’s house on a three-day weekend bender. James was supposed to be writing his next album, as Carly was working on hers, but he kept wandering off, blacking out, and doing stupid stuff. He later, regretful, told his biographer Timothy White, “One night, I got so drunk I blacked out a whole rampage of awful behavior. I don’t even know where I got the energy for it. I was at a party, and a friend loaned me his guitar, and I started playing ‘She Caught The Katy,’ which I love, for something like, hours. And when someone finally threatened, or offered, to beat me on the head if I kept playing the song, I actually had a kind of seizure… and bit a big hole in the guitar—which belonged to a good friend of mine, so it was a bad thing to have done.”
Lucy Simon publicly described her sister’s marriage as “in turmoil.”
Carly Simon still loved James Taylor with (almost) all her heart, but trying to raise their children (and write her next album of new songs) while coping with an alcoholic, drug-addicted husband and being afraid of almost everything, all the time, was starting to take a serious psychological toll on her.
But as 1980 and a new decade loomed, there were reasons to be hopefu
l. After ten years with Elektra, Carly signed a three-record deal with Warner Bros., one of the sister labels of the WEA empire. Warner president Mo Ostin promised Arlyne Rothberg that Carly would get a major promotional boost for her albums, the lack of which was the reason she was leaving Elektra. Carly also had a new producer, Mike Mainieri, a talented, jazz-informed musician she had met through Arif Mardin. In November 1979, Mainieri came to the Vineyard to write with Carly, working in the rented boathouse in Vineyard Haven. Early in 1980 they began working on her next record, Come Upstairs, at the Power Station recording studios on West Fifty-third Street, not far from her apartment. Carly sometimes walked to the studio (formerly a Con Edison electric power plant) for exercise, occasionally waving to neighbors John Lennon and Yoko Ono as they crossed Seventy-second Street to Central Park.
The Come Upstairs music reflects a transitional time in Carly’s life. Eight of the nine tracks are love songs, some specifically about her husband, others quite explicitly about others. The singer wants love and lots of it, and isn’t shy about her intentions, but she’s confused about the interesting number of men in her (intimate) life. The music itself was transitional under Mainieri’s direction. Warner Bros. wanted a contemporary album from Carly, who would be competing with sixties icons Fleetwood Mac and Marianne Faithfull, plus Blondie, Talking Heads, the Police, and other New Wave bands. Electronically generated backgrounds now replaced Arif Mardin’s lush string orchestras. Mainieri’s main instruments were the vibraphone and the marimba, but with Carly he doubled on the Oberheim and Prophet 5 synthesizers to make the songs sound more “eighties.”
The album’s ravenously seductive title song is very Blondie-like, synth-driven New York City power pop, a new style for Carly. The lyrics—“You can take off my clothes”—were provocative for a famously married woman to sing, an invitation to trespass, disrobing, and sin, with a joyous and apparently guilt-free chorus.
More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon Page 27