by Carole King
Hormones and pheromones mingled in the heat as we walked up and down such thoroughfares as the Coney Island Boardwalk, Sheepshead Bay Road, or Kings Highway. We did what teenagers typically do: the boys swaggered while the girls whispered and giggled. We also visualized ourselves wearing the fall clothes already on display in the store windows, but with barely enough money to share a banana split between us and still have bus fare home, we couldn’t afford to buy any of the cute outfits. Instead I settled for a box of handkerchiefs with the initial “C” embroidered on each handkerchief alternately in pink, blue, or yellow.
The summer of ’55 was a succession of salad days—a sweet, simple, peaceful time of golden youth and green innocence. There was nothing but the vine-ripe fruit of each delicious day and honeysuckle night. I thought, If every child on earth could experience just one such summer, it would be a much better world.
But as every school-age child learns, summers end.
Chapter Ten
To Manhattan and Back
I spent part of my first day at Performing Arts trying to avoid being jostled by overly excited students running up and down the stairs. It wasn’t easy to figure out where all the rooms were, and when fifth period ended I wondered how I would get from one end of the school to the other in time for sixth period. I was enrolled in drama and dance classes taught by Uta Hagen and Martha Graham. Among the names I heard during the first roll call were Al Pacino and Rafael Campos. Other names reflected the careers in film and theater of some of my classmates’ parents: Susan Strasberg, whose father was the acting teacher Lee Strasberg; Leticia Ferrer, daughter of Miss Hagen and the actor José Ferrer; and Frances Schwartz, daughter of the Yiddish theater actor Maurice Schwartz.
I began the semester thinking I could indulge my passion for popular music simultaneously with studying drama and taking the academic classes required of all New York State high school students, but the concentration demanded by the stimulating, sophisticated world of serious theater left little room for other pursuits. My fellow students were there because they wanted to act in movies (where the money was) and star in a Broadway show (where the prestige was). Their enthusiasm was infectious and I was highly motivated to do the rigorous work we were told was necessary to become a brilliant, celebrated, and (God willing!) financially successful actor.
My classmates and I learned to channel teenage angst into techniques that would inform a role or enhance an audition. At first I found the process fascinating, but as the semester progressed I became increasingly discouraged by the extraordinary effort it took to keep up with my fellow students. I excelled in academic studies, but as my teachers in the professional arena issued daily reminders of the hours of dedication required for success in each of their classes, my resolve began to waver.
The hours I spent commuting to and from Manhattan left me with no time to see my old friends, and the emotional exhaustion of the drama classes left me with no energy to see my new friends in a relaxed, teenage-kid-like setting, assuming any of them had such time to spend. We imitated adults in dress and manner. At fourteen I wore ensembles to school that included three-inch heels, a matching purse, and dangling earrings. I still wanted to be an actress and star in a Broadway show, but I felt that I was missing out on the everyday experiences an actress would need to portray normal people. They were also experiences a normal kid would have. I didn’t know what “normal” was, but it didn’t seem to exist for me at Performing Arts.
I didn’t want to disappoint my parents by quitting, so I pulled myself together, resolved to make my experience at P.A. a good one, and applied myself with a renewed commitment to the three disciplines required to graduate in my chosen field. I found that the drama classes taught me to listen and tune in beyond people’s words to the subtext of their underlying emotions and desires. In dance I learned to stretch and move my body. Not surprisingly, I enjoyed music the most. I expanded my knowledge of theory so quickly that my music teacher, Mr. Sachs, asked me to arrange “Beau Soir,” a Debussy piece, for chorus, which meant writing vocal parts for soprano, alto, tenor, and bass (SATB). This had the consequence, doubtless unintended by Mr. Sachs, of preparing me to arrange vocals for popular songs.
When Mr. Sachs suggested I transfer from drama to music, I considered it. But the seeds of my discontent had grown into an unwieldy plant. I was tired of trying to flourish in a garden in which I no longer felt I belonged. In the second semester of my sophomore year I rejoined my former classmates at James Madison High School, where I remained until I graduated in June 1958. I’ve never regretted going to Performing Arts, and I’ve never regretted leaving. At the time I believed I was losing forever the chance to star in a movie or a Broadway show, but I was okay with that.
Chapter Eleven
Aspiring to Be Popular
My primary objective at Madison was to be attractive, well liked, and respected by the other kids, but the more I sought popularity, the more it eluded me. Heredity had made me small in stature and a year late in commencing puberty, and I was still two years younger than most of my classmates. The math was inescapable. In those socially crucial high school years, I was almost three years behind my peers in physical development.
I cried the day I overheard a boy refer to me as “cute.” In those days it did not mean hot or attractive. “Cute” described a girl a boy thought of as a friend, not someone to date. As much as I didn’t want to be the girl boys called for advice about how they could get the girl they really wanted, that was the purpose of virtually every call from a boy. With few friends and no siblings at home, I spent a lot of time alone. But my solitude had an unexpected benefit; it made me a good observer. When a girl is gossiping and discussing shades of nail polish with her friends, she’s less available to pay attention to the world. Being alone gave me a chance to process what my senses took in without having to factor in other people’s opinions.
There was no danger of my falling in with a bad crowd. There wasn’t much of a bad crowd at my school. Sometimes the girls with more developed breasts and womanly shapes came to school with their hair curled in bobby pins under silk scarves. In addition to creating curls, this practice had a secondary purpose. It implied that the girl had a date after school with an older guy and didn’t care if the boys at school saw her in a scarf. They dressed like Natalie Wood in Rebel Without a Cause and smoked in the schoolyard. It’s possible that they were dating juvenile delinquents, but at least the girls showed up for classes.
Most of my classmates and I came from working-class families in which one or both parents kept a close watch on our activities. We were expected to achieve academic excellence, and I met those expectations. Unfortunately, that was a recipe for failure for a girl hoping to be asked out on a date. No matter how much I tried to downplay my intellectual curiosity, boys never took me seriously, which meant that the most popular girls didn’t take me seriously either. Or so I thought at the time.
Three decades later, a group of middle-aged men and women came backstage after one of my concerts to visit the middle-aged woman I had become. After they identified themselves as classmates from Madison, I was incredulous when they told me that they had thought me one of the prettiest, most popular, and most envied girls in the class. My first impulse was to say, “I wish you had told me that then,” but what I really wished was that I could have told myself these things at the time: You’re pretty. You’re smart. You’re funny. You’re just right the way you are. Be confident. Be yourself. Like yourself. Don’t worry, you’ll date, and then you’ll have different problems.
I didn’t know those things when I was at Madison. All I could do was keep trying to find my place in the social realm. As it happened, I wasn’t the only teenager attracted to the liberal arts in search of peer acceptance and self-expression. A remarkable number of kids from my generation who attended high schools in Brooklyn went on to achieve success in music, film, TV, literature, journalism, theater, and the visual arts. Not only were we supported in such e
ndeavors by our schools and families, but we were only a subway ride away from the array of opportunities awaiting us in New York City. It’s no wonder we were drawn to the city in search of artistic and material success.
Alongside the culture of material success existed a subculture of alienated, antimaterialistic nonconformists, the literary core of which included Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg on the East Coast, with Kenneth Rexroth, Gregory Corso, Michael McClure, and Philip Lamantia on the West Coast. There was some coast overlap: the first reading by Allen Ginsberg of his avant-garde poem Howl took place in 1955 in San Francisco, and Kerouac drank too much on both coasts. Other characters in the Beat generation included Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, who would become a bridge between Beats and hippies.
I had no idea why it was called the Beat generation. Later I heard that Jack Kerouac coined the phrase in the late forties. Some said he used “beat” in the street sense of cheated or down and out. Others said “beat” was short for beatitude, but with its meaning of exalted happiness and serenity, beatitude seems unlikely—unless Kerouac was being ironic, which is entirely possible. Either way, the subculture became known as the Beat generation, and its members were “beatniks.”
In 1957, when I was fifteen, the dominant style in the visual arts was abstract expressionism, exemplified by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Helen Frankenthaler. While visual artists created and displayed their work in Greenwich Village, jazz musicians such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Tito Puente, Thelonious Monk, and Charles Mingus could be heard at clubs such as the Village Vanguard or the Village Gate.
That year I sneaked off to Greenwich Village with some of the more daring kids I knew. Unlike suburban kids, we didn’t need a car. We could get anywhere by bus or subway. Walking on Bleecker Street I half expected to see a strung-out junkie on every corner. Because everyone’s parents had seen Reefer Madness,* I kept looking over my shoulder for my father, who I was certain would catch me and ground me for a year. After boldly trying to get into the jazz clubs, only to be turned away, we wound up in a coffee house with no age restriction. There we listened to poetry readings in a room full of people who looked like beatniks. Hanging out in the Village made me feel “cool.”
One night, notwithstanding my being fifteen and looking twelve, the woman at the door admitted my friends and me to the Vanguard. It was a propitious moment that expanded into a couple of hours of grace during which I witnessed two sets of jazz by players I didn’t know. The music was hot, cool, and mind-blowing. After the Vanguard, my friends and I went to someone’s apartment where they were smoking pot. Other than what I inhaled secondhand, I didn’t partake. I, too, had seen Reefer Madness. I was convinced that smoking pot would lead me to harder drugs and I would become a heroin addict. Luckily, nothing stronger than pot was offered that night, and even if it had been, I’ve never been tempted to try heroin in any form. At one point I wanted to leave the apartment, but my friends wanted to stay, so I people-watched and listened to music on the record player. By default, soon I became the one who selected the records. I found the music a lot more interesting than watching other people stoned on pot.
My parents’ respect for the arts and the creativity they nurtured in me gave me a strong foundation from which to appreciate the music and art uniquely available in Greenwich Village, but their support most assuredly would not have included allowing me to go to the Village without adult supervision. After the night of the reefers I decided to stop risking a yearlong grounding. Instead I stayed in Brooklyn and prayed that a boy—any boy—would ask me out on a date.
Chapter Twelve
The Function of a Cosine
I had always been fearless about raising my hand to answer a teacher’s question. Sometimes I gave a wrong answer, but my confidence in that sphere remained unshaken. But as a fifteen-year-old high school junior among seventeen-year-olds, when it came to winning the respect of my contemporaries my daily mantra went from “I just want everyone to be happy” to “What’s wrong with me?”
Accepting a suggestion from my mother, I volunteered to contribute musically to the annual James Madison High School Sing. I found tremendous satisfaction in writing and arranging songs for the Sing, and I even performed some of the songs myself. But I really enjoyed teaching other students to sing what I had written. After the show, the applause lifted me to the point where I began to wonder what I could do next. Encouraged by teachers and classmates, I decided to start a singing group.
The Alan Freed shows had made me aware of the burgeoning number of street-corner groups, so called because they sometimes sang on street corners, subways, buses, or, depending on the size of the singers, anywhere they liked. They sang a cappella usually in four-part harmony. Similar groups were forming in high schools all over Brooklyn. One such group was the Tokens from Madison’s rival Lincoln High School. After I heard Neil Sedaka and the Tokens perform “While I Dream” and “I Love My Baby,” cowritten by Neil and Howard Greenfield, I began to compose in earnest. Most of my songs had decent melodies, but my lyrics weren’t very good. It didn’t matter. The street-corner benchmark left plenty of room for mediocre lyrics.
Arranging classical pieces at Performing Arts had given me enough confidence to arrange some pieces for Mr. Jacobs’s chorus class. My arrangements were so well received that I decided to arrange some of my pop compositions for street-corner harmonies. Though the genres were considerably different, four-part harmony was four-part harmony. All I needed were a soprano, tenor, and bass. I would be the alto.
I recruited Iris Lipnick, Lenny Pullman, and Joel Zwick from Mr. Jacobs’s class. Lipnick, Pullman, Zwick, and Klein didn’t have quite the ring we were looking for, so we pulled a word from our trigonometry books and became the Cosines. It was a dreadful name, but it was ours. We worked on vocal arrangements, choreographed steps at my house after school, and then performed for free at dances and other school events. For some reason I’ve blocked out all memory of the names, melodies, and lyrics of most of our repertoire except one: “Leave, Schkeeve.” My God! Of all the songs we sang, I can’t believe that’s the one I remember. We wrote that song as a group. I had no idea what a schkeeve was, but it rhymed with “leave,” and that was all that mattered. Only a teenager with no social life would have put so much effort into arranging a song whose main lyric was “Leave, schkeeve / Bum doo-bee doo-wop.”
In those days I wrote exclusively on piano. I was really excited about writing that arrangement. I’ve always loved wrapping layers around a melody. When arranging for voices with a band, usually I begin with a foundation consisting of melody, lyrics, and the chords and rhythm coming from my piano. Then I bring in the rhythm section: a drumbeat on a kit with three drums, several cymbals, and a pair of sticks, mallets, or brushes; a bass line that’s pretty close to what my left hand plays on the piano; a rhythm guitar that complements my piano; and sometimes a lead guitar to add accents and fills to the mix of piano, rhythm guitar, bass, and drums. Then I add vocal harmonies. And if I’m lucky enough to have the use of an orchestra, I add a final layer of orchestral instruments.
At best, the aggregate is an aural design that adds to the emotion of a song. But there’s a fine line: vocal and instrumental flourishes can make an arrangement more interesting, but they can also detract from the mood. As ambiance is to a room, mood is to a song. If you add too many lights and a pinball machine, the mood is lost. When my instinct is working well, it notifies me when I’m adding too many elements. When it’s working really well, I feel as if the arrangement is writing itself through me. Though on occasion I’ve overarranged, in general my guiding principle is “less is more.”
In the case of the Cosines, less didn’t need to be more because we didn’t have a lot of elements to begin with. Though most of my arrangements for the group were in the “doo-wop” style of the era, I arranged pop standards such as “Once in a While” and “Young and Foolish.” I was
an artist in sound as I filled my sonic canvas with the colors and textures of vocal harmonies, which is why I preferred writing and arranging over performing. When I did perform, my preference was still to have someone else up there with me to attract some of the attention. As with Loretta Stone, this was the case with the other three Cosines, whose dance steps and humorous antics in the foreground would keep the audience’s eyes on them while I sang and played piano in the background. That seemed to work for our audiences, whose laughter, dancing, and applause made us feel terrific. As Madison’s own singing group, we were a worthy rival for the Tokens and groups from other high schools.
I still wasn’t being asked out on dates, but I was no longer lonely. I had finally found my niche in the social structure. With music as a path to peer recognition, I had become cool. But as rewarding as it was to perform with the Cosines, I wanted to hear my songs on the radio. In between homework, school activities, and household chores, I wrote prolifically and wondered if there was any way I could meet Alan Freed.
Chapter Thirteen
Atlantic and ABC-Paramount
I was still fifteen when I confided to my dad one afternoon that I wanted to play my songs for Alan Freed. My father sprang into action. All a New York City firefighter had to do was show his badge and he would be admitted as a V.I.P. anywhere in the city, from the finest restaurant to a museum, movie theater, or radio station WINS.
I don’t know if Alan really thought I had talent or if he was just being nice to the fireman’s kid, but he listened attentively to my songs, and he even took time to explain how the process worked. He told me to look in the phone book under “Record Companies,” make an appointment, and play my songs live for the A&R man in charge of finding artists and repertoire (a fancy name for songs). Usually a label had its own publishing company. If an A&R man liked one of my songs, he might offer me a contract and an advance of twenty-five dollars. The contract was simple. The publishing company would own the copyright and receive all the publishing income. The writer would get a standard writer’s mechanical and sheet music royalty minus the advance and the cost of recording a demo in one of the nearby demo studios such as Associated, Dick Charles, or Bell Sound. Alan chuckled when he said Atlantic Records didn’t use an outside studio. “If Jerry and Ah-mond like a song,” he said, “they’ll set up a mic in their office and record a demo on the spot.” That’s what I thought he’d said: “Jerry and Ah-mond.”