More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon (40 page)

Both James and Carly performed at the MUSE concerts at Madison Square Garden September 19– 23. These “Concerts for a Non-Nuclear Future” were the first major rock charity shows since George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh early in the decade, and all the MUSE shows sold out. The Doobie Brothers, one of the biggest jam bands in the country, headlined two of the concerts. Bruce Springsteen and Jackson Browne, at the apex of his career, each headlined one. Other performers included James Taylor; Crosby, Stills and Nash; Tom Petty; Bonnie Raitt; Ry Cooder; John Hall; Chaka Khan; Jesse Colin Young; and Gil Scott-Heron, all singing together in various permutations over the four nights of shows. All the music was recorded and filmed, which created a hectic, hothouse atmosphere backstage. Carly appeared as “a special guest” in James’s performances, running onstage in a shimmering greenish jumpsuit and bare feet when she heard Russ Kunkel pounding the tom-toms for the intro to “Mockingbird.” Amid lusty cheering from the crowd, Carly and James danced the Lindy Hop for the movie cameras, then strolled offstage arm in arm. This always earned one of the evening’s loudest ovations. Few guessed that Carly spent the last hour throwing up in the backstage ladies’ room. Leah Kunkel wanted to help Carly, but kept thinking, “She’s a little… crazy.” But Carly recovered enough to join her husband and Graham Nash (one of the MUSE producers) for a stirring harmonic version of Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changing.” This, and “Mockingbird,” would appear on
No Nukes,
the all-star two-LP album released later in the year by Asylum Records.
No Nukes
sold about a million copies, and eventually provided some important funding for the antinuclear movement.

In the autumn of 1979, Carly and James were only fitfully living together. It was rumored they were both close to others, outside the marriage. James was drinking heavily in public and said to be using drugs in private. He went on binges, sometimes disappearing. Carly worried that he was intoxicated when he picked the children up from school or playdates. She was afraid for their kids when they were with their father. On the Vineyard, he would take off on his bike and end up at brother Alex’s house on a three-day weekend bender. James was supposed to be writing his next album, as Carly was working on hers, but he kept wandering off, blacking out, and doing stupid stuff. He later, regretful, told his biographer Timothy White, “One night, I got so drunk I blacked out a whole rampage of awful behavior. I don’t even know where I got the energy for it. I was at a party, and a friend loaned me his guitar, and I started playing ‘She Caught The Katy,’ which I love, for something like,
hours
. And when someone finally threatened, or offered, to beat me on the head if I kept playing the song, I actually had a kind of seizure… and bit a big hole in the guitar—which belonged to a good friend of mine, so it was a bad thing to have done.”

Lucy Simon publicly described her sister’s marriage as “in turmoil.”

Carly Simon still loved James Taylor with (almost) all her heart, but trying to raise their children (and write her next album of new songs) while coping with an alcoholic, drug-addicted husband and being afraid of almost everything, all the time, was starting to take a serious psychological toll on her.

But as 1980 and a new decade loomed, there were reasons to be hopeful. After ten years with Elektra, Carly signed a three-record deal with Warner Bros., one of the sister labels of the WEA empire. Warner president Mo Ostin promised Arlyne Rothberg that Carly would get a major promotional boost for her albums, the lack of which was the reason she was leaving Elektra. Carly also had a new producer, Mike Mainieri, a talented, jazz-informed musician she had
met through Arif Mardin. In November 1979, Mainieri came to the Vineyard to write with Carly, working in the rented boathouse in Vineyard Haven. Early in 1980 they began working on her next record,
Come Upstairs,
at the Power Station recording studios on West Fifty-third Street, not far from her apartment. Carly sometimes walked to the studio (formerly a Con Edison electric power plant) for exercise, occasionally waving to neighbors John Lennon and Yoko Ono as they crossed Seventy-second Street to Central Park.

The
Come Upstairs
music reflects a transitional time in Carly’s life. Eight of the nine tracks are love songs, some specifically about her husband, others quite explicitly about others. The singer wants love and lots of it, and isn’t shy about her intentions, but she’s confused about the interesting number of men in her (intimate) life. The music itself was transitional under Mainieri’s direction. Warner Bros. wanted a contemporary album from Carly, who would be competing with sixties icons Fleetwood Mac and Marianne Faithfull, plus Blondie, Talking Heads, the Police, and other New Wave bands. Electronically generated backgrounds now replaced Arif Mardin’s lush string orchestras. Mainieri’s main instruments were the vibraphone and the marimba, but with Carly he doubled on the Oberheim and Prophet 5 synthesizers to make the songs sound more “eighties.”

The album’s ravenously seductive title song is very Blondie-like, synth-driven New York City power pop, a new style for Carly. The lyrics—“You can take off my clothes”—were provocative for a famously married woman to sing, an invitation to trespass, disrobing, and sin, with a joyous and apparently guilt-free chorus.

Carly’s husband joined her to sing on “Stardust,” a blatantly explicit homage to Mick Jagger, with whom said husband still suspected her of carrying on a long-term affair. Mick was a presence in this marriage from the beginning, and James was never satisfied with Carly’s profession of innocent friendship with the Rolling Stone. Mr. Taylor’s feelings about the track are unknown, but “Stardust” is pure, un-ironic hero worship, bumping and grinding along. “I told my
friends that you were just a man / Real nice…/ I feel so important!” (The drummer on this and other tracks is Rick Marotta, whose rhythmic drive would be important to Carly throughout the rest of her career.)

James also sings (with his brothers Alex and Hugh) on “Them,” a song about aliens. And he is the subject of the song “James,” an aching ballad, a fever dream that recalls long-ago romantic exaltation and especially the first night he played for Carly while she lay in the warm glow of her nighttable lamp, communicating with blue chords, soft phrasing, and improvised variations, demonstrating his genius and his worth to her. With a soft cello sending a prayerful message, the lyric beseeches, “Let the music speak for your heart…/ And bring us together once again.”

Carly and Mike Mainieri worked the hardest on “Jesse,” Carly’s new mid-tempo rocker slated to be the album’s first single. Rick Marotta hits the drums hard, and James, his brothers, and daughter Sally, now six, sing backing vocals on a song about a woman’s ambivalent feelings for an incontinent lover who wets the bed and needs fresh sheets. (“Jesse” was widely assumed to be about Jesse Colin Young, the honey-throated rock crooner.) Carly said “Jesse” was “a song laying plain the fact that good intentions go to hell when you are crazy for someone.” By the end of the lyrics, she decides to put fresh sheets on the bed.

The last four songs of
Come Upstairs
comprise a sort of chronicle of some of the rejection and difficult times Carly had been through for the past year. “In Pain” is a desolate piano ballad that devolves into operatic power chords. This is Carly as Pat Benatar (or Dory Previn), howling fury in the third verse—“I’m in pain”—a raging emotional torrent her audiences hadn’t heard from her before. “The Three of Us in the Dark” is a clever love triangle song—with a husband and a secret lover—asking who is just a guest and who has to go. Session musician Sid McGinnis played guitar in the style of Carly’s husband, adding poignancy to the song. “Take Me as I
Am” is a hard-edged synth rocker, played fast, the singer’s idealized version of herself and a plea for self-acceptance. The song sequence then closes with “The Desert,” an arty, lovelorn self-portrait amid moonlit dunes and feelings of impending and certain loss.

James was away much of that winter, 1980, absented from his family much like his father before him. He was also working on a new album in L. A. and making appearances for the liberal congressman John Anderson, who was trying an insurgent run for the president against the floundering and unelectable incumbent, Jimmy Carter. In this period, Carly was sometimes comforted by a young recording engineer who was working on
Come Upstairs
: There was talk that the title song was about that relationship. Around that time, she sold “Haven’t Got Time for the Pain” to the makers of the painkiller Medipren, and the “Pain” jingle was as omnipresent on the radio as Carly’s ketchup commercial had been, years before.

In April 1980, Andy Warhol, the supremo of pop art, received a call from the ABC-TV network. They were reviving
Omnibus,
a cultural program famous from the early days of television. The producers wanted three artists to do portraits of Carly Simon. In addition to Warhol, they had recruited Larry Rivers and Marisol, a sculptor who worked mostly in wood. According to his diary, Warhol liked Carly’s music and agreed to the portrait, but only if he got paid. The producers contacted Carly, who affirmed that she would buy the portrait if it weren’t too expensive.

Warhol called his friend Bianca Jagger, Mick’s now ex-wife, who assured him that Mick had been with Carly while he was married to her. She said that Mick was now with the American model Jerry Hall because she always gave him a blowjob before letting him out of the house. She added that the only girlfriend of Mick’s she was ever jealous of was Carly, because she was intelligent and looked like Mick—and Bianca—and it was a look Mick really liked.

Warhol’s diary: “They sent a limo for Carly, but when she arrived at the Factory she was too nervous to come up until we sent some
wine down to the car. Then she came up and was sociable. We made her put on lipstick and then after we worked she was hungry and we sent to Brownies for health sandwiches and she loved that. I taped it all. (Brownies: $8. 30, $23. 44).” The finished silk-screen portrait of Carly, heavily rouged, duly arrived at Carly’s apartment after the show was broadcast, and it hung in her various homes until it was sold for a fortune much later, in what Carly described as “a time of need.”

In May 1980, Carly and James patched things up and took the children to England, crossing the Atlantic on the liner
Queen Elizabeth II.
James wanted to show the children where some of his songs had been written in London, and he took them by his old flat on Beaufort Street, Chelsea. Carly introduced him to old flame Willie Donaldson, now a successful author and satirist. (In his diary, Willie said he thought Carly was disrespectful to James, but only when he wasn’t looking.) The family then traveled to Scotland by overnight train and toured the seacoast of Inverness. James told the children that his father had said the Taylor family originally came from around there, and that they were seafaring merchants who sailed to North Carolina and back in their own ships. Carly, James, and the kids spent a couple of happy days driving around the foggy, looming mountains and the valley glens whose landscapes were some of the most breathtaking Carly had ever seen.

I
n June 1980, Warner Bros. released
Come Upstairs,
Carly Simon’s ninth studio album. Producer Mainieri was credited with cowriting all the songs but “In Pain,” and French songwriter Jacques Brel was thanked for inspiration. British photographer Mick Rock depicted Carly jiving in au courant padded shoulders, wide lapels, and gold lamé. Mainieri had given the new songs a fashionably metallic sheen deliberately unlike the softer, piano-based, singer-songwriter soundscapes Carly’s fans were used to. As promised, the promo guys went to work. More specifically, the label hired independent promotion men—part of a loose (vaguely “connected”) association informally known as the Network—to fan out around the country with cash-stuffed envelopes and bribe radio program directors to play “Jesse,” the album’s first single. (Though this system of payola was a good deal for the indie promo men, crooked radio guys, and corporate promotion vice presidents getting kickbacks, it turned out badly for the labels that created it, ending in lost profits, lawsuits, and congressional investigations later in the decade.)

Sure enough, “Jesse” got on the radio, reached number eleven on the charts, got a gold record for a million units sold, and stayed alive for six months. But when sales of
Come Upstairs
stalled and the album reached only number thirty-eight, “Jesse” was said to be a “turntable hit,” a record that got on the radio but didn’t sell. A Warner Bros. executive later told a reporter, “‘Jesse’ was legendary as one of the most expensive singles of all time, in the amount of indie promotion spent on it. I don’t know the actual number, but it was probably around $300,000. It was a top ten record, got loads of airplay, but they didn’t sell any albums. It was perceived as a hit record, but it was a stiff. It was only successful for the independent promoters. You couldn’t blame them for taking the money.”