Boys in the Trees: A Memoir (29 page)

I would be slow to understand the trap of showbiz, but by the time I had done a few more shows at the Troubadour, opening for Harry Chapin, Don McLean, and Kris Kristofferson, and then opening up at Carnegie Hall, Symphony Hall in Philadelphia, and in Boston Symphony Hall for Cat Stevens, I was caught under the udder of the cow. The smell of the crowd and the roar of the greasepaint. It was dangerous, but so very heady. As long as I was the opening act and the audience wasn’t really expecting
some
thing from me, I could deliver a small set. I got comfortable speaking between songs. I didn’t stutter very much. I can’t explain it, though I think it had to do with having a good number of word substitutions. If I had had scripted introductions to songs, I wouldn’t have had the easy mobility of being able to pause or to change a word. My stammer and I weren’t paying quite the same kind of attention to one another. Maybe doing something that I admired myself for brought me out of it? With the exception of one review I remember that compared me to a whinnying horse, I was getting the kinds of reviews that said, “Watch out for Carly Simon, she’s heading for the stars.”

While in New York for our Carnegie Hall concert, I made a date with Cat Stevens. I invited him to my apartment for dinner. We had gotten to know each other while in L.A., but there had been other new friends there. Cat Stevens is a very cerebral and quiet-spoken man who dances out of that serene persona in his music when he goes for emphasis, for dynamics, for the big bang in a song. It has something to do with beauty by mistake. That chord that your fingers go to by accident and
that
takes the emotion around another corner from the one you expected, like the rock walls on the Vineyard. I learned it from listening to him while he was onstage, and from the hours and hours I listened to
Tea for the Tillerman
—till I was on my third vinyl copy. The night he was to come to dinner, I made chicken with cherries in a cream sauce and got a particularly nice wine. He was late. I got agitated. I closed my eyes in a deliberate attempt to relax and loosen up. I got lost in the boundaries of my expectation. Or was it fear? The darkness seemed infinite, which scared me. Would I ever be able to control my emotions? I let a sliver of light through my eyelids and by the time I did, the fear had changed. It became practical. I looked at my watch. He was still late. I took my guitar in my cold hands and determinedly wrote “Anticipation,” sitting on my bed. It was all there. There was no time to wait for the song to emerge; he might arrive any second. The urgency brought it out. I sang it with a growl, the way he would: “I’m no prophet … I don’t know nature’s ways.” I tore into those words with a gravelly passion, the way Steve (his name: Steven Demetre Georgiou) might break out of the placid phrase just before the arrival of the other side of the coin. Gravel, sparks, guitar on the offbeat! Dynamic lunge.

The song was all but finished by the time Steve arrived, but I didn’t go anywhere near playing it for him. Curiously, I had much more energy before he arrived at my apartment. Being with him, I was willowy and slow. I dedicated my album to him, and it had that song as its leadoff, and “Anticipation” was always the title from that night on. He and I became lovers for a very fine, but short, while. It felt astral. It feels too private to speak of our two bodies together, and too tender and spiritual to actually refer to it as sex. I loved to watch him as he slept, as he looked at the sky, or a piece of art. He rarely asked questions. When he did, it was in a wonderfully scratchy bass voice that sounded like an old man of the woods telling a tale of those who had passed by his tree hundreds of years ago. He gave me whispers and drawings of Blake poems. He told me about his childhood, his mixed Greek and Swedish parents, and we made a connection that has lasted.

Paul Samwell-Smith was my producer that summer of 1971. He had come to see the show at Carnegie Hall because he was Cat Stevens’s producer. Jac Holzman had wanted me to work with Paul and asked him to come and pay some special attention to the opening act. When I performed onstage, he liked me right away. He was determined to woo me. I couldn’t have been more wooed. I wanted to
be
Cat Stevens if it was at all possible. We talked after the show, and it was right there with Jac and my new manager, Arlyne Rothberg, in the dressing room, that we made plans to start one month from then. Arlyne would come along, and I would take my band to England! My first recording experience in London. There would be a lot of Willie memories.

I began writing in earnest in preparation for recording in England. One day, standing in line to get my passport, I saw a headline in the newspaper a man was holding in front of me. It was about Hank Williams Jr.; the headline said:
LEGEND IN HIS OWN TIME.
I cast James Taylor for some reason as that particular “legend” and started a song about him, imagining that I knew him, and I indeed was advancing him into a “lonely boy when he goes home alone.” I was going to rescue him.

I wrote another song called “Three Days,” about Kris Kristofferson, whom I felt in goofy, fruitless awe of. I was playing as his opening act sometime that May at the Bitter End in New York, and then again at the Troubadour in L.A. We had a strong physical connection, but I couldn’t be myself when I was with him. He made witty, flattering comments when he introduced me onstage: “Following Carly is like going from the sublime to the ridiculous.” Mostly I was speechless. I looked and I watched and I tried to please him. I felt a little interchangeable with the many other girls he could have so easily charmed.

Those were the days when he was drinking so much that he was falling asleep onstage. Kris and I were not to be a couple, but it certainly fit the bill for a slam-dunk deranged month or so. Arlyne thought we made a great couple (we looked good together), and those were days, just as now, when those things were actually manufactured, or spurred on, by managers, agents, and press agents. There were no setup photographs or falsified dates, just an air of two pretty electric personalities who both found music quite close to laughter and sex, and our audience could be gripped in a possible plot—hot information worthy of passing on.

Mercifully, I found him fascinating, even though I didn’t know how to find out who he really was. I did love singing “Help Me Make It Through the Night” with Kris, and I loved sitting on the bed in one of the many poorly lit hotel rooms he stayed in, learning and playing “I’ve Got to Have You” and helping to breathe new chords into the bridge, as if he could actually use them: “Wakin’ in the morning to the tenderness of holding you asleep in my arms, dreamin’ while your hair was blowin’ softer than a whisper on my cheek…” How did he think of that utterly fragile combination of words? Kris, the man of soft lips and marble eyes sunken in snow? The simplest textures, the songs of a night bird? Every time I sing it, I think of him and what a wonder he is. I think he is magic, the bad boy who only shaves when he doesn’t have to go to church.

I was already in London, living in a rented house across the street from Primrose Hill, that “soft summer garden,” and recording with Paul, when I had to come back to do one concert in D.C. with Kris. It was one of the ones that acted as a deterrent to my doing other concerts. We were co-billed, and during “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be,” I had palpitations that launched me into one of the worst onstage experiences I’d had. Thank God it was the last song in my set. After Kris’s last song, we had to grab our suitcases and guitars and get to the airport for the last shuttle to New York. We ran down the ramp inside the airport and managed to get in just before the door closed. We sat down (Kris in the window seat, I on the aisle), and my pulse rate was about a hundred and wouldn’t come down. The plane took off and I bent down and put my head in my lap. I was shaking as Kris read
The New York Times
and wrapped it around his head, like a tent. He didn’t want anything to do with the possibly sick or frightened woman he had on his hands. He told me to call the stewardess. I spent the rest of our flight breathing into a brown paper bag. But both of us knew other things were coming. He was going in another direction where paper bags wouldn’t be needed. And I was headed to where I didn’t know, but I knew it wasn’t with Kris. I didn’t need someone who made me feel the onslaught of the Beast. I returned to London after that night. Funny how you remember things pared down to a single image: Kris with the newspaper wrapped around his head.

The rest of the recording went well, and the result is one of the more memorable records I have ever made:
Anticipation
. Paul was the ultimate producer for me in so many ways I needed. He was patient, and heard what he wanted and described it in ways that were just poetic enough but not overly flowery. He knew how to get a performance out of me, and was funny in a new way. I loved that way. I played on every track except “Summer’s Coming Around Again.” Oddly, the song that was hardest to cut was the title track (“Anticipation”). You’d have thought because I had sung it live so many times before going into the studio that it would have just rolled off the reel. Not to be. We were starstruck by the song already. Intimidated. We didn’t know if we could make it as good a record as it already was a song. We could push it too far or leave crucial things out. Overproduction is a common enough worry. Paul would see how
little
production we could get away with. “Less is more” was his slogan. Andy Newmark, our drummer, was lying under the piano or beneath his drum kit for most of the day, and then was asked to play to my already clumsy (time-wise) guitar part, which is how the recording of most of the songs went. I almost always put down a guitar and vocal or piano and vocal first, and every other instrument was overdubbed by Paul and Jimmy and Andy, sometimes all together, sometimes one at a time. It made for an attractively empty, choppy, emotional album. My time was free flowing, erratic. I would linger long and not pick the time back up. One measure dipped or drooped into the next, hardly ever the same length as the next one or the one before. My band could only guess where the next downbeat might land. It wasn’t going to be a dance record, but that was just fine with me. It is unlike anything I’ve recorded before or since.

Paul is an original, the likes of whom I have never known. I got to know him very well during the summer of ’71, and we talked deeply, revealing our true selves. We talked about sadness, and I got furious in front of him and at him, and I walked out of the studio; we fought silently, viciously, then he very politely brought me back and fed me sausage sandwiches and very sweet tea. He was such a lovely, odd bird in the yard. He was elegant and had a marvelous vocabulary for subjects that were really quite obscene. He had worked with the Yardbirds as bass player for so many years and had plenty of experience with prima donnas. I was not a prima donna. Anyway, I sincerely didn’t think so. I know that my demands can be ridiculous at times. They rarely come out of anything but fear. I can trace all my cancellations, all my refusals to perform, to when there is a plane trip involved. Of course it’s all about being afraid. Paul spent lots of time patting me. He made me think it wasn’t mad to feel the ceiling might fall in during the next take of “I’ve Got to Have You.” He also gave every musician space and love. He appreciated every note and hesitation before a note.

Paul and I spent lots of time taking a day off here and there, driving all over the southern part of England in his Mini Cooper. There was a feast of delightful-enough B and Bs where we discussed the album, listening to it as we drove. We drank champagne, ate squab, made love in miniature bathtubs, and discussed matters that should have been private but weren’t, because we’d had the champagne first. Then we’d drive back to London and its summer gardens, Primrose Hill and Morgan Studios. We conversationally assembled the new ideas conceived during our voyage into the hinterlands about backup vocals, string arrangements, and mixes. I didn’t have any clear sense of having a singular emotional attachment; though I felt closest to Paul (Samwell-Smith), I have never been so influenced by any group of musicians as I was with Jimmy, Andy, and Paul Glanz, and people hanging out in the studio such as drummer Rick Marotta and Cat Stevens, who sang along with the rest of his band members on “Julie Through the Glass” and “Share the End.” I was more Paul’s girl than anyone else’s, but the fluidity of relationships (at least mine) was such that you only changed a coat’s lining, not the wool, cotton, or fur that made up the outer layer and thus the appearance. I was the girl of the band, and there weren’t many in the mix who I didn’t feel drawn to. I could see it all happening in the pages of rock ’n’ roll literature and magazines. The seventies were dazzling and uninhibited, but in my dreams was that Golden Books image I would chase forever—the apple-pie-cooling-on-the-windowsill, married little wife with her devoted husband and perfect children swinging from the swing that was tied to the old oak in the backyard. Or was it a fruit tree? That tree would nourish love, keeping it safe from harm. It might be able to undo the haunting images of my parents’ so-called marriage. I was counting on it.

What a perfect time to meet Warren Beatty.