“You Don’t Need Directions / You Know Which Way to Go”
The songs poured out of her one after the next, a waterfall of tender devotions, teenage angst, and existential yearning. Some were works of sheer inspiration and others came on on a deadline, but always they arrived. Simple machines of immense sophistication delivering indelible hooks, shot through with wisdom and melancholy. By her 10th year in the business she had written or cowritten a plethora of top 20 hits and had her songs recorded by the Beatles, Dusty Springfield, Bobby Vee, Aretha Franklin, and the Animals. Several of those compositions became immediate, celebrated standards. Still, all was not well. Following a lengthy estrangement, she was divorced from her spouse and creative partner. She was suddenly a single mother of two and a solo act. Then Carole King turned 26.
Do we talk enough about the miracle of Carole King? How much should you talk about a miracle? But try and picture: 5-foot-2 teenage Carol Klein in 1957, before she had any reason to consider changing her name. The precocious and clever but well-behaved daughter of a fireman and a theater-loving homemaker, raised on the outskirts of Brooklyn—the strange, byzantine parts near Coney Island where immigrants and children of immigrants congregated post–World War II, bent on making a better life (or any life) for their offspring. Now here she is, age 15, taking the long subway ride into Manhattan to play her songs for Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun—the omnisciently powerful Atlantic Records heads responsible for discovering Ray Charles, Solomon Burke, and other legends.
She doesn’t have an appointment. She hasn’t called ahead, fearing rejection. The elevator ride at Atlantic’s West 56th Street offices is an excruciatingly slow one, sapping her nerve with each passing second. When she finally spills out she can only ask a distracted secretary: “Is there anyone here who can listen to my songs?” At that very moment, Wexler and Ertegun just happen to walk out of their shared office and into the reception area. A miracle.
“I’ve Got My Pride / And I Know How to Hide”
At least twice a year like clockwork, there is a moment when I realize: hold on—Carole King wrote that song too? Maybe this also happens to you. You probably know she wrote “Natural Woman” and “The Loco-Motion.” Or maybe you don’t? “You’ve Got a Friend”? “Crying in the Rain”? “Wasn’t Born to Follow”? In any event, it’s a good rule of thumb that should you find yourself humming a well-known tune from the past 60 years and wondering who authored it, there are short Vegas odds that the answer is Carole King.
In this regard, she is less like an entertainer and more like an element: Her ubiquity is subtle. You might not know how Carole King has impacted your life and sense memories and experience of the world, but for anyone who consumes music, movies, or television to any minor degree, she incontrovertibly has. King used to tell confidantes and collaborators and label bosses: “Please, believe me. I don’t want to be a star.” And by this she meant a high-profile supernova for whom the press and public were an unending obligation. She did not want months of touring or constant speculation about her comings and goings and most intimate moments. Most of all she longed for stability and longevity.
“An Everlasting Vision / Of the Ever-Changing View”
It’s 1960, and the Shirelles, fresh off the success of their smash hit “Tonight’s the Night,’’ are the hottest girl group in the world. Carole King and her husband–writing partner Gerry Goffin are just two of many songwriters employed by Don Kirshner’s Aldon Publishing. The writers work in cubicles, competing to be heard, desperately attempting to render the next dance craze or novelty hit. Kirshner prevails upon King: “The Shirelles need a follow-up, and I want you to write it! Come on, babe—do it for me!” Maybe Kirshner talks that way to all of his writers, but King takes it to heart.
“Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” is a tremulous and strange composition, not quite rocker and not quite ballad. The mood borrows heavily from the “race records” that King first was exposed to as a small child by DJ Alan Freed. But there is something of the cotillion ball in it as well. There is a queasy feeling about what is happening in the song—a little Everlys, a little Nabokov. Strangely—or perhaps revealingly—the lyrics are actually Goffin’s contribution, while King provides the music and arrangement. The Shirelles’ finished version is a masterpiece. Shirley Owens’s vocals split the difference between debutante and dealmaker.
In her 2012 memoir A Natural Woman, King wrote about an agreement she and Goffin had struck, in which he could finally quit his day job as a chemist once one of their compositions had sold a million copies. Not 50,000. A million. This is the most 1960, children-of-Depression-era-parents thing ever. The duo had already written multiple hit songs and there was every reason to believe they were going to have motive, opportunity, and ability to write more. Imagine Jack Antonoff right now holding down a day job “just in case.”
One story goes that the day “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” broke a million sales, Don Kirshner himself sprung for a limo to pick up Gerry after his last day at the lab. For the rest of his life, Goffin would always joke about that moment: “It’s the last time I had a real job.” Or was he joking?
“There’s a Lot Two People Who Care About Each Other / Can Do to Make Each Other Cry”
The heartbreak of her split with Goffin mirrored the pain of her own parents’ divorce. When Goffin announced his intention to move to L.A. without her, the ground beneath King trembles.
Here’s the pain: packing up the happy memories from their West Orange, New Jersey home that compensated for its lack of proximity to Manhattan with its state-of-the-art stereo system, which the couple played their demos on in their “work room.” Their daughters capering and cavorting and occasionally breaking in and wrecking a take in progress, or making it still more charming.
Also the bad times. The time he decided he needed to “expand his mind” and all of the ill-advised, unsupervised acid trips that followed. His escalating paranoia and self-harm. Her excruciating decision to sign off on shock therapy when the psych ward was leaning on her to do so and nothing else seemed to work. She was 23. The doorbell on the old house plays an off-key rendering of “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” Eternally an open-ended question, for better or for worse.
“Way Over Yonder / Is a Place I Have Seen”
Tapestry is such a remarkable collection of songs and so immediately appealing that it can be easy to overlook the unlikeliness of its success. King was coming off two commercial flops: first a rather lugubrious collaboration with Danny Kortchmar and her second husband Charles Larkey called The City whose one LP (1968’s Now That Everything’s Been Said) took a swing at Band-style gravitas and failed to chart, followed by her underrated solo debut, 1970’s Writer. Inevitably, both releases had some excellent material but neither so much as hinted at King’s imminent emergence as a stand-alone commercial powerhouse. Something was slightly off.
Nothing is off on Tapestry. Everything clicks. Fundamentally, King is a soul and gospel singer. From the opening piano phrases of “I Feel the Earth Move” through the stunning and spare reading of “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” that culminates the record, Tapestry is Aretha by way of theater camp, a sui generis blend that channels both King’s immigrant roots and profound love of R&B. There was a lot of confessional soft-rock in the early ’70s—too much if we’re being objective. No doubt, King benefitted from the emergence of this genre as a popular force, but Tapestry is in no way soft. It has the grit, wit, and groove to match classic records that fellow soul-survivors Rod Stewart and the Rolling Stones released that same year: Every Picture Tells a Story and Sticky Fingers.
Consider the insinuating minor-chord verse of the deep blue “It’s Too Late,” which lingers and looms like an encroaching storm before exploding into the borderline ecstatic resignation of its Billie Holiday–worthy chorus. Or the Broadway-adjacent pyrotechnics of “Beautiful,” which connects the uplifting spiritual mantras of gospel to the whimsical melodies of Gilbert and Sullivan. These are songs so well known to us it can be difficult to remember that someone actually had to think to do this.
When Jerry Wexler approached Carole King in 1967 about writing a new single for Aretha Franklin, her first impulse was to feel overwhelmed and intimidated. After all, Aretha wrote a lot of her own material, and also… it was Aretha. It was like offering a song to a deity. But when King sat down at the piano, those chords came to her with such effortlessness that she knew they were right. Wexler, the genius, had already recognized what King surely couldn’t have. There was no one more like Aretha than Carole.
“It Doesn’t Matter Whether Skies Are Grey or Blue”
By some cosmic coincidence (a miracle?), the recording of Tapestry occurred at the same time and in the same studio as Joni Mitchell’s Blue.
Recently minted-couple Joni and James Taylor contributed harmonies to a slowed-down, wised-up rendering of “Will You Love Me Tomorrow”—an excavation of past hopes and profound pain that rhymes with the psychic exorcism of Mitchell’s Blue to an uncanny extent.
For all of their aesthetic overlap and vaulting genius, King and Mitchell are, if not polar opposites, then at least polarities. Endlessly practical, East-Coast-born-and-raised Carole with her dedication to stability at the cost of reason, and Mitchell with her Western Canada wanderlust and lethally honed skepticism. And yet here they both are—personally adrift and bereft of answers—literally playing the same piano.
In some ways this is the story of the ’60s in microcosm: the tension between King’s Eisenhower-adjacent traditionalism and Mitchell’s I-Wish-I-Had-a-River-I-Could-Skate-Away-On tendency toward the suddenly kaleidoscopic possibilities imbued by postwar prosperity. Where once a multigenerational continuum of place and station had been an insoluble economic reality, escape velocity was suddenly all too attainable. What is gained and what is lost when we access freedom and assert our own identity and leave expectations behind? This is the central question at the heart of both Tapestry and Blue.
“I am on a lonely road / And I am traveling, traveling, traveling, traveling” goes the weary first couplet to Blue’s opening track, “All I Want.” The first words on Tapestry are: “I feel the Earth move under my feet / I feel the sky come tumbling down.” Joni is a voyager and Carole is a passenger, but the turbulence and entropy is just the same. Buy the ticket, take the ride.
“Keep Your Head Together / And Call My Name out Loud”
Tapestry is a work of such powerful self-affirmation that it can be difficult to reconcile what happened to King in its aftermath: the disastrous decision to take up with and eventually marry the marginal hanger-on Rick Evers, whose pathological jealousy and talentless desire for music stardom would result in his sponging off her and—unforgivably, heartbreakingly—repeatedly beating her over the course of their relationship. King finally gathered the resources to leave in 1978, and Evers died of a drug overdose shortly after. That he couldn’t drag out their divorce—or, God forbid, do something worse—could be seen as a lucky break for King. Compassionate to a fault, she probably wouldn’t see it that way, although King does allow in her memoir: “In retrospect I probably should have asked Rick these two questions. ‘Why are you living in your van?’ and ‘Are you by any chance psychotic?’”
And yet this terrible episode also explains something about Tapestry, with its majestic songs of resilience. In some ways the precocious songwriting genius Carole King was always out front, leading the charge for the shy and self-critical Carol Klein and the perfect family she searched for. Thunderously brilliant, periodically surly, innately wise, and always self-aware, Carole King was an invented character, a superhero costume donned for occasions like riding up the elevator at Atlantic Records at age 15. Anyone who has never felt like an invented character has probably never been a woman competing in a male-dominated industry.
Fifty years after its release Tapestry remains a vibrant, living miracle. For so many of us it narrates the highs and lows, the good choices and the bad, and the seemingly insensible patterns of the life we are urgently, confusedly weaving. This is how I feel whenever I listen to it.
I am on a lonely road and I am traveling, traveling, traveling. But I’ve got a friend.
