by Carole King
But a recording that moves people is never just about the artist and the songwriters. It’s about people like Jerry and Ahmet, who matched the songwriters with a great title and a gifted artist; Arif Mardin, whose magnificent orchestral arrangement deserves the place it will forever occupy in popular music history; Tom Dowd, whose engineering skills captured the magic of this memorable musical moment for posterity; and the musicians in the rhythm section, the orchestral players, and the vocal contributions of the background singers—among them the unforgettable “Ah-oo!” after the first line of the verse. And the promotion and marketing people helped this song reach more people than it might have without them.
But in the end it was Aretha’s performance that sent our song not only to the top of the charts but all the way to heaven.
It takes a lot more people to deliver a song than most people are aware of, but you, the listener, are the most important person in the process. You complete the circle. You inspire us to write, sing, arrange, record, and promote songs that move us because we hope they will move you, too. There might still be an “us” without you, but you make us matter, and you make us better.
In 1970 I would record “Natural Woman” with a simple arrangement along the lines of the original demo. My 1970 version is slower than Aretha’s and has a few chords from Arif’s arrangement that weren’t on my original demo.
Q: How do you follow Aretha Franklin?
A: You don’t. You can only precede her.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Sold
In 1963, with something like thirty-three top 10 hits to Aldon’s credit, Donnie had begun negotiating with Screen Gems Television and Columbia Pictures to sell Aldon Music. The sale took place on April 12, 1963, with Donnie, then twenty-nine, becoming executive vice president in charge of all music publishing and recording, conducted primarily under the banners of Screen Gems–Columbia Music and Colpix Records. Al Nevins stayed on as a consultant until he passed away on January 25, 1965. He would have been fifty that year.
At first Gerry and I were unhappy about the sale, and Barry and Cynthia shared our dismay. We thought of ourselves as members of the Aldon Music family, and we were convinced that the new circumstances would herald the end of our careers. To assuage our vehement disapproval, Donnie sat down with Barry, Cynthia, Gerry, and me in the Manns’ living room. He swore he’d be just as active on our behalf as head of Screen Gems–Columbia Music as he’d been at Aldon. He’d get covers just as he always had, and it would be to our advantage that he would be in charge of Colpix Records.
“Nothing’s gonna change,” Donnie said. “It’ll only get better. I’ll be able to place your songs in movies.”
We were not convinced.
“You could win an Oscar!”
We thought that was too far-fetched.
Donnie gave us more examples of how he could get us theme songs for the television shows and movies he would now control. His logic was unassailable, but we were still miserable. Donnie showed singular patience in keeping the discussion going until Barry acknowledged the underlying reason we were so upset: Donnie was selling us as if we were chattel.
The problem was, we were chattel. For $6,000 Gerry and I had not only signed over our copyrights, we had given Aldon Music’s owners, heirs, and assigns the right to sell our services. But the worst part wasn’t the sale. It was the feeling that the circumstances around our professional and creative family were about to change, and the head of the family had the power to make that decision no matter how we felt about it. We were about to lose the physical location that had inspired so many songs. We would no longer be writing in the cubicles at 1650 not-really-Broadway. We would be writing at 711 Fifth Avenue in the corporate office building that housed the New York headquarters of Screen Gems–Columbia Pictures—a location in some ways as far from Tin Pan Alley, 1650 Broadway, and the Brill Building as Wall Street was from the Bronx.
Donnie’s gift for persuasion won the day. Before he left he extracted a promise from the four of us to keep an open mind. Then he proceeded to come through with TV and movie themes for his writers, and he put the corporate might of Colpix Records behind artists such as James Darren, Paul Peterson, and Shelley Fabares, all of whom recorded songs by Screen Gems–Columbia Music writers. Donnie also released recordings on Colpix by writers, artists, and musicians from his stable, including Barry Mann, Toni Wine, saxophonist Artie Kaplan, and Earl-Jean. When the Colpix release of Freddie Scott’s “Hey Girl” (produced by Gerry, arranged by me, and written by both of us) made the top 10 in 1963, Gerry and I were so jubilant that we didn’t object to how often Donnie said, “See? Didn’t I tell you? This is great! Sheel, how great is this?” But when the successful British Invasion pushed Colpix artists off the charts in 1965, Gerry and I and the Manns started grousing again. We missed the spirit of the cubicles. We yearned for the old sense of burgeoning possibilities. And at a time when young people across America were becoming increasingly aware of corporate interests’ control over their lives, we didn’t like being owned by a corporation.
Hoping to diminish our discontent, Donnie called us into his office and announced that he would soon be producing a new television show featuring four young men who, he assured us, would soon become America’s Beatles. Unlike most groups who came together on their own, Donnie would assemble this group through auditions.
“I mean, what better way than auditions to put a group together? They’ll be great!”
“Isn’t that kind of artificial?” I asked. “How can you put a group together and expect them to have chemistry when you don’t even know if they’re going to like each other?”
“It doesn’t matter how they come together. They can’t help but be successful because of all the great songs you guys are going to deliver.”
Donnie went on to explain that the Monkees would need several songs for each weekly show and even more songs for their albums, which Colpix would release and cross-market through the TV show.
“The Beatles may not need your songs,” he said, “but the Monkees will.”
Once again, Donnie’s instinct for business put him ahead of the curve. Starring Michael Nesmith, Davy Jones, Micky Dolenz, and Peter Tork, The Monkees TV show was a runaway hit, and so were the songs written by Donnie’s writers, among them Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, Barry and Cynthia, and Gerry and me. Released on Colpix and widely promoted by weekly exposure on national television, our Monkees songs sold remarkably well. Our success with that group was a mixed blessing for Gerry, because the critics whose opinions he most respected considered the Monkees a manufactured group with a bubblegum flavor and no staying power. Several decades later, some of the same critics would acknowledge that the Monkees had risen to the occasion with more musical ability than the critics had originally attributed to them.
Gerry felt a little better about our association with the Monkees in 1968 after a movie called Head was released. Written by Jack Nicholson and Bob Rafelson, directed by Rafelson, and starring the Monkees, the film was enthusiastically embraced by the counterculture. I’d like to believe “The Porpoise Song,” written by Gerry and me, was chosen for the opening of Head solely because it complemented the images over which it was used, but it probably didn’t hurt that Donnie was in a position to advocate for its use in a Columbia picture. Notwithstanding our identification with young people rebelling against The Man, material security remained important to the Goffin family. If our lifestyle was in danger, it was not from a financial wolf at the door.
Later I would come to appreciate Donnie’s timing and wisdom in selling Aldon to a multimedia corporation. If Donnie had increased his own opportunities for success, the sale had also undeniably increased the opportunities for his writers. Donnie would expand the musical knowledge of the next generation in the seventies and eighties when he presented performances on television by emerging and well-known acts, first on a late-night ABC-TV show called In Concert and then as the host of a series called Don Kirshner�
�s Rock Concert. Among the artists he introduced were the Rolling Stones, Curtis Mayfield, Chuck Berry, the Steve Miller Band, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Ike and Tina Turner, Alice Cooper, Led Zeppelin, Seals and Crofts, Billy Preston, the Isley Brothers, the Allman Brothers, Poco, and Kansas.
When I reconnected with Donnie and Sheila in Florida in 2010, I asked Donnie how his family was. He told me with characteristic enthusiasm how great his and Sheila’s by then adult children, Ricky and Daryn, were, and how great it was to be the grandparents of five grandchildren. Of course they were great. They were Donnie’s family, and they were as proud of him as he was of them. When I told him he had been right to sell Aldon Music to Screen Gems, his face lit up like a sunrise.
Donnie’s heart stopped beating on January 17, 2011. When I visited with Sheila and Daryn after his memorial service, I told them something that I want to say to the world. Between his work with songwriters and his presentation of an array of groups on television that a lot of viewers might not otherwise have seen, Don Kirshner was one of the most significant influences on popular music in the twentieth century.
Donnie, babe. You were great.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Aronowitz and the Myddle Class
The journalist Alfred Gilbert Aronowitz was born in Bordentown, New Jersey, on May 5, 1928. His articles and columns about the Beats and, later, his regular column in the New York Post called “Pop Scene” had a sense of immediacy and irreverence that resonated with readers who had come of age around the end of the fifties. Aronowitz first captured my husband’s attention when Gerry learned that Al had known Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Gerry’s interest was further piqued by Al’s relationship with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. But perhaps Aronowitz’s most compelling credential was that he was a confidant of the man who had written “The Times They Are A-Changin’.”
Released by Columbia Records in January 1964, Bob Dylan’s album The Times They Are A-Changin’ was a collection of self-composed, sparsely arranged, and lyrically unsettling songs that connected with mainstream audiences. While the executives at Columbia saw huge potential income in selling the concept of rebellion to a nation of willing teenagers, other men in positions of power and influence saw Bob as a threat. That he was. Bob Dylan was empowering young people to refuse to be a cog in the military-industrial machine, and they were listening.
At twenty-two, I should have understood Bob’s appeal, but I didn’t appreciate until much later the social significance of his lyrics or the allure of his dry humor and unpretentious musical presentation.
Gerry got Bob immediately. He heard the call to revolution and was enthralled. The more he listened to Dylan’s songs, the more frustrated he became. While Gerry had been commuting from the suburbs and achieving financial success with pop ditties about teenage love and dancing, Dylan had been honing his craft on Bleecker Street. Now Bob was exhorting young people to reject the path their parents had laid out for them and look deeper for the true meaning of life. Gerry didn’t believe he could find that meaning as the person he was. He wanted to be Bob. Short of that, he wanted to know Bob.
From the day Aronowitz promised Gerry a meeting with Dylan, my husband was as inexorably drawn to Aronowitz as a boulder to the bottom of a lake. As Gerry was drawn, I was repelled. I thought that at thirty-six, with a wife and three children in Summit, New Jersey, Al was too old to hang out all night like a groupie with artists, poets, and writers at theaters and parties in hotel rooms and clubs. But such people and settings were exactly what Gerry hungered for. He found Al’s invitations to be part of that scene irresistible. He didn’t share my opinion that Aronowitz was trying to hold on to his youth and his currency as a member of the pop scene by associating with the likes of Brian Jones, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, and now Gerry.
It was more instinct than logic that informed my perception of Aronowitz as a threat to my family. I wanted to fight this man with his moon-shaped face, scraggly red beard, and a knowing smile that always made me feel as if he knew what I was thinking. He probably did know. It wouldn’t have been difficult to discern my dislike of him or my fear that he would entice my husband away from Louise, Sherry, and me. But how could I fight someone who was not only a path to Bob Dylan but a bridge between the Beats and the new intellectuals?
Maybe the times would have tugged at Gerry even without Aronowitz. When we married in 1959 we were twenty and seventeen. Three years later we were the parents of two children. By the dawn of 1964 the responsibilities of marriage, family, and a suburban home were weighing heavily on Gerry. The dramatic societal changes that year only made him more aware of what he was missing. I thought it was my fault because I was an equal breadwinner instead of a traditional wife who stayed at home and took care of her man. But traditional wives and husbands weren’t exempt from the turmoil of the period. Gerry and I were part of a larger phenomenon in which one spouse enthusiastically embraced the new mores while the other was slower to accept them or didn’t accept them at all. While one member of a couple experimented with drugs, extramarital sex, or both, the other couldn’t understand why his or her spouse was abandoning previously shared values.
Had I been forty-two and Gerry forty-five, I might have understood his yearning for the bohemian lifestyle he’d never had. But I was a twenty-two-year-old wife and mother losing my twenty-five-year-old husband to avant-garde ideas. I wanted my life back. Unfortunately, yesterday had a no-return policy, and today wasn’t where I wanted to be. I could only hope tomorrow would be better.
I was understandably opposed when Aronowitz suggested early in 1965 that Gerry and I partner with him in forming an independent record label. When Gerry wouldn’t be deterred, I applied the maxim “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer” and agreed to the plan. We called the label Tomorrow Records to memorialize our first hit and augur a successful future. Now we needed an artist. Aronowitz had a group in mind.
The King Bees were a band of five New Jersey high school seniors from Summit, Plainfield, New Providence, and Berkeley Heights who had acquired a following playing at school dances and community functions. The band consisted of lead singer and lyricist Dave Palmer; guitarist, vocalist, and composer Rick Philp; organist and vocalist Danny Mansolino; Mike Rosa on drums; and Charlie Larkey on bass. All were eighteen.
If Aronowitz thought the band would be of interest to Gerry and me, he was right. Their music had an edgy sense of urgency. Dave’s lyrics and vocal presentation moved us intensely. Rick’s inventive guitar parts complemented the dynamic energy of the rest of the players. The band’s talent was raw but unmistakable.
Gerry couldn’t wait to sign and produce the King Bees, but before we could close the deal, we ran up against a minor legal problem. A band in Martha’s Vineyard had established prior use of the name “King Bees”; therefore, the New Jersey King Bees would have to change their name. Some of the Martha’s Vineyard King Bees would later become part of the Flying Machine. With the changing of i’s to y’s and vice versa then in vogue, whether in honor or mockery of their suburban roots, they became the Myddle Class. In that spirit, though there was no conflict with any other Mike Rosa, Mike changed the spelling of his first name to Myke.
Duly renamed and respelled, the band was now free to go into the studyo.
The Myddle Class album was definitely of its time, yet the band’s powerful presentation can still be appreciated today. Their well-written songs and fully committed performances embodied the tenuous freedom and impulsive energy of young men across America who knew that they could be sent overseas to die for their country at any moment. Even then, I considered Dave Palmer’s lyrics on a par with those of lyricists of greater maturity. I’d like to believe that Gerry and I added value to the Myddle Class’s album, but there was a reason that they already had developed a following. They were compelling. Though Aronowitz’s omnipresence continued to be challenging, the one thing he brought into my life for which I will always be grateful was that band.
There would be other products of my association with the Myddle Class, but the best of them would not emerge until the early seventies.
Chapter Thirty
The Mid-Sixties
Events taking place in disparate areas of American life in 1965 provided a context for the coalescence of various movements for social change.
With the United States increasingly on the offensive in Vietnam, and more American troops being sent into combat, antiwar protests grew more numerous and more vociferous.
Undeterred by beatings, bullwhips, and tear gas, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and hundreds of demonstrators continued to march for civil rights until the Voting Rights Act was signed into law on August 6, 1965.
Alan Freed passed away with little notice.
Malcolm X was assassinated and mourned by millions.
The Beatles’ albums Help and Rubber Soul soared to the top of the pop charts, with Bob Dylan, Sonny and Cher, the Byrds, and Wilson Pickett close behind.
Mainstream audiences rediscovered jazz through artists such as Bill Evans, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane, and they embraced Brazil’s soft, sexy samba and bossa nova tunes recorded by Stan Getz, João Gilberto, and Antonio Carlos Jobim.
Some of the most popular films that year were A Patch of Blue, Doctor Zhivago, and Thunderball. Though quirky movies garnered the best reviews, the tremendous box-office response to The Sound of Music reinforced the contention of the conservative contingent that not everyone wanted to be a hippie.