Carly Simon: Boys in the Trees & No Secrets

While prepping my notes for the debut of our “Songs of the 1980s” program, I checked out Carly Simon’s memoir to discover what, if anything, she had to say about “Let the River Run,” the first-ever simultaneous Grammy, Oscar, and Golden Globe winning song (written, composed, and performed). A quick flip to the back pages of Boys in the Trees led to the disappointing discovery that the memoir ended well before Simon’s big 1989 win. But as memoir chronicled one of the more influential voices in the musical backdrop of my adolescence--via radio and my personal copy of No Secrets.--I was curious to discover what made this particular voice tick.

She was the daughter of Richard Simon, founder of the famed Simon & Shuster book publishers. Luminaries, including the likes of Benny Goodman, Richard Rodgers, James Thurber, Oscar Hammerstein, were regular visitors to a household filled to the brim with music: her talented father endlessly performed classics on the piano, and the entire family entertained each other acapella with the latest from Broadway. 

But beneath this stunning façade was a depressive father who paid his third daughter little personal attention; a mother who carried on an affair in the family home with her son’s live-in tutor; a boy who sexually molested Carly, beginning when she was only seven; a painful and lifelong stutter she developed at eight. Simon might have been a daughter of privilege, but she was also a child of suffering.

However, the money came in handy when she and her sister, Lucy, began their singing career, traveling back and forth to London. Known as “The Simon Sisters,” the two put out three albums before Lucy got married and Carly was left on her own. At this point, her childhood repeated itself in a way; just as her parents surrounded themselves with the superstars of their day, so did Carly, making friends with half the music and film industry and sleeping with the other half: Cat Stevens, Kris Kristofferson, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, to name a few of her more famous, albeit brief, partners.

Her relationship with James Taylor was love at first sight. Or second--they knew of each from their Martha’s Vineyard childhood summers. Or wait, third sight: When Simon saw his face on the cover of Time Magazine in March 1971, she declared to her sister Lucy, “I’m going to marry that man.” A month later, they met as adults, and married the following year. The two had much in common: both grew up wealthy. Both were singer/songwriters. And both were pained souls searching for peace, as Simon describes in the memoir:

From the beginning, James and I were linked together as strongly as we were not just because of love, and music, but because we were both troubled people trying our best to pass as normal.

Yet, for all their issues, the initial union of these two creative forces seems to have been quite lovely:

As James came toward me, the space between us got smaller and smaller, and our perpendicular lines, with the surge of a waterfall, became parallel. Our life together would go on in just this way for quite some time.

The songs Simon wrote chronicling their early years were included in the No Secrets album, which I owned as a 12 y/o. While in the midst of the memoir, I suddenly regretted the LP having slipped from my keeping during my high school years. Reading the stories behind the songs produced a craving for another encounter with the record. Before its replacement came in the mail, I began comparing it to Carole King’s Tapestry in my mind. King was the other powerful musical backdrop in my young life, and her Tapestry songs, playing in my memory, seemed far more cerebral and cleverly put together than Simon’s.

But when No Secrets arrived, when I placed it on the turntable and was again in the presence of that lovely, husky voice, everything that compelled me to inhale it while it was in my possession came rushing back. The lyrics and tunes are simple, yes, and one sometimes feels that they don’t perfectly rhyme, but they are unarguably beautiful. And with half of the memoir under my belt, some of the songs now struck me as the creation of a sensitive soul, perhaps—no, definitely—someone who has transformed deep suffering into poetry. “Embrace Me You Child” is beyond touching, written by a late 20-ish woman who admired her musical father from the distance to which he always held her.

If Simon suffered from her short-term adult relationships (which, from the memoir, it’s clear she did), she had the last word with at least one of them in “Your So Vain,” a #1 song that kept the world guessing for decades. Beatty, it seems, was at least the subject of verse two, but verses one and three are amalgams of clever phrases Simon jotted down as well as (possibly) two additional men whose identities she has never revealed. Simon was tortured with lifelong low self-esteem, but perhaps at the moment of this song’s composition, she felt strong enough to call out at least one egotistical miscreant because she was happily in love with Taylor; making her own recording of his song, “Night Owl”; celebrating their new relationship in the joyous “The Right Thing to Do” while angsting over it in the title track, “No Secrets.”

I never got around to performing the inspiring "Let the River Run" at our 1980s library program because we ran out of time, though learning to play and sing it was pure joy. But I'm certainly thankful my research led me to Boys in the Trees. It's a fabulous read, written in loving detail by a life-long diarist and poet of the first order. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to play my new copy of No Secrets one more time.

"The Way We Were": Memories of a song.

 

I was a high school freshman when I saw “The Way We Were” in the theater with my clique of friends, one of those irritating groups of young people who attend films to socialize and watch the screen only during conversation lulls. So, I retained only two distinct memories of that viewing. Number one: When inebriated Hubble Gardiner momentarily rolls on top of an eagerly waiting Katie Moronsky, my friend Barb turned to me and whispered, “Did they just…?” I had no answer for her since I was just as clueless. You’ll have to cut us some slack; we were both sheltered 13-year-olds, and whatever the characters did during that brief scene remained very much under the covers.

The second memory was the music. Perhaps that’s why my babysitting family gifted me with the soundtrack album for Christmas the following year, which I listened to nonstop, despite my mother’s constant complaint that Streisand was just “yelling.”  

Mom was a choir singer with an excellent musical ear, but she and her contemporaries, who inhabited the tiny close-knit world of first-generation Dutch Americans, had been raised by Old-World parents who forbade their children to watch films or otherwise interact with popular culture. Although Mom snuck out to see The Wizard of Oz (naughty, naughty!), Judy Garland’s vocals apparently didn't ignite a life-long love affair with pop music; I later discovered a scrapbook Mom affectionately put together--programs from church and school choir concerts. While she clearly possessed a devoted affection for vocal performance, it was impossible that Streisand's exquisite sound would find a place in her heart. 

But I was mesmerized by the singer as was the rest of the world: I recently learned that 50 years ago, February 1974, the album's title song, “The Way We Were,” became the number one single on the US Billboard for three weeks, remaining in the top 100 for 24 weeks. It was Streisand’s first single to make it that far, which I found surprising, since she had been a star for more than a decade and The Way We Were was her fourteenth album. Yet the album’s title song was, indeed, her first number one.

Inauspiciously, this Oscar-, Golden Globe-, and Grammy-winning song was written on spec; composer Marvin Hamlisch hadn’t yet made a name for himself. But film producer Ray Stark promised him that if director Sydney Pollack liked Hamlisch's attempted title song, he would not only be reimbursed for its composition, but would also be hired to score the entire film. Hamlisch eagerly agreed. He and Streisand had been friends since the Broadway production of “Funny Girl” when she was the young rising star and he the rehearsal pianist.

He went to work, deciding early on that though the film tells the tale of a doomed love affair, the theme song should be in a major key, so as not to give away the ending. Working for three hours a day, composing draft after draft, he finally created something he loved, before nervously auditioning it for the film director. Pollock’s young assistant director, in the room when Hamlisch presented the song, was smitten: “From the moment I heard the first notes…chills ran up and down my spine. It was hauntingly beautiful.” (1)

Apparently, Pollack shared his opinion, because the tune was then turned over to Alan and Marilyn Bergman, a successful wordsmith team, who, together with Hamlisch, presented the finished product to Streisand in May 1972. She loved it, suggested a few brilliant alterations, and it was finished. 

The song was placed throughout the film, first during the opening credits, which portray Katie and Hubble as Cornell students at opposite ends of the 1930s cultural/political spectrum. Hamlisch was so concerned about overusing the song, he initially decided not to include it in the film's final scene, when the two leads have a brief encounter before parting forever. But when he sat through the first screening, he realized the music at the end wasn't working and should be replaced with the main theme.

He paid for some last-minute orchestration and attended the next screening. Tom Santopietro, in his book, The Way We Were: The Making of a Romantic Classic, relates what happened next:

“[Hamlisch] braced himself as Katie and Hubbell said goodbye and the orchestra swelled. He waited tensely—until he heard the sound of a single woman crying, and then another, and yet one more, until crying jags broke out throughout the theater. The song worked and the movie worked.” (2)

I hadn’t experienced enough of life in 1973 to join this throng of weeping fans, and I only saw the film once in the theater, so for years, all I had with which to encounter the song was my record album. It was plenty. The title song became a siren call, beckoning me to the beauty that could be discovered in not only listening to a song, but in performing one. Fifty years ago, “The Way We Were” catapulted its way into the consciousness of every musically inclined individual, even a sheltered suburban teenager who couldn’t get enough of its soul-tugging power.

 

(1)   Santopietro, Tom. The Way We Were: The Making of a Romantic Classic. Essex, CN: Applause Theater & Cinema Books, p. 108.

(2)   Santopietro, page 136.

Book review: All the Leaves are Brown: How the Mamas & the Papas Came Together and Broke Apart

 

A deeply troubled, musically-inclined man enters the folk music movement of the late 1950s, divorces his wife for a teen groupie, connects with two other folk musicians via drug parties, writes folk songs, goes broke, learns that west coast folk-rock is replacing east coast folk, moves across the country, writes folk-rock songs, goes more broke, walks into a recording studio with his dirty, hungry quartet, records a song, watches it go platinum, catches his young wife in the arms of his best friend, writes more songs, does more drugs, makes more records, makes more money, does more drugs, organizes (and performs at) the Monterey Music Festival, then watches (and assists) his quartet disintegrate. As he does more drugs.

You might call that the timeline of John Phillips, leader of and songwriter for The Mamas & the Papas, a musical comet that sailed briefly and brightly through the folk-rock constellation of the 1960s. I requested a review copy of Scott G. Shea’s new biography, All the Leaves are Brown, because, like most Boomers, the lovely “California Dreamin’” has a permanent spot in my musical memory and I never tire of hearing it. I distinctly recall walking to the bus stop one wintery morning while the song—already in its seventh year of existence--played in my head. And one dull Sunday afternoon, my flautist sister was able to perfectly mimic the song’s flute solo after we listened repeatedly to my 45.

But enough with the personal connections and on to Shea’s book. I was initially thrown off by the amount of detail he includes, especially the opening chapter which lays out Phillips’s ancestry. However, by the third chapter I was completely hooked on his conversational, accessible writing style and the details are what kept me reading. Shea also provides a masterful arc of the 1960s pop music scene while relating how the Mamas & the Papas found their place in it.  Here, the details not only fascinate but illuminate the entire era. 

The interpersonal relationships of the four were unbelievably chaotic, which makes the creation of their two mega-hits all the more remarkable. How could such beautiful meldings of melody and lyric performed with perfect harmonies emanate from these four substance-addled friends/combatants/lovers/wannabe lovers? The irony embedded in that question is part of what makes the book so absorbing and why I finished it in a couple of days, skipping very little.

Shea’s writing has been criticized for its lack of robust editing, and I won’t necessarily disagree with that assessment but on the other hand, because the prose doesn’t call attention to itself, the reader can instead focus on a fascinating story, largely well-told. 

Highly recommended for anyone interested in the Mamas & the Papas saga and the world they briefly inhabited.

Book Review: The Great American Songbook: 201 Favorites You Ought to Know (& Love).

 

Before glancing through The Great American Songbook: 201 Favorites You Ought to Know (& Love): I naturally assumed I’d be familiar with a solid percentage of its contents. After all, I grew up playing the ubiquitous green Reader’s Digest Family Songbook; was a fan of old films before there was a TCM; and spent the past two decades researching and performing America’s classic songs.

But I only recognized 69 out of the 201. Either I’m not as well-versed in American song as I thought I was (pun not initially intended but deliberately left in), or author Steven Suskin did some serious digging. Perhaps both are true. And how he managed to squeeze the history of 201 songs into 254 pages is simple: most entries are only three paragraphs long. But he masterfully fills those entries with an entertaining blend of pop history and moderately simple music theory, the ratio depending on whatever seems to interest him most about any particular song.

Occasionally, the theoretical aspects of his entries can get a bit technical, but they’re always fun. For instance, towards the end of a lengthy paragraph describing the keys, bars, and melody patterns of “I Get a Kick Out of You”, Suskind writes that lyricist/composer Cole Porter “effortlessly spreads, like fresh-churned butter, a six-pointed rhyme…over a mere nineteen beats.”

The “The Man That Got Away” entry points out the song’s A-B-A-B (and a surprise C) form but here Suskind seems far more interested in the song’s compositional history. The tune had been written a decade earlier, paired with what composer Harold Arlen later described as a melody-depleting lyric. However, when united with the mighty pen of Ira Gershwin, the tune, said Arlen, suddenly “sounded like the Rock of Gibralter.”

“Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” had a similar genesis. Jay Gorney’s tune was originally written for a never-used torch song which included the following forgettable lines: “I could go on crying/big blue tears.” But when the same melody connected up with Yip Harburg’s lyrics, the song became a searing collective cry of an entire generation, struggling in the ravages of the Great Depression.

Speaking of the above song, Suskind also includes a plethora of entertaining anecdotes like this one: Gorney’s wife eventually divorced him and married Harburg, at one point quipping, “Oh, my dear, I wouldn’t marry anyone who didn’t write ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime.’”

If one can tell a great deal about a culture from an encounter with its popular songs (and one definitely can), then reading through this labor of love is an addictively entertaining way to access the golden age of Hollywood and Broadway.

Book Review: Act Naturally: The Beatles on Film

I once knew a woman who would begin a topic, branch out into a related subject, add a few footnotes before launching into a similar train of thought until the air between us was filled with such a variety of crisscrossing themes that had the conversation been visible, it would have resembled the veins of a leaf as viewed under a microscope. Not everyone had the kind of time on their hands or patience necessary to listen to all Marianne’s exhaustive (and occasionally, exhausting) monologues, but anyone who did came away enriched and entertained.

I thought of Marianne when I read Steve Matteo’s Act Naturally: The Beatles on Film because while it certainly does fulfill the promise of its subtitle, it also presents a plethora of well-written background information that might be fascinating to some, overwhelming or even dull to others.

But let’s begin with the positive. Matteo is an excellent, descriptive writer. I won’t soon forget the image he paints of the Beatles waving to cheering crowds during the Liverpool premier of Hard Day’s Night while the city police band below them plays “Can’t Buy Me Love.” Ditto for the scene of Paul McCartney sketching out the idea for Magical Mystery Tour on airline stationery while flying home from the US. And while the following might not be news to diehard fans, I found this summation of the White Album quite illuminating:

“The album reflected not only the violence of the era, including protests against the war in Vietnam and nuclear proliferation and the assassination of political and social leaders, but also meditations on a variety of subjects, originally written on acoustic guitars in the tranquil days the group spent in India.”

Matteo also provides a plethora of insightful background material to set the stage for each new cinematic venture. For instance, I never connected the dots between the plot of Help! and the James Bond films popular at the time. But yes, for all its comedy and musical numbers, Help! is indeed a spoofy tale of international intrigue. Matteo brilliantly (if a bit tediously) sets the film within its historical context by listing and briefly describing each Bond film in chronological order before diving into Help!

However, more than occasionally, Matteo’s fondness for detail overwhelms his narrative, making the writing less descriptive and more encyclopedic. For instance, consider the following paragraph, which I quote in its entirety:

“Much has been said about the Beatles’ deal with UA. The initial budget of the film was 200,000 pounds for a black-and-white film. UA hired Walter Shenson to produce; he would be paid 12,000 pounds, splitting the profits 50/50 with UA. His company, Proscenium Films, had two separate deals with Brian Epstein: one with Northern Songs for the songs Lennon and McCartney would supply for the film (and, most importantly for UA, for the soundtrack), and one with NEMS Enterprises on behalf of the entire group. In the original deal, Epstein had said he wouldn’t accept less than an advance of 20,000 pounds and 25 percent of the net profits). Epstein then passed on the negotiations to his lawyer, David Jacobs. Jacobs quickly realized the number Epstein had floated was too low and eventually negotiated an advance of 25,000 pounds and 20 percent of the net profits.”

Interesting to anyone into numbers and percentages, but most likely, few others.

Act Naturally may not hold the interest of the average Beatles’ fan, but it is certainly an insightful and detailed labor of love and will be appreciated by anyone willing to take some time and a deep dive into the history of the Fab Four’s cinematic endeavors. 

Book Review: Holding the Note: Profiles in Popular Music

Artists who take the advice presented in most books on aging and productivity might find something to do at 60 related to but distinct from what they did at 20. Apparently, the artists featured in David Remnick’s Holding the Note: Profiles in Popular Music, didn’t get the memo, for when Remnick wrote the chapters for this book--originally individual pieces featured in The New Yorker--these aging musicians were actively pursuing their original craft.

What compelled them to carry on when their most productive and lucrative years were already in the past? Perhaps because they could still fill amphitheaters, or perhaps because they couldn’t think of anything else to do, becoming, as Remnick describes the Rolling Stones, “unfailing jukeboxes of their earlier selves.” And while he seems to admire Bruce Springsteen’s continued stage athleticism, his take on Mick Jagger’s current antics is not complimentary: “at his best evoking the spawn of James Brown and Gumby, at his worst coming off like someone’s liquored-up Aunt Gert, determined to trash her prettier sister’s wedding with a gruesome performance on the dance floor.”

Ouch. Remnick is equally honest—though less snarky—regarding the aging Luciano Pavarotti when he quotes an opera critic from the 1990s who told him that “Pavarotti’s high notes ran out some time ago. Now it’s often a strangled bleat.” Like the Stones, Pavarotti continued to perform, in part, simply because audiences kept purchasing tickets. But he also kept singing opera well past that genre’s normal retirement age because he felt the pressure of being “The Last Italian Tenor.” Similarly, Mavis Staples, the surviving member of a once-crowded family act, sings for the love and the legacy of those who have passed on. The work of late great blues players is ever present in the mind of Buddy Guy, who told Remnick he feels “like one of those aging souls who find themselves the last fluent speaker of an obscure regional language.”

Should aging singer-songwriters please their audiences with their old material, becoming those “unfailing jukeboxes,” or should they please themselves with the creative process? Bob Dylan tends towards the latter, creating entirely new albums—granted, not at his former speed of multiple songs per day---and still fills concerts with (perhaps) disappointed fans aching to hear old songs from their old prophet. Conversely, when stage-shy introverted Leonard Cohen took a lengthy world tour in his later years to recoup what an embezzling employee had stolen, he never stopped composing, but gave his audiences plenty of his old songs (albeit in a different key to accommodate the lower range of his aging voice).

Sir Paul McCartney walks a line between Dylan and Cohen, justifying the creation and performance of what he told Remnick was “wisdom art.” But ever the pleaser, he also gives his audiences “Hey Jude” so that, in his words, “everyone goes home happy.”

Holding the Note lacks the glossy section of photographs so often included at the center of biographies, collective and otherwise, perhaps because Remnick’s writing includes elements that most casual observers might miss in a photograph. For instance, Dylan’s strange Newsweek cover of October 4, 2004, is Googleable (and the story behind it even stranger unless you are aware of Dylan’s narcissistic streak), but Remnick’s description is more detailed, not to mention far more entertaining: “By then he was in his mid-sixties and looked like Vincent Price wearing Hank William’s clothes; pencil mustache, white Stetson, and cowboy suit.”

Anyone can watch Aretha Franklin’s 2015 Kennedy Center performance of “Natural Woman” on YouTube, but Remnick’s description shows more: “Aretha comes out onstage looking like the fanciest church lady in Christendom: fierce red lipstick, floor-length mink, a brocaded pink-and-gold dress that Bessie Smith would have worn if she’d sold tens of millions of records.”

Holding the Note is filled with wit, pathos, sharp observations, profound questions and is well worth a read. (less)

 

As we are the History Singers, I was asked to find a suffrage song with which to end my Veteran's Day talk regarding American women's efforts during the First World War and the passage of the 19th Amendment. Throughout our history, Americans have used songs to express their emotions and fire up their purposes and goals, much the way people today share those very things on social media. The American women’s suffrage movement was filled with songs intended to strengthen resolve and promote unity of purpose. What I learned during my recent search: some songs were written specifically for the suffrage movement, but just as the patriots of the American Revolution set their lyrics to familiar British tunes, so someone in the American women’s suffrage movement wrote new lyrics to familiar American tunes.  In this way, new songs could be cranked out and learned quickly—no one had to write a new melody and the singers didn’t have to learn one. The song I sang came from the above-pictured booklet, this one set to the then-familiar tune of the Union Civil War song, “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp” (which later became the tune for "Jesus Loves the Little Children.") 

It is quite fitting that women who were fighting for the right to vote would set their words to the tune of a war song.

Next Election Day

In our western homes we sit, thinking eastern friends of you

And the noble cause to which you give your might

And our eyes with joy are lit as we read of all you do

For we’re proud of you, our sisters dear, tonight.

 

CHORUS

Tramp, tramp, tramp, we’re onward marching

Good luck, comrades, on the way

And beneath the golden glow of the suffrage flag we know

You will join us on the next election day!

 

We have fought the battle here, we have won the freeman’s right

So, we promise you a loyal helping hand

Bid our sisters all good cheer

For the goal is now in sight

You are crossing now into the promised land.