B005S8O7YE EBOK (19 page)

Along with newfound freedoms came newfound confusion. With no rules, no boundaries, and no blueprint, as a twenty-six-year-old divorcée and mother at a time when other women my age had not yet married, I was unsure about virtually everything. The only thing of which I was certain was that I loved Sherry and Louise more than anything in the world. Rather than feeling tied
down by motherhood, I treasured having my children—not only because we loved each other so much but because I understood in a way I couldn’t have articulated at the time that their presence kept me grounded in reality. Though Willa Mae was a huge help, ultimately I was responsible for the girls, the house, our dogs, and our overweight cat, whom I probably would have named Puss-in-Boots or something equally obvious. I was glad that Gerry’s scholarly suggestion of Telemachus, after the son of Ulysses and Penelope, had prevailed. The photographer Jim McCrary would make our fat feline famous by including him in a photo that would become the cover of a bestselling album.
^*
Jim’s photo would also immortalize my living room on Wonderland Avenue with its hatch-cover bench and Indian-print curtains. The black Baldwin Acrosonic spinet piano on which so many hit songs had been written was behind Jim and therefore not visible in that photo.

When Toni and I wrote at that piano we hoped to have more of those hits. Sometimes we wrote with that in mind, but often we wrote simply for the joy of writing. At first our songs were recorded only as demos. Then Lou Adler recorded
“Lady of the Lake”
with Peggy Lipton, and Strawberry Alarm Clock released “Lady of the Lake” and
“Blues for a Young Girl Gone”
on their album
The World in a Sea Shell
. The Carpenters’ performance of
“It’s Going to Take Some Time”
was Toni’s and my first joint appearance at the top of the charts. Later,
“Where You Lead”
and
“It’s Too Late”
would find a home on the album with the corpulent kitty on the cover.

In the year 2000 Amy Sherman Palladino had the idea of
using “Where You Lead” as the theme song for
Gilmore Girls
, a TV show she had created about a young mother and the teenage daughter to whom she had given birth out of wedlock when she was sixteen. The women walk a blurry but entertaining line between being mother and daughter and each other’s best friend. Before the movement known as “women’s lib” had blossomed in the early seventies, Toni’s original lyric had taken a “stand by your man” approach. By the time that song was released on
Tapestry
in 1971 the lyric was already outdated. When Amy said she wanted “Where You Lead” rewritten as a love song between a mother and daughter, I asked Toni if she would modify the lyric. She rose to the occasion with a version we retitled
“Where You Lead I Will Follow.”
My by then adult daughter Louise joined me in singing the music that opened each episode of
Gilmore Girls
. This unexpected exposure carried Toni’s and my song to a second and third generation. The life of a song continues to amaze me.

When Toni brought her lyrics to me they were either neatly typed on a sheet of white paper or written on lined yellow paper in her distinctive handwriting. Her lyrics were artistic visually as well as lyrically, with the verses and choruses of each song forming a unique shape on the page. As soon as I placed the lyric on the music stand of my piano I let my mind go free, not so much thinking as absorbing the meter and content. This process often brought a melody to mind even before I was conscious that one was being suggested. Sometimes I worked on the tune without Toni there, and then she’d come by the next day to help polish what I had written. Other times I wrote the music with Toni right there to change the lyric if I took the song in an unexpected direction. Though the process was different for each song, it was always fun, and it was always creative.

In 1970 I began to experiment with writing my own lyrics again, with the underlying thought that maybe
this
time I could
work up the courage to play them for someone. It was difficult to shake the memory of earlier times when, during some of the more discouraging periods of my marriage, I had tried to prepare for the possibility of having to earn a living by writing my own lyrics. I had been so intimidated by Gerry’s gift, his intellectual capacity, his skill, and his success that I could never bring myself to show my lyrics to anyone. Often I didn’t even finish them. After having worked with Gerry for so long and knowing the level of excellence of which he was capable, I would stop myself in mid-lyric, thinking, Why bother?

It was Toni’s generous approach to songwriting that first inspired me to think that maybe I could write lyrics on my own. A second wave of inspiration would come in 1970 from someone I had met a few years earlier.

I
was twenty-five and still living in New Jersey in 1967 when I ran into two of the Myddle Class in a music store on West 48th Street. Rick and Charlie were there to look at guitars, and then they were going to a club in the Village to catch a band they knew.

“You gotta come see these guys,” Rick said. “They’re unbelievable!”

The Flying Machine was playing four sets a night. With Gerry in the studio and the girls in New Jersey with Willa Mae, I could catch an early set and be home by eleven.

The Night Owl Café was bustling when we entered. Charlie and Rick immediately recognized three of the Flying Machine among the people milling around the bar. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness the musicians greeted each other with what appeared to be some kind of secret handshake. Then Rick introduced me to drummer Joel “Bishop” O’Brien, and Danny Kortchmar, who sang, wrote, and played guitar. Charlie added that Joel and Danny had been two of the Martha’s Vineyard King Bees. Then Danny introduced me to Zach Wiesner, the Flying Machine’s bass player.
Following Zach’s glance, I noticed an extraordinarily tall man with long hair standing off to one side of the bar.

Following my look, Danny brought me over to the tall man and said, “James! Say hello to Carole King.” James Taylor mumbled something like, “Hrrph, harya,” then turned and covered the distance to the dressing room in several strides. Danny looked at his watch. It was time for their set. Danny, Bishop, and Zach quickly followed James.

Years later, James would tell me that he had so much respect for my songs that when Danny introduced us he didn’t know what to say, but at the time I felt like an unwelcome intruder.

“I should go,” I told Charlie.

“You’re already here,” he said. “Just stay for one set.”

“Trust me,” said Rick. “You’ll be blown away!”

With that, Rick took my arm and guided me toward the center of the club where some people were already seated in church pews. We were seated at a table barely big enough to hold a candle, drinks, and an ashtray. A waitress materialized to take our order, which arrived just as the Flying Machine began to file onto the stage. James pulled a mic toward his acoustic guitar, Zach and Danny plugged in their instruments, Bishop picked up his sticks, and the stage lights went up.

From the moment I heard the first notes out of James’s guitar, I was mesmerized. When the band came in on the downbeat of the first verse and James began to sing, I felt as if I were witnessing a long-lost friend who also happened to be an angel. Rick was right. I was blown away. As much as James tried to blend in with the band, his stage presence was unmistakable. His songs and the quality of his voice evoked an astonishing range of emotions. His modest demeanor was authentic and endearing. He told stories and jokes between songs with a dry, self-deprecating sense of humor, and his banter with Kootch, Zach, and Bishop was witty
and familiar. His joy at being onstage was apparent and infectious, and when he threw his head back to hit the high notes, there was no doubt about it: James Taylor loved to sing.

After the set James was swarmed by audience members eager to tell him how good he was. Though I shared their opinion, I didn’t relish being part of an after-show crush, and I was a little gun-shy following our earlier encounter. I was also experiencing that sense of borrowed time that mothers of young children often feel when they’re out having a good time. I decided to head back to New Jersey without saying goodbye to James or the band. Charlie and Rick walked me to my car, and I drove home to suburbia.

Like so many other bands who had come to New York, the Flying Machine believed that a record deal was all that stood between them and their ascent to the top of the charts. After all, their main songwriter was James, whose gift for singing and songwriting was manifest. Danny, in addition to being an accomplished guitar player, was also an excellent songwriter. And Zach was James’s cowriter on
“Rainy Day Man.”
But the potential of the Flying Machine would not be realized in that incarnation. As the seasons of New York changed around the smoky clubs in which hopeful bands played, the atmosphere inside remained the same, as did the availability of hard drugs in Greenwich Village. In addition to being one of a number of bands competing for the attention of A&R men, the Flying Machine was struggling with James’s addiction to heroin. In the fall of 1967 the hopes of the band were dashed to “pieces on the ground.”
^*
In desperate need of help, James called his father, Dr. Isaac Taylor, a professor at the University of North Carolina. Ike drove to New York and brought his son home to Chapel Hill.

After several months, James felt that he had recovered sufficiently to look for another career opportunity. His decision to fly to London turned out to be fortunate. Peter Asher was already known to the world as half of Peter and Gordon when the Beatles put him in charge of A&R for Apple Records, a division of the Beatles’ Apple Corps, Ltd.
^*
It was Kootch who suggested to Peter that he give James a listen, and Peter had the wisdom to sign James immediately. The result was James’s eponymous first album.

The first time I listened to the songs on
James Taylor
I thought, I could hear these songs a thousand times and never grow tired of them.

That theory would be tested and affirmed.

A
ccounts differ about when the Fugs were formed—1964 or 1965—but all agree that Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg were the founders. Tuli was a Beat hero who published magazines called
Birth
and
Yeah
and sold them on the street in the East and West Village. Sanders’s operation, Fuck You Press, published
Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts
, which he sold at his Peace Eye Bookstore on Avenue A in the East Village. The name Fugs was reportedly derived from Norman Mailer’s use, in his novel
The Naked and the Dead
, of “fug” as a substitute for the word everyone knew it replaced.

After the Flying Machine broke up, the Fugs hired Kootch. He brought with him a killer driving rhythm guitar and a seemingly unlimited supply of outrageous licks. But his real love was black music in any form. Danny was a good-looking kid from Larchmont, New York, an affluent town in lily-white Westchester County. Coming of age under the heavy influence of R&B, soul, blues, gospel, and jazz, he had listened and practiced until he had mastered some of the sounds of the guitar players he admired in the genres he favored, and then he had listened and practiced some more.

Danny’s gig with the Fugs didn’t afford him much of an opportunity to develop his skills in his preferred genres, but it did come with a couple of distinct advantages for a young man: it was a steady job, and the Fugs attracted plenty of women willing to provide companionship. Often, after the show, Danny would emerge from the stage door wondering if he would wind up going home with one of the young women waiting to hook up with someone in the band. It never occurred to Danny—handsome, smart, funny, and reasonably well brought up—to be anything other than nice and polite to the girls waiting outside. This of course made the girls want to have nothing whatsoever to do with him. They had come to hang out with the bad boys and by all that was unholy that’s what they were going to do. Thus it was Tuli and Ed coming out the door—snarling, cursing, and projecting all the dark glory of their outrageous personae—who got all the chicks.

Danny was just beginning to think about leaving the Fugs when an L.A. band called Clear Light offered him a job if he was willing to move to California. Kootch left the Fugs, flew to the West Coast, and moved in with a group of hippies and musicians living at the home of Frazier Mohawk. The hazy discussions around Frazier’s coffee table often included the observation that living in Laurel Canyon was a much more desirable option than, say, getting killed in the jungles of Vietnam. Southern California was the center of everything fresh, young, and current. The beautiful people, the gorgeous weather, the burgeoning music scene, and the free and easy lifestyle were a siren call to young men around the country, and they were responding in droves. One was a musician I’d known on the East Coast who would add a lot more than music to my life.

A
fter the dissolution of the Myddle Class, the Fugs hired Charlie Larkey to play bass. At the end of 1967 the band comprised Kenny Pine, Ken Weaver, Kootch, Charlie, Tuli, and Ed. Charlie was playing with the Fugs in New York when he learned that they had been booked in L.A. for three days in April 1968. By then it was common knowledge that Gerry and I were separated. When Charlie called to invite me to one of the Fugs’ concerts, I said yes. After the concert, he came home with me and stayed for the next three nights. When the Fugs’ engagement was over and Charlie had to go back to New York, we kept in touch by telephone. After two months, our conversations across the miles led to a big decision for both of us. Two months later Charlie gave notice, flew west, moved into the house on Wonderland Avenue, and began looking for a gig in L.A. He picked up a few studio sessions and sat in at clubs, but he wasn’t getting the regular paycheck he’d had with the Fugs.