by Carole King
A few years later, as I traveled around the West, poems, songs, and stories written by cowboys about their horses would inspire me to write a song about my equine buddy.* Whiskey’s lifetime was just right for a horse, but too short for a friend. In a perfect heaven Whiskey is romping with Seabiscuit.
Early days with Rick were a natural high. He was so excited about our future that every day felt like an adventure. But adventure didn’t come cheap. It required gear. The first thing Rick and I bought together was an old Dodge Power Wagon, though technically it wasn’t “we” who bought it. Rick found the Power Wagon through an ad in the paper. Though its body was rusty in places, it could haul a large family and lots of camping gear. With four-wheel drive it could, in theory, go anywhere. We had it painted metallic brown to camouflage the rust.
In the seventies—oh dear, this is so embarrassing—hippies named their cars. The first car I owned (as opposed to leased) in California was a white Volkswagen station wagon. I thought of it as female and named her Carma. With its beefy body and muscular engine, we deemed the Power Wagon to be a male, named him Shepherd, and registered the vehicle in Idaho with personalized plates reading SHPRD. Between 1975 and 1977, Rick and I covered thousands of miles in Shepherd traveling back and forth between California, Utah, and Colorado with Levi and Molly in search of what Rick had now begun to refer to as “our” dream. On one trip to Colorado we visited Dan Fogelberg, who lived in Boulder. On Rick’s advice, and with Dan’s blessing, I began working with members of a band called Navarro that Dan sometimes played with. Their musicianship was inspired and full of energy, and I enjoyed their company. Navarro, Rick, and I traveled between Boulder and L.A. to write and play music together. Soon Navarro and their families and friends became my primary social circle.
Shepherd carried us to a number of magnificent places in Colorado, to any one of which I might have happily moved, but I wanted to explore other areas before making a final decision. In Utah, Rick, my Larkey children, and I clambered up and down glorious red desert rocks and, along with copious amounts of water, drank in spectacular views of changing colors as the sun moved across the sky. And when I saw a stream flowing uphill in the Wasatch Mountains, I would have been receptive to anything a Utahn told me. But from the moment we crossed the state line, Idaho’s landscape had me in its grip. I was enthralled by the wide-open spaces of the high volcanic desert in which cows and horses grazed peacefully in large pastures on spacious farms against a vast panoramic backdrop of majestic snowcapped mountain ranges. I was humbled by a sense of infinite space and natural beauty unlike anything I’d ever experienced before. My field of vision widened to capacity as I tried to take in a full view of all that land on which there appeared to be absolutely nothing.
Of course there wasn’t “nothing.” Tens of thousands of organisms thrived there, from wild plants and herbs and creatures large and small to birds and insects that coexisted in symbiotic harmony. But what I perceived then as “nothing” was the absence of any sign of human habitation for miles. After spending so much of my life walking on the streets of New York, driving on the parkways of New Jersey, or sitting in traffic on the freeways of Southern California, always within sight and earshot of teeming humanity and the rumbling vehicles that conveyed people from place to place, I was awestruck by the very idea of all that land with no visible indication of human beings on it.
When I did encounter human beings, I found Idahoans’ directness, simplicity of lifestyle, and readiness to help others refreshing. It wasn’t that New Yorkers and Angelenos weren’t kind or helpful, but in Idaho helping strangers seemed to be a way of life. Folks never hesitated to stop whatever they were doing to pull someone’s car out of a ditch or help a neighbor with a chore. I had the impression that people in Idaho had more spare time than city people. Of course, had I said that to a farmer or rancher, she or he probably would have said, “Yeah? And just how much spare time do ya think I have?” even as the man or woman was climbing off a tractor and spending whatever time it took to pull my car out of the ditch.
If L.A. was the fast lane in 1975, Idaho was the extremely slow lane. Idahoans took pride in saying, “Idaho is what America was.” One night Rick and I went to dinner with a couple who spent quite a bit of time trying to determine whether “Boy-see” or “Boy-zee” was the correct way to pronounce the name of Idaho’s City of Trees. The husband, originally from California, favored “Boy-zee.” The wife, as did most Idahoans, said “Boy-see.” I say “Boy-see” because that’s how Rick pronounced it. I couldn’t believe how much time was spent on a question that is always resolved in the same way: both are correct.
At another evening meal, this time at the home of a much larger family, all the adults sat around the supper table and debated for an hour whether a neighbor’s truck had thrown a piston or a rod. And on a third occasion the topic was whether Barb’s Toll House cookies tasted better with half a cup or a whole cup of chocolate chips. Was that even in question?
What wasn’t in question was that during the nine years I had lived in Southern California I had never stopped thinking of New York as my home, but after less than a week, Idaho was already vying for that position.
Chapter Two
Mores Creek
In 1975, with only six gates, Boise Airport met the definition of a sleepy little airport. I first saw it from Shepherd on a road trip to visit Rick’s adoptive mother. Luey Noble lived in a small house on five irrigated acres less than a mile from the airport. Rick’s sister and brother-in-law, Mollie and Don Culley, lived on the property with Dennis, their eight-year-old son. They kept horses, dogs, cats, birds, chickens, and a cow on the small farm. They cared for the animals in the morning before they left for their jobs in town, then they came home and tended them again at night. The Culleys weren’t the only family to work multiple jobs while struggling to hold on to their property and way of life against encroaching development. For the Culleys and others it would be a losing battle. Open spaces and five-acre farms near Boise Airport have since given way to subdivisions, industrial parks, and massive structures with enough parking spaces to accommodate all the passengers who now use that airport, which, as I write this, has at least thirty-two gates and can no longer be considered “sleepy.”
At first, when Don and Mollie said they were going to do chores, I assumed they meant washing dishes, making the bed, and sweeping the kitchen. Wanting to be a considerate guest, I offered to help. That’s when I learned that on a farm “chores” meant getting up at 4 o’clock on a winter morning and slogging to the barn through slush, mud, and manure to feed the animals, milk the cow, and gather eggs. As a guest, my participation in chores was voluntary. For my hosts it was mandatory. A few years later, when I was responsible for the twice-daily care and feeding of farm animals, I would learn the meaning of “mandatory.” I would find it extremely challenging to leave my warm, cozy bed to go up to the barn in temperatures as low as 45 below zero, but I would also find caring for those animals grounding and rewarding.
Living in Idaho and visiting Los Angeles seemed a much better idea than the reverse. I could continue my professional career no matter where I lived. Even so, though I wrote and released a number of albums after I moved to Idaho, the perception in the industry was that I had dropped out. I suppose that if you measure a person’s standing in the music business by her position on the charts or her presence at star-studded parties, I did drop out. But I felt as if I were dropping in to real life—or as real as life can be when you have financial security beyond the reach of most of your neighbors.
Rick and I began the search for our dream place by driving northeast along the Boise River on Highway 21 toward Idaho City. The first property we looked at was about a half hour out of Boise in the highlands above Mores Creek, a tributary of the Boise River. The two brothers who owned the property could have been anywhere from forty to seventy-five. Each wore denim overalls that might have been blue at one time but had evolved to a nondescript slate color. They
lived together in a one-room cabin roughly twice the size of a hot-dog stand. A table covered with bills, envelopes, and other papers stood beneath a wall covered with girlie calendars from the 1940s. Unwashed dishes filled the sink, and there were black grease stains everywhere. The cabin reminded me of the back office of a filling station I’d walked through in rural Connecticut when I was a teenager.
To make conversation, I asked if either of them were married.
“Oh, no, ma’am,” one of the brothers drawled. “We find it’s cheaper to rent ’em.”
When Rick asked if we could view the property, the brother who had answered the “married” question led us out the back door to an old crew-cab pickup that would hold all four of us. Rick sat in the passenger seat. The other brother climbed in back with me. As we bumped along the two ruts that served as a road, Rick asked about water.
“Are there any hot or cold springs?”
The brother who had answered the “married” question replied, “Yep.” Evidently he was the more gregarious of the two.
We waited for him to continue. When he didn’t, Rick and I exchanged a look in the mirror as if to say, What do we have to do to get information out of these guys?
The gregarious brother stopped the pickup, pointed to a stand of red willows, and said, “Ya got a cold spring right there.”
“How can you tell?” I asked.
“Ma’am? D’ya see them willas?”
“Yes.”
“Wa-al,” he said, “where ya got willas, ya got water.”
“Sure,” I said, trying to sound as if I had already known that.
“Ya see,” he said. And he stopped as if that were his complete thought. Then, with the extra patience shown to a city slicker by a man raised in the country, he added, “That’s how it works.”
He shifted into first and started driving again. The taciturn brother decided it was time to end the discussion.
“No water, no willas.”
I had just received my first lesson in the lore of the land from a couple of locals. Other valuable lessons would come later, including that sewage flows downhill, payday’s on Friday, and the weather in Idaho changes every five minutes. In fact, right after “Idaho is what America was,” the phrase I would hear most often in my adopted state was, “If you don’t like the weather, wait a few minutes.”
The brothers’ land wasn’t suitable for our purposes, and neither were several other properties we viewed along Mores Creek. We wouldn’t find our dream place for nearly two years, but in the intervening months we had an unexpected encounter that led to an extraordinary evening in New York with a man who had changed the world.
Chapter Three
Taxi Driver
While living in Laurel Canyon I had traveled back and forth to New York frequently to visit friends, family, and other songwriters and musicians with whom I enjoyed working. After I met Rick I continued to travel to and from New York, but never without him. From the moment I saw Rick in his remarkable coat, he and I were virtually inseparable. More accurately, Rick was inseparable from me. That he insisted on going everywhere with me didn’t make me as uncomfortable in the beginning as it made my friends and family. Though they were glad I was happy, they thought Rick too possessive. That opinion was initially brought up by Rick, who had a keen sensitivity to anyone’s slightest possible dislike of him. He dismissed their judgment and said they were jealous of the love he and I shared. Caught in the middle (a place with which I was not unfamiliar), I tried to accommodate everyone. I allowed Rick to come everywhere with me, and I tried to assuage the fears of my friends and family by telling them it was my choice to have him with me. They didn’t believe me. Because they didn’t know what else to do, the people who loved me let me know that they were there if I needed them, and then they gave me the space that Rick was building so industriously around the two of us. I could have set the concept to music had someone not already written it as a nursery rhyme: “Everywhere that Carole went, Rick Evers was sure to go.”
Early in our relationship Rick told me that he was a big fan of the Moody Blues.
“Anyone can be a fan of the Beatles,” he said, “but it takes a really tuned-in person to appreciate the Moody Blues.”
When he said he would die to meet John Lodge, Justin Hayward, or Graeme Edge, I assumed he meant it figuratively. Rick never met the Moody Blues, but he did meet a Beatle, and he didn’t have to die to do it. All he had to do was go to a movie with me on a winter night in New York in 1976 after a business meeting, at which he was of course present. We went to a cinema on the Upper East Side to see Taxi Driver, in which Robert De Niro delivered one of the best-known lines in twentieth-century movie history when he looked in the mirror (as Travis Bickle) and said to his reflection, “Are you talkin’ to me?”
Just about everyone who has seen the film remembers that moment. I remember it, too, but the rest of the movie was eclipsed by other events that night.
Soon after that scene I became aware of an insistent call of nature. I eased out of my seat, sidled past the people in my row, and found the ladies’ room. As I emerged from the stall, the face I saw reflected in a mirror was instantly recognizable as that of Yoko Ono. Yoko was at the sink washing her hands when she looked up, saw me in the mirror, and recognized me. I suppose one good thing about having a famous face is that you don’t have to introduce yourself.
Drying her hands, Yoko asked, “Do you live in New York?”
I pressed down on the soap dispenser and said, “No. I came for business meetings and to visit my family.”
While we completed our ablutions, Yoko confided that she and John were enjoying their night out at the movies very much. “This is the first time we’ve gone out together since the birth of our son.” From news reports that had provided a waiting world with the announcement of Sean Ono Lennon’s arrival on October 9, 1975, I knew that their son had been born several months earlier.
“Oh, you must be so happy. Congratulations!”
Yoko moved toward the exit ahead of me. Just before she pushed the door open, she turned and volunteered that they would be leaving the theater soon. “Would you like to visit us at our apartment?”
“Sure,” I said. “Er… I’m here with my boyfriend. Is that okay?”
“Of course. You must bring him, too.”
As we entered the darkened theater together Yoko pointed to where John was sitting and whispered that they would be leaving before the movie was over. When I saw them get up, my boyfriend and I were to do the same and meet them at the back of the theater.
Incredulous, I whispered, “You’re not going to stay for the end of the movie?”
“No. We never do.”
As I made my way back to my seat I pondered the concept of never seeing the end of a movie. Rick glanced up when I arrived, then immediately turned his attention back to the screen. I tugged his sleeve to get his attention and whispered that I was going to get up again before the end of the movie, and when I did, he should follow me. It must have sounded very mysterious to him, but he nodded and returned to the movie.
I could no longer concentrate on Travis Bickle. I couldn’t stop thinking about Yoko’s invitation, and I was intrigued by her exit plan. Not wanting to miss Yoko’s cue, I kept looking in their direction. When at last Yoko and John stood up, so did two men behind them. I, too, stood up. Rick followed, keeping an eye on the screen all the way out. We trailed Yoko and John to the back of the theater and slipped out the door after them into the brightly lit, nearly empty lobby. One of the two men with them escorted us to the exit doors, where an old-fashioned woody station wagon was waiting.
To my surprise, neither the vehicle nor the Ono-Lennons seemed to attract anyone’s notice. The whole operation took less than a minute. One man helped Yoko into the back seat and instructed Rick and me to scoot in on either side of her. The second man quickly helped John into the back of the station wagon, where John immediately assumed a prone position. The man who had help
ed Yoko climbed into the front passenger seat while the second man closed the tailgate and raised his hand to hail a taxi.
As the woody sped away I asked the driver, “Do you do this all the time?”
“Yes,” he said. “We have to.”
Of course, I thought. Security would be a major concern for anyone charged with protecting a Beatle. And if you happened to be responsible for the Beatle who lived with Yoko Ono, the need for security would be even higher because, among millions of fans who mourned the Beatles’ breakup, many blamed Yoko.
Thinking about security, I remembered a frightening experience of my own. After my free concert in Central Park in 1973, a crowd of overenthusiastic fans had broken through the fence and surrounded a limo with Charlie and me inside. As I tried to get the terrified driver to inch forward slowly, the fans, who had worked themselves into a frenzy, began to rock the limo. These were ostensibly people who liked me. Fortunately, three of New York’s Finest showed up before anyone was hurt and persuaded the crowd to disperse.
Now, as we sped across Central Park toward John and Yoko’s home in the apartment building known as the Dakota, I realized that my scary fan experience was insignificant compared to what the Beatles had to deal with all the time. When it came to the Beatles, the fanaticism of some people knew no bounds. Hey, I knew what it meant to be a Beatles fan. I had been one when I first met them in 1965.
I’d been on my way to retrieve my car after a meeting with an A&R man when Al Aronowitz hailed me outside the Warwick Hotel. Seeing the crowd gathering behind stanchions off to one side of the entrance, I remembered having heard on the radio that the Beatles were in residence.
“Wanna meet the Beatles?” Al said, in the manner of a street guy offering to sell me a watch.