Carole King's Tapestry 9781501355622, 9781501355653, 9781501355639

Table of contents :
Cover page
Praise
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Contents
Introduction The Mother of Us All
1 Maturity
2 Trilogy
3 Celebrity
4 Legacy
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Also available in the series

Citation preview

TAPESTRY Praise for the series: It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch . . . The series . . . is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration — The New York Times Book Review Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough — Rolling Stone One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet — Bookslut These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds — Vice A brilliant series . . . each one a work of real love — NME (UK) Passionate, obsessive, and smart — Nylon Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful — Boldtype [A] consistently excellent series — Uncut (UK) We . . . aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way . . . watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Bloomsbury’s “33 1/3” series of books — Pitchfork For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our blog at 333sound.com and our website at http://www.bloomsbury.com/musicandsoundstudies Follow us on Twitter: @333books Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/33.3books For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book.

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Forthcoming in the series: Band of Gypsys by Michael E. Veal Timeless by Martyn Deykers Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963 by Colin Fleming Once Upon a Time by Alex Jeffery Tin Drum by Agata Pyzik The Archandroid by Alyssa Favreau Avalon by Simon Morrison Rio by Annie Zaleski xx by Jane Morgan and many more . . .

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Tapestry

Loren Glass

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2021 Copyright © Loren Glass, 2021 Cover design: Louise Dugdale For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. 87 constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Glass, Loren, author. Title: Carole King’s Tapestry / Loren Glass. Description: New York City : Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Series: 33 1/3 ; 153 | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: “A discussion of Tapestry as a watershed in musical and cultural history, challenging the male dominance of the music and entertainment industries”-- Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020039618 | ISBN 9781501355622 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501355639 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501355646 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: King, Carole, 1942– Tapestry. | King, Carole, 1942—Criticism and interpretation. | Popular music–United States–1971–1980–History and criticism. Classification: LCC ML410.K636 G53 2021 | DDC 782.42166026/8—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020039618 ISBN: PB: 978-1-5013-5562-2 ePDF: 978-1-5013-5563-9 eBook: 978-1-5013-5564-6 Series: 33 1/3 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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For my mother

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Contents

Introduction: The Mother of Us All 1 2 3 4

1

Maturity Trilogy Celebrity Legacy

21 37 59 79

Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography

87 89 105

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Introduction The Mother of Us All One of my earliest memories is of my mother’s consciousnessraising group, “She Who,” chanting in a circle in the living room as I lay alone in bed: “She Who Plays with Words,” the women would intone in unison. The syntactical ambiguity of the haunting refrain (She Who?) echoes in my memory against the voices of the singer-songwriters whose albums my mother played as I was growing up. They formed a kind of serial ersatz lullaby: Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro (“Stoney End”1 still provokes a powerful Proustian pull back to that darkened bedroom on Grant Street in Berkeley, California c. 1971), Holly Near, Phoebe Snow, Aretha Franklin, Cris Williamson, Roberta Flack, Nina Simone, and, of course, Carole King. I still have my mother’s ring-worn copy of Tapestry.2 I’m still comforted by “You’ve Got a Friend.”3 I still tear up to the chorus of “It’s Too Late.”4 My mother left my father and joined the women’s liberation movement in 1970; I was six and my sister was four. Like Carole King and her children, we had just moved to California from New York City and from that point on my sister and I were counterculturally co-parented. Mom came out as a lesbian and her lovers became a series of maternal 1

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figures modeling alternatives to the patriarchal nuclear families in which they had been raised. “She Who,” as I was to learn much later, was in fact a set of poems composed to be read aloud communally and collectively by lesbian feminist activist Judy Grahn, a founding member—along with her partner, the graphic artist Wendy Cadden—of the Gay Women’s Liberation Group, the Women’s Press Collective, and A Woman’s Place bookstore, located at the intersection of College and Broadway in North Oakland. Dad rapidly resettled with a free spirit from Florida, who at the time was living in a Berkeley commune called “Home Place.” I remember him telling me that of the three women he was sleeping with at the time, she was the only one who knew there was going to be a Revolution. That was apparently good enough, as they would move in together and have three more children in rapid succession. They married much later. Divorce in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s was the norm. Most of our parents were separated or divorced and we all shared in the disorders and discoveries that accompanied their attempts to negotiate the new domestic landscape. It was a time when my fifth-grade teacher could sleep with my best friend’s mother and take me and my sister to see an afternoon screening of the X-rated film Flesh Gordon (not on the same day). Our parents knew they didn’t want to raise us as they had been raised but they had few models upon which to base alternatives. For my mother, in particular, it was crucial that my sister and I be brought up aware of the sexism and stereotypes that had shaped her own childhood and adolescence as the child of Holocaust survivors (she was born in Danzig) in Modesto, California 2

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(she attended the high school where American Graffiti takes place). The goal was to raise a self-confident girl who wouldn’t be fucked over and a sensitive boy who wouldn’t fuck anybody over. Like Laurel Canyon to the south, the Bay Area was a countercultural cauldron of social and sexual experimentation. The 1960s had officially ended at Altamont—my parents had attended but left before the Stones came on because the vibe was so bad—and as the wave of utopian radicalism receded into recent memory, the activists who had survived settled down, had children, and tried to put at least some of their principles into practice. Civil Rights and Black Power had transformed the nomenclature of our geography: Grove Street was renamed Martin Luther King Jr. Way. and my elementary school was renamed Malcolm X. Sex education (called “Social Living”) began in sixth grade and continued every other year up through graduation. The first book we used, Show Me! A Picture Book of Sex for Children and Parents, has since been banned internationally as child pornography.5 All of my Social Living teachers were young, hip women entirely comfortable talking to teenagers with candor and sensitivity about sex, including contraception, masturbation, and homosexuality; they reminded me of my mother and stepmother. And Tapestry was in heavy rotation. It was in the air (both AM and FM) and on turntables all over the Bay Area. It pervaded both public and private space. Everyone heard it and sang it and bought it. And, unlike prior generations, we children of the counterculture shared our parents’ musical tastes. In the car and in the living room, we listened and sang 3

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along together. In the 1950s and 1960s, rock and roll had divided the generations; indeed, it was one of the main markers of the generation gap. In the 1970s, rock (as it was now called) was more likely to unite them. We all listened to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, to the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. And, of course, to Carole King. Tapestry opens with the piano, Carole King’s native instrument. It is the instrument of composition, the instrument for people who can read and write music. It is also a traditional American status symbol, as the ability to afford and architecturally accommodate an upright piano signifies that your family has made it to the middle class. Not surprisingly, it was “the first piece of furniture” in Sidney and Eugenia Klein’s semi-detached two-family home in Brooklyn.6 It was on this old upright that four-year-old Carol Klein received her first lessons from her mother, Genie. Later on, a studio upright would be the instrument on which the recently married Carole King composed hit songs with her new husband Gerry Goffin in the cramped cubicles of Aldon Music on 1650 Broadway in Manhattan. For Tapestry, King played a Steinway grand and, spurred partly by the album’s explosion into the national spotlight in 1971, the stately Steinway would become a resonant symbol of the female singer-songwriter, in contrast to the more masculine guitar of folk rock icons such as Bob Dylan (who couldn’t read music). The image of Carole King sitting and singing behind a massive grand piano with a halo of hair still stands as a synecdoche for the 1970s singer-songwriter sound. For me, the aggressive minor seventh chord that opens “I Feel the Earth Move” introduced an earthquake.7 We were in 4

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California after all, and rumor has it that there was in fact an earthquake on King’s birthday in the year of Tapestry’s release. But now I realize that the song is really about sex, about female desire, and indeed about female orgasm, which has been represented by earthquakes at least since Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and by thunderstorms at least since Kate Chopin’s “The Storm.”8 As Ann Powers eloquently affirms, the song is “a gospel shout-out to the feminist cause of orgasms for all.”9 And as Judy Kutulas notes, the rhythm mimics an orgasm, “building to a climax and then slowing down languidly.”10 The chords and melody complement this rise and fall as the relative minor of the opening chorus modulates into the dominant major seventh chords of the verse until, after the third and concluding iteration of the chorus, the sky comes tumbling down over and into a descending progression of minor and major sevenths that bears King’s inimitable musical signature. Carole King is the queen of chords; her brilliant progressions are the rich soil bed in which her elegant melodies grow, and this canonical intro confirms a clear compositional authority as the piano pounds alone for two measures before Charlie Larkey booms in with his octavebouncing bass line. The seamless accompaniment is fitting, as Larkey was King’s second husband (the two had been married on September 16, 1970, in a traditional Jewish wedding), and therefore presumably the one making the earth move, biographically speaking. Once Danny “Kootch” Kortchmar’s guitar starts to fill in around the vocals in the second chorus one can sense the comfort level of the entire ensemble, which had been rehearsing in King’s Laurel Canyon living room on 5

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Wonderland Avenue. It is the sound of Carole King, but also the sound of California which, unlike New York City, featured large houses with spacious living rooms where musicians could jam as loud as they wanted, whenever they wanted, and for as long as they wanted, a new experience for King, who was accustomed to cramped rehearsal rooms, production deadlines, and suburban subdivisions. But collective as the rehearsals were, the division of musical labor on the album is clear throughout, as Larkey, Kootch, and the other accompanists subtly and surely subordinate themselves to the piano and voice. And the voice asserts itself effortlessly. It is not an exceptional singing voice, but this is precisely what gives it a specifically sexual strength in this opening song and throughout the album. As countless listeners have testified, Carole King’s singing voice sounds intimate and familiar. Relatively thin in timbre and limited in range, it nevertheless communicates a unique combination of passion and professionalism in service to the song, whose lyrics are in turn always understandable and relatable. It is a voice that invites singing along, a voice that gets in your head and never leaves. It is also a gracious voice, one that has gladly ceded its place to the innumerable other voices who have covered King’s songs and made them their own. It is the voice of a friend. And “You’ve Got a Friend,” which opens side two, is a true musical masterpiece.11 Inextricably linked to (though not directly inspired by) James Taylor, who made a mega-hit out of it in the same year, the song epitomizes the relational forcefield of the entire album, which invites us in and then, in turn, insinuates itself into the pleasures and pains of our own 6

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personal lives. Taylor had been introduced to King by Kortchmar (a childhood friend and musical collaborator) at the Night Owl Café in Greenwich Village in 1967, and their lifelong platonic friendship embodies the spirit of the album and indeed of the times, which radically expanded the scope of what it meant to have a “relationship.” Theirs is a friendship based in and lived through music, a friendship that has persisted across many marriages and moves, both emotional and geographic. Taylor’s guitar is mixed way down on this track (and indeed throughout the album), subordinated not only to King’s voice and piano but also to the string ensemble; but in later live performances (some quite legendary), their intuitive musical understanding is audible and awe-inspiring. The magic of this song—which also modulates from a relative minor chord sequence, this time the opening verse which elegantly encapsulates the lonely desolation everyone feels at some point in their lives, to a dominant major chord sequence in the famous chorus which heralds the arrival of the friend on call in all seasons—is that it can represent any relationship on which you can rely, from friend to lover to family member. For me, it is as a mother that King sings, and many of the men who contributed to the album describe her as the “earth mother” of the studio, providing both cookies and comfort. But the song is about anyone you can count on. We all have, or want, a friend like this. One friend on whom King knew she could rely was producer Lou Adler, who was crucial to the success of Tapestry. When King arrived in Los Angeles in 1968, Adler was already one of the key architects of the emergent California sound and scene, both North and South, having 7

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recently produced “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” and “California Dreaming,” with its aching invocation of LA, both written by the Mamas and the Papas musical mastermind John Phillips.12 Adler had met Phillips through Barry McGuire, whose “Eve of Destruction” had been a huge hit for his label Dunhill Records.13 The Mamas and the Papas would in turn become Dunhill’s star act and cash cow. Can You Believe Your Eyes and Ears was in heavy rotation in both my houses, and the controversial cover photo of the Mamas and the Papas in a bathtub next to a toilet constitutes one of my earliest album cover memories, eerily indicating in retrospect the polymorphous perversity of the period. At the time, the plurality of the Mamas and the Papas seemed expansive and liberatory, signifying that family arrangements didn’t have to be restricted to the standard nuclear form. My sister and I moved back and forth between two alternative domestic arrangements: a lesbian household in which my mother’s partners constituted part of a larger community of radical women in the Bay Area and an ever-expanding second family which kept the spirit of the 1960s alive with May Day festivals, communal childcare, and back-to-theland adventures growing cannabis in Humboldt County. We had lots of mothers and fathers, and they were also friends. It was a new social frontier epitomized by the legendary Monterey Pop Festival that Adler co-produced with Phillips, literally bridging Northern and Southern California, launching the careers of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, and generating industry interest in the entire West Coast scene. 8

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Adler had been a hustler in the music industry from a young age, joining up with his friend Herb Alpert in the early 1960s to form Herb B. Lou Productions. The two co-wrote “What a Wonderful World” with Sam Cooke, with whom Adler would work closely (and live briefly) until his tragic untimely death.14 He met King in the early 1960s through her first employers Don Kirshner and Al Nevins when he went to New York in search of songs and returned to LA as manager of Aldon’s West Coast headquarters. One of the first things King did upon arriving on the West Coast was to look him up. Adler had recently sold his shares in Dunhill Records in order to start Ode as his personal label, allowing him to work more closely and exclusively on albums with artists of his choice. A quiet man with a calm authority in the studio and a cool confidence in public, Adler had a shrewd eye for talent and was committed to King. His job, as he saw it, was to realize her vision and he knew she had a vision with this album (he famously predicted to Kootch that it would be the Love Story of LPs).15 He also protected her privacy; when King told him that she didn’t want to do any publicity, he conducted his own informal set of interviews with her and sent the results out in response to the slew of requests from reporters that followed upon the album’s smash success. Ode was one of a number of companies making use of the A&M Recording facilities housed on the second story of Charlie Chaplin’s old Hollywood studio lot on 1416 N. La Brea Avenue in 1971. Joni Mitchell was making Blue for Reprise in Studio C, and the Carpenters were recording their eponymous album in Studio A.16 James Taylor, who was dating Mitchell at the time, was recording Mudslide Slim and 9

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the Blue Horizon (which would include his version of “You’ve Got a Friend”), with producer and manager Peter Asher at Crystal Sound a few blocks away;17 the cross fertilization between projects and personnel was generous and generative, and the collaborative atmosphere is illustrated by the many names that recur across the album credits. Indeed, singular as it is, Tapestry was also the product of a Laurel Canyon community whose creative apotheosis it would come to epitomize. In addition to Taylor and Mitchell, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Neil Young, and Graham Nash (collectively CSNY) would produce, collaboratively and separately, Déjà Vu (1970), If I Could Only Remember My Name (1971), Stephen Stills (1970), Songs for Beginners (1971), After the Gold Rush (1970) and Harvest (1972).18 As with King and Taylor, CSNY was a collaborative (if somewhat more fractious) singer-songwriter collective, touring together and playing on each other’s albums as an expression of a larger cultural scene. The liner notes on these albums are a veritable who’s who of Laurel Canyon, which was becoming the epicenter of a popular music industry that would soon explode into mainstream hegemony with chart shattering albums and blockbuster world tours by artists such as the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac in the mid-1970s. Tapestry was released on February 10, 1971.19 Its iconic gatefold cover, with Jim McCrary’s classic photo of the calmly confident and casually barefoot singer-songwriter comfortably seated with her tapestry in her lap and her cat Telemachus on a pillow in the window seat of her Laurel Canyon home, provides a perfect visual and verbal complement to the songs, whose lyrics are featured on the 10

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back in a practice only recently inaugurated by Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and then made de rigueur for the singer-songwriters of the 1970s. Countless fans—of all genders and ages and ethnicities—have read these lyrics as they listened to this album, etching them into our collective memory. Inside the gatefold is a photo of the tapestry itself, subtly signed with a curling c-shaped length of yarn and featuring a small country house and side building surrounded by trees and animals, a bucolic fantasy King would later rustically realize in the mountains of Idaho. If you look carefully, you can see the words “Thank You” unobtrusively stitched into the bottom right-hand corner; they are addressed to Adler, to whom King gave the tapestry as a token of her appreciation.20 It is flanked by photos of King and her musical collaborators, bassist Charles “Charlie” Larkey, guitarist Danny “Kootch” Kortchmar, drummers Russ Kunkel and Joel O’Brien, backup singers James Taylor and Joni Mitchell, engineer Hank Cicalo and producer Lou Adler. The inner sleeve is ostentatiously dominated by an enlarged image of Adler’s Ode records trademark, an enormous “O” spiraling into a smaller “D,” which in turn encircles a lowercase “e.” The trademark is designed to look like a spindle adaptor, felicitously signifying King’s career move from singles in the 1960s to albums in the 1970s (indeed on the center label it figures as the “0” in the number 70). The first draft of Tapestry’s history was promptly published on April 29 in Rolling Stone magazine, which had become the paper of record when it came to serious rock album reviews. Jon Landau opens by gushing that “it is an album of surpassing personal intimacy and musical accomplishment and a work 11

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infused with a sense of artistic purpose,” adding that “it is also easy to listen to and easy to enjoy,” anticipating the genre to which King’s music would eventually be relegated.21 Landau sees the theme of the album as “the search for lasting friendship, friendship that can be trusted, friendship that can be felt,” and he goes on to affirm that “ ‘You’ve Got A Friend’ is Carole’s most perfect new song.”22 According to Landau, friendship “remains both her outlook and her subject matter . . . No one has recently expressed its full range of feelings as well as Carole King and she has done it nowhere as finely as on Tapestry.”23 The claim is more socially and even politically radical than it might seem in retrospect. Tapestry transcends the relational constraints of traditional pop music, which generally relegates women to the narrow confines of heterosexual courtship. It radically expanded the relationship repertoire of the popular song to encompass friendships and familial ties. Landau concludes by affirming that Tapestry is both a collection of songs and an album. This music is not the product of someone adopting styles and then discarding them when they are no longer useful. Tapestry is the product of a musician with a specific point of view and the ability to express it through a personal style. It is an album that takes a stand: it doesn’t balance one cut against another, one style against another, one feeling against another.24 It is this exceptional unity of artist and album that makes Tapestry so remarkable and memorable. The two remain wedded to each other and to the historical moment from which they emerged. 12

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It was a moment marked not only by King’s emergence as a singer-songwriter but also as a performer. She had overcome her stage fright in a guest appearance with James Taylor the previous November at Doug Weston’s legendary Troubadour Club on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, when she was famously interrupted by a bomb scare. Fittingly, she made her headline debut at the same venue, with six sold-out shows in mid-May. She played unaccompanied, ratifying her autonomy as a singer-songwriter and solo performer. In attendance, according to Los Angeles Times legendary gossip columnist Joyce Haber, were Lou Adler, Michelle Phillips, Herb Alpert, Jerry Moss, Andy Williams, and Clive Davis. Haber was equally interested in who was absent, noting that Peggy Lipton sent flowers, Jack Nicholson was at Cannes, and Jon Voigt was in Georgia shooting Deliverance. Also there was LA Times music critic Robert Hilburn, who would have a front row seat to King’s meteoric rise in the early 1970s. In his review, he confirms that “the audience senses it has a friend in Miss King,” but he also expressed reservations, noting that, “since there is a narrow range to her voice, she could use the shading and texture that some instrumentation (at least bass and drums) can provide.”25 King appears to have agreed. At her next gig on June 18, a triumphant return to New York City for two sold-out shows at Carnegie Hall, she brought along some special friends. Starting, as usual, by herself with “I Feel the Earth Move,” and then, fittingly for a Brooklyn girl returning to her old stomping ground, “Home Again.”26 She is joined a few songs later by Larkey on bass for “Song of Long Ago” and then Kootch on guitar for “It’s Too Late,” which generates a swell of 13

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applause on the signature opening riff. This is the trio that jammed in her living room and you can feel the familiarity in Kootch’s solos, to which King playfully scats.27 And then, as a surprise special guest, James Taylor walks out for a duet on “You’ve Got a Friend” and the audience erupts.28 The full band then goes into an exquisite medley of “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,” “Some Kind of Wonderful,” and “Up on the Roof,” after which King closes it out alone with “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” making the unforgettable evening a unique iteration of Tapestry, with selected earlier and more recent songs sprinkled between performances of the first and last tracks on the album.29 King returned to California in August for two sold-out shows at the Greek Theater in Berkeley, this time accompanied by Larkey and saxophonist Curtis Amy, as well as a special guest appearance by her songwriting companion and erstwhile competitor Barry Mann. This time Hilburn had no reservations, declaring ecstatically: I Love Carole King. I really do. Not just for her music—though that is certainly reason enough—but for the uncompromising way she refused to assume any false airs or to surround herself with any show business pretentiousness Wednesday night at her Greek Theater opening.30 Hilburn goes on to note that, although King has rapidly become the “fashionable favorite of the chic Hollywood crowd,” her sudden fame has not caused “the slightest change in Miss King’s values. There were no fireworks, fancy gowns, 14

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multitude of dancers, show business trimmings, special dialog, trace of smugness or anything else to mar her opening.”31 The radical simplicity and sexual politics of King’s performance style in the early 1970s can still be seen in the performance for BBC4 that she recorded in London that summer, which was aired on October 6.32 King took her daughters with her to England, and her commitment to them was not lost on Geoffrey Cannon, who profiled her for The Guardian. Seeing the “two small beautiful girls” backstage he asks, “How can you concentrate on tour, with your kids as well?” to which she frankly responds, “I’d rather they were with me . . . It’s good for everyone.”33 Cannon’s profile and review indexes the rapidity of King’s rise on both sides of the Atlantic, and the solidity of her stature in the music press, as he affirms that she has the ability to make her best songs her most popular songs, because she has trained and honed her skill, of evoking our emotional circumstances. And, like Lennon/ McCartney, she consistently achieves this in songs which are paced delicately, whose music is stressed either with, or in apposition to, the lyrics, with exact control, and whose words have an intelligence which focuses the situation of the song, so we feel it as new.34 He also oddly notes that, “as she sang, her nose looked very like that of Bob Dylan, and her cheeks puffed out as his did years ago.”35 Together, the similes firmly situate King in the ranks of rock’s ruling elite. On the TV special, King opens alone with “I Feel the Earth Move,” casually attired in a pink peasant dress with her long 15

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wavy hair flowing freely. She then delivers a powerfully passionate and exceptionally erotic rendition of “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” before being joined by James Taylor and Charlie Larkey for “So Far Away” and “It’s Too Late,” and then Ralph Schuckett and Joel O’Brien for “Smackwater Jack.” She finishes off again on her own with an exquisite medley of “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” and “Up on the Roof.”36 King’s authority, both musical and sexual, in this performance is clearly illustrated by the structural subordination of the men in both time and space. They gradually appear and then disappear such that she begins and ends alone at the piano. All of them are seated like satellites around her, none of them sing, and their instrumental contributions are rigorously in service to the prominence of her voice and piano. And then, when she stands up at the end to thank the studio audience, you realize that she’s pregnant, and she’s been playing songs with words written by her ex-husband while being accompanied by her current husband, neither of whose last names she uses. It also appears that she’s not wearing a bra. Hilburn got the chance to elaborate on King’s radical lack of pretension in the profile he published on December 13 anointing her a “Times Woman of the Year” for her “Return to Simple Values.”37 The article pays particular attention to King’s role as a mother, explaining that while Tapestry “spent a record 15 weeks on top of the national sales chart and her concerts were consistent sellouts . . . she can still be seen in such nonsuperstar activities as baking cookies from time to time for those who help in her recording sessions and picking up her daughters after school in her white VW squareback.”38 16

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Hilburn then quotes photographer Jim McCrary, who claims that what impressed him most about King was her commitment to her daughters, who came home from school during the photo shoot for the album cover. According to McCrary, “when they entered the room, she turned all her attention to them. She didn’t just say hello or make them wait until we were through to talk to them. She instantly became a mother.”39 King’s devotion to her daughters defined her public image during this decade, especially insofar as they were the basis of her demand for privacy and her reluctance to tour. Indeed, King didn’t attend the Grammys in 1972 because she was still nursing her newborn third daughter, Molly Larkey. The 14th Annual Grammy Awards were broadcast live from Madison Square Garden and Tapestry won Album of the Year, having already sold over 10 million copies. King won for Best Female Pop Vocal performance, “It’s Too Late” won Record of the Year and “You’ve Got a Friend” won Song of the Year. James Taylor won Best Male Pop Vocal Performance for “You’ve Got a Friend,” and Quincy Jones won Best Instrumental Pop Performance for his rendition of “Smackwater Jack.”40 Hilburn called it “the biggest sweep by one artist in the major categories in the history of the NARAS competition.”41 Lou Adler, appropriately and tersely, accepted the awards in her stead. Carole King’s apotheosis at the Grammys marked the culmination of a year which music journalist David Hepworth calls “the annus mirabilis of the rock album.”42 In addition to Tapestry, 1971 saw the release of Carly Simon’s Anticipation, Curtis Mayfield’s Roots, David Bowie’s Hunky 17

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Dory, Don McLean’s American Pie, the Doors’ LA Woman, Janis Joplin’s Pearl, Jethro Tull’s Aqualung, John Lennon’s Imagine, Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV, Leonard Cohen’s Songs of Love and Hate, Linda Ronstadt’s eponymous debut, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, Paul McCartney’s Ram, Pink Floyd’s Meddle, Roberta Flack’s Quiet Fire, the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers, Van Morrison’s Tupelo Honey, and the Who’s Who’s Next. The rock album had come of age as a serious art form and an agent of cultural change. It is well worth noting the number of women on Hepworth’s list. The rise of rock had been a mostly male (and mostly white) affair, but in 1971 the demographics began to shift, with Carly Simon, Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, Roberta Flack, and others entering the expanding pantheon. And these women weren’t just singing; they were writing and producing and sequencing and orchestrating and, in many cases, designing album covers as well. The triumph of Tapestry at the Grammys in 1972 confirmed the degree to which the women’s liberation movement played a central role in “the year that rock exploded.”43 And 1972 was a banner year for second-wave feminism. It saw the passage of Title IX of the Education Amendments Act, which would ensure that Carole King’s daughters, and indeed all children in the United States, would grow up in a very different world from their parents in terms of gender equity and social justice. From high school athletics up through workplace politics, women and girls would have the legal and political leverage to demand equal rights. Also in that year, the Supreme Court upheld the right of unmarried couples to use birth control, ratifying the results of the sexual 18

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revolution and setting the stage for the swinging ’70s. And in 1972, the US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit decided in favor of the plaintiff in the landmark case of Charles E. Moritz v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, holding for the first time in US history that the Constitution does not permit discrimination on the basis of sex. Tapestry can be understood as a cultural analog to these legal and political landmarks. It confirmed that you could be both a professional musician and a devoted mother, both sexually autonomous and emotionally engaged. It heralded a new, more equitable, era for parents and their children.

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1 Maturity Tapestry was a declaration of independence for Carole King, marking the culmination of her break from the lucrative and already legendary collaboration she had with her ex-husband Gerry Goffin and the Brill Building assembly-line songwriting system within which they worked in the early 1960s. But the album also includes two songs which were products of that collaboration—“Will You Love Me Tomorrow” and “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman”—leading the listener back to her earlier career as one half of a successful songwriting team for Al Nevins and Don Kirshner’s Aldon music (founded in 1958), where, alongside legendary tunesmiths Neil Sedaka, Neil Diamond, and Paul Simon, and in friendly rivalry with Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, King and Goffin wrote a string of hits for other artists, including “Don’t Bring Me Down,” “Take Good Care of My Baby,” “Chains,” “One Fine Day,” “The Loco-Motion,” “I’m into Something Good” and “Up On the Roof,” among many other lesser-known songs that didn’t make the charts.44 All of these songs were singles geared toward AM radio and the lucrative teen market, and became collectively associated with the Brill Building, a few blocks down Broadway from Aldon, the 21

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first song publishing company dedicated exclusively to rock and roll. And Carol Klein’s youth coincided with the birth of rock and roll. She grew up listening to inaugural hits such as “Rocket 88” and “Rock around the Clock” on the radio, attending Alan Freed’s landmark integrated stage shows at the Brooklyn Paramount (where she saw the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, and Little Richard), and watching Elvis Presley’s first performances on The Ed Sullivan Show on her family’s black-and-white TV.45 Her discovery of rock and roll, she claims in her autobiography, coincided with her “increasing awareness of the lower half ” of her body, and that primal connection between puberty and backbeat would inform many of her hits with Goffin.46 But she had other early musical influences. Her mother began taking her to Broadway musicals in Manhattan when she was five, after which they would listen to original cast recordings on a portable record player, giving the future composer an early idea of how an album might cohere as a thematically linked series of songs that tell a story. Full cast recordings of shows such as Carousel, Oklahoma!, and South Pacific were in essence early iterations of the concept album that would be so central to the rise of rock music as an art form, and lucrative collaborations between industry professionals such as Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II illustrated the ways in which composers and lyricists could not only write hit songs but also create best-selling albums. She took piano lessons from an early age but, like her mother before her, she didn’t like them; instead she learned mostly by ear, copying songs from the radio and playing along with 22

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records. Gifted with relative pitch (the ability to play or sing a melodic interval after hearing a single note), she was a fast learner and was encouraged by both her parents. The household was not a happy one. Her parents, Sid and Genie, fought often and the friction between them was exacerbated by having to care for Carol’s severely disabled little brother, Richard, who was institutionalized at a young age. Carol was close to both parents, but they were growing apart from each other. They separated when she was eleven and eventually divorced, though her father stayed close to the family throughout Carol’s adolescence and the two eventually remarried. As an adult, King has attributed the conciliatory and comforting tenor of her lyrics to her peacemaking role as a daughter and her desire, common among children of divorce, for a stable domestic environment, a home. It is a desire almost inevitably frustrated by the tendency to repeat the divisions and discord that originally provoked it, as King’s four marriages and divorces attest. Whatever the tensions, her parents were supportive of her ambitions, and she was ambitious. Carol Klein had already changed her name to Carole King (shrewdly replacing the ethnic with the aristocratic and establishing the premise for many gender-bending headlines), formed a doo-wop band, conducted an orchestra, and recorded two songs for ABC-Paramount when she entered Queens College at the age of sixteen. There she met and made a few demos with another ambitious young musician named Paul Simon, but they were just friends and never wrote songs together. She wanted a boyfriend and needed a lyricist and she got both when she met Gerry Goffin, a night student three years her senior. 23

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At the time Goffin apparently wanted to write a musical play about the Beat Generation, but in the end he would write (or at least publish) nothing but song lyrics; other than a slew of obituaries when he died in 2014, very little has been published by or about him except in relation to King. Like her, he was a child of divorce, but if her childhood experiences made her long for a happy and stable family environment, he was clearly more restless and emotionally unstable. Nevertheless, Carol was smitten, and though her father, no longer living with the family but still very much present, strongly disapproved, Goffin frequently spent the night in the Klein household. She quickly became pregnant and the two were married in a traditional Jewish wedding ceremony in August 1959; she was seventeen and he was twenty. Initially, he got a job in a chemistry lab and they worked on songs in the evenings when the baby was asleep. It was Carole’s friend Neil Sedaka who hooked them up with Don Kirshner, the “man with the golden ear.”47 Kirshner had recently pitched the somewhat unlikely idea of a rockand-roll publishing company to industry veteran Al Nevins, twenty years his senior, and the fledgling company was always on the lookout for talented young songwriters. King already had both recommendations and bona fides, and Kirshner was quick to accommodate her needs, allowing her to bring her baby, along with a collapsible playpen, to the office, and requisitioning the secretaries as babysitters. Goffin continued to work his day job. The division of labor in the popular music industry of the time was strict, with songwriters composing for specific artists assigned by their employers, frequently on tight 24

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deadlines in imitation of prior hits. King and Goffin’s breakout hit, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” was written overnight and on assignment for Shirley Owens, lead singer for the all African American girl group the Shirelles, as a “sideways” version of the group’s 1960 hit, “Tonight’s the Night.”48 Owens initially turned it down as too country (i.e., too white), but she capitulated after King herself added an arrangement for strings (it was her first time orchestrating a song). In recording the lyrics, Owens ended up imitating King’s vocal style from the Aldon demo, and, thus, in King’s words, “trying to sound like me sounding like her,” a revealing example of how the division of duties in the Brill Building system fostered interracial collaboration, especially between Jewish American composers and African American performers.49 Indeed, one of the models for King and Goffin’s collaboration was Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, the legendary Jewish songwriting duo who wrote “Hound Dog” for Big Mama Thornton;50 Leiber and Stoller would in turn produce many of their hits for Aldon. “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” was released on Scepter Records, one of a string of successful labels founded by the legendary housewife turned record producer Florence Greenberg, and quickly rocketed to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in January 1961, a first for an all-female group, black or white. The song is a classic of the girl group era in terms of both sound and sense. Supported by King’s orchestrated string arrangement, it anticipates Phil Spector’s signature “wall of sound.” And with lyrics clearly implying premarital sex from the opening line (“Tonight you’re mine, completely”) just after FDA approval of the birth control pill, the song was 25

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suggestive without being explicit (though it was banned from some of the more prudish radio stations). It also presaged the unique sexual dynamics of King and Goffin’s collaboration, with King composing the music on piano and Goffin writing the lyrics from a female perspective, frequently with King herself as the model and singer on the demo. The song became a standard on 1960s radio, with subsequent versions by Brenda Lee (1961), Little Eva (1962), Dusty Springfield (1964), Cher (1966), Jackie DeShannon (1966), the Four Seasons (1968), and Linda Ronstadt (1970).51 The sheet music also sold briskly, hearkening back to the days when the family piano was as much a source of revenue for song publishing companies as AM radio airplay. And the covers continued after King’s own haunting re-appropriation on Tapestry, with versions by Roberta Flack (1972), Dionne Warwick (1983), Joe Walsh (1992), Bryan Ferry (1993), and Amy Winehouse (2004), taking it into the post-feminist era and testifying to its broad appeal across identities and genres. It remains an instantly recognizable hit on oldies stations.52 At eighteen, Carole King was little more than a girl herself when the song hit the charts, with “Boys,” by Luther Dixon and Wes Farrell, as the B-Side.53 And, like the girl groups she wrote for, she had little control over her own career and material. Rather, she worked in a cubicle for a corporation owned and operated by men who called women “girls” and she produced music that was associated with adolescent frivolity as opposed to high art. As King confirms in her autobiography, “we were chattel.”54 Though paid fairly well, the couple worked on salary and by assignment, with no ownership or control over the songs they wrote. They liked their bosses and their co-workers 26

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and appreciated their pay, but they also chaffed against their limitations, both cultural and economic. Goffin, in particular, was something of a highbrow whose intellectual pretensions would generate conflict, especially once Bob Dylan came on the scene, directly targeting the commercialism and frivolity of the Brill Building system. King may have been called a girl by most of the men she worked with at Aldon, but by the opening of the decade she was a grown woman by most measures. By 1962, she had two daughters and a full-time job. For the rest of the decade, she would have to juggle family and career, while also putting up with Goffin’s increasing drug abuse, mental instability, and serial infidelity, as he got swept up in the lively New York City swinging ’60s scene. Goffin became particularly erratic over the course of the decade, dropping LSD habitually, with consequent episodes of paranoia and panic, and then, after being diagnosed with schizophrenia, suffering from depression as a side effect of the Thorazine his doctors prescribed in large doses. At one point, King, at the age of twenty-three, had to provide permission for him to receive electro-shock therapy. Luckily, the couple could afford to have live-in help, and the girl they hired, herself only sixteen at the time, would also become a musical collaborator and pop star in her own right. “Little” Eva Boyd, as King and Goffin knew her, had musical aspirations of her own before she took up the position, and her singing and dancing around the house confirmed that she had marketable talent. Inspired by their babysitter, King and Goffin wrote “The Loco-Motion,” and invited Eva to sing on the demo.55 It sounded so good that Kirshner decided to release it as a single and it quickly rocketed to the top of both 27

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the Billboard Hot 100 and the Billboard R&B charts. “Little” Eva became a successful recording artist, and Goffin and King had to find a new babysitter. The entire story again attests to the complex interracial dynamics of the Brill Building system, uniquely inflected by the sexual synergy between Goffin and King. The couples’ commitment, both personal and professional, was severely tested shortly thereafter when Goffin openly had an affair and a child with Earl-Jean “Jeanie” McCrea of the African American girl group the Cookies, who was also married at the time. King and Goffin had written a number of songs for the Cookies, and the affair began when Goffin went on tour with the group while King stayed home with their two young daughters. Jeanie McCrea’s daughter by Goffin was born in July 1964, but King stuck with him, even co-writing “I’m into Something Good” especially for McCrea and the Cookies in that same year. It is painful to imagine King, young and married with children, composing music for lyrics such as “He’s everything I’ve been dreaming of,” knowing her husband had written them for a woman with whom he was having an affair.56 It could only have been an additional painful irony when the song, with the pronouns reversed, became a huge hit later that year for Herman’s Hermits. King understandably doesn’t mention this episode in her autobiography, but its emotional effects can be detected in many of the lyrics she began to compose once she finally divorced Goffin. The entire affair attests to the combination of tough professionalism and emotional vulnerability that informs King’s character and would come to constitute the appeal of her solo corpus, as well as her future relationship trajectory. 28

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Carole King and Gerry Goffin didn’t divorce until 1969 and they continued to enjoy success throughout most of the decade, even as Dylan and the British Invasion merged songwriting and performance, pushing the Brill Building sound and arrangement into the past and permanently transforming the structure of the popular music industry. King couldn’t have known it at the time, but she was laying the groundwork for her solo career, not only in terms of honing her songwriting chops but also, and crucially, in terms of establishing a kind of legacy songbook that she could sprinkle across her solo albums in the 1970s. In addition to the two classics on Tapestry, “Up on the Roof ” closes off side two of Writer, and “Some Kind of Wonderful” appears as the fourth track on side one of Music.57 These songs, which were also strategically deployed in her performance repertoire (frequently as medleys), carried King’s listeners, many of whom didn’t know of her prior career as a tunesmith, back to the 1960s of their youth, strengthening their emotional attachment to her albums. Musically speaking, they subtly reminded listeners of King’s deep roots in the R&B sound and its interracial origins in the antiquated Brill Building system. Don Kirshner’s savvy response to the demise of that system was to sell Aldon, along with King and Goffin’s contracts, to Screen Gems-Columbia music for $2 million, shifting his focus from New York City to Los Angeles, and developing synergies with the film and television industries, which were just beginning to discover the lucrative possibilities of the burgeoning youth counterculture. His most successful foray was surely the Monkees, the ersatz 29

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Beatles knock-off band who needed a continuous stream of singles for their surprisingly successful TV show, which ran from 1966 to 1968. King and Goffin wrote a number of songs for the Monkees, including “Take a Giant Step,” “Sweet Young Thing,” “Some Time in the Morning,” “Star Collector,” and, most notably, “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” which, in its pointed satire of suburban “status symbol land,” indicated Goffin’s increasing restlessness with the domestic arrangements in West Orange, New Jersey, where the couple had moved in 1965.58 King longed for the domestic stability promised by the subdivision, but Goffin chaffed, continuously tempted by the hedonistic opportunities calling from the big city across the Hudson River. The couple’s last collaboration for the Monkees was the “Porpoise Song,” which opened the band’s psychedelic swan song film, Head, directed by Bob Rafelson (and co-written by a young Jack Nicholson) and one of the inaugural productions of the New Hollywood that would burst into being in the 1970s alongside the Laurel Canyon scene. It also shows the clear influence of Dylan on Goffin’s lyrics, opening with “the clock in the sky/is pounding away” and concluding with “castles/And kings and things that go/With a life of style.” Increasingly, Goffin’s lyrics were invoking both the psychedelic surrealism and ironic cynicism characterized by the new lyrical sensibilities of the Album Era. The other song on Tapestry from King’s past dates to this later period in the couple’s collaboration as husband and wife. Written for Aretha Franklin in 1967, “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” in its very title marks the inception of the political and terminological transition from 30

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girl to woman which would both precipitate and reflect the cresting of feminism’s second wave in the late 1960s and early 1970s (and become the go-to epithet for King herself).59 The story of its genesis is an industry legend: King and Goffin were walking down Broadway when a huge limousine pulled up alongside them, the rear window slid down, and producer Jerry Wexler stuck his head out and said he needed a big hit for “Aretha” (no last name necessary), whom Atlantic has just acquired from Columbia, and he suggested they call it “A Natural Woman.” The couple, who needed a hit, promptly went home and wrote one. The song features some of Goffin’s most memorable turns of phrase, including the metaphorical “When my soul was in the lost and found, you came along to claim it.”60 It also once again epitomizes the cross-racial and cross-gender lines of identification that were lost with the rise of rock (now newly without the “roll”), which ironically (re)segregated the American music industry. King recorded the demo on the very next day and promptly sent it to Wexler, who loved it, as did Aretha herself. Released as a single in 1967 (with co-writing credit to Wexler for inspiring the title), the song rose to number eight on the Billboard Hot 100.61 In the next year, it was featured as the last track on the first side of Aretha: Lady Soul, which swept the Billboard Charts, hitting number one as a soul album, number two as a pop album, and number three as a jazz album, emphatically testifying to Aretha’s appeal across genre and race.62 The song became a performance staple for both Franklin and King, as well as an anthem for a generation of women. Like “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?,” “A Natural Woman” has been covered repeatedly, including by Peggy 31

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Lee (1969), Celine Dion (1995), and Mary J. Blige (1995), as well as being adapted into “A Natural Man” by George Benson (1968) and Rod Stewart (1974).63 It is entirely appropriate that it close out Tapestry, emphatically affirming King’s independent womanhood as a singer-songwriter, as well as her sisterhood with Aretha. If Tapestry marked a new autonomy for King, the move to Atlantic was a declaration of independence for Franklin. She had chaffed under the management at Columbia, who recognized her talent but couldn’t successfully find the right sound or producer. Atlantic provided her with the autonomy she required to become the “Queen of Soul.” As Wexler gushingly affirms in the liner notes to her brilliant 1967 debut with Atlantic, I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, “Aretha played on all the tunes in this outstanding collection, and each song and arranging conception began with Aretha singing to her own piano accompaniment,” not unlike Adler’s method with King on Tapestry.64 And its smash hits—which included the title song as well as “Respect” and “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man”—were themselves militant affirmations of maturity that resonated with women around the globe.65 Before King came out with Tapestry, Franklin was arranging full-blown albums that testified to her authority and autonomy as both a woman and a musician. And while the songs on these albums, for the most part, stayed within the conventional terms of heterosexual love, the confident consciousness and compositional control expressed through them helped to kick-start the women’s liberation movement. This trend began with Barbra Streisand, who insisted from 32

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the beginning of her contract with Columbia in 1962 that she have total creative control over her albums. Then, across race and genre, trailblazers such as Franklin, Janis Joplin, Loretta Lynn, Nina Simone, and many others, over the course of the 1960s began to embody an adult womanhood in stark contrast to the adolescence of the girl groups, in the themes of the songs, in the images and words on the albums, and in their control over their production. These women provided the soundtrack for second-wave feminism, inspiring activists and acolytes alike. Many of these artists, including King and Franklin, were also single mothers whose personal struggles for respect in their relations with men mirrored their professional struggles for independence in a male-dominated industry. Their personal lives mapped onto their professional careers which, in turn, inspired and galvanized the women who bought their records and shared in their struggles. At a time when most American men across the political and cultural spectrum casually called women “girls” (or “chicks” or “babes”) and assumed they occupied a subordinate position in both the family and the workplace, these artists not only sang as and for women, they aggressively injected the word “woman” into the popular lexicon. Indeed, the peak years of the women’s liberation movement coincide with the apogee of the long-playing album as an art form, and this is not an historical coincidence. Unlike the 45-rpm single, which was associated both economically and thematically with teenagers and adolescence, the 33-rpm album was associated with maturity and adulthood by both artists and audiences. Singles were the ephemeral product of 33

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AM radio; albums presented more perennial fare for FM stations and home stereo systems, which were becoming increasingly sophisticated and affordable. If singles were listened to on cheap portable turntables by teenagers in the bedrooms of their parents’ homes, albums were listened to on expensive stereo systems by adults in their living rooms. And while albums had initially appealed to a mostly male clientele, Tapestry confirmed that there was a large untapped market of independent women with money and musical sophistication who would, in the 1970s, be a central economic and cultural driver of the singer-songwriter sound. These albums were the soundtrack of the consciousness-raising generation, providing both emotional succor and relationship advice as women reevaluated their personal and professional associations with the men in their lives. As historian Judy Kutulas confirms, the synergy between the women’s liberation movement and the popular music industry at this time generated “a new market niche: the well-educated, young, single, white female consumer primed to make purchases partly predicated on ‘liberation’ as a concept.”66 The passage from the wistful and anxious “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” to the soaring affirmation of “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” on side two of Tapestry encapsulates the passage from girl to woman, both for King personally and for the generation of women to and for whom she wrote and sang. The former is interrogative, virginal, uncertain, crystalizing the tension and anticipation of a first sexual experience without specifying answer or outcome. The latter can be understood to voice that outcome as an ecstatic confirmation of sexual consummation (feeling 34

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“so good inside”) without guilt or regret. The inexperienced interrogative is supplanted by the confident declarative; adult female sexuality is enacted and affirmed. It is a passage that, for Carole King and her cohort, would be historically indexed by the triumph that is Tapestry.

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2 Trilogy In her autobiography, Carole King retrospectively represents her first three albums with Ode as a trilogy culminating in Tapestry, though they were not perceived as discrete components of a coherent narrative arc when they were produced. Indeed, at the time, it was more like she and the cohort she established alongside James Taylor were all making one massive album across multiple studios as the expression of a shared musical scene. Both perspectives are useful in understanding the genesis of Tapestry. On the one hand, King’s voice, both literally and figuratively, emerges with increasing clarity and power over the course of the three albums. On the other hand, a coherent sound and style, based in the session musicians shared by King and Taylor during this period, situates all three albums firmly in their time and place as part of a larger soft-rock singer-songwriter cultural scene. When King arrived in Southern California with her two young daughters in March 1968, she wasn’t looking to be a solo artist and she didn’t want to perform publicly. She still saw herself as a composer in need of a lyricist and she quickly found one in Toni Stern, a native Southern Californian 37

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already on contract with Screen Gems who also introduced King and her daughters to the lively scene and lovely climate of late-1960s Los Angeles, which was on the cusp of becoming an epicenter of the rock music industry. The possibility of forming a band arose when King reconnected romantically with Charlie Larkey, at the time the bass player for the legendary New York underground band The Fugs. Larkey had joined The Fugs the summer before with his old friend guitarist Danny Kortchmar and the two stayed with the band for a year before deciding to join the growing exodus to Los Angeles, where the Laurel Canyon scene was beginning to emerge in the wake of the smash success of The Byrds, who would put the region on the map as the seedbed of a new folk rock sound. Larkey, who had been in an on-again off-again affair with King in New York, moved in with her and began jamming in her living room with Kortchmar. King naturally insinuated herself into the sessions, and The City (named for New York, where all three grew up and met) was formed, mostly as a vehicle for King’s compositions. They approached Lou Adler, who was initially only interested in King, but she convinced him to sign the entire band, with the additional proviso that they would not go on tour. Now That Everything’s Been Said, the album that resulted, has the casual California groove of those Laurel Canyon jams (the songs were recorded live and the comfort level and close coordination amongst King, Larkey, and Kortchmar is already audible), and Lou Adler’s flawless ear is evident throughout, but the sense of casual collective cohesion is achieved at the price of King’s voice and piano, both of which are downplayed by engineer Eric Weinbang’s mix. Furthermore, though she 38

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composed the music for all the tracks except one and sings on all but another, she wrote none of the lyrics. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to conclude that the lyricists she collaborated with were channeling her breakup with Goffin, including Goffin himself, who had already written the lyrics for half the songs on the album before his mental and emotional disintegration made further collaboration temporarily impossible (the two were separated but not yet divorced, and they remained in contact during this difficult period). Indeed, the first two songs are Goffin–King collaborations that both chronicle and anticipate the terms of their relationship’s dissolution. The album opens with “Snow Queen,” a jazzy waltz that warns, “You may believe you’re a winner, but with her you will soon bite the dust,” lyrics that eerily presage the divergent trajectories their careers are about to take.67 On the next track,“Wasn’t Born to Follow,” the two reverse their traditional gender dynamics, with King ventriloquizing a breakup from a male point of view: “She may beg, she may plead [but] in the end she will surely know I wasn’t born to follow.”68 The chords are clearly King’s but the lyrics provide a rare insight into Goffin’s resistance to their domestic arrangements. Any doubt that this song is at least partly about their separation is laid to rest by the third track and title song, co-authored with Stern, which starts out up-tempo with, “Oh, now that everything’s been said, now that everything’s been done, how come you wanna leave me here?”69 Stern may have been writing with her ex-boyfriend, the New Hollywood production wunderkind Bert Schneider, in mind, but it’s not hard to feel King’s closeness to the topic throughout the album. 39

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Now That Everything’s Been Said, in other words, is a breakup album, with the collective buoyancy of the music playing off against the solitary mourning and melancholia expressed in most of the lyrics. The title track is followed by “Paradise Alley,” a song co-written with former Larkey bandmate and future Steely Dan member David Palmer, who would later collaborate with King again on Wrap Around Joy.70 Though the title hints at happiness, the song is in fact a semi-suicidal lament, with a chorus that cries, “I’m about to be drowned and my cup is so empty, just let me know when my time has come.”71 This mournful tune is followed by another gloomy Goffin–King collaboration, “A Man without a Dream.”72 This time Kortchmar sings, surely ventriloquizing Goffin’s sentiments with, “Losing you, I’ve become a man without a dream.”73 Side one concludes with another somber collaboration with Palmer, “Victim of Circumstance,” which laments, “I do have a prayer but don’t stand a chance, I’m just a victim of circumstance.”74 Side two continues the thematic through-line of loss and loneliness, with “Why Are You Leaving,” another collaboration with Stern, which opens, “You told me that you had to go,” and concludes by repeating the title lines six times, echoing emphatically.75 The next few songs, however, diverge from this thematic focus. “Lady,” another upbeat waltz with lyrics by Goffin, queries a prostitute about the wages of her profession; “My Sweet Home” covers a Margaret Allison gospel song with additional lyrics by Stern; “I Don’t Believe It,” another collaboration with Stern, is a sort of “You’re So Vain” address to a suitor who insists he’s sincere; and “That Sweet Old Roll” is a classic Goffin–King collaboration soon to 40

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be made into a hit by Blood, Sweat, and Tears.76 The concluding track, “All My Time,” can only be understood ironically in the context of the album’s larger thematic orientation.77 Yet another product of King and Goffin’s backlist, the song is a paean to fidelity and devotion, with a chorus that repeats, “All my time, all my time, all my time belongs to you,” and verses that extol the kind of unqualified commitment which is cast into question by the songs that precede it.78 Uneven both thematically and technically, Now That Everything’s Been Said never hit the charts, though the band had high expectations. As always with King, the songs are solid as musical compositions and encompass a variety of genres from jazz to gospel to pop, and the rhythm section is tight (the “Guest Drummer” was session man and Hal Blaine acolyte Jimmy Gordon, who would later appear on Pet Sounds), but the album as a whole lacks a center of gravity. The cover, which features Larkey, Kortchmar and King seated on the running board of an abandoned car, reflects this liability; Kootch sits in the center, flanked by Larkey to his right and King to his left, subtly misrepresenting the compositional dynamics of the trio. It didn’t help that King refused to promote the album and that Adler, according to the liner notes from Light in the Attic’s recent reissue (the original has been unavailable since the ’90s), was in the process of switching Ode’s parent company from Columbia to A&M, re-uniting with his old pal Herb Alpert and leaving the album in a kind of distribution limbo. King’s next album, and first solo effort, was Writer, recorded and released in Spring 1970. It emphatically introduces King as an autonomous artist. The cover photograph by Guy 41

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Webster—who had already established himself as an innovator with album designs for the Rolling Stones, The Byrds, and the Doors—features King standing alone in a psychedelic floral print dress against a stark black-and-white background of leafless trees, a rainbow arcing directly into her head. She looks calmly yet circumspectly out into the distance. The photo is centered in ample white space with only the words “Writer: Carole King” directly above it, the artist’s name more than twice as large as the album title. The back cover reinforces this focalization on King as the conceptual center of the album’s contents with a full-size black-and-white photo of King’s face in profile such that the album credits, track list, and grainy black-and-white band photos are literally in her head. Clearly, we are meant to understand that she is the writer in the title. And yet she wrote none of the lyrics on the album. Other than two collaborations with Stern, all of the lyrics are again by Goffin, who gets additional credit for mixing, even though he was in and out of mental breakdowns at this time, periodically turning up at King’s house desperately begging her to take him back. This emotional turmoil is evident in the lyrics, many of which continue the focus on loss and lamentation from Now That Everything’s Been Said. Also like that prior album, King’s piano is downplayed on Writer, but this time there’s a new instrument in the mix: a Moog synthesizer, only recently invented and introduced into popular music. The man playing the Moog is John Fischbach, who produced Writer at Crystal Sound Studios in Los Angeles, which he had only just launched with engineer Andrew Berliner (they would go on to produce Stevie Wonder’s 42

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groundbreaking Songs in the Key of Life). Fischbach had encouraged King to go solo (Adler was occupied with other projects), but, ironically, his Moog-saturated mix doesn’t always foreground her sound. Writer is as busy as Tapestry is sparse, and the contrast between Fischbach’s fancy effects and King’s simpler downhome style is simultaneously fascinating and frustrating. The first track, “Spaceship Races,” kicks off with a Kootch fanfare and closes with a long electric guitar solo.79 The lyrics dive deeply and directly into Goffin’s psychic disarray but, as is his trademark, they are written from King’s point of view. Thus, the first verse proclaims, “Baby, you’re so frazzled/ Spinnin’ around in a Busby swirl,” and the subsequent verses continue in this vein, clearly illustrating the influence of both Dylan and drugs.80 The chorus on “Spaceship Races” doing “laps around the sun” ambivalently evokes California psychedelia, closing with the singer’s promise to “take you home with me.”81 This ventriloquizing pattern persists across the album, providing additional insight into the complex ways in which Goffin and King’s unique collaboration was inflected by their breakup. Indeed, the very next song, “No Easy Way Down,” also feels like Goffin seeing himself through King’s eyes, opening slowly in three-quarter time with “Your toy balloon has sailed to the sky/But now it must fall to the ground,” followed by the haunting refrain of the title.82 Musically speaking, this is one of King’s most memorable compositions, with the refrain alternating its terminal chord between a resolving G major and a soaring A major, placing the chord sequence in complex contrast to the tenor of the lyrics (literally rising up on the 43

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word “down”). This song also features soulful gospel-inflected backup vocals by Abigale Haness (Kortchmar’s wife, co-founder of the short-lived band Jo Mama with Kootch and James Taylor, and future Rocky Horror Show cast member) and Delores Hall (member of the original cast for the Los Angeles run of Hair). And yet there is no piano. Rather, Fischbach’s Moog and Ralph Schuckett’s organ dominate the mix, adding an additional layer of cacophonic complexity as King’s voice struggles to rise above the swirl of electronic sound. With the next track, “Child of Mine,” we finally get just voice and piano, with a gentle bass line over the middle eight, anticipating both the sound and sense of Tapestry.83 The chorus is lovingly maternal and the third verse, with the lines “There’ll always be people to make it hard for a while, but you’ll change their heads when they see you smile” clearly anticipating the sentiments of “You’ve Got a Friend.”84 With “Child of Mine” we hear the King we will come to know and love, a voice of comfort and compassion, with the wise words of a parent who is also a friend. The fourth track, “Goin’ Back,” returns us to an earlier phase of King and Goffin’s collaboration. Written in 1966, it had already been recorded by Dusty Springfield and The Byrds.85 This is also the first track to feature James Taylor, on both acoustic guitar and backing vocals. Lyrically, the song provides an ironic counterpoint to the preceding track, as the tone throughout is nostalgic, with the singer longing to return “to those days when I was young enough to know the truth.”86 The next track, “To Love,” opens again with the Moog, with which Fischbach was clearly enamored.87 Nevertheless, the 44

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bouncy country-rock rhythms burst through, particularly on the catchy chorus, which provides King with the opportunity to reach some of her higher registers. Side one concludes with “What Have You Got to Lose,” another jazzy number co-written with Stern which yet again foregrounds guitar over piano.88 Like “To Love,” this one is upbeat in both tempo and tone, in contrast to the more melancholic numbers that precede. Side two opens with “Eventually,” one of Goffin’s few attempts at political commentary, which doubles as a retrospective on the 1960s, starting slow and ponderous on piano and guitar with, “Was a time I remember, hope flashed and went dim.”89 The refrain initially expresses a sort of “won’t get fooled again” retrospective wisdom with “And they told us they’d work it out, eventually,” but then modulates into a final aspirational “I hope we can work it out, eventually.”90 With the Moog yet again in the mix, the song marks a political and technological transition, relegating acoustic protest to the past. The next track, “Raspberry Jam,” with lyrics by Stern, then envisions the present as a sort of groovy domesticity.91 An upbeat waltz announcing, “Pieces of toast, raspberry jam, laid out on the breakfast table,” the song has a resolutely affirmative tenor.92 When the band breaks into a lengthy series of organ, guitar, and piano solos in the middle, the musical meaning of “jam” becomes clear, and the song seems to celebrate the incipient Laurel Canyon scene as a vision for the swinging ’70s. The following track, “Can’t You Be Real,” returns to the familiar theme of personal dissolution and loss, with “Long ago we had our dreams and that was all we needed, then all at 45

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once we got to see the cycles we repeated,” and the chorus once more feels like Goffin channeling King addressing him with “Baby, can’t you be real.”93 The song is slow and soulful, and again, inexplicably, the piano is mixed down behind the organ and guitar. The next number doubles down on this theme with a song composed back in 1966 and already recorded and released by Betty Everett and Dusty Springfield. “I Can’t Hear You No More” is an emphatically proto-feminist breakup song, opening with “Here you are again tellin’ me you’re sorry, baby, tellin’ me you wanna come back home.”94 Then, with lines such as “You ain’t a-reachin me” and “I can’t take no more of your jive,” King shows off her ability to cop the soulful vocal styles of Motown and Vee-Jay, adding cross-racial complexities to the gender ventriloquism built into the song.95 Side two winds up, like the album as a whole, looking both forward and backward from the historical perch of 1970. “Sweet Sweetheart,” like “Child of Mine,” powerfully anticipates “You’ve Got a Friend,” assuring its titular addressee, “You’re a sweet sweetheart, you’ve been a real good friend.”96 The final track is Goffin’s favorite of his many collaborations with King, “Up on the Roof,” originally made famous in 1963 by the Drifters.97 The song powerfully and poignantly evokes the architecture and culture of New York City, where the only escape from the noisy crowded streets, especially in the poorer neighborhoods, was on the sparsely populated roofscape that stretched for blocks across the top of tightly packed multistory walk-ups (apparently the roof had been a refuge for Goffin as a boy when his parents were fighting). But if the song lyrically evokes the personal past of King and Goffin, it also anticipates a Californian collaboration to come, opening with a melodic 46

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duet between King on piano and James Taylor on guitar. The two extend their contrapuntal communication in the musical interlude, illustrating King’s claim that playing with Taylor was like “playing with an extension of myself.”98 Speaking more generally, this song anticipates the degree to which King would be able to launch her solo career partly by re-interpreting songs she wrote in New York with Goffin in terms of her new musical collaborations in California. As with Now That Everything’s Been Said, the reception of Writer was a disappointment. It didn’t hit the charts or get prominent reviews until after Tapestry was released, indicating the degree to which that latter album would dominate King’s discography, relegating all her other albums to subordinate positions. Nevertheless, it marked the emergence of Carole King as a solo artist and formidable singer-songwriter, though lyrics continued to elude her. She was still ventriloquizing others, mostly Goffin, giving her output up to this point a kind of melancholic backward-looking tenor. Then, at some point in the summer of 1970, King finally began composing her own lyrics in her own voice. The catalyst was clearly James Taylor, who took her on the road with him that fall to promote Sweet Baby James.99 It was during that brief but consequential tour of college towns that King wrote “So Far Away,” with “Charlie in mind personally and James in mind musically.”100 Goffin was receding into the past as Larkey and Taylor emerged as companions and collaborators willing to subordinate their talents to hers. And this time, Lou Adler was available. The production of Tapestry was a simple affair. Adler wanted to capture the spare clean sound of King’s already 47

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legendary demos, which he had been sharing with his friends and colleagues for years. The idea from the beginning was to foreground King, her voice and piano; most tracks were recorded live and few overdubs were done. The atmosphere in Studio B was California casual, with candles and incense burning and (one imagines) the scent of cannabis in the air. King’s daughters dropped in regularly with their friends, creating a comfortable family atmosphere. But if the environment was casual and comfortable, the work ethic was serious and strict; King knew what she wanted and got it. The entire album was recorded in two weeks and cost about $26,000 (Adler’s accounts vary). Engineer Hank Cicalo, already an old studio hand who’d got his start recording Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Nat King Cole, among many others, for Capitol Records before honing his pop chops recording four hit records with the Monkees for Colgems, organized the musicians around King at the red Hamburg Steinway Grand in the center so she could see and direct everyone with a nod of the head and, thanks to a quilted piano cover of his own design, record her vocals live. According to critic Roy Trakin, Cicalo used “a variety of vacuum tube and ribbon microphones,” each tailored to the requirements of the source, from vocals to piano to strings to drums to reeds.101 With minimal equalization, the sound went directly through the preamps on A&M’s API console into a 16-track tape machine. And King found the Sel-Sync process, originally developed by Les Paul specifically for analog multitrack recording and refined over the ensuing years, invaluable for honing her background vocals, allowing her to “weave an aural tapestry out of sound waves.”102 48

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The process was entirely analog, with the sound first being recorded onto multitrack reel-to-reel tape and then cut into a master disk that, in turn, is used to make multiple “mothers” (discs with ridges instead of grooves), the inverse medium from which the vinyl record gets pressed. King humbly and eloquently summarizes the process: “My job was to create a song and perform it, and then watch in awe as highly skilled people used technology to convey music from microphones to tape, then to a master, a mother, and ultimately a vinyl disc with a label and a hole in the middle.”103 It seems somehow appropriate that the matrix in the middle of this resolutely analog process is called a “mother.” After consulting with King, Adler took the masters to Mexico for sequencing. In order to make an album into a work of art, sequencing is crucial, and Adler had learned from John Phillips how to coordinate the ends and beginnings of songs such that the order feels natural and necessary, the whole becoming more than the sum of its parts, thematically unified and, ideally, telling a story. According to Adler, he sequenced “for the person who was listening at home, alone.”104 The album tells an intimate, personal story, making the listener feel as though the voice is singing to them alone and in confidence. Tapestry is, first and foremost, an album, and the sequence of its songs has a logic whose thematic and musical cohesion is invoked by each individual song. The sides divide partly along compositional lines, as the first side, with the exception of “It’s Too Late,” features songs written recently and solely by King while the second side features mostly collaborations, including the two early classics with Goffin. The productive tension between autonomy and 49

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dependence that runs through most of the songs is recapitulated by the complementarity of the two sides, whose opening songs reinforce this thematic contrast. The tension is embodied in “I Feel the Earth Move,” which sets the tone of the first side and the entire album with a signature pull between the aggressive and assertive power of the piano and the more ambiguous agency expressed through the lyrics. The music makes it sound like the singer is making the earth move, but the lyrics indicate that it moves because of the allure of her (presumably male) lover. King’s voice encapsulates this tension between artistic agency and sexual passion, a dominant theme of the album as a whole, in which aesthetic independence is expressed through songs about emotional attachment, vulnerability, and need. Also immediately clear on this opening track is what we might call the harmonious subordination of King’s accompanists. O’Brien, Larkey, and Kootch support King seamlessly, working both underneath and around her voice and piano in stark contrast to the busy muddle of Writer. This is also the song with which King almost invariably began her live performances in the 1970s, usually alone on the stage, establishing a counterpoint between her aggressive assertiveness as a musician and her shy vulnerability as a performer. Next comes “So Far Away,” a slower and far more haunting song that Adler initially wanted to be the album’s first single.105 Like “You’ve Got a Friend,” “So Far Away” can apply to any and all emotional attachments. The unforgettable opening chorus, slipping slowly from Dmaj9 to D6, invokes both a personal absence and a general social condition, as the modern mobility of “anybody” modulates into the specific 50

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missing face. By the last verse the song merges these polarities into the particular liabilities of King’s profession, as she wistfully hopes that the road won’t come to own her. It is not surprising that this song would have particular resonance for King’s daughter Louise, who remembers listening to it when her mother went on tour. The song is also the first to feature Taylor on acoustic guitar, as well as Curtis Amy with a haunting flute solo. Indeed, the album slowly accretes accompanists over the course of side one and then subtracts them over the course of side two, thus beginning and ending with King alone. She would mirror this structure in performance, affirming her solitary authority as a woman while welcoming the support of her male accompanists. Ralph Schuckett comes in on electric piano for “It’s Too Late,” expanding the ensemble for the first single to be released from the album in April 1971.106 Breakups were in the air in the early 1970s, but Toni Stern’s lyrics inflect the inevitable sadness and loss with an optimistic tenor as the last verse famously foresees good times to come and good memories to share. Stern herself was a legendarily liberated native-born Los Angelina, a poet and painter and sexual adventurer who happily lived alone with her cat in Laurel Canyon. King had of course broken up with Goffin and remarried, but she would continue to be supportive of him for the rest of his life. Indeed, Goffin apparently felt that “It’s Too Late,” as well as “You’ve Got a Friend,” were written both for and about him. I can’t remember if the song evoked my own parents’ divorce at the time but in retrospect it fits insofar as the break was precipitated by my mother. Like Goffin and King, my parents remained on (relatively) good terms; both 51

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stayed in the Bay Area, were committed to their children and were (usually) supportive of each other’s new social and sexual arrangements. “It’s Too Late” heralded a new honesty in songs about sexual relationships, as the power of passion is poignantly complemented by the inevitability of its passing. Both Stern’s sexual autonomy and King’s serial monogamy are celebrated by this uniquely bittersweet song, which yet again modulates between melancholy minor chords in the verses and more optative, even triumphal, major sevenths for the echoic chorus which has, in turn, become the soundtrack for countless breakups ever since. The song hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and Adult Contemporary charts. The double-A side with “I Feel the Earth Move” was the number three Record of 1971. Thus, the first three songs on the first side of Tapestry blanketed the airwaves in that pivotal year in musical and cultural history. When you bought the album and put it on the turntable it already felt familiar. Track four is “Home Again,” a song that epitomizes the longing for domestic tranquility that characterizes Carole King’s life and lyrics.107 In both sound and sense it serves as something of a complement to “So Far Away,” with the singer lamenting her distance from “home,” a crucial term in King’s lyric vocabulary. The opening piano riff is melodically simple and emotionally aspirational in its rising structure, elegantly isolated before resolving into the first verse, accompanied only by Larkey’s unobtrusive bass line and Taylor’s quiet acoustic guitar accompaniment. Russ Kunkel’s drums don’t kick in until the central piano solo, a masterpiece of modest virtuosity alternating between tonic and subdominant based 52

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chord sequences. The chorus features an elegant modulation into the relative minor for the rising call that “snow is cold, rain is wet,” reinforcing the opening major chord as the warm musical “home” of the song, into which it quietly resolves.108 As Kutulas confirms, “when the female singer-songwriters sang about home, they meant homes very different from those of their mothers,” and in songs like this King was participating in this definitional realignment of domesticity.109 “Home” for King was where musicality and motherhood merged; men and marriage mattered but her name was on the deed and her primary commitment was to her daughters. And then there is “Beautiful,” a pop pick-me-up if there ever was one, and a song whose lyrical assurances anticipate the more intimate comforts of “You’ve Got a Friend.”110 Inspired by a New York City subway ride during which King saw her own feelings projected onto the faces of the other passengers, “Beautiful” is the more (pop) philosophical of the two, but the self-help clichés are redeemed by the sincerity of the singing voice and the elegance of the chord arrangements, which masterfully modulate into a minor key for the verses that introduce the song’s subway station inspiration. The many minor chords are then affectively offset by King’s jaunty keyboard accompaniment throughout. Side one closes out with “Way over Yonder,” an exquisitely orchestrated gospel number in three-quarter time that elevates the thematic power of the album from the social to the spiritual, and also reminds us of the remarkable range of King’s musical talents, as well as those of her accompanists, who are more prominently featured on this track, including the peerless backing vocals of Merry Clayton (of “Gimme 53

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Shelter” fame; Adler produced her solo album of the same name in that same year), the saxophone solo of Clayton’s husband Curtis Amy and a string quartet.111 In this song there is no “you,” implicit or explicit, to counterbalance the lyrical “I.” Rather, the singer invokes her solitary journey, musical and spiritual, to the “home” toward which the entire album strives, and which it has represented to so many listeners. It is a fitting place to pause before turning the record over. Side two opens with “You’ve Got a Friend,” a song whose musical complexity belies the relative simplicity of the lyrics.112 Here the “you” returns with poignance and power, confirming the relational center of gravity of the entire album. The instantly recognizable opening chord progression in G major immediately modulates into its relative minor for the opening verse, setting up a structural and musical opposition between melancholy solitude and the reassuring companionship promised by the chorus. And with this song we have a bridge which drops us down one whole note in key signature to emphasize both the reassurance (“ain’t it good to know?”) but also the exhortation (“don’t you let them”) that leads us back to the comfort of the chorus.113 This song was, of course, an immediate classic covered not only by James Taylor, whose version won the Grammy (and whose acoustic guitar is featured on this track), but also by Michael Jackson and Donny Hathaway. If there is a weak link on the album it is “Where You Lead,” whose jaunty rhythms clash against the gentle beat of the songs on either side and whose lyrics, written by Toni Stern, feel like a pale (and patriarchal) imitation of the preceding masterpiece.114 Thus, lines like “All you have to do is call my name/and I’ll be 54

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there on the next train” sound like a sing-songy parody of the side’s opening track.115 But in a sense the album needs a weak link, a reminder of the persistent pull of traditional gender dynamics in popular music and, in retrospect, an ironic anticipation of King’s future relationships with men. It is not surprising that this is the only track that gave Adler trouble with the sequencing, nor that King never performed it live until she revised and updated the lyrics for mother–daughter relations as the theme song for the Gilmore Girls. Next, we plunge into the past, for King’s truly beautiful rendition of the song that started it all. The contrast between her version of “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” and the original Shirelles’ single encapsulates not only King’s personal growth from girl to woman but also a larger historical shift in musical and cultural sensibilities. Most notably, we’ve slowed things down and cleaned them up. This is not a bouncy pop song but a serious love ballad. And there is a layer of harmonic and emotional depth provided by James Taylor and Joni Mitchell’s backing vocals (they are billed on the back cover, with light irony, as “The Mitchell/Taylor Boy-and-Girl Choir”), especially insofar as the couple would themselves break up soon after.116 The triple harmonies intertwining with King and Taylor’s contrapuntal piano and guitar reveal the musical sophistication beneath what once seemed a simple pop single. “Smackwater Jack,” the next track and the other single on the double-A side with “So Far Away,” is the only third-person song on Tapestry.117 An upbeat shuffle about a frontier outlaw, it provides something of a break in both the musical and thematic arc of the album. As such, it testifies to the range of 55

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King’s collaboration with Goffin, who wrote the lyrics to this resolutely West Coast tune. Merry Clayton’s backing vocals and Curtis Amy’s baritone saxophone support the storytelling swing. Things slow down again with “Tapestry,” a song which weaves the thematic through-line of the album into a fairy tale register of remarkable melancholy and darkness.118 Like “Where You Lead,” there is an ominousness to the lyrics, a gesture toward a masculine power that shadows the feminine force of the album’s compositional strength. The song is uniquely structured without a chorus or bridge, instead featuring only verses that modulate across multiple key signatures, as King sings of a mysterious male figure who starts as “a man of fortune, a drifter,” turns into a toad, and then reappears “dressed in black” to unravel her tapestry and “take her back” to a notably unspecified place.119 In retrospect, there is a haunting dramatic irony to this title song, which pulls against the more optative and sentimental tenor of the rest of the album, hinting that men may in fact threaten, as opposed to complement or encourage, the female singer’s creative powers. The album closes out with the magisterial authority of “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” affirming both its anchor in the past and its power in the present.120 Slower and cleaner than Aretha’s spectacular original, it appropriately features just voice and piano, reminding us of the heart and soul of the album we’ve just heard. Like the opening song, the resolute independence of the voice and piano pulls elegantly against the masculine agency represented in the lyrics. This is the same “you” that made the earth move and the sky come tumbling down (indeed Larkey provides quiet support on 56

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the upright string bass) but, as the parentheses in the title subtly indicate, the “you” is grammatically subordinate to the “I” of the singer to whom we have been listening throughout, and whose voice literally accompanies itself on this track, further reinforcing the complementarity between creative autonomy and sexual dependence the album promises. As the culmination of a trilogy, Tapestry stands as the final chapter in a musical portrait of the artist as a grown woman, no longer dependent on men for lyrics and no longer lost in the mix of male musicians. It marks Carole King’s triumphant emergence as a true singer-songwriter with a distinctive voice. As the expression of a musical scene, Tapestry marks the apogee of the singer-songwriter sound as a product and expression of Los Angeles in the 1970s, particularly as that sound crystallized in the work of a close cohort including James Taylor and Joni Mitchell. But ultimately and uniquely Tapestry stands alone. No album before or since has been able to speak so intimately to so many for so long. It both embodies and transcends its time.

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3 Celebrity Tapestry made Carole King into an international superstar, but she was a reluctant celebrity, and this reluctance contributed to the nature of her fame. Her insistence on maintaining her privacy ironically resulted in a public image closely associated with the private sphere. Furthermore, the definitions of and boundaries between public and private were undergoing transformation in the 1970s, and the relationship between King’s private life and public image reflected these developments for her fans. The sexual revolution had dramatically increased public discussion and display of erotic imagery and intimate experience while the second-wave feminist pronouncement that the personal is political compelled many to consider the degree to which sex and sexuality are suffused with patriarchal power dynamics. At the same time, white middle-class women like King were increasingly entering professional and political spheres, challenging the old-boy networks that had heretofore run the world. The result was for many a wholesale renegotiation of the relationship between intimate experience and public expression. Tapestry emerged as a soundtrack to these transformative experiences, and it made Carole King a star. 59

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Her coronation was nationally announced by Time Magazine on July 12, 1971, with a piece entitled “King as Queen?” situating her as first among equals in a group including Carly Simon, Rita Coolidge, and Linda Ronstadt.121 The profile opens with two paragraphs of backstory, introducing King as a “young Jewish girl from Brooklyn” who pioneered the sound of “uptown rhythm and blues” in New York City before arriving in Los Angeles and launching her solo career.122 While many of her fans were unaware of this interracially intertwined backstory, it was well-known to music journalists and almost always chronicled and commented upon in their profiles and reviews from this period. The fact that she was a Jewish American woman from Brooklyn who honed her style writing for and imitating African American vocalists informed her public image, even for those who were unaware of these crucial details. Changing her name to conceal her ethnic antecedents while adopting African American musical idioms placed King in an American tradition running back through Al Jolson and the vaudeville stage, simultaneously complicating and confirming her claims to authenticity. The article then emphasizes King’s “low musical profile” both professionally and personally, describing her taking the stage at Carnegie Hall “in an unpretentious print dress . . . looking somewhat frail and plaintive.”123 But this all changes when she sits down to play “I Feel the Earth Move,” and the profile eloquently registers the transformation that occurs once she begins “thumping out” the initial piano chords and “wail[ing]” the opening lines.124 The author of the article describes her voice as “a Canarsie twang” with “the deceptive thin strength of a whip antenna,” the first of many attempts to 60

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capture the unique combination of fragility and strength that characterizes both King’s singing style and public image.125 The profile concludes by noting that “she lets very little disturb the life she has arranged for herself in the Laurel Canyon house in Los Angeles where she tends to her nineand eleven-year-old daughters by her first marriage.”126 The article features Tapestry’s already ubiquitous cover photo with the tagline “Carole King and Friend at Home in LA.”127 As we have already seen, it was as a friend and mother that King presented herself on Tapestry, and the press cooperated in creating this syncretic image, which has remained remarkably stable over the course of her long career. Profiles inevitably mention her devotion to her daughters and commonly refer to her fans as “friends.” In a period of fractured families and rising divorce rates, King offered the radical image of stable domesticity and comfortable camaraderie without a father (Goffin and Larkey are mentioned in passing but almost never pictured or discussed in any detail in all the public profiles from this period). According to P. David Marshall, the popular music celebrity embodies authenticity: “How he or she expresses the emotionality of the music and his or her own inner emotions, feelings, and personality and how faithful the performer is to the intentions of the musical score are all part of how the individual performer is determined to be authentic.”128 As he elaborates, this authenticity was centrally (and ironically) informed for white celebrities by the imitation of African American performance styles and musical idioms, and further inflected by the home-based media platforms, first sheet music and then phonographs, through which audiences 61

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gained access to popular songs. You didn’t have to leave your house to listen to your favorite pop stars, and if anyone in your home played piano or guitar you could perform their songs yourself. Indeed, in the summer of 1971, Wallich’s Music City offered the sheet music for Tapestry free with an album purchase, confirming the degree to which the album tapped into this older and more participatory form of reception. As the writer and performer of accessible and playable songs, King perfectly embodied the domestic inflection of popular music celebrity in the United States. And while King, characteristically, maintained no formally organized fan club, acclaimed memoirist and biographer Sheila Weller can confirm in retrospect that “we who came of age in the late 1960s looked at [her] across . . . ‘the celebrity divide’ and saw ourselves.”129 While historian Judy Kutulas simply notes “women heard and saw a peer in King.”130 And she managed to be a rock star without being a sex symbol, an astonishing achievement for either gender in the industry of the time. King sang about sex and sexuality but her self-presentation had none of the glamour or allure of the classic movie star nor any of the frantic flamboyance of a figure like Janis Joplin; like her singer-songwriter cohort more generally, she sang as the subject, not the object, of sexual experience and desire. Nor did she suffer from the journalistic gossip mill like her colleagues Carly Simon and Joni Mitchell (the latter was patronizingly dubbed “Old Lady of the Year” by Rolling Stone in 1972, alongside a chart of her romantic relationships, both rumored and real). Carole King was celebrated as a “woman,” not a “lady” or a “girl,” and she rarely appeared in gossip columns, though her personal life was turbulent at times. 62

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Since she refused to be interviewed, did no publicity or promotion, and only toured selectively, her public image was shaped by a kind of economy of scarcity in which Jim McCrary’s photographic archive loomed large. Tapestry’s cover photo rapidly became ubiquitous, supplemented by a series of publicity shots of King in windows and living rooms. Some of these, like the Tapestry cover, are shot from within and others feature exteriors, framing King looking out the window. As a visual trope, windows are ambiguous, both inviting us in and keeping us out. It is as if McCrary is enabling us to vicariously occupy the boundary between King’s private and public personae, to see her looking out at us from a domestic interior to which we have no real access. McCrary’s photos for her follow-up albums Music (1971) and Rhymes and Reasons (1972) built on this domestic downhome feel.131 King was pregnant with her third daughter during the photo shoot for Music, and the album cover literally obscures while metaphorically emphasizing her condition, as she sits behind her now legendary and recently auctioned 1924 model “M” Steinway grand piano, smiling somewhat sheepishly, framed in the triangular space created by the raised lid and the massive cabinet, her slightly swollen calves extending below. Though the camera is positioned such that her belly is behind the piano, this only serves to emphasize the morphological similarities between the instrument’s curving cabinet and her hidden baby bulge, encouraging a symbolic association between songs and children. The association is reinforced in the center photo of the gatefold, this time taken from the side with a zither hanging on the wall behind her, its bulging shape clearing 63

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riffing off the curve of the piano’s lid, into which King casually leans, her belly again obscured, a German shepherd lying at her feet. This time Adler is thanked “again” in a handwritten musical staff in the lower left-hand corner below the credits. The photos are contradictory in their class associations. On the one hand, she is a professional musician, posing with the tools of her trade. On the other hand, she looks like a privileged aristocrat, posing with a grand piano in a luxurious atrium with a purebred dog. She is both working mother and woman of leisure, the contradictions smoothed over by the utopian possibility King’s image offered that women are no longer restricted by the practical and ideological limitations of patriarchy and the nuclear family. Like all of King’s subsequent albums, Music has been obscured by the triumph of Tapestry, and indeed Tim Crouse’s review in Rolling Stone anticipates the somewhat ironic fate of King’s ensuing career when he declares that “the new album doesn’t have its predecessor’s sure, unified sense of style.”132 It features the same session musicians, sequencing and sound, and it sold over a million copies and went Gold on the day it was released, joining Tapestry in the top ten. Nevertheless, it was the first indication that King would be working in the shadow of her landmark album for the rest of her life. Crouse elaborates that “Carole King is the most naturally, unaffectedly black of our white pop stars–black in her phrasing, in the feeling of the songs she composes, and in her deep love of rhythm and blues,” and indeed Music represents the beginning of King’s attempt to more directly engage the political possibilities of her interracial musical legacy.133 It 64

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opens with “Brother, Brother,” clearly written in response to Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On both lyrically and sonically.134 The opening chorus, “Oh, Brother, Brother, Brother, I know you been layin’ back a long time” both mimics and responds to the lyrics of Gaye’s title song, effectively bringing a new family member of color into King’s imaginary domestic sphere.135 And the song swings with the same upbeat groove, featuring King on electric piano and a soulful tenor sax solo by Curtis Amy. Indeed, many of the songs on this album feature brass and woodwind accompaniment, giving it the pop orchestral feel of Gaye’s Motown masterpiece. The next two tracks, “It’s Going to Take Some Time” and “Sweet Seasons,” are both collaborations with Stern and, heard in sequence, they feel thematically discordant with the opening song.136 “It’s Going to Take Some Time” is about getting over a breakup (by now a familiar King–Stern theme) and “Sweet Seasons” seems to be at least partly about the depredations of celebrity, featuring the lines “Just when you thought you had made it, all around the block people will talk,” and then anticipating King’s retreat from the spotlight with the lines, “I’ll build me a life in the open, a life in the country.”137 These are followed by “Some Kind of Wonderful,” originally written for the Drifters in 1961 and the only Goffin collaboration on the album.138 However, as if to register the musical changing of the guard, King performs it with James Taylor on guitar. The side concludes with “Surely,” a slow simple love song in three-quarter time and then “Carry Your Load,” another “You’ve Got a Friend”-type ballad which accrues political connotations when heard in tandem with the first track, opening as it does with the lines, “Meet me on the highway, 65

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meet me on the road; as long as you’ve got to travel, don’t you want someone to help you carry your load?”139 Side two opens with the title track, a jazzy jam again featuring a Curtis Amy saxophone solo, this time channeling John Coltrane’s modal meditations and thus further signaling the interracial and cross-genre range of King’s musical talents and sensibilities. This side is all solo compositions, with the exception of one collaboration with Stern, and there is a certain thematic thinness in the lyrics over and against the strength and skill of the composition and musicianship. Indeed, the mix itself foregrounds musicality, with Larkey’s bass lines and Taylor’s guitar afforded particular prominence alongside the many other session musicians and backup singers. Unfortunately, King’s piano and voice, so prominent and clear on Tapestry, occasionally get lost in the mix. The album concludes with “Back to California,” an upbeat shuffle which is more thematically complex.140 The chorus, “So, won’t you carry me back to California, I’ve been on the road too long” affirms that King now claims the West Coast as home, and there is some indication that the lyrics are about the loneliness and stress of touring; but the opening lines, “I’ve been feelin’ down in Atlanta, immobile in Alabama,” introduce a regional thematic which seems to refer to the Great Migration of African Americans to the North and West over the course of the twentieth century, triggering a demographic transformation which created the musical tradition that so deeply informs King’s sound and style.141 Ultimately, then, Music hangs together thematically as a homecoming album, in terms of King’s adopted California and her acceptance of her coronation as queen of the Laurel 66

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Canyon scene and, more generally and ambitiously, in terms of music itself as a kind of utopian space of interracial collaboration and equality. Indeed, the album credits conclude with “Use the Power. Register and Vote,” confirming the political engagement that shared music can effect.142 King’s next album, 1972’s Rhymes and Reasons, is more melancholy, clearly indicating the restlessness and discontent that would eventually drive her away from California, which was already transforming from the marijuana infused mellowness of the 1960s into the cocaine-fueled frenzy of the 1970s.143 The songs are downbeat not only in lyrical content but also in musical style, with fewer R&B rhythms and more gestures toward an easy listening, adult contemporary sound. There is also more orchestration, including a full string section, which fills out the sound, frequently at the expense of King’s voice and piano, both of which are considerably more subdued; there are no belting vocals and few piano solos. There are many strong backup musicians, but James Taylor is gone and his absence subtly inflects the loneliness of the lyrics. Rhymes and Reasons sold respectably, making it to number two on the Billboard Top 200. The album cover echoes the headshot on the back of Writer, with King in profile, framed such that her hair dominates, trailing off to the left and around the spine to the back cover. Inside the gatefold are two large color photos facing front, one with King smiling and one with her gazing downward, both again prominently featuring her center-parted long curly hair. The look is natural, relaxed, feminine but not erotic, and by this point resolutely familiar to all. And it bears a subtle but unmistakable ideological 67

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message in contrast to the beehives and elaborate up-dos of the 1960s. For both men and women of the era, long natural hair signified freedom and authenticity. For musical celebrities, from Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix through Carole King and Roberta Flack, it also provided perfect album-size facial framing, conveniently overlaying the head from which songs emerge onto the vinyl on which they are stored. Subtly but certainly, these headshots invite you into the singersongwriter’s personal experience, their thoughts and feelings, as authentic and natural as their hairstyles. And the thoughts and feelings on this album are sad. As Stephen Holden notes in his Rolling Stone review, “its spirit is uncharacteristically depressed and uncertain.”144 The first four songs on side one are all collaborations with Stern, and it would appear that both women were struggling with loneliness and anomie. Thus “Come Down Easy” laments, “I’ve been alone so long that I just don’t know what to do”; “My My She Cries” opens with “My, my she cries, everyone dies”; “Peace in the Valley” repeats a refrain of “I’m the selfish one” and then concludes that “Peace in the Valley just don’t come”; and “Feeling Sad Tonight” speaks for itself.145 By the time we get to the fifth track, “The First Day in August,” a love song co-written with Larkey (their only recorded compositional collaboration), it’s hard to take the tenderness at face value.146 Side one concludes with “Bitter with the Sweet,” which would seem to be the theme of the album.147 Side two is all solo compositions, with the exception of a new collaboration with Goffin. The tone remains melancholy throughout, and indeed, as Holden elaborates, “In the past, Carole has reached out to us, offering the strength of her 68

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musical confidence and humanistic faith. On Rhymes and Reasons, the tables are reversed, and the burden is ours to bear with her.”148 Thus, “Goodbye Don’t Mean I’m Gone” qualifies and inverts the message of “You’ve Got a Friend,” reminding us that “I’d like to see more of you but it’s all I can do to be a mother (my baby’s in one hand, I got a pen in the other),” a rare acknowledgment of her domestic and professional burdens.149 The next two songs, “Stand Behind Me” and “Gotta Get through Another Day” elaborate on this theme of melancholy weariness, while the song that follows, “I Think I Can Hear You,” finds King straining for spiritual sustenance, addressing a “you” that is “probably not a man or a woman or a time or a season but I’m here and life is dear and I guess that’s a good enough reason,” a notably tepid and uncertain reference to the album title.150 Holden sees the “you” in this song as her audience, and though the evidence feels thin to me, the album does interrogate the bond between singer and fan that feels so effortless and natural on Tapestry.151 And the one collaboration with Goffin, their first in years, is an unredeemable downer, with a chorus that laments, “I’m gonna wade in a cold rocky stream so I will be sure not to give a damn.”152 The album concludes with its one hit single, “Been to Canaan” which, with its chorus of “Been so long I can’t remember when I’ve been to Canaan and I want to go back again” seems to indicate that California is not working out for King anymore.153 Surely the burdens of celebrity, and the increasingly reckless hedonism of the Los Angeles music scene, were a factor. A turning point in King’s career comes with Fantasy (1973), her first album to meet with genuinely negative 69

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reviews.154 The reasons are informative and have as much to do with her public image as her musical talent. Fantasy is a concept album written entirely by King and the fantasy of the title is that she can become anyone of any race or gender through song. Insofar as her career had begun with writing songs for singers of different genders and races the conceit made sense, but in practice, given her prominent celebrity and the considerably different political climate of the early 1970s, it seemed naïve and contrived. Robert Christgau’s review conveniently if crankily sums up the contradictions: The title means she’s decided to step outside herself and write songs about imaginary situations, just like some Brill Building hack. A decision which seems to have brightened her music considerably. As for the situations themselves, well, what hath Walter Lippman wrought?155 The Lippman reference is notable, insofar as it specifically associates the political liabilities of King’s “fantasy” with the limits of American liberalism. King is a wealthy white West Coast liberal, Christgau seems to be saying, and this limits her ability to fully empathize with or appeal to oppressed minorities, even if their experiences had so intimately informed her musical style. Holden was equally harsh, opening his Rolling Stone review with the claim that Fantasy is King’s “first, and I hope last, ‘conceptual’ album.”156 Holden sees the liberal concept of the album as King speaking in “her institutional role as humanitarian empathist,” directly linking the political aspirations of the album to King’s emergence as a celebrity spokeswoman for the left wing of the Democratic party.157 70

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The album cover, designed by Chuck Beeson, for the first time has no photographs. Rather, it features an illustration by prolific and award-winning album and movie poster artist Drew Struzan of an urban street scene contained within the outline of a grand piano as seen from above, with the keys running along the bottom border; in the upper-right corner is a drawing of King’s face as a girl, freckled and slightly smiling. On the back side, the piano-shaped frame is flipped with King at the keyboard along the top, below which are a series of outlined black-and-white illustrations of her multiracial and coeducational collaborators, all of whom are thanked for their “inspiration, musicianship, and good feelings” in the credits below, concluding with Lou Adler, whose bearded smiling face appears alongside King’s beaming profile at the bottom of the illustration. The fantasy of Fantasy is summarized simply in the concluding lines of the opening introductory track: “In fantasy I can be black or white, a woman or a man.”158 And if the conceit can seem both naïve and entitled, I would argue that the album achieves musically what it strains to express lyrically. As a whole, the album feels, in both style and substance, like another response to What’s Going On, and indeed it prominently features session guitarist David T. Walker, who also played with Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and the Jackson Five, among many other soul and R&B acts. King also solicited the help of fusion jazz drummer Harvey Mason, pioneering female percussionist Bobbye Hall, and Temptations co-founder Eddie Kendricks, along with a multicultural crew of brass, woodwind, and strings, making for a truly diverse Sly and the Family Stone-style ensemble. 71

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And for this album the orchestration works, enhancing the collaborative feel without obscuring King’s piano and voice. The album swings, with groovy rhythms, satisfying solo breaks, and a well-sequenced mix of genres that cover the range of King’s musical influences. King took Fantasy on the road, performing it at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1973, with an eleven-piece backup band including David Walker, Bobbye Hall, George Bohanon, and Tom Scott. It was her first concert on the European continent, on the heels of her triumphant performance before one hundred thousand people in Central Park. She started out, alone as usual, with “I Feel the Earth Move,” followed by a small selection of tracks from Tapestry, then introduced the band, dressed incongruously (at Lou Adler’s suggestion) in St. Louis Blues hockey jerseys, with whom she played through Fantasy, concluding (again alone) with “You’ve Got a Friend” and “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” effectively bookending the latter with the former for a truly landmark reflection on and representation of her career up to that point. King returned to her roots, literally, with her 1975 project, Really Rosie, a collaboration with Maurice Sendak about a Brooklyn girl who imagines herself a movie star.159 The collaboration was issued both as an album with accompanying book and an animated television special. Since King voiced the title character, she in essence functions as both mother and daughter, roles which perfectly conformed to her public image. Christgau called it “her most exciting music since Tapestry,” and indeed Rosie rivals that album in the memories of those who grew up in the 1970s.160 If your mother listened 72

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to Tapestry, you probably remember Rosie. In a sense, the projects are bookends for the peak period of King’s stardom and success as a singer-songwriter. Indeed, King’s celebrity is as televisual as it is musical, insofar as it accommodates the “familiarity” associated with the television set which, of course, is a resolutely domestic medium. According to Marshall, televisual celebrities are more intimate and familiar than movie stars or rock stars. We see them in our homes and they speak directly to us out of a small screen that, significantly, invokes the shape of both windows and album covers. It should not surprise us that, as King’s albums generated less and less publicity, her televisual presence, buttressed by the increasingly nostalgic pull of Tapestry, persisted in a series of guest appearances, TV specials, and recorded concerts that have kept her in the public eye by way of private viewing. King would make two more albums before breaking with Adler and leaving California for Idaho. Wrap Around Joy continues with the jazzy orchestrated sound of Fantasy, this time with David Palmer returning as lyricist on all of the tracks.161 The album generated one hit—“Jazzman”—but the chemistry King had with Goffin and Stern is absent, giving the album a thin and perfunctory feel. And then Thoroughbred, in retrospect, feels like a farewell to the entire Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter scene, featuring prominent guest appearances by James Taylor, David Crosby, and Graham Nash, as well as new collaborations with Goffin.162 The cover design and photography by Chuck Besson features King riding a horse along a beach, facing the camera and smiling on the front and then in silhouette with the sun setting on the 73

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back. This picture replaces the Ode logo on the album’s center label, subtly indicating that King may be riding into the sunset. Few listen to or even remember Thoroughbred, but Stephen Holden called it King’s “finest album since Tapestry.”163 It’s one breakout single, “Only Love Is Real,” would be King’s last chart-topping song.164 Thoroughbred sold well and was certified Gold but times had changed, and what had been a revolutionary new soft-rock sound was now getting relegated to easy listening and adult contemporary radio formats. King’s life was changing as well. She and Charlie Larkey, the first in a series of handsome younger men whose earning power and creative talent were dwarfed by hers, amicably divorced in 1975. In 1976, King left Ode for Capitol Records, severing her relation with Adler, whom she would later sue for breach of contract (he was, in any case, shifting his focus to film, first co-producing The Rocky Horror Picture Show, then co-directing Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke and directing the cult hit Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains, in which he inserted a gratuitous dig at Tapestry as epitomizing easy listening for lonely housewives).165 Her next marriage, extensively documented both in her autobiography and in Sheila Weller’s Girls Like Us, was to a physically and emotionally abusive younger man who was both threatened by her celebrity and determined to use it as a launching pad for his own career. Nevertheless, Rick Evers, who died of a drug overdose in 1978, would propel King into the next stage of her life as a backwoods recluse and environmental activist in Idaho, which led to her continuing campaign as a vigorous proponent of the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act. 74

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Celebrity has its liabilities as well as its benefits, particularly for women. Most men resist and resent being the subordinate power in a monogamous couple, and King’s sometimes sordid saga of serial monogamy is sadly a fairly standard narrative arc for female rock stars. However, although she followed Evers to Idaho, it is important to clarify that there were other considerations driving her decision. For one thing, Los Angeles had become a much less mellow scene, saturated with big money and hard drugs, and King surely worried about her daughters getting seduced into the predatory groupie scene developing just down the road on Sunset Strip. Furthermore, getting “back to the land” was a generational trend for disaffected ex-hippies in the mid-1970s, a reverse migration from city to country in which my own parents participated when my father and stepmother bought into a communally owned 80-acre parcel in Southern Humboldt county on which they would build a house in the 1970s and to which they would retreat in the early 1980s; it had been known as “The Old Homestead” but we called it simply “The Land.” King herself would later represent the move to Idaho as a way to retain some of the utopian aspirations of the 1960s, and her willingness, indeed eagerness, to live in a desolate wilderness without electricity or indoor plumbing when she could afford to live in luxury in LA testifies to her steely determination and strong political conviction. In her extensive advocacy for liberal and environmental causes, King figures as an exemplar of David Shumway’s claim that the “Rock Star” emerged in the postwar era as a new form of celebrity with a resolutely political valence.166 If 75

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most movie stars of the classical Hollywood era tended to avoid political controversy with professionally curated public images, rock stars from Elvis onward embraced it, both symbolically in terms of the social and sexual freedom they modeled and, at least for some, more directly in terms of endorsing specific politicians and causes. From early on, King worked to leverage her stardom politically, starting with the ill-fated presidential campaign of George McGovern, when she appeared as one of “Four 4 McGovern” (the other three were Barbra Streisand, James Taylor, and Quincy Jones) at a benefit concert organized by Lou Adler and Warren Beatty in 1972. She has thrown her weight behind a series of democratic presidential candidates since then, including Gary Hart, John Kerry, and Barack Obama. And she has been a vigorous critic of the Trump administration. As a public figure, King is a member of the groundbreaking generational cohort that includes more resolutely political American women such as Gloria Steinem and Hillary Rodham Clinton, who modeled a new kind of womanhood made possible by the feminist insistence not only that the personal is political but also that the professional is political, insofar as the social and sexual transformations envisioned by the movement depended on women having independent careers and economic autonomy. King’s star image incorporated these political components, even as she herself, like many prominent women in the music industry, resisted being seen as a “feminist,” despite the fact that her own success was undeniably indebted to the women’s liberation movement. As Kutulas confirms, “part of the success of the female singer-songwriters was their ability to straddle the line 76

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between traditional womanliness and feminism; they were liberated but not adversarial.”167 This measured distance from feminism was crucial to King’s widespread acceptance, especially once the backlash kicked in. By the end of the 1970s, the term was already becoming vilified and associated with “man-hating,” even as women and girls continued to benefit from its pioneering cultural and legislative achievements. It is surely not incidental that King essentially vanished from the scene during this period, retreating to Idaho and avoiding many of her old friends and colleagues on both coasts. She continued to write and record music, but increasingly, it was her back catalogue that sold in legacy collections such as Her Greatest Hits: Songs of Long Ago (1978), Pearls: Songs of Goffin and King (1980), Natural Woman: The Ode Collection, 1968– 1976 (1994), Time Gone By (1994) and Super Hits (2000).168 When she returned to the spotlight she was a grandmotherly figure who could nostalgically invoke the spirit of the early 1970s while smoothing over the decades’ messier social and political conflicts and contradictions.

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4 Legacy In 1995, Lava Records issued Tapestry Revisited: A Tribute to Carole King, a CD of cover versions of all the songs on the album by a motley crew of performers, including a number of legitimate “heirs” to Carole King, such as Amy Grant, Faith Hill, and Celine Dion.169 But despite, and possibly even because of, the impressive variety of professional voices, the collection is uneven and unsatisfying, provoking a desire to hear the originals instead of appreciating the new interpretations. Ironically and appropriately, the woman who initially wrote songs exclusively for others went on to make an album in her own voice whose songs now seem to belong exclusively to her. Thus it was no surprise when, in April 2008, Sony BMG Entertainment released a two-CD Legacy Edition of Tapestry.170 Los Angeles music critic and Laurel Canyon chronicler Harvey Kubernik wrote the liner notes, which open with “If Jane Austen came back as a gutsy, guileful, Brooklyn girl, with a knack for a lyrical and musical hook, she’d be Carole King.”171 While King’s lyrics are not as literary as Austen’s prose, the comparison is apt insofar as both women anchor a female canon in a larger tradition dominated by 79

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men. Kubernik also reviewed the set for Goldmine, extolling that “the deluxe package finally realizes Lou Adler’s decadeslong dream concept, as it marries a newly remastered version of the classic 12-song album with a second CD containing previously unreleased, live piano-voice concert versions of songs from the album (in the same order).”172 Its release confirmed that Tapestry’s popularity would persist well into the twenty-first century, but not on CD, a format which by 2008 was already becoming superannuated. Rather, and as the second CD in the set indicated, aging boomers wanted to see and hear their idols live while they still had the chance. As both network radio play and CD purchases plummeted in the wake of the digital download and streaming revolution, comeback and reunion tours became one of the primary mechanisms whereby the profitability of classic rock could continue to be maximized. King had already started to exploit this niche with her “Living Room Tour” in 2005 and 2006. She wrote an opening song, “Welcome to My Living Room,” especially for the tour, and designed the set as an upscale domestic interior, with her grand piano off to the left and a set of couches, tables, and lamps off to the right.173 She was accompanied throughout by guitarist Rudy Guess and country songwriter Gary Burr who, like Larkey and Kootch, support her with subtle subordination, both filling out and foregrounding her songs. Percussion was provided by the audience, which can be heard obediently and enthusiastically clapping on cue to such songs as “Smackwater Jack.”174 The 2-CD set that followed was sold at Starbucks and advertised extensively on television; it was her highest charting release since 1977 and sold like hotcakes on Amazon.175 A DVD was released in 2007.176 80

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Then, in 2010, King reunited with James Taylor, Danny Kortchmar, Leland Sklar, and Russ Kunkel for the Troubadour Reunion Tour. The dates were announced on November 9, 2009, and by the end of January 2010, it had become the bestselling ticket event in the world, outselling the Super Bowl, according to ticketnews.com.177 The tour started in Melbourne and circled the globe from there, concluding in Los Angeles. The North American leg incorporated a nightclub-style stage design with VIP seats for audience members who could afford them to re-experience the intimacy of the original legendary venue. The tour grossed $58 million, generating a popular CD/DVD package and a PBS Television Special, spectacularly reintroducing both Taylor and King to their many fans of all ages.178 Then, on January 12, 2014, Beautiful: The Carole King Musical debuted at the Stephen Sondheim Theater in Manhattan.179 Written by award-winning screenwriter Douglas McGrath, directed by Broadway newcomer Marc Bruni, and featuring Jessie Mueller as Carole King, the show focuses on her early life and relationship with Goffin (played by Jake Epstein), including his infidelities, and concludes with the production of Tapestry. Most of the musical numbers are therefore from the Brill Building period of King’s career, including some by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, who are also characters in the play. Indeed, as originally written the show was about the two couples, but it was quickly realized at the first table reading that it had to include Tapestry. Thus, the opening musical medley starts with the instantly recognizable piano fanfare from “I Feel the Earth Move” and King’s first lines are cribbed from her famous Carnegie Hall 81

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performance, after which she plays “So Far Away,” before the story circles back to her childhood. McGrath also added a final scene in Los Angeles with Lou Adler. Tapestry, in other words, is featured as both context and culmination of the musical, which played through 2019, including extensive runs across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. In 2014, Jessie Mueller won the Tony Award for Best Actress, and in 2015 the soundtrack won a Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album. Beautiful, along with the publication of King’s autobiography A Natural Woman and Sheila Weller’s Girls like Us, canonized King’s life story and mapped it onto larger developments in the music industry and the culture at large.180 Many of her fans never knew the details of her life before and after Tapestry and this sometimes painful excavation of her past expanded and revitalized appreciation of her historic significance. She had been a star; now she was an icon. Then, on July 3, 2016, Carole King performed all the songs from Tapestry in sequence for the first time ever at the British Summer Concert series in Hyde Park, London.181 The performance was introduced with a lengthy video montage of vintage footage alternating with gushing testimonies from Tom Hanks, Elton John, Graham Nash, Lou Adler, Danny Kortchmar, James Taylor, David Crosby, Barry Mann, and Cynthia Weil, eloquently describing the enduring significance the album had for their personal and professional lives. And, based on the radiant faces in the multigenerational crowd featured in the many panning shots of the audience, that significance has been passed down from parents to children 82

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ever since the album’s release forty-five years earlier. Reinforcing the intergenerational significance of the album, King shares the stage with her daughter Louise Goffin for the revised and revitalized “Where You Lead.”182 Kootch is also on the stage to represent the original studio band. King herself looks happy and healthy at seventy-four, and her rapport with the audience is palpable. Everyone is singing along; the lyrics have become part of our collective unconscious. Tapestry is a popular music perennial; every time the industry introduces a new listening format, its sales swell. And the album itself is about growth, especially for mothers and daughters but also for anyone who needs a friend whose devotion is as unconditional as a parent. To illustrate its transcendent multigenerational power, it is worth quoting from a few of the many thousands of Instagram posts to King’s official website celebrating the forty-eighth anniversary of the album’s release. Many of them recollect how old they were when it came out, such as “You are my all-time favorite singer/songwriter/performer and Tapestry, released when I was twenty-one (clicking my heels!), remains my all-time favorite LP. I have it on vinyl, CD, mp3, iTunes, and iMusic, and it has brought joy into my life” or “I may have been five when the album came out but it sounds even Better the Older I get.” Others emphasize the familial context of their familiarity, such as “My mom introduced me to the tapestry album over 28 years ago. I had the cd and cassette tape growing up” or “I was seven years old, my uncle bought this album and it was my mom’s favorite. She would listen to this while cleaning the home on the weekend” or simply “This is My most beloved bond with my mother who showed me the 83

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album when I was thirteen!!!” One listener extols in Spanish: “Mi primer Álbum en formato LP. Lo llevaba bajo mis brazos de fiesta en fiesta. Fueron los mejores momentos de mi vida” (My first album in LP format. I took it with me from one party to another. They were the best moments of my life). As these quotes illustrate, the album is particularly meaningful as a bond between mothers and children. Only the Beatles have achieved this degree of cross-generational appeal, but most of us “grow out” of our Beatles phase while Tapestry endures, as can be seen from the many listeners who repurchase it when a new format is introduced. If the Beatles represent a sort of adolescent stage in the development of our musical tastes, Tapestry represents development itself, the process of growing up and coming to terms with the emotional challenges of adulthood, which never truly end. And while it poignantly reminds us of the reality of loss, it also comforts us with the wisdom gained from suffering, a wisdom which is always and inevitably shared. Friends and family are the people with whom we share that wisdom, and for the many moments in our lives when they aren’t around, we can always listen to Tapestry. Preferably on vinyl: Tapestry is an iconic reminder of the Album Era, of that relatively brief but eventful period between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s when longplaying records dominated the industry, deeply informing our relationship to popular music. Indeed, insofar as it indexes King’s graduation from pop singles to (soft) rock albums, Tapestry chronicles the inception of the album as a mature work of musical art in which songs are sequenced and covers are designed to tell a story, frequently about 84

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growing up. Indeed, rock music itself grew up during this era, and Tapestry was an icon of this new cultural maturity and seriousness. It is also an enduring symbol of and testimony to the women’s liberation movement with which it historically coincided. Tapestry legitimated women as creative subjects and economic agents in the popular music industry, inspiring and empowering innumerable subsequent careers, from Madonna to Mariah Carey to Lauryn Hill to Amy Winehouse. And, as one of the bestselling albums of all time, it proved that there was a robust and reliable market for these artists, that women were relevant as both producers and consumers of popular music. Just as second-wave feminism irreversibly if incompletely transformed personal and professional experience on a global scale, Tapestry revolutionized the music business, inaugurating a multigenerational and multicultural cohort of women producers, performers, and purchasers whose solidarity it continues to signify. And this significance has been part and parcel of a wholesale reappraisal of the female lifecycle. If, before Tapestry, mainstream understandings of female development focused on marriage and childrearing, girls and women can now envision the varieties of achievement and experience previously restricted to men. Indeed, if Tapestry helped to establish the word “woman” as a signifier of sexual maturity and economic agency, it also contributed to reinterpretations of the term “girl” from object to subject, as in riot grrrl and girl power. King’s awareness and ownership of this significance is evident in her 2007 composition, “Girl Power,” written in celebration of Mia Hamm’s Olympic Gold Medal and 85

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performed at the Women’s Singles Tennis Final of the 2007 US Open.183 A testament to Title IX, King has also periodically recirculated it online to remind people of the continuing pay gap in professional sports. From friendship to feminism, Tapestry’s legacy endures. If, on the one hand, it is very much of its time, it is also timeless. As a grassroots political movement, women’s liberation lasted only a few years, and as a musical movement, the singersongwriter sound lasted only slightly longer. Both were essentially “over” by 1975, after which Carole King retreated to the mountains of Idaho. But insofar as the struggle for equality continues and the need for love—both erotic and platonic—is never sated, Tapestry continues to find friends for whom its messages are both politically and emotionally relevant and resonant.

86

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I want to thank my friend and colleague Kembrew McLeod, who first brought me to the Experience Music Project (EMP) Pop Conference in Seattle, thereby turning me on to a vital conversation that includes not only music critics and English professors but also practicing musicians and industry professionals.184 Kembrew encouraged me to propose this volume, and graciously read multiple drafts, providing invaluable suggestions about both content and form. Ann Powers, who I met at the EMP Pop conference, graciously agreed to take the time from her busy schedule to read the manuscript. Her commentary and encouragement were invaluable. I also want to thank my colleague Steve Ungar for his useful comments on an early draft. This project benefitted from discussions with colleagues and students too numerous to name. I want to thank everyone who attended the annual meeting of the Post45 Collective at Wesleyan University in 2017 where I circulated some early ideas about the Album Era in general and Tapestry in particular.185 And I have to acknowledge all the students in my undergraduate Writing Rock Music class at the University of Iowa, who showed me how exciting and rewarding it can 87

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be to write about something you love instead of something you were assigned to read. I dedicate this book to my mother, Ruth Minka, but here I’d like to acknowledge two other mother-figures in my life. My stepmother, Carol VanSant, always treated my sister and me as her children, even after she and my dad had three more of their own. And my mom’s partner when I was growing up, Shoshana Levenberg, helped guide me through my adolescence, teaching me the crucial lesson that families can function just fine without fathers. I like to think that these multiple mothers, who had educations and careers and lived on equal terms with the men in their lives, played a role in my choice to enter a profession that was being transformed by feminism and laid the foundation for me to work with and learn from my mentors in graduate school, Janice Radway and Cathy Davidson, as well as my colleagues at Iowa, among them Dee Morris, Linda Bolton, Claire Sponsler, Judith Pascoe, Claire Fox, Mary Lou Emery, Florence Boos, and Barbara Eckstein, who for a time made our English department a model of gender equity across rank. These women were members and beneficiaries of Carole King’s pioneering generation, teaching us that the future of the American family didn’t have to be the same as its past. My mother’s current partner, Kathy Smith, has helped my current family realize this future, unreservedly embracing being a Nana to my daughters, Nora and Rebecca. I want to thank Tara Shochet, the mother of those daughters, and my partner in all things, including the composition of this book. And finally, I have to mention my three sisters, Julie, Katy, and Megan, and my grown-up daughter, Tessa; like their own mothers, and like Carole King, they are strong women who expect equality, and their support and friendship enriches and enables my writing. 88

Notes

1. Laura Nyro, “Stoney End” (Los Angeles: Ode, 1968). 2. Carole King, Tapestry (New York: ColGems–EMI Music, 1971). 3. Carole King, “You’ve Got a Friend” (New York: ColGems–EMI Music, 1971). 4. Carole King, “It’s Too Late” (New York: ColGems–EMI Music, 1971). 5. Will McBridge and Helga Fleischhauer-Hardt, Show Me! A Picture Book of Sex for Children and Parents (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975). 6. Carole King, A Natural Woman: A Memoir (New York: Grand Central, 2012), 13. 7. Carole King, “I Feel the Earth” (New York: ColGems–EMI Music, 1971). 8. Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940); and Kate Chopin, “The Storm” in the Complete Works of Kate Chopin, ed. Per Seyersted (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969). 9. Ann Powers, Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music (New York: Dey Street Books, 2017), 234.

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NOTES

10. Judy Kutulas, “ ‘That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be’: Baby Boomers, 1970s Songwriters, and Romantic Relationships,” Journal of American History 97, no. 3 (December 2010): 682–702. 11. King, “You’ve Got a Friend.” 12. John Philips, “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” (Los Angeles: Ode, 1966); and John Philips and Michelle Philips, “California Dreaming” (New York: Dunhill Records, 1965). 13. P. F. Sloan, “Eve of Destruction,” performed by Barry McGuire (New York: Dunhill Records, 1965). 14. Lou Adler, Herb Alpert, and Sam Cooke, “What a Wonderful World” (Los Angeles: Radio Recorders, 1960). 15. Erich Segal, Love Story (New York: New American Library); and Love Story, directed by Arthur Hiller (Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures). 16. Joni Mitchell, Blue (Los Angeles: A&M Records, 1971); and Carpenters, Carpenters (Los Angeles: A&M Records, 1971). 17. James Taylor, Mudslide Slim and the Blue Horizon (Los Angeles: Warner Bros., 1971). 18. David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash, Déjà Vu (New York: Atlantic Records, 1970); David Crosby, If I Could Only Remember My Name (New York: Atlantic Records, 1971); Stephen Stills, Stephen Stills (New York: Atlantic Records, 1970); Graham Nash, Songs for Beginners (New York: Atlantic Records, 1971); Neil Young, After the Gold Rush (New York: Reprise Records, 1970); and Neil Young, Harvest (New York: Reprise Records, 1972). 19. King, Tapestry. 20. King, Tapestry.

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21. Jon Landau, Tapestry [Album Review], Rolling Stone, April 29, 1971. Available online: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/ music-album-reviews/tapestry-184476/. 22. Landau, Tapestry [Album Review]. 23. Landau, Tapestry [Album Review]. 24. Landau, Tapestry [Album Review]. 25. Robert Hilburn, “Carole King’s New Role as Singer,” Los Angeles Times, May 22, 1971, A6. 26. Carole King, “I Feel the Earth” and “Home Again,” Carnegie Hall Concert, June 18, 1971. 27. Carole King, “Song of Long Ago” and “It’s Too Late,” Carnegie Hall Concert, June 18, 1971. 28. Carole King, “You’ve Got a Friend,” Carnegie Hall Concert, June 18, 1971. 29. Carole King, “Medley: Will You Love Me Tomorrow/Some Kind of Wonderful/Up on the Roof,” Carnegie Hall Concert, June 18, 1971. 30. Robert Hilburn, “Carole King in Greek Bow,” Los Angeles Times, 20 August 20, 1971, F1. 31. Hilburn, “Carole King in Greek Bow,” F1. 32. Carole King in Concert, BBC4, October 6, 1971. 33. Geoffrey Cannon, “It’s Never Too Late,” Guardian, July 24, 1971, 8. 34. Cannon, “It’s Never Too Late,” 8. 35. Cannon, “It’s Never Too Late,” 8. 36. Carole King in Concert, BBC4. 37. Robert Hilburn, “Carole King: Return to Simple Values,” Los Angeles Times, December 13, 1971, G1. 38. Hilburn, “Carole King: Return to Simple Values,” 16.

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39. Hilburn, “Carole King: Return to Simple Values,” 16. 40. See 14th Annual Grammy Awards, directed by Marty Pasetta (New York: Sullivan Productions, 1972). List of winners available online: https://www.grammy.com/grammys/ awards/14th-annual-grammy-awards-1971. 41. Robert Hilburn, “Carole King Sweeps Recording Honors with 4 Grammys,” Los Angeles Times, March 15, 1972, A3. 42. David Hepworth, Never a Dull Moment: 1971—The Year That Rock Exploded (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016), 287. 43. Hepworth, Never a Dull Moment, 287. 44. Gerry Goffin and Carole King, “Don’t Bring Me Down” (New York: Screen Gems–EMI Music, 1966); Gerry Goffin and Carole King, “Take Good Care of My Baby” (New York: Screen Gems–EMI Music, 1961); Gerry Goffin and Carole King, “Chains” (New York: Screen Gems–EMI Music, 1962); Gerry Goffin and Carole King, “One Fine Day” (New York: Screen Gems–EMI Music, 1962); Gerry Goffin and Carole King, “The Loco-Motion” (New York: Screen Gems–EMI Music, 1962); Gerry Goffin and Carole King, “I’m into Something Good” (New York: Screen Gems–EMI Music, 1964); and Gerry Goffin and Carole King, “Up On the Roof ” (New York: Screen Gems–EMI Music, 1962). 45. Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats, “Rocket 88” (Memphis: Memphis Recording Service, 1951); and Max C. Freedman and James E. Myers, “Rock around the Clock” (New York: Pythian Temple Studios, 1954). 46. King, A Natural Woman, 44. 47. Rich Podolsky, Don Kirshner, the Man with the Golden Ear: How He Changed the Face of Rock and Roll (Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard Books, 2012).

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48. Gerry Goffin and Carole King, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” (New York: Screen Gems–EMI Music, 1960); and Luther Dixon and Shirley Owens, “Tonight’s the Night” (New York: Bell Sound Studios, 1960). 49. King, A Natural Woman, 95. 50. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, “Hound Dog” (Los Angeles: Radio Recorders Annex, 1953). 51. Brenda Lee, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” (Nashville: Decca, 1961); Little Eva, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” (New York: Dimension, 1962); Dusty Springfield, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” (London: Olympic Studios, 1964); Cher, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” (Los Angeles: Gold Star Studios, 1966); Jackie DeShannon, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” (Hollywood, CA: Imperial, 1966); Four Seasons, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” (New York: Columbia Records, 1968); and Linda Ronstadt, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” (Los Angeles: Capitol Records, 1970). 52. Roberta Flack, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” (New York: Atlantic Records, 1972); Dionne Warwick, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” (New York: Artista, 1983); Joe Walsh, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” (Los Angeles: Epic, 1992); Bryan Ferry, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” (London: Virgin, 1993); and Amy Winehouse, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” (Santa Monica, CA: Geffen Records, 2004). 53. Luther Dixon and Wes Farrell, “Boys” (New York: Bell Sound Studios, 1960). 54. King, A Natural Woman, 128. 55. Goffin and King, “The Loco-Motion.” 56. Goffin and King, “I’m into Something Good.”

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57. Goffin and King, “Up on the Roof ”; and Gerry Goffin and Carole King, “Some Kind of Wonderful” (New York: Screen Gems–EMI Music, 1961). 58. Gerry Goffin and Carole King, “Take a Giant Step” (New York: Screen Gems–EMI Music, 1966); Michael Nesmith, Gerry Goffin, and Carole King “Sweet Young Thing” (New York: Screen Gems–EMI Music, 1966); Gerry Goffin and Carole King, “Some Time in the Morning” (New York: Screen Gems–EMI Music, 1966); Gerry Goffin and Carole King, “Star Collector” (New York: Screen Gems–EMI Music, 1967); and Gerry Goffin and Carole King, “Pleasant Valley Sunday” (New York: Screen Gems–EMI Music, 1967). 59. Gerry Goffin, Carole King, and Jerry Wrexler “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” (New York: Screen Gems–EMI Music, 1967). 60. Goffin, King, and Wrexler, “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.” 61. “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” Wikipedia, July 31, 2020. Available online: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ (You_Make_Me_Feel_Like)_A_Natural_Woman#Charts. 62. “Lady Soul,” Wikipedia, August 3, 2020. Available online: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Soul#Charts. 63. Peggy Lee, “A Natural Woman” (Los Angeles: Capitol Records, 1969); Celine Dion, “A Natural Woman” (New York: Atlantic Records, 1995); Mary J. Blige, “A Natural Woman” (New York: MCA Records, 1995); George Benson, “A Natural Man” (New York: A&R Studios, 1968); and Rod Stewart, “A Natural Man” (London: Morgan Studios, 1974). 64. Jerry Wrexler, liner notes for Aretha Franklin’s I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You (New York: Atlantic Records, 1967).

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65. Otis Reading, “Respect,” performed by Aretha Franklin (New York: Atlantic Records, 1967); and Chips Moman and Dan Penn, “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man,” performed by Aretha Franklin (New York: Atlantic Records, 1967). 66. Judy Kutulas, “ ‘You Probably Think This Song Is about You’: 1970s Women’s Music from Carole King to the Disco Divas,” in Disco Divas: Women and Popular Culture in the 1970s, ed. Sherrie A. Inness (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 174. 67. Gerry Goffin and Carole King, “Snow Queen” (New York: Screen Gems–EMI Music, 1966). 68. Gerry Goffin and Carole King, “Wasn’t Born to Follow” (New York: Screen Gems–EMI Music, 1968). 69. Carole King and Toni Stern, “Now That Everything’s Been Said” (New York: ColGems–EMI Music, 1968). 70. Carole King and David Palmer, “Paradise Alley” (New York: Screen Gems–EMI Music, 1968); and Carole King, Wrap around Joy (Los Angeles: Ode, 1974). 71. King and Palmer, “Paradise Alley.” 72. Gerry Goffin and Carole King, “A Man without a Dream” (New York: Screen Gems–EMI Music, 1966). 73. Goffin and King, “A Man without a Dream.” 74. Carole King and David Palmer, “Victim of Circumstance” (New York: Screen Gems–EMI Music, 1968). 75. Carole King and Toni Stern, “Why Are You Leaving” (New York: ColGems–EMI Music, 1968). 76. Gerry Goffin and Carole King, “Lady” (New York: Screen Gems–EMI Music, 1968); Carole King and Toni Stern, “My Sweet Home” (New York: ColGems–EMI Music, 1968); Carole

95

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King and Toni Stern, “I Don’t Believe It” (New York: ColGems–EMI Music, 1968); and Gerry Goffin and Carole King, “That Sweet Old Roll” (New York: ColGems–EMI Music, 1968). 77. Gerry Goffin and Carole King, “All My Time” (New York: Screen Gems–EMI Music, 1968). 78. Goffin and King, “All My Time.” 79. Gerry Goffin and Carole King, “Spaceship Races” (New York: Screen Gems–EMI Music, 1970). 80. Goffin and King, “Spaceship Races.” 81. Goffin and King, “Spaceship Races.” 82. Gerry Goffin and Carole King, “No Easy Way Down” (New York: Screen Gems–EMI Music, 1967). 83. Peter Duchin, “Child of Mine” (New York: Screen Gems–EMI Music, 1970). 84. Duchin, “Child of Mine.” 85. Gerry Goffin and Carole King, “Goin’ Back” (New York: Screen Gems–EMI Music, 1966). 86. Goffin and King, “Goin’ Back.” 87. Goffin and King, “Goin’ Back.” 88. Carole King and Toni Stern, “What Have You Got to Lose” (New York: Screen Gems–EMI Music, 1968). 89. Carole King, “Eventually” (New York: Screen Gems–EMI Music, 1970). 90. King, “Eventually.” 91. Carole King, “Raspberry Jam” (New York: ColGems–EMI Music, 1970). 92. King, “Raspberry Jam.”

96

NOTES

93. Carole King, “Can’t You Be Real” (New York: Screen Gems–EMI Music, 1970). 94. Carole King, “I Can’t Hear You No More” (New York: Screen Gems–EMI Music, 1966). 95. King, “I Can’t Hear You No More.” 96. Carole King, “Sweet Sweetheart” (New York: Screen Gems–EMI Music, 1970). 97. Goffin and King, “Up on the Roof.” 98. King, A Natural Woman, 199. 99. James Taylor, Sweet Baby James (Los Angeles: Sunset Sound Studios, 1970). 100. King, A Natural Woman, 201. 101. Roy Trakin, “Carole King: Tapestry,” Musician, July 1997, 31. 102. King, A Natural Woman, 218. 103. King, A Natural Woman, 214. 104. Quoted in Harvey Kubernik, Canyon of Dreams: The Magic and Music of Laurel Canyon (New York: Sterling, 2009). 105. Carole King, “So Far Away” (New York: ColGems–EMI Music, 1971). 106. Carole King, “It’s Too Late.” 107. Carole King, “Home Again” (New York: ColGems–EMI Music, 1971). 108. King, “Home Again.” 109. Kutulas, “You Probably Think This Song Is about You,” 182. 110. Carole King, “Beautiful” (New York: ColGems–EMI Music, 1971). 111. Carole King, “Way over Yonder” (New York: ColGems–EMI Music, 1971).

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112. King, “You’ve Got a Friend.” 113. King, “You’ve Got a Friend.” 114. Carole King and Toni Stern, “Where You Lead” (New York: ColGems–EMI Music, 1971). 115. King and Stern, “Where You Lead.” 116. See liner notes for Carole King’s Tapestry (New York: ColGems–EMI Music, 1971). 117. Gerry Goffin and Carole King, “Smackwater Jack” (New York: Screen Gems–EMI Music, 1971). 118. Carole King, “Tapestry” (New York: ColGems–EMI Music, 1971). 119. King, “Tapestry.” 120. Goffin, King, and Wrexler, “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.” 121. “King as Queen?,” Time Magazine, Vol. 98, no. 2, July 12, 1971. 122. “King as Queen?,” Time Magazine. 123. “King as Queen?,” Time Magazine. 124. “King as Queen?,” Time Magazine. 125. “King as Queen?,” Time Magazine. 126. “King as Queen?,” Time Magazine. 127. “King as Queen?,” Time Magazine. 128. David P. Marshall, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 150. 129. Shelia Weller, Girls like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon—and the Journey of a Generation (New York: Washington Square Press, 2008), xi.

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130. Kutulas, “ ‘That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be,’ 689. 131. Carole King, Music (Los Angeles: Ode/Epic, 1971); and Carole King, Rhymes and Reasons (Los Angeles: Ode/Epic, 1972). 132. Tim Crouse, Music [Album Review], Rolling Stone, January 20, 1972. Available online: https://www.rollingstone.com/ music/music-album-reviews/music-100978/. 133. Crouse, Music [Album Review], Rolling Stone. 134. Carole King, “Brother, Brother” (New York: ColGems–EMI Music, 1971); and Marvin Gaye, What’s Going On (Detroit, MI: Tamla, 1971). 135. King, “Brother, Brother.” 136. Carole King and Toni Stern, “It’s Going to Take Some Time” (New York: ColGems–EMI Music, 1971); and Carole King and Toni Stern, “Sweet Seasons” (New York: ColGems–EMI Music, 1971). 137. King and Stern, “Sweet Seasons.” 138. Goffin and King, “Some Kind of Wonderful.” 139. Carole King, “Surely” (New York: ColGems–EMI Music, 1971); and Carole King, “Carry Your Load” (New York: ColGems–EMI Music, 1971). 140. Carole King, “Back to California” (New York: ColGems–EMI Music, 1971). 141. King, “Back to California.” 142. See album credits for Carole King’s Music (Los Angeles: Ode/ Epic, 1971). 143. King, Rhymes and Reasons. 144. Stephen Holden, Rhymes and Reasons [Album Review], Rolling Stone, December 21, 1972. Available online: https://

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www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/ rhymes-reasons-183178/. 145. Carole King and Toni Stern, “Come down Easy” (New York: ColGems–EMI Music, 1972); Carole King and Toni Stern, “My My She Cries” (New York: ColGems–EMI Music, 1972); Carole King and Toni Stern, “Peace in the Valley” (New York: ColGems–EMI Music, 1972); and Carole King and Toni Stern, “Feeling Sad Tonight” (New York: ColGems–EMI Music, 1972). 146. Carole King and Charles Larkey, “The First Day in August” (New York: Screen Gems–EMI Music, 1972). 147. Carole King, “Bitter with the Sweet” (New York: Elorac Music, 1972). 148. Holden, Rhymes and Reasons [Album Review], Rolling Stone. 149. Carole King, “Goodbye Don’t Mean I’m Gone” (New York: ColGems–EMI Music, 1972). 150. Carole King, “Stand behind Me” (New York: Elorac Music, 1972); Carole King, “Gotta Get through Another Day” (New York: Elorac Music, 1972); and Carole King, “I Think I Can Hear You” (New York: Elorac Music, 1972). 151. Holden, Rhymes and Reasons [Album Review], Rolling Stone. 152. Gerry Goffin and Carole King, “Ferguson Road” (New York: Screen Gems–EMI Music, 1972). 153. Carole King, “Been to Canaan” (New York: ColGems–EMI Music, 1972). 154. Carole King, Fantasy (Los Angeles: Ode/Epic, 1973). 155. Robert Christgau, “Carole King” [Consumer Guide Reviews]. Available online: https://robertchristgau.com/get_artist. php?name=carole+king.

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156. Stephen Holden, Fantasy [Album Review], Rolling Stone, August 2, 1973. Available online: https://www.rollingstone. com/music/music-album-reviews/fantasy-2-251974/. 157. Holden, Fantasy [Album Review], Rolling Stone. 158. Carole King, “Fantasy Beginning” (New York: Elorac Music, 1973). 159. Carole King, Really Rosie (Los Angeles: Ode/Epic/Legacy, 1975). 160. Christgau, “Carole King” [Consumer Guide Reviews]. 161. King, Wrap around Joy. 162. Carole King, Thoroughbred (Los Angeles: Ode/Epic, 1975). 163. Stephen Holden, Thoroughbred [Album Review], Rolling Stone, March 26, 1976. Available online: https://www. rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/ thoroughbred-246491/. 164. Carole King, “Only Love Is Real” (New York: Elorac Music, 1976). 165. The Rocky Horror Picture Show, directed by Jim Sharman, produced by Lou Adler, John Goldstone, and Michael White (Los Angeles: Twentieth-Century Fox, 1975); Up in Smoke, directed by Lou Adler (Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures, 1978); and Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains, directed by Lou Adler (Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures, 1982). 166. David Shumway, Rock Star: The Making of Musical Icons from Elvis to Springsteen (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). 167. Kutulas, “You Probably Think This Song Is about You,” 184.

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168. Carole King, Her Greatest Hits: Songs of Long Ago (Los Angeles: Ode/Epic, 1978); Carole King, Pearls: Songs of Goffin and King (New York: Capitol Records, 1980); Carole King, Natural Woman: The Ode Collection, 1968–1976 (Los Angeles: Ode/Epic/Legacy, 1994); Carole King, Time Gone By (New York: Priority, 1994); and Carole King, Super Hits (Los Angeles: Ode/Epic/Legacy, 2000). 169. Various Artists, Tapestry Revisited: A Tribute to Carole King (Los Angeles: Lava Records, 1995). 170. Carole King, Tapestry: Legacy Edition, 2-CD (Los Angeles: Sony BMG Entertainment, 2008). 171. Harvey Kubernik, liner notes for Tapestry: Legacy Edition (Los Angeles: Sony BMG Entertainment, 2008). 172. Harvey Kubernik, “Weaving through Carole King’s Tapestry,” Goldmine, July 18, 2008, 38. 173. Carole King, “Welcome to My Living Room” (Los Angeles: Lushmole Music, 2004). 174. Goffin and King, “Smackwater Jack.” 175. Carole King, The Living Room Tour, 2-CD (Los Angeles: Rockingale Records, 2005). 176. Carole King: Welcome to My Living Room, DVD (Los Angeles: Rockingale Records, 2007). 177. “Top Combined Events,” TicketNews, January 25, 2010. Available online: https://web.archive.org/ web/20100130002824/http://www.ticketnews.com/top_ combined_events_rankings_2010_1_24. 178. Carole King and James Taylor, Live at the Troubadour (Los Angeles: Hear Music, 2010); and Carole King: Natural Woman, PBS American Masters, February 19, 2016.

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179. Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, by Douglas McGrath (New York City: Stephen Sondheim Theater, January 12, 2014). 180. Beautiful: The Carole King Musical; King, A Natural Woman; and Weller, Girls like Us. 181. Carole King, Tapestry: Live in Hyde Park (Los Angeles: Sony Legacy/Rockingale Records, 2017). 182. King and Stern, “Where You Lead.” 183. Carole King, “Girl Power” (Los Angeles: Lushmole Music, 1999). 184. Experience Music Project (EMP) Pop Conference, “Sign O’ the Times: Music and Politics,” EMP Museum, Seattle, Washington, April 20–23, 2017. 185. Post45 Collective, hosted by Sean McCann, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 2017.

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Adler, Lou. “A Note from the Producer.” Liner Notes for A Natural Woman: The Ode Collection, 1968–1976. Los Angeles: Ode/ Epic/Legacy, 1994. Cannon, Geoffrey. “It’s Never Too Late.” Guardian, July 24, 1971, 8. Carole King in Concert. BBC4, October 6, 1971. Carole King Live at Montreux 1973. New York: Eagle Rock Entertainment, 2019. Carole King: Natural Woman. PBS American Masters, February 19, 2016. Carole King: One to One, directed by Scott Garen. Los Angeles: Garen/Albrecht Productions, 1982. “Carole King’s Tapestry over 5,000,000 in Sales.” Variety, October 6, 1971, 48. Carole King: Welcome to My Living Room [DVD]. Los Angeles: Rockingale Records, 2007. Christgau, Robert. “Carole King” [Consumer Guide Reviews]. Available online: https://robertchristgau.com/get_artist. php?name=carole+king. Crouse, Tim. Music [Album Review]. Rolling Stone, January 20, 1972. Available online: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/ music-album-reviews/music-100978/.

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Doyle, Jack. “Goffin and King, Love & Music: 1950s–2010s.” PopHistoryDig, May 24, 2018. Available online: https://www. pophistorydig.com/topics/goffin-king-1960s/. Farber, Jim. Liner Notes for Carole King Live at Montreux 1973. New York: Eagle Rock Entertainment, 2019. Goffin, Louise, and Paul Zollo. The Great Song Adventure. Podcast Episodes 21–25. Available online: http://thegreatsongadventure. com/. Goldman, Albert. “A Season Saved by the Belles: Pop’s Debt to Women.” Life Magazine, 71, December 31, 1971. Haber, Joyce. “Fans Turn Out for Carole King.” Los Angeles Times, May 26, 1971, H15. Haber, Joyce. “Carole King: Even Icemen Out in Cold.” Los Angeles Times, August 12, 1971, H11. Heckman, David. “Rock 1970: Year of the Woman?” New York Times, June 6, 1971, D22. Hepworth, David. Never a Dull Moment: 1971—The Year That Rock Exploded. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016. Hilburn, Robert. “Carole King’s New Role as Singer.” Los Angeles Times, May 22, 1971, A6. Hilburn, Robert. “Carole King in Greek Bow.” Los Angeles Times, 20 August 20, 1971, F1. Hilburn, Robert. “King, Goodman Album Rate Nods.” Los Angeles Times, December 5, 1971, Z54. Hilburn, Robert. “Carole King: Return to Simple Values.” Los Angeles Times, December 13, 1971, G1. Hilburn, Robert. “Carole King Sweeps Recording Honors with 4 Grammys.” Los Angeles Times, March 15, 1972, A3. Hilburn, Robert. “The Return of Carole King.” Los Angeles Times, April 7, 1973, B5. Hilburn, Robert. “Another Winner for Carole King.” Los Angeles Times, October 8, 1974, E7.

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Hochman, Steve. Liner Notes for Now That Everything’s Been Said. Seattle, WA: Light in the Attic Records, 2015. Holden, Stephen. Rhymes and Reasons [Album Review]. Rolling Stone, December 21, 1972. Available online: https://www. rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/rhymesreasons-183178/. Holden, Stephen. Fantasy [Album Review]. Rolling Stone, August 2, 1973. Available online: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/ music-album-reviews/fantasy-2-251974/. Holden, Stephen. Thoroughbred [Album Review]. Rolling Stone, March 26, 1976. Available online: https://www.rollingstone. com/music/music-album-reviews/thoroughbred-246491/. Hoskins, Barney. Waiting for the Sun: A Rock and Roll History of Los Angeles. New York: Backbeat Books, 2003. “King as Queen?” Time Magazine, Vol. 98, no. 2, July 12, 1971. King, Carole. A Natural Woman: A Memoir. New York: Grand Central, 2012. Kubernik, Harvey. Liner Notes for Tapestry: Legacy Edition. Los Angeles: Sony BMG Entertainment, 2008. Kubernik, Harvey. “Weaving through Carole King’s Tapestry.” Goldmine, July 18, 2008, 38–40. Kubernik, Harvey. Canyon of Dreams: The Magic and Music of Laurel Canyon. New York: Sterling, 2009. Kutulas, Judy. “ ‘You Probably Think This Song Is about You’: 1970s Women’s Music from Carole King to the Disco Divas.” In Disco Divas: Women and Popular Culture in the 1970s, edited by Sherrie A. Inness, 172–93. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Kutulas, Judy. “ ‘That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be’: Baby Boomers, 1970s Songwriters, and Romantic Relationships.” Journal of American History 97, no. 3 (December 2010): 682–702.

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Landau, Jon. Tapestry [Album Review]. Rolling Stone, April 29, 1971. Available online: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/ music-album-reviews/tapestry-184476/. Lichtenstein, Grace. “Carole King Steps into the Limelight.” New York Times, November 29, 1971, 149. Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Miller, Edwin. “The Singer Is the Song.” Seventeen Magazine 32, November 1973, 72. Patrick, Mick. Liner Notes for Lou Adler: A Musical History. London: Ace Records, 2014. Perone, J. Carole King: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. Podolsky, Rich. Don Kirshner: The Man with the Golden Ear. New York: Hal Leonard, 2012. Powers, Ann. Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music. New York: Dey Street Books, 2017. Shumway, David. Rock Star: The Making of Musical Icons from Elvis to Springsteen. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Tapestry: Live in Hyde Park, directed by Viner, Marcus. London: Sony Music Entertainment, 2017. Thomson, Graeme. “The Earth Moves . . .” Uncut, July 2016, 18–24. Trakin, Roy. “Carole King: Tapestry.” Musician, July 1997, 31. Troubadours, directed by Morgan Neville. Los Angeles: Tremolo Productions, 2011. Walker, Michael. Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock-and-Roll’s Legendary Neighborhood. New York: Faber and Faber, 2006. Weller, Sheila. Girls like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon—and the Journey of a Generation. New York: Washington Square Press, 2008.

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Wexler, Jerry. Liner Notes for I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You. New York: Atlantic Records, 1967. Wilson, John. “Two Full Houses Hear Carole King.” New York Times, June 20, 1971, 49. Windeler, Robert. “Carole King: ‘You Can Get to Know Me through My Music.’ ” Stereo Review 30, no. 5 (May 1973): 76–77. You’ve Got a Friend: The Carole King Story. BBC4, June 6, 2014.

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Also available in the series

1. Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes

9. Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott

2. Love’s Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans

10. Prince’s Sign “ō” the Times by Michaelangelo Matos

3. Neil Young’s Harvest by Sam Inglis

11. The Velvet Underground’s The Velvet Underground & Nico by Joe Harvard

4. The Kinks’ The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller

12. The Beatles’ Let It Be by Steve Matteo

5. The Smiths’ Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice

13. James Brown’s Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk

6. Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh

14. Jethro Tull’s Aqualung by Allan Moore

7. ABBA’s ABBA Gold: Greatest Hits by Elisabeth Vincentelli

15. Radiohead’s OK Computer by Dai Griffiths 16. The Replacements’ Let It Be by Colin Meloy

8. The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Electric Ladyland by John Perry

17. Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis

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18. The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. by Bill Janovitz

31. Pixies’ Doolittle by Ben Sisario

19. The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli

32. Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis

20. Ramones’ Ramones by Nicholas Rombes

33. The Stone Roses’ The Stone Roses by Alex Green

21. Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno

34. Nirvana’s In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar

22. R.E.M.’s Murmur by J. Niimi

35. Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti

23. Jeff Buckley’s Grace by Daphne Brooks

36. My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless by Mike McGonigal

24. DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing . . . by Eliot Wilder 25. MC5’s Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese

37. The Who’s The Who Sell Out by John Dougan

26. David Bowie’s Low by Hugo Wilcken

38. Guided by Voices’ Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworth

27. Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey Himes

39. Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns

28. The Band’s Music from Big Pink by John Niven

40. Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark by Sean Nelson

29. Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane over the Sea by Kim Cooper

41. Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion I and II by Eric Weisbard

30. Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique by Dan Le Roy

42. Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy

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43. The Byrds’ The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck

54. Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel

44. Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier

55. Patti Smith’s Horses by Philip Shaw 56. Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality by John Darnielle

45. Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier

57. Slayer’s Reign in Blood by D.X. Ferris

46. Steely Dan’s Aja by Don Breithaupt

58. Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden Childs

47. A Tribe Called Quest’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor

59. The Afghan Whigs’ Gentlemen by Bob Gendron

48. PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me by Kate Schatz

60. The Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash by Jeffery T. Roesgen

49. U2’s Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite

61. The Flying Burrito Brothers’ The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob Proehl

50. Belle & Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott Plagenhoef

62. Wire’s Pink Flag by Wilson Neate

51. Nick Drake’s Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich

63. Elliott Smith’s XO by Matthew Lemay

52. Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk about Love by Carl Wilson

64. Nas’ Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier

53. Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones by David Smay

65. Big Star’s Radio City by Bruce Eaton

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66. Madness’ One Step Beyond . . . by Terry Edwards

79. Ween’s Chocolate and Cheese by Hank Shteamer

67. Brian Eno’s Another Green World by Geeta Dayal

80. Johnny Cash’s American Recordings by Tony Tost

68. The Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka by Mark Richardson

81. The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls by Cyrus Patell

69. The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs by LD Beghtol

82. Dinosaur Jr.’s You’re Living All Over Me by Nick Attfield

70. Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s Facing Future by Dan Kois

83. Television’s Marquee Moon by Bryan Waterman

71. Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Christopher R. Weingarten

84. Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace by Aaron Cohen 85. Portishead’s Dummy by RJ Wheaton

72. Pavement’s Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles

86. Talking Heads’ Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem

73. AC/DC’s Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo

87. Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson by Darran Anderson

74. Van Dyke Parks’s Song Cycle by Richard Henderson

88. They Might Be Giants’ Flood by S. Alexander Reed and Elizabeth Sandifer

75. Slint’s Spiderland by Scott Tennent 76. Radiohead’s Kid A by Marvin Lin

89. Andrew W.K.’s I Get Wet by Phillip Crandall

77. Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk by Rob Trucks

90. Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum

78. Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne Carr

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91. Gang of Four’s Entertainment by Kevin J.H. Dettmar

104. Devo’s Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy 105. Dead Kennedys’ Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Michael Stewart Foley

92. Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ Blank Generation by Pete Astor

106. Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros. by Andrew Schartmann

93. J Dilla’s Donuts by Jordan Ferguson 94. The Beach Boys’ Smile by Luis Sanchez

107. Beat Happening’s Beat Happening by Bryan C. Parker

95. Oasis’ Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven

108. Metallica’s Metallica by David Masciotra

96. Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville by Gina Arnold

109. Phish’s A Live One by Walter Holland

97. Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves

110. Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew by George Grella Jr.

98. Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album by Charles Fairchild

111. Blondie’s Parallel Lines by Kembrew McLeod

99. Sigur Rós’s () by Ethan Hayden

112. Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead by Buzz Poole

100. Michael Jackson’s Dangerous by Susan Fast 101. Can’s Tago Mago by Alan Warner

113. New Kids on The Block’s Hangin’ Tough by Rebecca Wallwork

102. Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Murtha

114. The Geto Boys’ The Geto Boys by Rolf Potts

103. Hole’s Live through This by Anwen Crawford

115. Sleater-Kinney’s Dig Me Out by Jovana Babovic

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A L S O AVA I L A B L E I N T H E SE R I E S

116. LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver by Ryan Leas

126. The Raincoats’ The Raincoats by Jenn Pelly

117. Donny Hathaway’s Donny Hathaway Live by Emily J. Lordi

127. Björk’s Homogenic by Emily Mackay 128. Merle Haggard’s Okie from Muskogee by Rachel Lee Rubin

118. The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy by Paula Mejia

129. Fugazi’s In on the Kill Taker by Joe Gross

119. The Modern Lovers’ The Modern Lovers by Sean L. Maloney

130. Jawbreaker’s 24 Hour Revenge Therapy by Ronen Givony

120. Angelo Badalamenti’s Soundtrack from Twin Peaks by Clare Nina Norelli

131. Lou Reed’s Transformer by Ezra Furman 132. Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Peepshow by Samantha Bennett

121. Young Marble Giants’ Colossal Youth by Michael Blair and Joe Bucciero

133. Drive-By Truckers’ Southern Rock Opera by Rien Fertel

122. The Pharcyde’s Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde by Andrew Barker

134. dc Talk’s Jesus Freak by Will Stockton and D. Gilson

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135. Tori Amos’s Boys for Pele by Amy Gentry

124. Bob Mould’s Workbook by Walter Biggins and Daniel Couch

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125. Camp Lo’s Uptown Saturday Night by Patrick Rivers and Will Fulton

137. Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible by David Evans

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138. The Shangri-Las’ Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las by Ada Wolin

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148. Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope by Ayanna Dozier

140. Massive Attack’s Blue Lines by Ian Bourland

149. Suicide’s Suicide by Andi Coulter

141. Wendy Carlos’s SwitchedOn Bach by Roshanak Kheshti

150. Elvis Presley’s From Elvis in Memphis by Eric Wolfson

142. The Wild Tchoupitoulas’ The Wild Tchoupitoulas by Bryan Wagner

151. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads by Santi Elijah Holley

143. David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs by Glenn Hendler

152. 24 Carat Black’s Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth by Zach Schonfeld

144. D’Angelo’s Voodoo by Faith A. Pennick

153. Carole King’s Tapestry by Loren Glass

145. Judy Garland’s Judy at Carnegie Hall by Manuel Betancourt

154. Pearl Jam’s Vs. by Clint Brownlee

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