More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon (18 page)

Then Carly told Holzman that she hated to fly, and she wanted to record there in New York.

The next item was finding a producer, and Holzman surprised Carly by suggesting she meet with Eddie Kramer, one of the top recording engineers in the business. Originally from South Africa, Kramer had distinguished himself in London working with Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, and Joe Cocker. He was currently designing a million-dollar recording studio for Hendrix in the Village, which Holzman suggested as a possible studio for Carly when the facility opened in June 1970. Kramer, Holzman told her, might be a good fit for her as well. Later, Carly said she was relieved the meeting had gone so well; she wanted to feel she had a home at Elektra, a company named after a princess who killed her father.

Carly auditioned for Eddie Kramer at Jake Brackman’s apartment in Murray Hill. Kramer had heard a cassette of her demo tape and hadn’t been impressed, but had been persuaded that she was talented and that the label would back her up. It was worth a shot. Kramer, a long-haired London rocker, was dressed in a leather jacket, a dirty silk scarf, shades, bell-bottom trousers, and scuffed Chelsea boots. Carly played him some things she was working on, and again he was less than awed—until she played “That’s the Way I Always Heard It Should Be.”

By then, this collaboration between Carly and Jake had evolved into a song of sadness and low expectations, but the lyrics were acutely personal. Carly acted out the song’s differing voices. The singer introduces her dysfunctional family, and then despairs of hateful suburbia and its conflicts. She’s under pressure to be married, but she’s a rebel,
sneering at societal norms and sexual imprisonment. The passion in her wants to triumph, but by the third verse, she’s a caged bird living for her husband. The song ends in resignation and a woman’s stifled sense of self, as Carly sings, “We’ll marry,” in a regressed, little-girl voice that has forgotten the brazen alto of the verses and chorus.

Kramer sensed that this song—an ironic take on “women’s lib”—would resonate with young women, and he told her he wanted to work with her. She also played him another new song, called “Dan, My Fling.” Again, this was Jake writing the musical of Carly’s life in the form of a lusty ballad about breaking up with Dan Armstrong, and it was clear it could be a big production, possibly with orchestration, the whole deal. Kramer told Holzman he wanted to do the record, and quickly made a deal with Jerry Brandt to produce Carly, under the supervision of Jac Holzman, at Electric Lady Studios. This was the team that would make the
Carly Simon
album later in the year.

C
arly now began a somewhat frantic search for songs. She kept working with Jake Brackman on ideas. She kept trying to get Jac Holzman to accept her as a writer. “He liked my voice,” she said, “but he didn’t want to give me the gift of my own songs. But I kept inserting my own songs into the various demos until he finally said, ‘ Wow—who wrote that one?’”

Carly was listening carefully, nearly every day, to
Sweet Baby James,
James Taylor’s second album, a heartbroken, visionary sequence of new songs released by Warner Bros. Records in February 1970. Her brother, Peter, played it for her first, and she wasn’t sure what she felt. Then she became obsessed with Taylor’s addictive lullabies and grieving blues. Some of these new songs were indeed stunning. “Sweet Baby James” was a frosty winter lullaby, very melancholy, with a crying steel guitar. “Fire and Rain” was about mental turmoil, and death and loss by suicide. James’s voice had an endearing Carolina twang that especially touched the hearts of his female listeners, and his guitar playing as heard on
Sweet Baby James
was extremely masterful for someone who was twenty-one when he made this record. Carole King, a hero of Carly’s, played piano on “Steamroller Blues,” which at least showed that this melancholy prophet had a sense of humor. But even a song called “Sunny Skies” was disconsolate, because the singer was so alone in his remote, existential world.

Sweet Baby James
was eventually summed up by the song “Country Road,” which describes taking to the highway and disappearing into the land. All over America young people, exhausted by opposition to war and the psychic turmoil of the sixties, were leaving the cities for communal living in the woods. It was the same with young musicians. The music of the Band and Neil Young constituted this movement’s anthems up to that time. Now hippie communes from Maine to California took up James Taylor like magic mushrooms. The album got to number three on
Billboard
magazine’s chart and sold around three million copies. The “Fire and Rain” single also rose to number three, an almost apocalyptic song that managed to sound soulful and important on AM car radios and the FM dial.

(There was also a critical backlash against Taylor, whom some regarded as a prophet of disengagement, a singer whose self-absorbed navel-gazing distracted his listeners from the epochal cultural energies of the previous few years. A Boston deejay dubbed him “the White Zombie” for his stoned or wooden demeanor in concert. His supporters countered that Taylor’s deeply felt songs concerning his mental state and drug use constituted a sort of unprecedented heroic candor. Both sides were probably right.)

Carly was hooked on Taylor’s album. “It actually took me three or four listenings, to get into
Sweet Baby James,
” she remembered, “and then there was
nothing
else—almost no other record—I could play. Everything else around that theme kind of… paled.”

Around this time Carly took to the highway, heading north to Vermont, where Peter Simon and some friends had bought an old
farm on two hundred acres of rolling pasture, with beaver ponds and birch trees. It was down the road from Total Loss Farm, a hardscrabble artistic commune led by the young radical editor Ray Mungo. Peter and his friends, including Kim Rosen, established Tree Frog Farm as a more upscale, Woodstockian commune that emphasized country pursuits, serious gardening (mostly in the nude), and working with animals. Music was big. James Taylor vied with Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Stills and Nash, and the Rolling Stones as the most played artist. Carly came up to the farm a few times to get away from New York and discover whether country life could do anything for her. Eventually the lure of her career always drew her back to Manhattan after a few days of fresh air.

In this era, over the course of several months in 1970, Carly was part of an intense sexual roundelay that left her spiritually exhausted and emotionally spent. This involved the production of a movie Jake Brackman had written,
The King of Marvin Gardens,
the story of two struggling brothers in a gritty, slumlike Atlantic City. The filming brought a crew of glamorous Hollywood types to New York, including actors Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern. The film’s director was Bob Rafelson, who had worked on
The Monkees
TV show and was involved with several moderate-budget collaborations with Nicholson. Now the parties at Jake Brackman’s place grew more interesting, and Carly was seen with Jack Nicholson, the hottest star in Hollywood after his star turn in
Easy Rider
the year before. But Nicholson had a famous girlfriend back in L. A. He gave Carly’s number to his friend Warren Beatty when the actor arrived in town. Carly grew “close” to Beatty, as she put it, for a brief period of time. When Warren returned to the West Coast, she began seeing Bob Rafelson, who needed consolation because he wasn’t getting much from the actors, who felt the script was too bleak. The filming complete, Carly went
to Jamaica on holiday with Rafelson’s brother, Don. They stayed at an almost deserted resort on the island’s north coast. Carly wrote to her brother that it rained almost every day.

As this cycle of relationships petered out, Carly began working on her album. Her emotions were raw and bruised, as revealed in her letters from this period. She felt she had been passed around this group of powerful and attractive men for a couple of months (“treated like a piece of meat,” as she later described it); some of this experience transcended contemporary mores and accepted sexual behavior, and evoked in Carly a sense of embarrassment. The artistic ideas generated by the feelings were too recent to be transformed into songs for her current album, but they would have an explosive impact for her music a couple of years in the future.

Summer 1970. Joni Mitchell is writing
Blue
. Carole King is writing
Tapestry
. Carly begins recording in the new underground Electric Lady Studios at 52 West Eighth Street. Jimi Hendrix, who lives nearby, has sunk his fortune into this first studio owned by a rock star, and likes to look in when he’s not on the road. The vibe of the place is brilliant, and it is booked solid for months. (The space used to be the club Generation, where Jimi liked to jam until late. The reception area now displays a mural of a pixie girl at the controls of a spaceship.) Eddie Kramer basically built the facility from the soundboards up, and has complete run of the three recording rooms. In fact, he is also producing a band called Zephyr, in studio B, while working with Carly in studio A.

Carly brought in her songs. These were “That’s the Way I Always Heard It Should Be,” “Dan, My Fling,” and some other material she later described as only half-prepared.

“Not all the songs had arrangements,” she said later. “A lot of them were head arrangements—just get in the studio with a bunch of people and figure it out. Eddie Kramer knew all the musicians. I made some input, but I didn’t know too much about what I was doing.”
She brought in
Sweet Baby James
and told Kramer she wanted the drums to sound like James’s drummer, Russ Kunkel, on this or that track. She said she wanted the piano to sound like the guy on Judy Collins’s record. Sometimes it felt as if she weren’t being listened to. “I felt intimidated every time I opened my mouth,” she said in 1972. “The producer also seemed intimidated by my mouth opening, so there wasn’t a very good feeling in the studio.”

At least Kramer had enlisted some cool musicians to play on the record. Paul Griffin had played piano on all the great Bob Dylan albums and would also work on the orchestrations for Carly’s record. Jeff Baxter was a hot session guitarist. Ditto Tony Levin and Jerry Jemmot on bass. Carly brought in David Bromberg and Jimmy Ryan to play guitar on various tracks.

Jac Holzman went to some of the early sessions, and things seemed to be getting on. Then he went to Europe, and Kramer had a freer hand with things such as drum sounds and orchestrations. Carly rebelled, then stopped showing up. She called Holzman, but he was out of town. His brother Keith Holzman, a competent executive, ran over to Electric Lady and mediated between Carly and Kramer, eventually getting the sessions back on track. In fact, they got so on track that the members of Zephyr noticed that they were getting the short end of the stick because Eddie Kramer was now working only with Carly. Then they noticed that Carly and Eddie left the studio together, and returned together the next day. Zephyr assumed that Carly was having her way with Eddie Kramer, “not the most macho of men,” as Zephyr’s lead guitarist put it later.

The main problem between Carly and her producer had been the drum sound. Carly, writing in 2011: “We were recording ‘That’s the Way’ at Electric Lady and I wanted to have big drums on it. Everyone disputed and disagreed. They said it was such a ballad, and they said no drums belonged on the song. But I had become addicted to the way Russ Kunkel played on ‘Sweet Baby James’ and especially
‘Country Road.’ I begged Eddie Kramer to have a drummer on the session who could hit hard. So he hired Jimmy Johnson and waited to see what the hell I meant.

“I heard the chorus with a very strong entrance and primarily tom-toms going through the entire chorus, instead of a steady snare and bass drum backbeat. I started to literally conduct the strokes of Jimmy, gesturing what I wanted from him, most likely to his utter chagrin and that of all the other drummers I have worked with since. But my Leonard Bernstein soul flowed through me as I vaulted my hair in front of my thrusting arms. I wondered what the drummer thought of this. He must have been on the verge of leaving. Who did I think I was? Where did this chutzpah come from? Can I put that on Chebe? Uncle Peter? Certainly not my father’s side of the family. Jimmy Johnson was amused. All I wanted was to be able to be brought aloft both spiritually and viscerally by the sound of the variously tuned toms.