Carole King's Tapestry

Loren Glass

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501355646
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Carole King's Tapestry is both an anthemic embodiment of second-wave feminism and an apotheosis of the Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter sound and scene. And these two elements of the album's historic significance are closely related insofar as the professional autonomy of the singer-songwriter is an expression of the freedom and independence women of King's generation sought as the turbulent sixties came to a close. Aligning King's own development from girl to woman with the larger shift in the music industry from teen-oriented singles by girl groups to albums by adult-oriented singer-songwriters, this volume situates Tapestry both within King's original vision as the third in a trilogy (preceded by Now That Everything's Been Said and Writer ) and as a watershed in musical and cultural history, challenging the male dominance of the music and entertainment industries and laying the groundwork for female dominated genres such as women's music and Riot Grrrl punk.

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 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 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.

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 rock-and-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 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 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 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 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.

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 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...