WE HAVE NO SECRETS
CARLY SIMON IS QUESTIONING MOJO about The Crown. Will there be a new series taking it to Charles’s coronation? What do people think of Camilla? How does the media treat her? What would the royal family have been like had Margaret been queen? It figures that the TV drama would appeal to a senior member of folk rock royalty, someone who knows what it’s like to be hounded by paparazzi and gossip columnists. Besides, it’s easier to ask questions than answer them. “I haven’t done an interview in a very long time,” she says.
It’s been eight years since her last album, the two-disc retrospective Songs From The Trees (2015), compiled as a musical accompaniment to her first memoir, Boys In The Trees. Her new release is a retrospective double too: These Are The Good Old Days: The Carly Simon And Jac Holzman Story (2023). But these songs are just from the first three solo albums she made after Holzman signed her to Elektra – Carly Simon (1971), Anticipation (1971) and No Secrets (1972). All three were hits, each bigger than the one before. Though Simon continued to make albums on Elektra before moving to Warners in 1980, these were the only albums that had Holzman at the helm – and that, Simon says, was important. Holzman signed Simon as a solo artist after the other music label patriarchs had scorned her. “Jac,” says Simon, “saw something the others didn’t.”
There was something intriguing in Simon’s voice that stood her apart from Carole King and Joni Mitchell – the stars of 1970 – or ’60s singers such as Joan Baez, whom Holzman wanted to sign to Elektra, and Judy Collins, whom he did. Simon didn’t have a pure soprano like Mitchell or a long, successful history as a songwriter like King. Her voice was a sensual, sometimes husky, sometimes vulnerable contralto, sometimes all of these in the same song. She had Collins’s sense of experimentation when it came to material. As Holzman said, it was the way she delivered the songs. Her originals ranged in style from her sophisticated, Sondheim-esque debut hit single That’s The Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be, to the swaggering blockbuster hit on her third album, You’re So Vain.
That was over 50 years ago. Simon is 80 now and Holzman 92. “But my memory is good,” says Simon, “and I’ve got my diaries, about 2,000 pages.” She leafs through some of them for MOJO, stopping now and then to read aloud: “Friday, June 24, 1966. Bob Dylan called this afternoon as a birthday present…”
IT’S AN EARLY AUTUMN AFTERNOON ON Martha’s Vineyard. The island off the southern end of Cape Cod, Massachusetts has long been a favourite summer destination for East Coast elites, from the Kennedys to the Obamas. But Simon lives here year-round in a bohemian, rambling farmhouse, a rustic Camelot.
There are woods and animals, barns and a beehive – the bees she ordered from Canada and Maine have just arrived. James➢
Taylor – whose well-to-do family often summered on the island – bought a large swathe of land here with a record deal advance and started designing and building a house. Simon moved in with him in 1971. They married in 1972, raising their two children there. He left after their divorce in 1983.
Simon first encountered Taylor on the Vineyard when they were children, a time of life when Simon’s being four years Taylor’s senior made a difference. She saw him again years later at a local coffee house, the Moon-Cusser, where she performed with her big sister Lucy as half of folk duo the Simon Sisters.
There was always music in the Simons’ New York home. Carly’s oldest sister Joanna became a professional opera singer. Carly was raised on show tunes and classical music. Her mother sang and her father played Chopin on the piano. Guests at their dinner table included George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. “My father founded [publishing company] Simon & Schuster, who were doing their biographies and autobiographies,” she explains.
Pete Seeger was a music teacher at her kindergarten in Greenwich Village. He gave her some guitar lessons when she was three or four. “He would bring his banjo and start teaching us these little Communist-era songs. I remember there was a whole kind of a panic about the material he was feeding to the kids in the school.”
Her favourite singers back then were Odetta – “I used go to the gym where the echo was so good and sing, ‘I don’t want no bald-headed woman,’ as low as I could possibly get it” – and Peggy Lee, “the singer’s voice I really identified with, who I came to by way of Walt Disney because she was Lady in Lady And The Tramp. My uncle managed Peggy Lee so I got to go to her concerts.”
Signed by Kapp Records in 1963, the Simon Sisters made their TV debut on the US variety show Hootenanny and released the first of their three albums, Meet The Simon Sisters, in 1964. Their single, Winkin’, Blinkin’ And Nod – Lucy’s adaption of the children’s poem – made it to the lower end of the Billboard charts. The pair headed to London in ’65, the same year that folk singer Paul Simon, no relation, was over playing the folk clubs.
“I didn’t see him but there were lots of near encounters with The Beatles!” Simon grins – she’s a big Beatles fan. “There was the night we went to a club called Danny La Rue’s and Ringo and his wife were there and sat at the table right next to us. I was too shy to talk to him.” There was another night when “Paul McCartney’s brother came to see us.” This was the doing of their UK agent, the writer and satirist Willy Donaldson: “the man I was going out with and very much in love with.” Donaldson, something of a playboy, left his girlfriend, the actress Sarah Miles, for Simon, and the pair were engaged for a while.
After an appearance on Ready Steady Go!, Carly and Lucy went back to the States. Looking for gigs, they dressed in peasant skirts and Mexican farm girl blouses and hitchhiked up to Provincetown to try their luck. “We got a job at a place called Moors – the guy who’d been the singer there all year had just been conscripted and was off to Vietnam, so we got his job. We quickly learned a few more chords on our guitars and we were up there on-stage two nights after we got there with our new repertoire of songs.”
One night a friend of Lucy’s came to see them at Moors. He suggested they might make a good act for a TV show called From The Bitter End, named for the club in Greenwich Village, though the show was actually shot at various college campuses. After their first appearance, Carly got a phone call from John Court, Albert Grossman’s associate.
“He said that they would like to meet me because they thought I could team up with Bob Dylan and Bob Dylan could write some songs for me,” Simon recalls. “So I went over in late June of ’66 and I met with Bob, Albert and John.” The meeting ended with Simon and Dylan, alone in a room. He had his guitar with him and sang her a song, Baby Let Me Follow You Down – Eric Von Schmidt’s arrangement of the traditional song. “He had altered the words slightly and he taught it to me,” Simon tells MOJO. “I remember right in the middle of it Dylan spread his arms out à la Jesus and he said, ‘That’s definitely a song you’d want to do. There’s nothing like that song.’ Then he said, ‘You ought to go to Nashville and cut your record down there where all the musicians are.’ He gave me a list of everybody I should call up.” The following day, Dylan had his motorcycle accident.
SIMON DID AS DYLAN SAID AND went through his list. Among the names was Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On
Blonde producer Bob Johnston, with whom she wrote a song called Goodbye Lovin’ Man.
“I was at the studio putting down the track and Bob Johnston made some less than stunning propositions to me in the back room,” she recalls. “But I was on my guard, very much the boarding school girl still. I said something to him almost like, How dare you! I’m not that green that I don’t understand what you mean.”
Johnston and Grossman wanted her to record this new song and Dylan’s rewrite of Baby Let Me Follow You Down in New York with Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, Paul Griffin, Al Kooper and Mike Bloomfield. “The group was supposed to be called – and I still don’t know why – Carly & The Deacon.”
Simon’s feelings about some of the musicians were expressed in another page of her diary, dated June 30, 1966. “Baby Let Me Follow You Down is going all through my head, Robbie has been so wonderful to me and consoling and even affectionate that I want to fall right into his arms. Mike Bloomfield, excellent guitarist though he might be, I can live without.” (Robertson’s 2017 memoir, Testimony, mentions a liaison with Simon.)
Neither of the recordings would enjoy an official release.
However, the Simon Sisters were still a going concern – that is, until Lucy left to get married. Reluctant to perform alone but determined to stay in music, Carly decided she’d be a songwriter, recording a demo tape with David Bromberg that Columbia’s Clive Davis reportedly threw across his office. But in 1970, Elektra’s Jac Holzman entered the picture.
“He was very tall and aristocraticlooking,” remembers Simon. He was also meticulous, with strong opinions about which songs she should record.
“The first LP, I fought hard to get two or three of my songs on there,” says Simon. “I think Jac largely saw me as a singer, not a songwriter, so I spent the first album trying to prove to him that I was.” Simon must have been tenacious, as Carly
Simon, released in February 1971, would include seven Simon songs or co-writes, including Alone, whose languid, country-folk demo appears on These Are The Good Old Days and the Grammy-nominated That’s The Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be.
Meanwhile, Holzman was keen for Simon to play live, but she wasn’t. “I wanted to stay out of the spotlight,” she says. Still, a plan evolved for her to start as an opening act for Cat Stevens in spring 1971.
“I’d been listening to Cat Stevens’ music since the beginning of 1970, just loving the songs so much that they had grown to be mine,” says Simon. “I’d memorised all his phrasing the way I used to imitate Odetta. But I had built up too much anticipatory fear.”
She came up with a scheme. She agreed to play only if she could have Russ Kunkel in her band – knowing the drummer was on tour with James Taylor and was therefore unavailable. “Jac said OK and the next day he called and said, ‘We’ve got Russ Kunkel, when do you want to start rehearsals?’”
On opening night, at the Troubadour in LA, Simon wore the precious red Chelsea Cobbler boots Holzman gave her as a gift when she signed to Elektra. Frightened as she was, she was comforted by the proximity of Cat Stevens.
“If you listen to people’s voices for a long time and you know their songs,” she says, “there’s a familiarity that you feel as if you’re already friends.”
Simon and Stevens became close. “He’s like a flight of angels.
There’s no one like him,” she says.
THERE’S A STORY behind the song on These Are The
Good Old Days that wasn’t on any of the first three LPs: Angel From Montgomery.
Simon’s version of the John Prine song had to wait for her 1995 retrospective Clouds In My Coffee to be heard. Back in New York, Simon was going out with Kris Kristofferson: “another of the men in my life who I heard their voices before I met them.” Kristofferson, playing a residency at the Bitter End, was living in Simon’s apartment.
“At one point,” says Simon, “Kris was at Dylan’s house and he called me and asked if he could bring Dylan by and have a cup of coffee? Dylan came and I don’t remember how it was but John [Prine] and Steve [Goodman] were there. I think John had just written or recorded Angel From Montgomery.”
With everyone in Simon’s kitchen, Prine sang the song and taught her to play it. “It was a time when there was a lot of passing the guitar around,” she says. “People were being generous with the music. When people got very famous, they weren’t so comfortable saying, ‘Do you want to hear this?’”
James Taylor had got very, very famous. In March, 1971, he was on the cover of Time magazine. He was also backstage at Simon’s Troubadour show with Cat Stevens, accompanied by Joni Mitchell, his then girlfriend. But Simon was adamant that she and Taylor would marry, and shortly they became a couple.
In autumn 1972, Simon was in London recording her third album, No Secrets, when Taylor proposed to her.
“In a letter,” says Simon. “He had just been to my mother to ask for my hand.” Before leaving for England she had suggested they get hitched but he hadn’t felt the need. When Simon asked him what had changed, he said, “This time it was my idea.”
Her finest LP, No Secrets featured a stellar cast including Klaus Voormann, Lowell George, Nicky Hopkins, Jim Keltner, Bobby Keys and, guesting on backing vocals, Paul and Linda McCartney and Mick Jagger. That’s Jagger sharing the chorus, uncredited, on the LP’s fabled
pièce de resistance, You’re So Vain. The candour of her lyrics about the arrogant older guy who “had me years ago when I was still naïve,” along with her tough and spirited dismissal of his pathetic vanity, speak powerfully across the decades and the song remains her biggest hit.
Maybe it was being betrothed, then married to Taylor that made her refuse to name the real-life subject of the song, so it remained one of those music mysteries, like what it was that Billie Joe
McAllister threw off of Tallahatchie Bridge. In 2015, decades after Simon and Taylor’s divorce, she told People magazine that the second verse was about Warren Beatty. Jagger’s name has come up too, but Simon has always declined to confirm or deny.
PEOPLE WERE ALWAYS TELLING CARLY SIMON HOW much she and Mick Jagger looked alike, and there had been an idea that she should interview the Stones singer for the New York Times. But she didn’t encounter Jagger in the flesh until they met at a soirée at Ahmet Ertegun’s house in Beverley Hills.
“We had a really good time at the party just getting to know each other and talking and laughing and comparing French poets and being otherwise obnoxious,” she laughs. “I was at the Chateau Marmont with James [Taylor], and I got a call from Mick and he said, ‘We’re playing in San Francisco tonight and we’ve got a plane. Do you want to fly up with us and we can do part of the interview on the plane?’ I wasn’t ready for that yet but I told him I was coming to London to record and we kind of finalised that we would do an interview there.”
She was recording in Trident Studios in Soho when Jagger, outside in a limo, extended an offer to take her to dinner. She told him, “Harry [Nilsson] is here. Why don’t you come up and join us?”
The three of them stood around the mike singing You’re So Vain, “then Harry stepped away and said, ‘I don’t think the two of you need any help, I think you’ve got this made.’”
After half an hour they took a break. Then Jagger started playing the piano, quietly, and started singing old country ballads – Long Black Veil, Lonesome Whistle, D-I-V-O-R-C-E – in a surprisingly gentle voice, while Simon added harmony. “We had a big bottle of Courvoisier on the top of the piano,” she laughs. They didn’t know that the mike was still on. Years later, Simon got to hear the recordings. Of their version of D-I-V-O-R-C-E she notes, “I think it would be very great to be played over a scene in The Crown.”
WE’RE BACK WHERE WE STARTED, WITH THE Crown, and what happens when a royal couple part. In 1972, the final year of the music on her new compilation, divorce was the last thing on Simon’s mind. With husband Taylor she wrote a love song, Forever My Love, which appeared on her next album Hotcakes. The hit duet Mockingbird followed in 1974 – the year she gave birth to their first child, Sarah. She returned the favour, singing backup on Taylor’s albums throughout the decade and co-writing the song Terra Nova on JT (1977).
From the outside it looked idyllic; the once-reluctant solo artist had found the perfect duo. But though albums and hits and awards kept coming, there were problems, chiefly Taylor’s drug addiction. They divorced, but Simon kept going, releasing 23 studio albums, the last in 2009, Never Been Gone. She continues to write books and film and TV scores, and has recorded several covers albums. Already in the Grammy Hall Of Fame and the Songwriters Hall Of Fame, and an Oscar winner, she was finally inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year.
Taylor, however, has never been far from her thoughts. Does he come back to see her in the house he built?
“No,” she says. “I’m sorry to have to tell you that because I’d love to have a friendship with him. There was something about James that was right. Right for me and for my life. He’s a part of my energy, he’s very much a part of my thoughts.”
She pauses.
“There’s a line in Forever My Love: ‘I’m looking forward to looking back/From further on down the track/Together in fact forever my love.’ Every year that I was married to James was more amazing than the last – and because my memory is so good I have a lot to remember.”