Chapter 28
On a futon in Japan a song is heard, the way it should be ... One magic night at the Troub ... New girl in town wakes up a star
JAC: The downside of working so hard and traveling so much was that it took me away from the music, especially at home in the US, so it was a double pleasure when I happened upon a great artist who seemed custom-made for Elektra.
CARLY SIMON: While I was growing up I did not want to be a singer, I did not want to be a star. I did not want to be in the public eye at all. From time to time, I wanted to be various things, from a spy to a nurse to a schoolteacher, to a professor's wife, where I would serve up the dinners.
I started singing with my sister Lucy, folk songs, just to make money for a summer vacation, and that turned into a semi-professional relationship, actually quite a professional relationship. I wouldn't say a lucrative one, but while I was in college we did sing together around the campuses of New England, for about two years. And then in the Village. We were the opening act for Woody Allen and Bill Cosby and Joan Rivers, all the wonderful comics who were testing out their new material. Shel Silverstein played there. We also opened for the Tarriers—Alan Arkin, Marshall Brickman. All these people went on to do good things.
You did have the feeling that you were in on something that was really beginning, a movement. It was exciting to be a part of that, in whatever small way. There was much more jamming than now, people just sitting around backstage and playing. People were so generous with their time. Theo Bikel would come into our dressing room and teach us songs. Buzzy Linhart, who was on the scene, so talented. I remember Phoebe Snow would come back and I'd teach her things.
Anyway, Lucy and I were the Simon Sisters, and we had a minor hit, 'Winken, Blinken and Nod.'
When Lucy married, I decided that we would not have a career anymore, and I was happy about that—not because I wanted a solo career, I didn't want a career at all. But I kept on getting somehow sucked into it. People would pay me a compliment, you see: "Wow, you have a great voice, you should make a record."
So I made a demo record. John Court introduced me to Albert Grossman, and then I met Bob Dylan, and the Band, and I made this record called "Carly and the Deacon." Albert Grossman had this image of me and this Southern deacon, and the deacon was probably going to be Richie Havens. They looked around for a suitable deacon and couldn't come up with one, so consequently I recorded a couple of tracks with Bob Dylan's engineer, Bob Johnston, with the Band playing.
One was a rewrite of a Dave Van Ronk song called 'Baby, Let Me Follow You Down.' Dylan rewrote the words for me the day before his motorcycle accident. He was pretty much out of it. I wonder what it would have been like the day after his accident? I never thought about that. Just before the accident was the time that he was most caressed and possessed by the various drugs that he was taking, and the effects on him were that he was pretty displaced. But it was a wonderful meeting, during which he gave me the lyrics that he had written for the Dave Van Ronk song. I fell in love with Robbie Robertson of the Band and we went into the studio and recorded.
And Bob Johnston said, "If you're nice to me, I'll make you a nice record." And I stood very calm and said, "I'm not that hungry." That was such a typical Hollywood casting couch routine that it was amazing to actually hear it come out of somebody's mouth.
But this was the end for me for quite a long time. I was frozen. Whatever Bob Johnston said to Albert Grossman, I was shelved. I wish I had those tapes. CBS owned the demo, and they never got put out. So I never heard them again.
Then I got an offer to sing with this group called Elephant's Memory. They were a bunch of very New York street-smart jazz hip people who had backed John Lennon for a time. And I had a very bad experience with them. Very bad.
They didn't like, as Albert Grossman didn't like, the fact that my parents had been wealthy and that I lived in a big house in Riverdale. Albert said to me, "On a one to ten scale as a woman, you're a nine." I said, "That's flattering, but where do I miss out?" Albert said, "You've had it too easy, you haven't suffered enough, you don't know what working for a living is like." And Elephant's Memory pretty much said, "Get off your fat ass and help us carry the speakers." I did have a fat ass at that point, by the way. But we didn't speak the same language at all, and the devastating part of it was that the management really screwed me.
I had never signed as a writer. I had signed something about performing with them, and they attached a writer's rider. And so later, after my first, second and third hit, they sued me. That was my experience with Elephant's Memory. Nothing good came out of it. Only that lawsuit. I'm sure that happens to a lot of people.
I didn't do more than five or six gigs with them. I left and went to work as a counselor at summer camp. There I met Jacob Brackman and we formed a very important friendship, which was to guide many of the things I did over the next ten years.
I was playing the guitar and singing for friends, and I sang at Jake's house. There were these Hollywood types—Jake was good friends with Jack Nicholson, Bob Rafelson, and all those people. Jerry Brandt was over there one night at a party, and I sang a couple of my songs for him, and he said, "I'd love to manage you, and I'd love to put up money for you to do a demo."
So I did about five songs, with David Bromberg as the producer. Jerry took my tape to CBS, and Clive Davis heard it and threw it across the room and said, "What do I want with a Jewish New York girl?" That's what Jerry told me. And then he brought it to Jac.
From the time I was in high school, all the records I liked were on Elektra. I was very aware of the music industry. It was something that looked glamorous to me from outside, when I was in college. I always thought if I could ever make it in the music business I would want to be on Elektra. It was an appealing label. Elektra had Nonesuch, which was wonderful; I had a big library of Nonesuch records. And Elektra had artists that I liked. Theodore Bikel. Judy Henske—I loved Judy Henske. She was just kind of solidly earthy. Amazing. I remember her singing 'Wade in the Water,' and I adored that. I still have that record. And the Butterfield Band. And Judy Collins. I admired Judy Collins so much. She was one of the females I emulated, and I copied her songs, and the fact that she was on Elektra meant a lot to me, too. So Elektra had a standard. Elektra meant if I get a book now and it's published by Knopf, it means that somebody there is checking their list. They're the third little pig, they're very careful about what they do and what they don't do, they have good taste, they seem to have values. And I had heard that Jac Holzman was terrific.
JAC: Carly's friend Jerry Brandt, who was sidelining into management, brought me a tape and said, "Look, I think this girl is rather unusual. Her name is Carly Simon." "Is she one of the Simon Sisters?" I asked. One of my favorite songs was a little lullaby called 'Winken, Blinken and Nod.'
In a few days I was to fly to Japan with my son Adam, who was then twelve, for Expo '70 in Osaka, and almost as an afterthought I tossed the cassette into my carry-on bag. The Walkman was not yet invented, so I lugged a rather cumbersome Sony cassette recorder, battery-driven, six heavy D cells. I'm isolated at Lake Hakone in a little ryokan, sleeping on a futon, it's four in the morning and I still haven't adjusted to the time difference, so I slip on the Carly Simon tape and listen through headphones. And whatever drowsiness I felt just evaporated. She is wonderful. Here I am in the Japanese countryside, and there's no phone at the inn. I don't even know how to dial a phone in this country. And I'm going to lose this artist! A few days later, I'm back in Tokyo, and I call Jerry and tell him that I love the tape and definitely want to work with Carly.
CARLY SIMON: So I went up to the Gulf & Western Building—it was an interesting building that swayed when you went to the top—and had my first meeting with Jac Holzman. He was very tall, with a leadership quality about him. His conversation was letter perfect. He wouldn't waste a word. It was almost as if you could read exactly what he was saying, in a letter. There's a very organized thing about him. You have the feeling that all his desk drawers are very neat and that every record and tape is catalogued. He was like a machine in a lot of ways, yet he had a very fluent, imaginative style.
He took a strong role in the beginning of my career, very hands-on. The first thing was, he did not see me as a writer. Interestingly enough, Clive Davis doesn't see me as a writer, either. Clive Davis said only a couple of years ago that I was a singer, I wasn't really a writer. When I was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, I think he stopped saying that. But Jac at the beginning did not see me as a writer, either. And he said so.
He had heard my songs from the demo tape, and without hearing anything else he said, "I see you more as an interpretive singer," and "I'd like you to do songs of Tim Buckley," and he gave me various names of other people whose songs he wanted me to record—Tim Hardin, Paul Siebel, some Donovan songs. He played a lot of tunes for me.
I just went about my own business, writing my own songs. I think I was challenged by his saying that he didn't think I was a writer. Every time I wrote a song I would say, "What about this?" and he'd say, "Yes, that's good!" So he began to think of me in his own mind as a singer-songwriter, which I knew I already was, but he had to catch up with my vision. He simply had not heard what I could write, and that most of the material I sang of my own demonstrated a sincerity that was truer than when I interpreted the songs of others.
In my own mind I think I fashioned myself like a Carole King, because I wanted to be a writer more than anything else. I thought that maybe other artists would hear my songs and want to do them. People say, "Are you a singer first or a writer first?" Now I think I'm both first. And I don't always have to be the singer, I don't always have to be the writer. And within my writing, I don't always have to be the lyricist and I don't always have to be the composer. But then I didn't want to be an interpretive singer, because if I'd been an interpretive singer and made an album, I would have had to have gone out and promote it, and I didn't want to, because I was too scared of getting on the stage. I hated to get onstage. I hadn't discussed this with Jac. Or with Jerry Brandt. I almost hadn't discussed it with myself. It was more panic.
JAC: Carly pulled together a fine group of songs, and now I had to select the right, the most appropriate, producer. I had a hunch about Eddie Kramer who had worked with Jimi Hendrix and who performed his magic at Electric Lady Studios, on 8th street in the Village, a studio, literally underground, that he helped design. Eddie was skilled at creating a rich, fat sound, each instrument or voice being heard with its proper weight, and for her first album Carly needed the strength of a real pro in the studio.
CARLY SIMON: Not all the songs had arrangements. A lot of them were head arrangements—just get in the studio with a bunch of people and figure it out. I would bring in other records. I was very big on James Taylor's sound at that point. I brought in 'Sweet Baby James' and said, "I want the drums to sound like Russ Kunkel on this track," or I would say I wanted a piano player that sounded like the piano player on Judy Collins's record. I gave input, but I didn't know too much about what I was doing. Eddie Kramer was producing, and he knew all the musicians. He had just done the Joe Cocker record, and I guess Jac thought he would be good for me.
JAC: I went to several of the early sessions and they seemed to be getting on.
CARLY SIMON: But we had some wars and Jac was in Europe, so I called Keith.
KEITH HOLZMAN: About two weeks into the project Carly called, frustrated with Eddie and the sessions. It wasn't fisticuffs or anything, just disagreements, and they needed a buffer. I sped down to the studio and mediated, smoothed the waters, held her hand, and got her through the remaining sessions plus attending all the mix sessions.
STEVE HARRIS: I met Carly before she finished the album. David Steinberg was friendly with her and we had talked about her and he said, "Why don't we go over to her apartment?"
She had a lovely flat on East 35th Street, right off Lexington Avenue. When I walked in, I thought there was something about her, and I couldn't put my finger on it. Sometimes she looked attractive, sometimes she didn't. We started talking about the record. I hadn't heard it yet. She said, "Would you like to hear one of the songs?" She picked up her guitar and she sang the first cut on side one. And when she started to sing, her whole face changed, her whole manner shifted. She became absolutely beautiful and I thought, "If anything happens to this record, if we can get her out, working in front of an audience, this is going to be a killer."
Carly greets the world on her first album EKS-74082
JAC: The album was different from anything else I had been hearing and that buoyed me. The songs were sophisticated and openhearted, which is a rare combination. Some of the lyrics reminded me of Stephen Sondheim, with their keen sense of the crosscurrents of life and the human condition. Though Carly sang with a rock backing, her polished, well-bred voice was of a kind rarely heard in that context. Bill Harvey and I decided to give the album cover a soft, matte finish, a mark of substance and quality. The cover photo showed Carly wearing a lace dress with lace curtains behind her, sitting in a homey setting, legs gloriously akimbo, with a challenging look as if waiting for the world to finally pay attention to her.
CARLY SIMON: Jac was the one who picked 'That's the Way I Always Heard It Should Be' for the single. It wasn't on the first demo tape. I had been asked to write the music for a TV documentary called "Who Killed Lake Erie?" a very early environmental documentary, and that became the melody for 'That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be.' Once I've got a melody in my head, I can't write words to it. For me, the words have to come first. So I had that melody for so long that I was blocked. I thought it would be fun to write some songs with Jake Brackman, so I gave it to him, and he came up with the lyrics. That's the first time that we ever collaborated. He was able to write from my point of view—that was what was so great about it.
We didn't know that it was going to be the single. But Jac did. I think it's terribly important when you put a song out—I don't think a lot of people are aware of this–that the song and the singer really match up, persona-wise. Because every song has a character of its own, and if the singer and the song are really closely interwoven, closely enmeshed in personality and essence, then it's probably going to catch on. At least it's going to be true. And when Jac picked 'That's the Way I Always Heard It Should Be'—that song was so much me. I can't really describe why. But Jac was able to see it. He was able to create a synthesis, or at least decide when it existed, and he was able to pick the songs that were most true to the artist. And so 'That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be' was a very smart choice, because it was introducing me to the public that wasn't aware of me, with a song that was unusual, that wasn't the typical single of the day. He took a chance on it.
STEVE HARRIS: The record came out in February of 1971. Carol Hall came out with a record at the same time, and Paul Siebel, and nothing much happened to the three albums. Nice word of mouth on Paul: "Isn't he wonderful?" Carol the same. Both great music, not good sales. Meanwhile I'm on the phone all over the place about Carly.
CARLY SIMON: I went off to Jamaica on a holiday and came back. The single was out, and Jac called me from California saying that Nina had been driving along the freeway and it had come on the radio and she had to pull off to the side because she was so moved by it. That meant a lot to him, that she had reacted so profoundly. And that was a sign that it was going to hit a lot of people in a very strong way.
It started moving up, slowly but steadily. Then I got a call from Steve, very excited. It was up around Number 25.
STEVE HARRIS: I'm promoting it. I'm on the phone. Now I need Carly in front of an audience, and I want to get her the right show, and I figure the best way to introduce her live is in Los Angeles. I heard about Elton John breaking big after his first night at the Troubadour.
JAC: I had been in London several months earlier, when Elton was still pretty much unknown in the US. I saw his album in several record stores, bought a copy, listened, and hightailed immediately over to Dick James to secure the US rights. Dick had a longstanding deal with Decca/MCA for release of his product through their Congress label, but he told me that if MCA didn't pick it up I could have it. I couldn't imagine that MCA would blow it, and they didn't.
This was when the Troubadour was really hot. The Elton John gig had just created a furor rarely seen in a town blasé about success. Radio stations took out paid ads thanking him for playing such a killer set and hailing his arrival. The irony was that another Elektra artist, David Ackles, was the headliner. Now, Elton was an over-the-top David Ackles fan and when he heard that David was on the same bill he was overjoyed.
STEVE HARRIS: I was pushing Carly. I called up Doug Weston, the owner of the Troub: "Who've you got coming in?" He reads me off about nine weeks worth of bookings. And when he got to Cat Stevens, I said, "That's the show, Doug. I want that show." Of course Carly would have to sign over everything to Doug, probably including her first-born child—that's how Doug was operating at the time. I called her: "Carly, Carly, we're going to do the Troubadour, and you're going to open April 6th."
CARLY SIMON: I was completely flustered, because it never occurred to me that this record was going to take off. I said I really couldn't do it, that I didn't really want to be a performer. Well, I don't think they believed it at Elektra. They just thought I was hemming and hawing. The feedback was, "You can't not promote this record."
JAC: She had to be seen.
STEVE HARRIS: Carly says, "I have to perform? Let's talk." So I go over to her apartment. The realization had finally hit her. She says, "I can't go out there. I'm afraid to fly." I said, "So am I." And I really am. She says, "I haven't got a drummer." I said, "I'll work that out for you." Then she says, "I have to have a minor operation." I mean, she put all these roadblocks in the way. I said, "Look, we'll fly together. We'll both get loaded before we take off. I'll take fifty milligrams of valium, with some drinks." Carly says, "OK, I'll take five milligrams with a couple of Old-Fashioneds." Fine. Then she calls up again: "I can't do this job without a drummer." I said, "What kind of drummer do you want?" "Somebody who sounds like Russ Kunkel."
CARLY SIMON: Because I knew perfectly well that Russ Kunkel was on the road with James Taylor. So I thought he was not going to be available.
STEVE HARRIS: I call up Russ: "Russell, what are you doing April 6th through the 12th?" Russell says, "Nothing, James isn't working." I said, "Great, Carly Simon." He said, "Five hundred bucks." I called Carly and said, "I got you somebody who sounds just like Russ Kunkel." She says, "Oh, who?" You know, she was prepared to say, "Forget it, I can't do it." I said, "Russ Kunkel," and she screams and says, "Well, I guess I have to do it, don't I?"
CARLY SIMON: I made that huge step and said yes. We went into rehearsals, in my apartment.
STEVE HARRIS: Then Carly says, "Should I have the operation before or after the gig?" I said, "Look, I got you Russ Kunkel, I'll hold your hand on the plane, we'll work this out."
CARLY SIMON: So we flew, Steve and me, on valium. Five milligrams for me, which was a lot, forty for Steve—he really wanted to kind of float through the experience. It was very exciting, but I tried very hard not to think about it. I tried to just let the minutes go by and soon it would be over. Because it was very scary.
STEVE HARRIS: We arrived two days early, and we were having a wonderful time, just terrific.
CARLY SIMON: It was so exciting to me, just driving in from the airport. I was a very East Coast person, never been west of New Jersey, and this was the first time I had seen a palm tree, if you can believe it. I remember being so amazed at the whole different color of it, the whole landscape. It was so un-East Coast and it seemed so dramatically far away. It was just thrilling. And I remember thinking, "Well, I can't be scared, this is a foreign land, these people won't even speak the same language. I don't have to be scared of them."
Steve was so giddy and giggly and fun, very eager to share and spill the beans and be naughty and scared with me. So alive. We stayed at the Continental Hyatt House on Sunset. He and I both had rooms with beds on platforms. His room was red with a crown over the bed. I was just amazed. I had hardly ever stayed in a hotel—I don't think I ever had. I was so provincial. It's very hard to call somebody provincial when they come from as sophisticated an environment as I did, but I was so backward in terms of my expansion into the world, this was a whole new world for me, and I was already twenty-five. How could I have lived that long and gone nowhere?
I don't know. We went up on the roof to the pool and we ordered drinks, and it seemed like the absolute most decadent thing that had ever happened to me—drinks on the roof! And I was trying very hard to get enough of a sunburn so that I would look like a California girl. This is my first time on the West Coast, and I wanted everything that the West Coast had, I wanted it all, including the sun. But it was April and it was quite cold, and I couldn't get the tan.
We went over to the Troubadour and had a rehearsal with Russ Kunkel, who was a kind of a demi-god to me, because I was already in love with James Taylor from a distance, that whole sound—I hadn't yet thought I was going to have his children. So I was rehearsing with Russ, and I was in awe of him, and somehow I didn't know how I was going to get through it, but I thought, "It's only six songs"—as an opening act I only had to prepare six songs. I had such a wonderful band. I loved Jimmy Ryan so much, and Andy Newmark. All of the guys were so great that I started to love being around musicians, the sensibility of the musician. This was my first real band experience. It was heavy. I loved it. And that's something I've never lost.
STEVE HARRIS: Then came the sound check. Jac knows sound, so I wanted him there if there were any technical problems. Jac found romance rewiring machines, as well as in the music and the artists. The sound check went fine.
JAC: The Troubadour had better than average acoustics and a good sound system which we augmented by bringing in our best studio mikes. Carly's voice was strong, and once we got the instruments balanced properly, blending her into the final mix would be easy.
There was not a moment of fear showing in the rehearsal. She seemed like such a pro.
CARLY SIMON: We went back to the Hyatt House and ordered room service, the first time I ever had room service, poor little rich kid. I think steak and french fries—I was eating meat in those days. Russ stayed and we watched a boxing match in my room, with Steve and Jimmy. It got to be that thing where I was hanging out with men who were musicians or in charge of my career and it was getting heady, and that's the first sign of life from me that there was going to be something about it that I really liked. And that evening was the opening.
STEVE HARRIS: I said to Carly, "I'll pick you up about seven." I knock on her door, and if you've ever held a kitten that's totally afraid, that was Carly. She was trembling, she couldn't focus, she was stuttering. She had a stuttering problem, and I saw that she stuttered every once in a while. What she said was, as a child she stuttered, and she knew which words she could say and which she couldn't, and she created a whole other vocabulary to avoid those words. Well, that day she was stuttering all over the place.
At the Troubadour she was so afraid. She went to the dressing room, tuned up, and said, "How many people are out there?" I said, "Carly, it's completely sold out." It was star-studded.
CARLY SIMON: There were a lot of A&M people because of Cat Stevens, and all the Elektra people. The Elektra publicity people had put a rose on every table, saying "Love from Carly and Elektra." That was quite a cool thing. They put a lot of energy behind me.
STEVE HARRIS: She said, "Can I go down and talk to everybody? Make friends with them?" I said, "No, you can't." She said, "Can we go for a walk?" I said, "Yes, we can." We walked down the stairs of the Troubadour, Elektra Records is all there, ready to cheer her on, and we walked arm in arm out the door and they think we've split forever, never to return.
We come back by the back door, up the stairs, and Carly looks at me and says, "After the show, if Jac Holzman comes backstage and tells me how wonderful I am, 'Carly, you were just fabulous, we're going to be behind you a hundred percent,' I'll know I failed. I'll know he's faking. I don't want to hear that, Steve. Don't let him come back and say that to me."
CARLY SIMON: That sounds just like me.
STEVE HARRIS: So—she goes on.
Carly... clearly at ease
CARLY SIMON: I only had to do my six songs. I was singing and playing the piano, and the microphone kept slipping as I was singing into it, it kept veering off to the left and I'd follow it and play the piano at the same time and then I would swing it back like a typewriter and start again, and it would go further and further over to the left, and the audience was watching me do this. No stage manager, no Doug Weston, no Steve Harris or anybody, came up and tightened the mike, which was what should have happened. But that preoccupied me so much that it preoccupied me right out of fear, because I was too concerned with the mechanics of this microphone slipping. It was a wonderful thing. It was like a little angel, just doing something to distract me so that I wouldn't be afraid. Six songs, and 'That's the Way I Always Heard It Should Be' was the encore. And it was great.
STEVE HARRIS: She was wonderful, just wonderful. One of those magical nights that you knew she was going to wake up in the morning a star. Everyone comes backstage to pay their greetings and salutations. Of course the first one is Jac. And of course he says, "Carly, you're wonderful. We think you're terrific. Everything you want, we're going to do for you." And Carly's looking at me like—
JAC:—Well, she was wonderful! How do you think she would have felt if I said nothing?
STEVE HARRIS: Downstairs I talk with the press and I'm taking accolades for her, then I rush back up and she's sitting on the couch in the dressing room, and James Taylor is sitting on the floor.
CARLY SIMON: That was the night I met James. He had come to see Russ, I guess, and I can't imagine what Russ had said: "I'm working with this new girl singer"—
STEVE HARRIS:—They're having this fabulous conversation. I can see the sparks flying. And there was a whole bunch of kids calling to her from the alleyway behind, so she took her guitar and opened up the window and played a song for them, and she was feeling no pain. Then she looked at the musicians and said, "Well, fellas, we've got a second show to do."
CARLY SIMON: You know, there are certain periods in your life when a lot of events seem to come together and they influence the rest of your life. The year I met Jake Brackman was very important for me. And then '71, right around April 6, was a confluence of a lot of people and energies which would change the rest of my life. Meeting James. And the big success at the Troub.
STEVE HARRIS: She was riding a crest. Everybody wanted her for press conferences. And she handled them so well, so intelligent and warm and charming. The stories were great. They couldn't get enough pictures of her. She was this remarkable looking young lady. Incredibly sexy. They were playing all the cuts from the album like they were singles, and it was really unifying her image, her songs, her personality, her looks, everything, The Woman of the Seventies.
"Anticipation," Carly's second album EKS-75016
CARLY SIMON: I was the new girl in town. You can only be the new girl in town once. In that town, at least. I still haven't played Europe, so I can still be the new kid in town there. But LA was a big success. I never remember being so popular in my whole life as then. At Elektra too, of course. I certainly felt it there. Especially when you're breaking in as an artist, you have that feeling more than when you are established. Everybody's rooting for you, everybody's plugging for you in a way that they never will again. And it's such an exciting feeling.
As a result of the Troubadour I was asked to open for Cat Stevens at Carnegie Hall, and Kris Kristofferson at the Bitter End. I loved being the opening act. I liked it so much better than being the star.
April was the Troubadour, May was the Bitter End, June was Carnegie Hall. The single was about Number 20 when I played the Troub, and then the next two months really solidified it. It got to Number 10.
After the first album, Jac stopped telling me he didn't think I was a writer, and I was off to England to make my second record.
JAC: "Anticipation." It was to be produced by an old friend of mine, Paul Samwell- Smith, bass player for the original Yardbirds.
Carly is one of those artists whose incandescence burns brightest with a new producer for each album. After they have squeezed the juice out of each other, it's on to the next, rather like a holiday romance, which in some cases I'm sure it was.
Paul made a very caring and lovely record, beautifully crafted, giving the songs a frame of easy intimacy that helped the listener welcome them into his own life. "Anticipation" consolidated Carly's position as a writer-singer of enormous craft, imagination and honesty.
"No Secrets" EKS-75049
Approaching her third album, "No Secrets," I was prepared with fresh producer meat. This time I wanted a producer who had been born in the studio, with solid arranging skills, a person who would push Carly and not flinch when she pushed back, as I knew she would. My candidate was Richard Perry, whose lawyer was none other than my off-and-on nemesis, Abe Somer. Abe seemed surprised by my call but quickly warmed to the idea of matching Richard and Carly.
Carly went off to England, to record at Trident Studios. There were rumblings of problems between her and Richard, but from an ocean away I could do nothing unless there was an explosion needing my fire-fighting skills. I'm sure they drove each other nuts, but out of that combination came "You're So Vain," her million-selling, Number 1 single.
