More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon (36 page)

James Taylor later told friends that he was “still doing drugs” when he and Peter Asher made the
JT
album, but the drugs must have been helping, because he was burning up the studio and making his best album in years. “Secret O’ Life” and a cover of Otis Blackwell’s “Handy Man” would both be hit singles. “Another Grey Morning” and “There We Are” are both beautiful and less-than-idyllic sketches of a contemporary marriage that had its variable moods and malaise. “Terra Nova” is an ultimate traveling song, visionary and deeply emotional. These songs portrayed a seemingly unfiltered James Taylor for the first time in years, and would resonate with his audience when the album was released in June 1977.

The month before that, Carly was persuaded to play two nights at the Other End, formerly the Bitter End, her old haunt on Bleecker Street. The small club was filled with record people, the press, Carly’s family, and a few celebrities, including Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, and Art Garfunkel. On the second night, Elektra’s Steve Harris was sitting in the club’s back booth with Alyne Rothberg and Diane Keaton. As Carly started to sing, Mick Jagger slid into the booth with them. Keaton was so flustered by Mick’s sudden presence that she called him “Mike” for the rest of the evening.

Two different female critics panned Carly’s shows in the downtown weekly
Village Voice,
both on socioeconomic grounds. One described her as impossibly culturally privileged. Regarding her romantic songs, the other described Carly as “too sleek and well-adjusted to be a credible victim.” For arch-feminists in the crumbling New York of 1977, Carly was too preoccupied “with that old, demeaning dance of courtly love” to be taken seriously. New York in the squalid seventies was no place for an old-fashioned romantic like Carly Simon.

Columbia released
JT
in June. James’s new album sold two
million units by the end of the year. His singing with Linda Ronstadt and Graham Nash (and Leah Kunkel) transformed “Handy Man” into an Appalachian soft blues song that got on the radio all that summer and climbed to number four. (James would win a Best Pop Vocal Grammy Award for “Handy Man” the following year.) The philosophical “Secret O’ Life” established James as a national junkie savant, dispensing quiet teachings and aperçus like a secular American guru. James and the band went out on the road for the summer. Carly was worried about him. But then, she was worried about a lot of things. Baby Ben still wasn’t sleeping. She had a permanent foreboding, she told friends, and a lingering feeling that something was wrong.

Then she had her own hit record that summer. United Artists Records released “Nobody Does It Better” in July and it proved to be Carly’s biggest hit since “You’re So Vain” of four years earlier. The single, awash in strings and flourishes of brass, was number two for three weeks on the Hot 100 and number one on the adult contemporary chart. Many fans thought Carly wrote the song, but Marvin Hamlisch and Carole Bayer Sager received the Academy Award nomination for Best Song.

Carly went to the gala premiere of
The Spy Who Loved Me
in New York. She recalled, “There was a huge blackout in the Northeast the day of the screening. As Roger Moore was drifting to earth with that famous Union Jack parachute, he started falling more slowly, and my voice in the soundtrack got lower and lower, and then there was nothing. No Roger. No me. No lights in the theater.”

Peter Simon married his girlfriend, Ronnie Susan Goldman, on Martha’s Vineyard that summer. Carly attended the ceremony, conducted by Peter’s spiritual adviser, Baba Ram Dass, formerly Professor Richard Alpert of the Harvard psychology department. The wedding reception was held at Andrea Simon’s house, Highmark, with its infinity view of the sea. The wedding ensemble was led by
John Hall, the lead guitarist of the rock band Orleans. Hall came over to Carly’s house to rehearse the day before, and she showed him some clever wedding lyrics—at Ram Dass’s slight expense—she wanted to insert into “Chapel of Love.” She also fronted the band doing the Beatles’ “Things We Said Today,” which sounded great in the open summer twilight as bride, groom, and guru danced barefoot, holding hands.

At some point Peter asked Ram Dass to speak with Carly. Kindly and heavily bearded, the guru had a calmness about him that Peter thought might appeal to Carly, who was living a somewhat frazzled existence then. “Be here now” was Ram Dass’s mantra, describing a way of living that emphasized presence of mind and an absence of anxiety over events that were beyond an individual’s control.

Carly liked him, and told him her troubles. She said that her image of herself wasn’t clear, and that this bothered her. She spoke about her marriage, and the competitiveness between her and her husband. She told him that she had this feeling that something was not all right. Carly recalls, “He was immensely alert and a great listener. He made me believe that I was all right, but not full of illusions about myself. I said I thought that our feelings of competitiveness were a good thing. He said that wasn’t an illusion. He agreed with me that I was earthbound, and unready to assume my mystical duties. The main thing he told me that was I was all right. I need confirmation of this every couple of weeks.”

Later that summer James was home from the road, and he and Carly went to the old Jungle Beach in Chilmark with some house guests and friends. There was a strong undertow that day, so no one was in the water. James was quiet, mostly listening to the conversation on the hot and sunny day. When some clouds moved in, the sea picked up and James went in for a swim. He swam straight out to sea with long, easy strokes. Soon he was a quarter mile out, and barely visible. By the time a series of combers began to crash on the beach, he had
disappeared. Carly grew alarmed. She walked down to the water. Her husband wasn’t in sight. She came back to their blanket with tears on her cheeks. Why did he need to be so reckless and frighten her? Someone was suggesting they try to get help when James could be seen walking back to them from way to the east, where the inexorable current had carried him.

J
ames Taylor hated November in the Northeast. Its shorter days and colder nights reminded him of his traumatic prep school days, which is why for the past few years he and his wife and children decamped to sunny southern California, where he could make his records without the rigors of what later came to be called seasonal affective disorder.

But in 1977, Carly Simon didn’t want to go to California, and James wasn’t about to go without her, so during the winter of 1977/ 78, the family stayed home. The plan was that she would record her next album in New York, with a new producer. Sometime in the spring, they would return to California, where James would cut the follow-up to the bestselling
JT
album.

So in November 1977, Carly began work on
Boys in the Trees
with producer Arif Mardin. He was one of Atlantic Records’ Turkish mafia, close to the label’s cofounders Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun. He was a consummate New York record man—suave, savvy, sophisticated—and he had worked with major stars from Aretha
Franklin to Diana Ross to Bette Midler. His specialty was lush orchestration that could propel a diva into a sonic cloudscape beyond her usual comfort zone. Elektra executives thought he would supply Carly with a more grown-up sound with which to cross over from the rock market to a broader commercial appeal.

Arif Mardin didn’t hear a hit single in the new material Carly brought to the early recording sessions at legendary Atlantic Studios (Ray Charles et al.) on Broadway and A&R Studios in Midtown. But in December, providence intervened, under pressure, in the form of Carly’s last producer, who sent her a tape of a new song by the Doobie Brothers’ singer Mike McDonald. Carly: “Teddy Templeman sent me a tape, a ‘la-la-la-la-la’ tape to what is now the melody of ‘You Belong to Me,’ and I had to fill in the spaces—within minutes!—because the Doobies were in the studio and seriously about to record the song. It didn’t have
any
words, except the very, very important ones: ‘You belong to me.’

“So the rest of the lyrics, on my version, was a direct-to-the-gut response to his ‘you belong to me’ start. I put myself into the position of a woman whose man is being attractively waylaid by another woman. I wrote the lyrics in the kind of short time that panic elicits—panic that someone else will steal your job. Teddy gave [the lyrics] to the group and they recorded it on the spot. Several months later, I recorded it too, and it became my first [self-written] hit in a while.

“I always found it odd that during all those months Michael [McDonald] and I never spoke. It was all done through middlemen: the producers. Although when my version went Top Ten, Mike McDonald very graciously sent me a plant.

“I know for sure that my audience used to think the song was about James—but no, not really. In fact, later on, I was shopping at Tiffany’s on Fifth Avenue. A man came up to me and said, ‘James Taylor—that
rat
. How could he have
done
that to you?’ This was overheard by a woman, who joined in and said, ‘Yes, Carly, you
have
to fight back. Get him
out
of your life, be
strong
.’

“This was always a problem for me in those days. I so often had to reassure those that really care about me that ‘It’s only a song’ and that I operate under poetic license all the time. Then of course there are those times when I take
no
poetic license—songs like ‘Anticipation’ and ‘Like a River’—and there are those that are very reporter-esque and utterly true to fact. I found this to be the most satisfying thing about being a songwriter, or any kind of fiction writer: that you can so easily disguise or mislead. I could be lying to you now… but I’m not.”

Carly was recording in New York City for the first time since she’d made her first album at Electric Lady in 1970. Carly: “I now met many of the musicians I would play with for years to come: [drummer] Steve Gadd, [bassist] Richard Tee, [keyboardist] Hugh McCracken, [multi-instrumentalist] Mike Mainieri, [arranger/ guitarist] David Spinozza—to mention some of those spectacular New York chaps.” The rhythm section of Steve Gadd and Richard Tee was the nucleus of the performing band Stuff, which recorded for Warner Bros. and played clubs while mostly doing daily service in Manhattan’s busy recording studios. Various permutations of these above players would now record and perform with Carly over the next decade, identifiably her “middle period,” from 1978 to 1988.

But in many instances the guiding spirit of
Boys in the Trees
was James Taylor. Sticking close to his wife, and spending some serious time with her in the studio, he produced, arranged, sang, and played on most of the album’s tracks. He’s first heard on “You Belong to Me,” as a vocalist, riding the rail between soft rock and soft jazz, a locus now owned mostly by Fleetwood Mac. James plays expert-level guitar on the title song, a haunting (and very memory-driven) acoustic ballad/ art song about a risible girl’s adolescence. The album’s fulcrum is a duet between Carly and James on “Devoted to You,” the old Everly Brothers standard from 1958. James did the vocal arrangement and plays guitar on Carly’s cod calypso “De Bat,” based on a true-life incident on Martha’s Vineyard.

“Tranquillo (Melt My Heart)” was Arif Mardin’s attempt to land Carly on the dance floor in the au courant disco world of
Saturday Night Fever
, John Travolta, and the Bee Gees. The lyrics are mostly about their son, baby Ben Taylor, who was still crying all the time (and still no one quite knew why). The lyric wondered, “Can’t stay up and won’t go to sleep / What does it mean?”

“He was just a very noisy, crying baby,” Carly remembered, “and I started calling him ‘Tranquillo’ as a nickname, thinking that I would magically imbue him with that characteristic. And he cried all the harder, and of course I was… Well, I always picked him up whenever he cried. He would quiet down and I would kind of sing this song to him.”

James Taylor wrote (but doesn’t play on) “One Man Woman,” on which Carly is expertly backed by the Stuff players, augmented by Michael Brecker, whose soulful saxophone solos were deployed by both Carly and James on their records. Other tracks on
Boys/ Trees
include the operatic “Haunting,” with both of Carly’s sisters on backing vocals; “In a Small Moment,” a guilty moment closely observed; “Back Down to Earth” (with John Hall on guitar); and “For Old Time’s Sake,” sentimentally cowritten with Jake Brackman—for old time’s sake.

Elektra really liked the album. “You Belong to Me” was obviously a hit single—everyone loved David Sanborn’s alto sax solo—and the duet with James felt like money in the bank. For the album sleeve, photographer Deborah Turbeville shot Carly in gauzy soft focus, all lingerie and stockings in a ballet studio. Once again Carly would be portrayed as the barely dressed temptress of the seventies, the leggy fallen woman. A nipple reportedly had to be airbrushed into detumescense before Elektra would print the album jacket.