by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago Charles and I watched a couple of music
programs on KPBS. One was an American Masters episode about Carole King, the iconic singer-songwriter who began as a
collaborator with her first husband Gerry Goffin (they married when he was 18,
she was 17 and he had just got her pregnant), working out of the celebrated
Brill Building for a company co-owned by Don Kirschner, the fabled producer and
marketer later responsible for the Monkees, the Archies and the TV show Don
Kirschner’s Rock Concert. The Brill
Building in New York City had been the center of the fabled Tin Pan Alley in
the 1910’s, 1920’s and 1930’s, and by the time Goffin and King — along with
their lifetime friends Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, who wrote for some of the
same artists and were fiercely competitive with Goffin and King in terms of who
could place their songs with whom and how successful they’d be — got there the
rules of the songwriting business were pretty much the same as when Irving
Berlin, George Gershwin and others had tried to crack it decades earlier. The
music business was ruled by publishers, who had the songwriters under contract
and had them crank out songs in huge buildings, equipped with cubicles, each of
which contained a piano and a couple of chairs. The publishers would pay the
songwriters a regular salary and in return they would own all their material;
then they would send out song pluggers to get musicians to perform and record
their songs, and if all went well some of them would be hits and make the
publishers huge amounts of money, which they might or (more usually) might not
share with the actual songwriters. The standard royalty rules was that
songwriter payments went half to the writer and half to the publisher, but
there were plenty of ways unscrupulous publishers could get around that, either
by putting their own names on as co-writers (as Irving Mills infamously did on
most of Duke Ellington’s greatest hits from 1926 to 1939, when Ellington left
Mills and set up his own publishing company) or by forcing the writers to
accept lower royalties — or none at all, on the basis that they were already
being compensated by the regular salaries they were getting from the
publishers.
Also, publishers often arranged for the singers or bandleaders to
take so-called “cut-in credits,” having their names put on a song as “co-composers” even if they’d
had nothing to do with writing it so they’d get a steady income not only from
their own record of a song but from anyone else who recorded it as well. Some
stars, like Paul Whiteman and Frank Sinatra, found cut-in credits immoral and
refused on principle to take them; others, like Bing Crosby and Elvis Presley,
were notorious for refusing to record a song unless they got a cut-in. This system began to break down
in the 1950’s because most of the early Black rock-’n’-rollers like Chuck Berry, Little Richard
and Fats Domino wrote or co-wrote their own songs — the Tin Pan Alley
old-timers really didn’t understand how to write for Black artists and white
songwriters who could “write
Black” like Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Mann and Weil, and Goffin and King
were much in demand — though most of the white rock artists still relied on
other people’s songs. (The big exceptions were Carl Perkins and Buddy Holly,
who not only wrote for themselves but wrote great songs that are still being performed today.) The
system was blasted apart by the huge success of the Beatles, who not only wrote
most of their own material (though their first, second and fourth albums each
adhered to a ratio of eight originals to six covers, and one of their covers
from their first album, Please Please Me, was King’s and Goffin’s “Chains”) but were affirmatively
promoted by their manager, Brian Epstein,
as doing so. The assumption that performers who did their own material did so
only because they weren’t strong enough in the business to get the best songs
from the publishers went out the window, and instead audiences, record
companies, managers and promoters started assuming that performers who wrote
their own songs were better, more complete artists than those who didn’t. (In
the late 1980’s and 1990’s, thanks largely to the success of Whitney Houston,
the pendulum started swinging back the other way and singing and songwriting
were once more seen as separate skills — so non-singing songwriters like Diane
Warren and Carole Bayer Sager could once again have major careers and make lots
of money without having to perform their own material.)
Goffin and King
remained together for about a decade and wrote some of the greatest hits and best songs of the period: Little Eva’s “Loco-Motion”
(it was a song about a dance but when Goffin wrote the lyric no dance called
the Loco-Motion existed; Little Eva, whom Goffin and King met when they hired
her to baby-sit, had to invent one in a hurry when she went out on the road to
support the record), the Chiffons’ “One Fine Day” (which Goffin and King
recorded a backing track for, intending it for Little Eva; when she
inexplicably turned it down they gave it to the Chiffons, and the Chiffons
added their vocals over the original backing track — you can hear this because
Carole King had recorded a hammering piano part for the breaks, which she
wouldn’t have if the track had been intended for a vocal group instead of a
solo singer because the group members could supply the fills vocally, so you
hear the Chiffons singing their backups over King’s slam-bang piano chords),
the Drifters’ “Up on the Roof,” Bobby Vee’s “Take Good Care of My Baby” (also covered by the Beatles, though only on their Decca
audition tape — this show featured a TV clip of Vee singing it and, not
surprisingly, the Beatles’ version is worlds better even though anyone
listening to the Decca tape as a whole, which is O.K. but falls far short of
what the Beatles did once EMI signed them, will probably think, “Gee, if this is what I’d had to go on, I wouldn’t have signed
them either!”), “Halfway to Paradise” for Tony Orlando pre-Dawn (later covered
beautifully by Nick Lowe), “I’m Into Something Good” for Herman’s Hermits,
“Pleasant Valley Sunday” for the Monkees (the show is an attack on suburban
conformity and it was written after Goffin and King had moved to the suburbs,
which King loved — she saw them as a much better place than Manhattan to raise
their two daughters — and Goffin hated, and made clear his hatred for in his
lyric), “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” for Aretha Franklin, and a little-known
and quite beautiful song called “Hi-De-Ho (That Old Sweet Roll),” which wasn’t
recorded until 1970 by Blood, Sweat and Tears — two years after the marriage of
Goffin and King came to an abrupt end. It seems he wanted to see other women
and even asked King for permission (it doesn’t seem to have occurred to him to
go the Joseph Smith, Jr. route and simply found a new religion where polygamy
would be permitted), and the two of them moved with their two daughters, Louise
and Sherry, to L.A. but bought separate houses there. King took up with some of
the singer-songwriters beginning to emerge on the L.A. scene, including James
Taylor and Joni Mitchell (both of whom sang uncredited backup parts on her
commercial breakthrough as a performer, Tapestry), and started a band called The City with her second
husband, bassist Charles Larkey, and Danny “Kootch” Kortchmar, long-time
collaborator of James Taylor. The City’s one album, Now That
Everything’s Been Said (1969) for Lou
Adler’s Ode Records, flopped — it didn’t help that the terminally shy King was
now willing to perform in the studio but was still petrified at the thought of
playing live; it also didn’t help that Adler shifted the distribution of Ode
from Columbia to A&M just after The City’s album was released — and so did
King’s first solo album, Writer
(1970).
Her second album, Tapestry
(1971), was a different matter altogether; song after song on it — “I Feel the
Earth Move,” “It’s Too Late,” “Beautiful,” “You’ve Got a Friend,” “Where You
Lead” — became not only hits but enduring standards, and the album sold nine
million copies, the best ever by a woman artist to that time. (The record for
sales by a woman King broke had been held by Judy Garland for her Live
at Carnegie Hall album.) James Taylor had
the hit on “You’ve Got a Friend” but King didn’t mind — they had actually
recorded it about the same time and she generously made a deal with him that
whoever got their record out first would have the hit — and apparently King
made a promotional film performing much of Tapestry in private, because there’s quite a lot of footage
of her playing these beautiful songs at her piano at home, with Charles Larkey
sitting down with his bass guitar on his lap and providing her only other
accompaniment. She made one more great album after Tapestry, Carole
King: Music, with the great rocker “Back to
California” and a reworking of the Goffin-King song “Some Kind of Wonderful,”
but after that her albums became increasingly repetitive as she decided that
“mellow” would be her stock in trade — though occasionally she’d return to
rock, notably with a Capitol release called Pearls: Songs of Goffin
and King (1980), her own versions of the
songs she and Goffin had written for other artists in the 1960’s. (King gave an
interview with the release of Pearls
saying that her working title for that album had been the comment a lot of
people had had about those songs: “I Didn’t Know You Wrote … ”.) Along the way she ended up with a third husband,
Rick Evers, with whom she moved to rural Idaho in 1977; Idaho stayed with her
but Evers didn’t. It seems he beat her on a regular basis and he also took
large amounts of drugs, and two days after King had had enough and told Evers
she was leaving him, he did a major overdose of cocaine which at the time was
announced as a fortuitous accident but on this show was presented as suicide.
She stayed in Idaho and worked on a bill to protect much of the state from
exploitation for its minerals (Idaho has a reputation as the most Right-wing
state in the U.S. — it was home to Randy Weaver and his white-supremacist
movement, it was the last state in the country to report a case of AIDS and
according to the Human Rights Campaign, the only U.S. state that has no openly
Queer elected official — so this has been an uphill battle); she’s also had a
reputation for supporting, and doing benefits for, Democratic Presidential
candidates from George McGovern to Hillary Clinton (in 2008).
King made her
most recent comeback when Douglas McGrath got the idea to write a musical
called Beautiful, which would be
about the career of King and Gerry Goffin and would use their songs as the
soundtrack. The people who first read McGrath’s book were disappointed that he
stopped the story when Goffin and King split up and told him to expand the
story at least to the recording and release of Tapestry. He did, and ended up with a sensational hit; Jessie
Mueller won a Tony Award for her performance as the young Carole King and did a
spectacular duet on “Beautiful” at the Tony Awards show with King herself.
Carole King’s story is fascinating mostly because her songs are so beautiful
and so enduring — though, like Burt Bacharach, King survived as a songwriter
despite the poor quality of some of the early recordings of her songs. The show
features a TV clip of the Shirelles singing “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?,”
and confirms my impression of them as a mediocre group who became successes
because whoever was picking their material got them a succession of incredible
songs. (When I got the Supremes’ 25th Anniversary
Retrospective two-CD set, which featured
one disc of their hits and one of obscurities and previously unreleased tracks
— including a great record from 1961 called “Those D.J. Shows” which should
have made them stars three years before “Where Did Our Love Go?” actually did —
one of the surprises was hearing the Supremes try to imitate the Shirelles even
though they had much better voices than the Shirelles ever did.) One other
aspect of the Carole King documentary is how much her music, like all blues, soul and rock, owes to Black Gospel music: it
seems every time she sat at a piano, especially to write or record a mid-tempo
or fast song, her fingers went to those same chords that had begun in the Black
churches.
