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CARLY
SIMON isn’t the first name you would expect to find on a
list of classic-rock superstars who keep tabs on
American Idol. “I tune in whenever I get a chance,”
she says in that signature dusky voice. “How could I
not, when this season Brooke White sang ‘You’re So Vain’
and did such a nice job on it, and Carly [Smithson] was
named after me?”
But it’s
not enough to make a complete Idol believer out of the
woman who long ago defined female rock-star cool and who
helped usher in a new era for female singer-songwriters
in which they were no longer simply attractive voices
and faces for music largely written and produced by men.
Idol
trots out singers of both sexes before a panel of judges
so that millions of viewers can choose one for career
molding by an all-powerful veteran—and
male—music-industry titan, Clive Davis.
In that
sense, the most powerful music platform in today’s world
seems the antithesis of the time in the early ’70s when
Simon, Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro and their
sister artists were achieving greater autonomy.
“There’s
no question that through American Idol we’ve gone
back a couple of eras into the Berry Gordy/Supremes
pulling-the-strings kind of thing,” said the jet-setting
onetime paramour of Warren Beatty and Kris
Kristofferson, who later married—then divorced—folk-rock
star James Taylor.
This is
the same woman who won a Grammy for best new artist
after her questioning of conventional marriage in the
1971 ballad “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should
Be” and who went to No. 1 with one of pop music’s most
celebrity comeuppances ever, “You’re So Vain,” the 1973
hit that turned up on Idol.
Today,
Simon still questions the status quo—whether musical,
social or political. But her main interest, the way it
always was, is understanding and expressing her inner
world.
That can
come out in a new album, like This Kind of Love,
released recently, or through projects such as Romulus
Hunt, the family opera she wrote in 1993 and which has
been revived this year in Florida.
She’s
going about it with the help of the two things she
prizes most from her days as a queen of rock: her
children (with Taylor) Ben and Sally.
Simon
remains rock-star chic at age 62 in a black leather
jacket covering a burgundy dress slipped over a black
body stocking. Thick wedge sandals push her rangy frame
over the six-foot mark. She’s every bit as slim as she
was on the covers of her earliest albums, despite her
assertion that “I never exercised a day in my life.”
She’s
not one to suggest that everything magically turned
gender-blind during the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s
and ’70s. Her role as a musician-turned-feminist pioneer
is recounted and celebrated in Sheila Weller’s new book,
Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly
Simon—and the Journey of a Generation (Atria Books).
“I don’t
think there was a halcyon time” for women, she says.
Simon
had her own encounters with sexism—one of Weller’s
anecdotes intimates that a rock engineer once refused to
work on her album unless she slept with him.
But as
the ’70s unfolded, “There was somehow an innate respect
that the heads of the record companies and producers had
for the three of us as artists.
“It
might have been because of the success that we were
winning for them, or that [musicians’] contracts changed
a little bit. But there was a little movement—it just
wasn’t a movement that changed anything for keeps. It
was a movement that led into imitators who were not
respected except as people who could sell records and
look good.”
Simon
has turned over the glare of the spotlight to newer
faces. But when she puts out a new album, it still sells
respectable quantities, as do many baby-boomer rock
acts. Her latest, the Brazilian-tinged This Kind of
Love, has sold 68,000 copies since its release.
This
year, she joined Mitchell, Paul McCartney and ex-husband
Taylor on the Hear Music label, the Starbucks-Concord
Records’ joint venture. But just before This Kind of
Love was released, Starbucks went through a shake-up
in which founder Howard Schultz returned the emphasis to
selling coffee. Part of that included dumping many of
the music staff that had nurtured Simon’s record.
Day-to-day operation of Hear Music has been handed over
to Starbucks’ original partner in the venture, the
jazz-oriented Concord Music label. Simon said the
transition has renewed her confidence, but only after
serious trauma.
“I was
very angry at first,” Simon said. “I went through all
the stages: anger, denial, acceptance.... But we had a
big meeting at Concord where I got to meet all the new
people, and I got the confidence that people had either
done their homework or were initially fans.”
She
liked former Starbucks-Hear Music talent development
exec Alan Mintz so much that she recently hired him as
her manager. The new album also reconnected her with
songwriter Jimmy Webb, with whom she produced it.
There’s
a family thread among the baker’s dozen songs, most
written by Simon but one each written by Sally Taylor
and Ben Taylor, (34 and 31, respectively): “When We’re
Together” and Ben’s “Island.”
They
also included “Hola Soleil,” one Carly wrote with Ben
(and four other cowriters), only the second time she’s
recorded a song she worked on with her son.
Ben, who
lives with his mother in New York, is a reassuring
presence for the woman who still hasn’t fully warmed to
playing on stage. She’s done a handful of shows to
promote the new album, and there is some talk at the
label of a summer tour.
With
Ben, Sally and some of their peers, such as Ben’s duo
partner, David Saw, Simon strives at home to sustain the
sense of musical community she reveled in long ago.
She’s made a series of playful, extremely casual
instructional videos in which she teaches viewers, from
her home music room, how to play some of her best-known
songs on guitar or piano.
Although
anyone can make music today, thanks to digital recording
and computer-editing software, Simon thinks that the
give and take among living, breathing musicians has
taken a hit.
“The
peregrination from dressing room to dressing room was
just remarkable,” she said of the past. “We’d all teach
each other new chords....I don’t see much of that now.”
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