April 21, 1974, Page 141Buy Reprints
CARLY SIMON has never been in motorcycle accident, nor freaked out on drugs. She didn't have to quit school at 14 to support her family by slinging hash nor has she made the front pages by throwing punches at paparazzi. Yet, by communicating basic huinan experiences, she has reached superstar status in the world of rock with her latest and fourth album, “Hotcakes,” selling just like Aunt Jemima's best, and her album betore that, “No Secrets,” having sold almost two million records. That album contained her million‐selling single “You're So Vain,” the song that kept the pop world and its fans guessing whether it was Mick Jagger or Warren Beatty or just who it was that “walked into the party like you were walking onto a yacht.”
And even now that she's married to another superstar, James Taylor, and is a new mama to boot, with Sarah Maria born on Jan. 7, Carly Simon insists: “We feel better keeping our musical identities separate. Just because we're married it's not it natural condition that we should perform together. We didn't start our careers as a team and we don't want to be the Ozzie and Harriet of rock.”
There can be no question about Carly Simon's artistic identity. Possessed of a rich and expressive voice that conveys positive energy charges, she also writes melodies that catch the ear easily. As a lyricist concerned with the subtleties in relationships between men and women, she can offer us insights into our own actions and reactions, Carly Simon is that rare artist who can express feelings that most of us have, but don't take time to define. Her We Have No Secrets” is a case in point. The song reveals lovers who are totally honest with each other. Yet, there's a price to pay for such total frankness, as she points out in the last stanza: “In the name of honesty in the name of what is fair/ You always answer my questions/ but they don't always answer my prayers.” (©1972 Quackenbush Music Ltd.) “Grownup,” on her new album, points out that children think grownups are so self‐assured, but that a grownup can be just as lacking in confidence as a child.
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“You know what Mel Brooks said to me once when I had left a restaurant with him?” Carly asks. “We were walking between Sixth and Seventh Avenues on 57th Street and I said, ‘My god, this is a long block!’ And Mel Brooks said, ‘that's what's so great about you—you say things that nobody else would think to say, but which happen to be true. This is a long block.’ He said, ‘That's what your talent is, you say things that are obvious but nobody else thinks to say them.’”
It's as clear as her blue eyes that Carly Simon is happy now as she croons “Sarah Maria, Sarah Maria” over and over to her daughter. She's sitting in the sunlit living room of her Manhattan apartment. And even though the Taylors have achieved success, the fur throw on the peach velvet sofa is more comfortable than opulent and the Olympia portable typewriter perched on the small desk looks like a survivor from college days. Like the songs that she writes, sometimes in collaboration with old friend Jacob Brackman, Carly is real and direct. There are those who are quick to say that because Carly's father was the Simon of Simon & Schuster and she grew up in well‐to‐do Riverdale, she never knew trough times. Yet, the third in the family of four children, she was always considered a loser. Her oldest sister, Joanna, is an opera singer and next sister, Lucy, who was Carly's partner in the sining Simon Sisters on the coffee‐house circuit in, the early sixties, is married to a Manhattan doctor and it about to embark on her own recording career. Her younger brother, Peter, is a freelance photographer. But Carly, who dropped out of Sarah Lawrence College, spent years in a succession of dull media jobs while she went through the inner anguish of finding what to do that would make her happy.
“I think,” she reflects, “I felt a desire to break away from what my parents felt was important. For instance, my father was a book publisher and I did my damnedest never to read a book. It's just the old rebellious spirit. For a long time I was feeling that the only way I could get anyone's attention or love was by being the black sheep who wasn't making any money, didn't have a job, didn't fit in.”
During that period in her life Carly took off for the south of France to live with a boyfriend in a romantic setting overlooking the Mediterranean. But every night she'd wake up with the shakes and her boyfriend would tell her no, she wasn't shaking. She was convinced she must be “stark, raving looney” so she headed home to a psychoanalyst who diagnosed her symptoms as severe anxiety attacks. She spent four years in analysis and as she points out: “Once you go into analysis you find all the ways in which you're terribly neurotic and why your life is miserable and you're not functioning. It's because have to explore the reasons for this one symptom—in my case, shaking—and you come up with a whole lot of reasons. Well, it happened that years later, after my analysis, I was in a French restaurant and ordered the same wine that had had all during that time I was living in the south of Prance. That night the tremors began again. I discovered I was allergic to the wine. So I had spent four years in analysis because of the wine, four years delving up, dredging up all of the things that were bothering me but that I didn't concentrate on until I went into analysis.”
While all this was going on, Carly used, to spend her spare time writing tunes. Then with the encouragement of Jacob Brackman, whom she had known when she was a camp counselor in her teens, Carly began taking her songs seriously. Jac Holzman, then president of Elektra Records, signed her on the basis of a demo and his memories of the Simon Sisters. Her first single, written with Brackman, “That's The Way I've Always Heard It Should Be,” not only gave her the 1971 Grammy as Best New Artist, but also put her on the road to becoming America's leading female singer/songwriter.
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Now she can chuckle about the jitters that hit her on her first date as Cat Stevens' opening act at Los Angeles' Troubadour. It was April 6, 1971, and she was terrorstricken because she had heard that her idol James Taylor was in the audience. She had been acquainted with James since they were kids summering at Martha's Vineyard. But the show at the Troubadour went well and afterward James hung out in Carly's dressing room and the ensuing courtship led to their marriage on Nov. 3, 1972—an event which was announced by James to a cheering crowd, at his Radio City Music Hall concert that night.
At the end of this month, after completing a new album, James begins a concert tour that brings him to Carnegie Hall on May 26 and 27 and Nassau Coliseum June 1. Carly, who will accompany James on the road, doesn't rule out the possibility of joining him onstage for a few numbers.
She has reached the point where she has found fulfillment on both professional and personal levels. “There is a different role for me now that I've gotten married,” she explains, “but I don't feel that I have less independence. In fact, I have more since I have gotten married. It's not the kind of independence that makes me free to fly off and have an affair in Rio, but I'm freer to know myself which is the most important kind of freedom. I've gotten a certain amount of stability and self‐assurance within a particular relationship that makes you open up to getting to know yourself.”
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Later in the afternoon, walking, in the rain along 60th Street under an umbrella large enough to keep all five foot nine inches of her dry, Carly talks about how some critics are treating her new songs as frivolous because they are happy. “What mainly is on my mind,” she says, “is how can people really think that in order to be profound, you've got to be miserable or that you have to pay for your happiness in some way. That's the idea of my song, ‘Misfit,’ and one of the themes of the LP. The line in there about ‘It's hip to be miserable when you're young and intellectual’ It's saying, ‘I'm a misfit, I'm neurotic, I'm profound, I'm heavy.’ But that doesn't hold any water past sophomore year in college.
“If you write a really sad love song, more people can identify with that than if you write about how happy you are in love. In fact, it really is true that I write a lot more if I'm sort of low because very often I do write songs out of the need to solve a problem. But fortunately my dilemmas are not as self‐torturing as before. It just shows you how I've been feeling recently that so many good‐feeling songs came out and were the ones that I wanted to carry on writing. So I've just kind of accepted that I'm not altogether neurotic and downtrodden and a miserable creature. I'm happy about being happy. I don't feel as guilty about it as I would have a while ago. I'm not interested in wallowing in self‐pity any more.”