Thinking About Carole King

(This blog post originally appeared on another now-defunct blogging platform on August 11, 2011, and has been reposted here for posterity.)

When I was in the 11^th grade, the Russian Club, of which I was a member in good standing, went to see James Taylor at the old Boston Garden. This was my first rock concert and the crowd was even bigger and more enthusiastic than anything I’d previously experienced when I’d gone there to see the Celtics or Ice Capades. But before James Taylor took the stage, he introduced a woman named Carole King. None of us in the Brockton High School Russian Club had ever heard of her, but when she started to sing “I Feel the Earth Move,” I couldn’t believe we were seeing such a great opening act. Were all rock concerts like this?

She went on to sing several other great but previously unheard of (by us) songs, including “You’ve Got a Friend” and “It’s Too Late.” She also did some nice renditions of “(You Make me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” and “Will You Love me Tomorrow,” songs that we thought belonged to Aretha Franklin and The Shirelles. To this day, that was one of the best concerts I ever attended.

It wasn’t until several months later that we understood the significance of what we’d seen – that concert tour was essentially the launch of the singer-songwriter era. There had been singer-songwriters before – Bob Dylan and such – but this new confessional genre didn’t really coalesce as a vehicle until the release of “Tapestry,” a monster hit that was Billboard’s number one album for 15 weeks and went on to sell 25 million copies.

I hadn’t really thought about Carole King until she and James Taylor went on their wildly nostalgic “Troubadour” reunion tour last year. And then when I was on vacation last month I heard “It’s Too Late” on the car radio – always an evocative experience when you’re driving to the beach with the windows open and smelling of Coppertone.

When I returned from vacation I pulled out the CD. (No, I never had it in vinyl. As much as a liked the individual songs, buying “Tapestry” itself didn’t seem like a Y-chromosome thing to do.) I wanted to see if such a consequential album still held up after all these years.

The first thing I noticed is that the album cover is one of the greatest rebranding jobs in music history. The cover photo is a long shot of a woman of indeterminate age and ethnicity sitting in the cozy window seat of a vaguely rural house. She’s bathed in sunlight, barefoot, wearing jeans and holding what appears to be a tapestry in her lap. Oh, and there’s a cat in the foreground. This is the picture of a mellowed-out former hippy and quasi-Earth Mother, someone with whom you would have a nice cup of chamomile tea.

In fact, until the album came out, Carole King was no one’s idea of a back-to-the-earth hippy. She was born in Brooklyn (where her college boyfriend was Neil Sedaka!) and together with her husband Gerry Goffin she had become a phenomenally successful Manhattan-based songwriter. Working out of the Brill Building in the 1960’s she churned out hits for artists as diverse as Aretha Franklin, The Monkees, The Chiffones, The Drifters, Herman’s Hermits and Blood Sweat and Tears. She was among the last practitioners of that old-fashioned tradition going back to Tin Pan Alley in which a songwriter wrote a song on spec, hoping to sell it to someone who would make it hit. She was in show business, with an emphasis on the business.

The young Carole King and Gerry Goffin

But after splitting from Goffin, she and her kids moved to L.A., and settled into Laurel Canyon, a haven for artists like Joni Mitchell and Crosby Stills and Nash, who were developing a new style of music. It was out of this amazingly creative milieu that the new Carole King emerged.

If there was ever an album that captured the Zeitgeist of its age, it was “Tapestry.”   The Carole King celebrated therein is a natural women, lovelorn but independent. She’s strong but vulnerable. She’s a friend and a lover (but definitely not a mother – kids are neither seen nor heard of in this album). She was what every thinking woman wanted to be as the sixties morphed into the seventies.

Hearing “Tapestry” afresh, the songs that were great then remain great today. “I Feel the Earth Move” is still one of rock’s great anthems to passion, and has there ever been a more rueful break-up song than “It’s Too Late”? And in “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” her slower, more mature approach seems profounder than the Shirelle’s pop version.

Not every song is a gem. Although the “Tapestry” versions are OK, I do prefer the more soulful renditions of “Natural Woman” and “You’ve got a Friend” by Aretha Franklin and James Taylor, respectively. I actively dislike Smackwater Jack, with its clichéd attack on small town sheriffs; and “Beautiful” (“You’ve got to get up every morning, with a smile on your face and show the world all the love in your heart”), is a little too self-helpy for my taste.

Then there’s the title song, which is one of the weirdest, most out-of-place songs on any gigantically popular album. The opening line does a perfect job in setting the tone for the whole album: “My life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue.” But then the song describes “a man of fortune” with “a coat of many colors” who eventually turns into a frog. He is replaced by a gray and ghostly figure, previously seen in black, who unravels the tapestry, because he has “come to take me back.”   This sounds like the grim reaper coming to get her at the end of her life. If so, this is such a downer of a song, I can’t believe it’s on this otherwise generally optimistic empowering album. My guess is that most listeners grew confused with the heavy-handed symbolism and just pretended the song wasn’t even there.

What strikes me about the album now is that except for the aforementioned title song, everything in “Tapestry” is very simple, with few complicated images or multisyllabic words. Nothing wrong with that. Great poetry often relies on short basic words, but after a lifetime of listening to the sophisticated melodies, lyrics and meanings of Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon or the Beatles, it’s a surprise to see that that this album is a work of such sparseness.

Although most of the classic songs on Tapestry remain terrific, I can’t say I love Carole King’s overall delivery. Her voice is neither rich nor deep, and she falls into the trap of over e-nun-ci-a-ting every syllable. It’s almost as if, after a career or seeing her lyrics smothered by mushy vocals, she wanted to make sure that every word came through clearly. This makes the singing a little choppy and very duh-duh-da-duh.

Finally, what strikes me about this album after so many years is that she made it when she was only 29 years old. Today, that seems remarkably young (particularly for someone who had already had an astoundingly successful first career as a song-writer) and she seems wise beyond her years. But at the time, her corporate overlords must have thought she was a little over-the-hill. How else can you explain that soft-focus cover photo, where she’s wearing long pants and a long-sleeve sweater? Not only is the camera pulled back far enough to obscure her face, but there is not an inch of skin showing. She is definitely not selling sexuality. No Gaga-esque outfits for her.

So, to the question at hand; after listening to “Tapestry” fresh for the first time in years, I would say, yes, it remains terrific, mostly. I’ve downloaded it into my iPod and will be once again playing my favorite songs and deleting the rest. I might even play the CD itself on a cool autumn night when we’ve made a fire and are mellowing out with some Port.  Now if I could just find my “Sweet Baby James” album, we’d be all set.

Rewatching “The Beverly Hillbillies”

Whenever I look back at number-one-rated shows from the past, there’s always one that puzzles me – “The Beverly Hillbillies.”

I can understand why “I love Lucy,” “Gunsmoke,” “All in the Family” and “Happy Days” were all massive hits.  But why was “The Beverly Hillbillies” such a huge blockbuster?  In the 1962-1964 era about a third of all households were tuned to the show.  That’s the modern equivalent of 30 Super Bowls a year for two years.

The popularity of this series has perplexed because I actually remember when it came on and knew even then it was kind of dumb.  As an adult I been wondering if perhaps my memory was wrong – maybe it was better than I remembered.  After all, when I now watch its contemporary “The Andy Griffith Show,” I appreciate it in a way I never did as a child.

Well, thanks to the miracle of Amazon Prime I am now able to watch all the old “Beverly Hillbilly” episodes I want.  But be careful what you wish for because when I recently streamed a few shows I realized it was even worse than my recollection; I had to turn it off after a handful of episodes.

The premise of the series is that a family of simple Appalachian mountain folk (the Clampetts) strike it rich when oil is discovered on their land and move to Beverly Hills, where they experience culture conflict with their more traditionally wealthy and snooty neighbors.

Jeffrey Melton an associate professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama points out that this is a “one joke” show and boy is he right.  In episode after episode the alleged humor is derived from the Clampetts’ extreme naiveté and lack of understanding of modern cultural norms.  Thus the swimming pool is called the “cement pond” and the pool table in the billiards room is construed to be some kind of special dining table – complete with bumpers to prevent spillage and a glued-on felt table cloth. Ha ha.

A secondary source of humor on the show is that the young characters – the daughter Elly May and the nephew Jethro – are ideal specimens of physical beauty but have no sexual desire themselves and don’t pick up on the va-va-va-voom impact they’re having on others.  Elly May, a country girl who’s lived among animals all her live, supposedly doesn’t know “the facts of life,” and Jethro is about the only virile twenty-something in the United States who is consistently obtuse when beautiful women are coming on to him.

Professor Melton makes the case that the “Beverly Hillbillies” was so popular because it embodies “The American Joke,” that has preoccupied American humorists for centuries – the gap between the ideals of equality espoused by politicians since the Declaration of Independence and the reality of how American society has turned out.  The joke is we purport to believe that all men are created equal and yet strive mightily to enhance our status and climb a ladder that theoretically doesn’t exist.

To that end, “The Beverly Hillbillies” mixes together the very lowest socio-economic class with the very highest. And lo and behold, the rich are as clueless as the Clampetts, with stuffy uncomprehending butlers, vain wives and their own ridiculous behaviors.  This would have resonated in the more egalitarian sixties, when the U.S, boasted a vast middle class; in a monoculture worshipping the new suburban lifestyle, people could laugh harmlessly at both their social inferiors and their nominal social betters.

The problem in a one joke show, though, is that the inability of the characters to understand each other goes on and on, episode after episode.  No matter how many years the Clampetts live in Beverly Hills they never learn a thing and are always surprised by the most basic aspect of modern life. And their neighbors never seem to be able to explain anything to them – like how a gas stove works.

My real frustration with the Clampetts is that they aren’t the sly country bumpkins of most rural humor.  It’s much funnier when a hayseed is underestimated by a snob and then turns out to be wiser than expected.  Not here. The humor always depends on Clampetts being dumber than expected.

Once you know about the theory of “The American Joke” you can see it everywhere – in soap opera dramas like “Dallas,” “Empire,” “Gossip Girl,” and “Billions” and comedies like “The Jeffersons,” “Arrested Development,” and “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.”  As believers in the American dream, we long to be rich ourselves but gratified to see that wealth doesn’t bring happiness.

What we will not see today, however, is a show that outright mocks hillbilly culture.  Ever since the movie “Deliverance,” hillbillies have seemed dangerous.  On “Justified” and “Ozark” for example, they are outright frightening.  And knowing what we know now about that culture from J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy,” it would be kicking a vulnerable population in crisis while they’re down to make fun of hillbillies these days.

Nope, it’s always safer to mock the rich.  Let’s watch “Succession.”