More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon (33 page)

“After the Storm” opens
Playing Possum,
a piano ballad with a jazzy feel and lush orchestration. Carly wrote it after that fierce fight with James, and the subsequent reconciliation, shortly after they
arrived in California. “Love out in the Street” follows, Carly’s sexual predator persona singing rapturously with Rita Coolidge (now Mrs. Kristofferson) and Clydie King. James Taylor puts some beautiful acoustic guitar on “Look Me in the Eyes,” another cry, from deep in the singer’s heart, for more intimacy, more passion, more love.

Dr. John plays like Professor Longhair on his song “More and More,” while Ringo Starr lays down a funky shuffle and Steely Dan guitarist Jeff Baxter rips off some tasty licks. Carly sings the lyrics very soul-style, perhaps in tribute to her longtime idol Martha Reeves. This is followed by “Slave,” written with Jake. It only made it onto
Playing Possum
because Carly had a fit and threatened to walk out if it was left off. She anticipated a backlash from people who would take the abject lyrics at face value. But people did have the feelings expressed in the song. They were authentic. “The thing that I feel is, that it is
true,
” Carly has said. “I
do
feel sometimes a victim of my own enslavement, but I’m angry about it in the song. It’s
damn it, sometimes I actually still feel like a slave
. That’s what the sentiment [in the song] is.”

Much of the drumming on
Possum
is played by Carly’s regular drummer Andy Newmark, but Jim Gordon plays on “Attitude Dancing,” with lyrics by Jake. (Willie Weeks plays bass on many of the tracks.) Carly later wrote: “It was about our enjoying the thought of all those early dances—the hully gully, the locomotion, the mashed potato—being danced at the same time: a creative mélange of self-expression.” Carole King and an uncredited James Taylor sing in the chorus. Elektra executives liked the disco-tinged song, figuring it could be a hit on the dance floor.

Carly multitracks her vocals, echoing the days of the Simon Sisters, on Billy Mernit’s “Sons of Summer,” while he plays piano on his arty song. This is followed by “Waterfall,” one of Carly’s greatest compositions. James’s rhythm section—Russ Kunkel and bassist Lee Sklar—came over from James’s sessions. James sings with Carly on the chorus and wails a full-throated, wordless vocal solo in the
bridge. (The high spirits and love in the song are almost unmatched in Carly’s music.) Carly’s “Are You Ticklish” is old-fashioned and corny.
Playing Possum
finishes with its title song, a portrait based loosely on her brother’s old friend Ray Mungo, who was a fire-breathing radical editor in the sixties but was now the owner of a bookstore “with patches on his sleeves.” “Playing possum” is an old expression for hiding out and keeping a low profile, something that Carly wanted for herself, so there was a lot of sympathy for the character. In this song, James again sings his ass off with Carly, as the orchestra comes up and star-crossed
Playing Possum
fades to black.

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.”

P
laying
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.”

T
ed 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.