Boys in the Trees: A Memoir (23 page)

In my despondency over Willie, I began decorating my bedroom with cheap Mexican furniture I’d picked up on Astor Place. My friend Annie Felshin had a store called the Mexican Art Annex. I spent hours there and always came home with a flowerpot or a scary Mexican spirit statue. The room, with its double bed left behind by Joey’s former roommate, was definitely the “second” bedroom, and overlooked a courtyard where flocks of dirty pigeons gathered to defecate on the window ledge. As part of her sales pitch, Joey had said, “Look at all those glorious birds outside, Carly! They love you so much they want to come inside!” At least Joey could laugh at herself. The hall bathroom became my sanctuary, a place where I first heard a lot of great songs on my little mono radio, like Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe” and Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale.” I would light a candle, sink into the tub, and sing along to the Stones’ “Satisfaction,” Herman’s Hermits’ “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter,” and Peter and Gordon’s “World Without Love.” That music, and other songs from that era, began influencing and even honing my own writing and chord changes. I started playing around not just with changes of tempo midsong, but with ideas.

As for the fate of the Simon Sisters, Lucy and I might have stayed together, but our lives were rivers parting, diverging, and going in tender new directions. Soon she would be moving in with her boyfriend David Levine; they would be married by the spring. Having Lucy gone from our little three-sister housing project obviously changed the dynamic. I became more independent, though; in that vacuum I also formed another trusted and close alliance with the comic David Steinberg and the photographer Mary Ellen Mark, whom I’d met in London through Willie. David was a member of Second City, which was having a run in New York. They had moved into Lucy’s just-vacated apartment, and they became part of a dazzling crowd of comedians, actors, and opera singers who mingled with my college friends Annie and Ellen in that exciting way that can happen when everyone is under twenty-five. Each night there was a featured guest and someone else would cook something new. The “hang,” as we now called it, was superior.

David, Mary Ellen, Annie, Ellen, and I graced the town, often with a few more in tow. David was always fixing me up with his friends. He also tried to get Willie to come back to me with a not-too-urgent telephone call, but Willie didn’t want to be in touch. He was already feeling guilty, having set the “cad phenomenon” in motion, i.e., not wanting to think about the person you’ve hurt and therefore completely dismissing him or her. I think I was a bit in admiration/love with David. He was so there for me and loved to make me laugh. When Second City opened in the Village, I became a groupie of the every-night variety. Many nights David and I stayed up late in one or the other of our living rooms and played the guitar, making up hilarious free-association songs: “I love you and the cows go moo.” Decades later, he would go on to direct episodes of
Seinfeld
and many other TV shows. Mary Ellen would indulge me, listening to my woes on the subject of Willie long into the night. She was becoming one of the world’s greatest photographers.

*   *   *

Before Lucy joined me in England, she and I had landed our first music manager and producer since Harold Leventhal and Charlie Close. John Court was partners with Albert Grossman, and they had started Grosscourt, a management company whose client roster included Bob Dylan; Peter, Paul and Mary; and others. John had been telling me the same thing Willie had: that if Lucy was going the marriage route, I should consider going out on my own as a performer, without my sidekick, the older, more spectacular Simon sister. John also believed I could benefit from other, rougher-edged, more Greenwich Village-y influences, that I was a posh uptown girl who, if she had any sense about her, would be acting more “downtown” like Nico.

A day before my twenty-first birthday, in 1966, I was in the living room of our apartment when the telephone rang. It was Bob Dylan on the other line. I was completely frozen. Dylan, after all, was a prophet, a modern-day link to Woody Guthrie, and though I didn’t like all his songs, I was already in awe. John Court had choreographed the call, and a minute later, I’d accepted Dylan’s invitation to pay a visit to Grosscourt’s offices.

When I got there, John introduced me all around. “Go talk to Bob,” he said. “He’ll tell you some things.”

If talking to Bob Dylan on the phone had paralyzed me, being in the same room made me, if possible, even more awestruck. There was, after all, no one else like him. But I did as John said. Bob and I ended up sequestered in a mostly airless office, and Bob began talking. Thank God, he was stoned, which meant I didn’t have to worry too much about making a good impression or our conversation going down in history. Bob had just come back from touring in Australia and the U.S., and though he wouldn’t record
Nashville Skyline
until 1969, he had just recorded his new album,
Blonde on Blonde
, in Nashville. Bob went on and on about the glory, the sheer magic, that was Nashville, and told me that if and when I recorded an album, Nashville was the place to be. He also told me about the music producer he was working with, and the sounds he was able to produce by pressing new buttons that effected echo, reverb, and EQ. Then he recommended a song that he said would be perfect for me: “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down,” adapted by Eric von Schmidt from an older blues song, adding that he, Bob, would be willing to reshape or rewrite some of the lyrics to accommodate my voice and style.

As we talked, I couldn’t help but think of Willie, who had claimed numerous times to have served as Bob’s agent in London, but when I asked Dylan if he knew Willie Donaldson, he looked at me, faintly dazed, as if to say
Maybe you’re thinking of someone else?
Briefly losing focus, Bob recovered, and for the next ten minutes went into another serenade about Nashville so incantatory it should have been reprinted on highway signs as you entered the city limits. Bob’s energy was soaring, until finally, his eyes closed, his arms spread out evangelistically, he growled, emphatically, “Believe me! Believe me!” That’s one of my hallmark memories.

Later, John told me that working with Bob was the chance of a lifetime, and that recording “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down” would change my life. From now on, he said, I would be known as “Carly and the Deacon,” the Deacon in this case being Richie Havens, who I would do something with. What, I did not know. In the meantime, though, Robbie Robertson would come over to my apartment and rehearse the arrangement so the song would better fit my voice.

There was a lot of
holy shit!
–ness. Still, my very first thought was that I had to keep what was happening to me from Lucy. I didn’t think it was even possible to succeed without her. I slowly started to tell a few close friends, and even my brother, Peter, who was crazy about Dylan, but the reality of it all only became clear when Robbie Robertson showed up at my apartment a week later, only days after Dylan had his now-famous motorcycle accident in Woodstock, New York.

As Robbie and I began discussing the song, it became clear that “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down” was nothing at all like the folk songs I was accustomed to singing with Lucy. Nor was it like the songs I’d been writing recently on my own, songs that felt, to my own crooked ear, like standards, jazzy, artsy. Listening to the popular vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross, I’d become dependent on hearing jazz intervals. I imitated Annie Ross, and tried to scat-sing the way Jon Hendricks did. I was attracted to so many different styles of music, it was difficult to know which one to follow.

There was another problem. Even though Lucy and I had both taken our turns soloing during our performances, I wasn’t used to being a solo performer. My whole life I’d always had Lucy to lean on. Being told that it was now me alone set my nerves on edge, and I had no choice but to place all my faith in Robbie Robertson. Robbie was fawnlike in his looks, as well as innately modest, and gave off a schoolboy vibe with unsettled hormones. When our first rehearsal ended, Robbie invited me out for a drink, and we eventually ended up in the Chelsea Hotel, the plan being to meet the Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones for a drink, even though Brian never appeared. The idea of having a drink with Robbie and Brian made me feel I was inhabiting my own version of Rock ’n’ Roll Heaven. It was like being allowed a sneak glimpse into the permanent collection of a great museum. There have been few times in my life where I’ve felt genuinely agog, and that was one of those nights. Brian may not have made an appearance, but that night his seat was filled by Mike Bloomfield, Richard Manuel, and other acquaintances who stopped by our table to make heavy, but easy, conversation about electric music. When the evening ended, Robbie and I eventually ended up in Robbie’s room, where I spent the night at a tempting distance. Robbie and I were shy with each other. Too shy to get into a rock ’n’ roll groove.

*   *   *

A few days before the recording, I took the subway to the Columbia building, where I met the Producer, to find the most flattering key for my voice. Right then and there I picked up something unsavory in his eyes. First, he asked me to sing a verse a cappella, and overpraised me too soon.
Fantastic, darlin’, you got some voice!
After I’d sung four or five lines of lyrics, he offered me a drink. When I declined, the Producer removed a whiskey bottle from the well-stocked bar behind his desk and helped himself to a tumbler. His puffy pink eyes narrowed to a squint. “Honey, if you’re nice to me”—he pronounced it
nasss
, in his thick, purring, polluted voice—“I’ll make you a
nasss
record.”

It couldn’t have been the first time he’d used that line on a woman. Willie, I knew, would be in heaven over this, and would have come up with the perfect riposte. But I wasn’t Willie. As the Producer came closer to me, I stared him down from my seat on the couch. Did he think I was some Okie from Muskogee? Did he think I was an “easy chick”? As he got closer, I noticed the mottled drink-splotches on his nose, at which point I stood, shook my head, and came up with what I thought was the perfect retort: “I’m sorry, I’m greener than that!”

What I meant to say was “I’m sorry, but I’m not that hungry,” or “I’m sorry, but I’m not that green,” but put on the spot, it came out wrong. I straightened my dress and assumed my finest “audacious” look, as if to say, If you’re the kind of person who takes inordinate pleasure from insulting women, well, distance yourself, asshole. I would have stormed out of the room right then and there, but I couldn’t. Unfortunately, I’d taken off my pink Capezio flats, and one was missing. I had to retrieve it from under the couch, kneeling before the Producer like a supplicant, while doing my best to maintain my dignity and my blazing eye contact. He looked at me as though he had some deep inner knowledge that he would screw me. It didn’t matter how or when, but he’d get it done. I didn’t look back at him as I sauntered out of the room.

The next day was even more devastating, one of the first of what would turn out to be many difficult experiences with men in the music business. It was the day I was scheduled to record my vocal. The band wandered in slowly until they were all assembled. Mike Bloomfield, Levon Helm, Al Kooper, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Paul Griffin. Things couldn’t get any loftier than that. Some of these guys had backed up Bob Dylan, after all, on his 1966 world tour, and a year later, as the Band, the core group would create
Music from Big Pink
, but to me, they were already brilliant stars, all of them. I knew Al Kooper the best, but I can’t remember why—maybe because he and I had done something together at a Boston University fund-raiser when my brother was a student there. Al had been one of the many brainy, schooled musicians from Berklee College of Music in Boston, as opposed to me, who had left school without even knowing how to read music. Those men in that studio on West Fifty-seventh Street were men whose reputations were like a whiff of whiskey in a cool downtown bar. You’d see pictures of them in magazines like
Rolling Stone
, sometimes together, sometimes individually, or alongside Andy Warhol or Twiggy. They were the people at the coveted corner booths at the Lamplight and the Bitter End. You heard gossip about who Levon Helm was dating and why they were all collecting in Woodstock, New York. Names were dropped, other facts blithely exaggerated. I wondered if I was ready to fall in love again, and could it be Robbie Robertson? I shut the hell up.

As the band laid down its track, I ventured into the control room, standing beside Albert Grossman, who asked me to sing along with the track, even though the melody was pitched too low for my voice. That could be a breaker. It was the difference between a surround that caught the song, and my voice, in its very best light, and a surround that would make me clumsily try to fit into an unloving slot. Caught up in his own grandeur, Albert turned full on me and asked, “Carly—when is it going to be our time? When are you and I going to get it on?”

Albert’s long gray hair was damp and sweaty, bound by a rubber band or dirty piece of twine. I forgot for a moment who I was. What is all this? Who am I? Why are they playing this in the wrong key? What was I doing here? My God, instead of trying to come on to me, why wasn’t Albert checking to see how Bob Dylan was doing in the hospital following his motorcycle wreck? “You know, you’re a nine out of a perfect ten,” Albert added. “You miss the mark because you have too much money.” I was confused; I had no idea what he meant. He must have assumed I was rich, which I wasn’t, though I wasn’t altogether sure, either. I’d grown up in a household where it was considered gauche to talk about money, where I never learned the difference between a hundred dollars and a thousand. My mother never gave me any money, and I was living perfectly well on fifty dollars cash a week. Even if there was more money squirreled away somewhere, did it matter, and who was he to say? It was obvious that Albert equated a bank account with a lack of soul and feeling.