Carly Simon’s Artistry Comes in Waves – Saucy Schemes Pt. 1

Caught in the undertow of her new album, I revisit her career and my lifelong affinity with her music.

Our First Day(s) Together

Carly Simon has been my favorite singer/songwriter since I was a kid. In fifth grade, between the time my mom left for work and the time I locked the front door with my latchkey and walked to school, I frequently listened to Mom’s 8-track copy of The Best of Carly Simon. I’d stand in the living room, surrounded by the sound of Carly’s voice, and sing along to all the songs on repeat. This created many hours of joy for me, and many late arrivals at school.

My awareness and enjoyment of her music predate those fifth-grade mornings by a few years, however. When I was no more than 6 or 7 years old, I remember singing along to “You’re So Vain” on trips to the beach, or at home, because it was one of those huge radio hits that soundtracked my life for a while. The song was ubiquitous during its run, and when you’re that age, a few months can feel like forever. At that time, I had no idea who she was, or what she looked like, or that her name was Carly Simon. In fact, when I first saw her picture on my mom’s 8-track, I had no idea who she was until I heard “You’re So Vain” again when she played the tape in her car.

I was also well-acquainted with the chorus of her song “Anticipation,” which was licensed not long after its release and notoriously used in a series of commercials for Heinz ketchup. I can still remember those shots of the ketchup bottle tilted slightly, filling the TV frame as a thick glob of ketchup oozed out of the bottle and onto a burger patty to the sound of a woman’s voice singing, “Anticip-ayaytion…” Mom’s 8-track also taught me that “Anticipation” was a real song before it became a commercial jingle. I’ll admit, it took me a while to appreciate the track on its own merits without associating it with ketchup.

Comes in Waves arrives at a moment when both Carly and I have had plenty of time to figure out at least some things about this journey through life in which we find ourselves afloat. Together, her presence and her music have been one of the very few constants in my life that I could reliably return to when I needed any number of things: comfort, reassurance, commiseration, you name it. Over the course of our journeys, I’ve been surprised, delighted, moved, and sometimes disappointed, depending on how she connected with me at any given time. As I’ve moved through life, the songs that resonate most have been cycling through. The cool thing is, the cycle never stops. And no matter the circumstances, or my reactions to her work, she’s always been there.

Carly Simon is one of America’s premier music artists, one who has skillfully maintained musical and cultural relevance for nearly sixty years. Since the release of her self-titled solo debut, Simon has sometimes accommodated the pop market, and at other times taken unexpected sharp left turns straight out of it. Several manifestations of her artistic expression became cultural touchstones; some of them captured the zeitgeist of their moments, while others challenged or subverted expectations. No matter its form or its impact, Simon has always maintained high aim with her artistry.

More Good Old Days

I won’t give you the full pre-career biographical rundown (her fantastic autobiography, Boys in the Trees: A Memoir, is the premier source for that info — I recommend the audiobook, which is narrated by Carly herself and utilizes several of her songs to great effect), but she came out the gate as a solo artist with immediate success and credibility bestowed upon her.

Her eponymous debut arrived in February 1971. Its inaugural single, “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be,” was a Top 10 hit and became Carly’s first cultural touchstone. The song captured the collective ambivalence many American women felt toward marriage as feminism’s Second Wave was just about to crest. The song explored the internal struggle of a woman who could clearly see the damage marriage often did to people; not just to those getting married, but to their families as well. In the song, she makes these unflattering observations, then chooses to get married anyway; not because she wants to, but because she feels trapped by what’s expected of her. She doesn’t seem to be aware of any other options for herself.

There was quite a bit of overlap as her career momentum accelerated. Her sophomore album Anticipation followed in November of the same year, producing another hit single with its title track, which peaked at №13 on the Billboard Hot 100. At the 14th Annual Grammys ceremony in March of 1972, Simon was nominated for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for her debut single (the award went to Carole King for Tapestry), and she scored a win for Best New Artist.

Simon released another cultural touchstone 8 months later, one that eclipsed her previous hit singles and sent her skyrocketing into the pop culture stratosphere. But first, on November 3, 1972, Carly Simon married one of the biggest pop stars in music, the guy frequently credited with launching the singer/songwriter genre: James Taylor. They immediately became rock’s royal couple. Just 5 days later, the song that would come to define her was released. “You’re So Vain” dropped on November 8, 1972, as the lead single from her album No Secrets, which came out three weeks later. To say this was Carly’s commercial breakthrough feels like a gross understatement. November 1972 marked the beginning of her commercial zenith.

“You’re So Vain” truly needs no introduction. It’s a song that has resonated with generations of music lovers, been reworked and covered by several artists, ranging from Marilyn Manson and Johnny Depp to Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs. The song lives on through the decades, enjoying unexpected periods of renewed interest that just keep happening: Simon performed the song with Taylor Swift on the latter’s Red Tour in 2013 to a cheering audience of 55,000. Upon its initial release, “You’re So Vain” topped the pop and adult contemporary charts, stayed at №1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for three weeks, and remained in the Top 10 for eleven weeks.

The No Secrets album cover is a shot of Simon striding along a London street, braless under a blue jersey, sporting a pair of velour jeans that match her floppy maroon hat, with an oversized bag swinging from her shoulder. It captures a woman at the peak of early 1970s fashion in motion, her glamour on par with the likes of other icons of the era such as Gloria Steinem, Mary Tyler Moore, and Jane Fonda. The image captures a fashion aesthetic of the moment that felt chic and sophisticated: a natural, unadorned, minimalist glamour that was grounded in reality, and therefore achievable. Unlike the glamour aesthetics of previous decades, with their emphasis on diamonds, furs, and dresses so tight one wrong move might result in a fashion disaster, the glamour these modern women exuded appeared to be not just organic, but effortless.

No Secrets ascended to the top spot on the Billboard albums chart, stayed there for five weeks, spent 14 weeks in the Top 10, ranked №4 on Billboard’s year-end list of 1973’s top-performing albums, and remained on the chart for a total of 71 consecutive weeks before ending its initial chart run in April 1974.

Silly Pests

Such heights are wonderful when reached, no doubt, but as we all know by now, they’re difficult to maintain. Though she enjoyed periods of commercial success and pop cultural cachet in the 1970s (and during a meticulously orchestrated adult contemporary comeback in the mid-1980s), critics of the time tended to dismiss Carly’s output as either lightweight or inauthentic, and their reviews were often dismissive and patronizing, if not hostile.

Robert Christgau, a revered New York music critic of the time who has successfully maintained his influence as an authority on popular music, titled a 1973 Newsday essay he wrote about her, “Carly Simon as Mistress of Schlock.” The few nice things he has ever had to say about her have been doled out begrudgingly, and in a manner that implies he’s only saying them in spite of himself, out of a sense of duty and possible respect for her longevity in the business.

This underestimation of Simon’s artistic output was the result of multiple factors. The first was what initially soured Christgau on her: Carly’s background. In his heyday, her father Richard L. Simon was a publishing magnate who co-founded Simon & Schuster, made a lot of money, and ran in elite social circles that included such luminaries as Albert Einstein, Benny Goodman, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Robinson, George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Though he died in 1960 when she was 17, the patina of wealth associated with him was something Simon was never able to shake in the public’s view of her.

Despite public perception, Carly had depleted her modest inheritance several years before her solo career took off, and in the mid-to-late 1960s worked a succession of low-level jobs to stay afloat: secretary at a production company, talent handler/hostess for a TV show called Live from the Bitter End, “researcher” (or “a reporter who didn’t have a penis,” as Sheila Weller clarifies in her fascinating book Girls Like Us) in Newsweek magazine’s Letters department, and summer camp music counselor for a season in the Berkshires. Though she wasn’t rolling in dough, neither was she ever at risk of being unhoused, in part due to the youth/young adult culture of the time (couch surfing was commonplace), and in part due to a strong network of affluent connections her admittedly privileged upbringing provided her. Relatively speaking, she was by no means living the high life at the dawn of the 1970s.

Christgau was not alone in his contempt for her perceived class privilege. Ellen Willis, a pioneer of pop music criticism (she was the first pop music critic for The New Yorker and later wrote for Rolling Stone, The Nation, and The Village Voice, among others) considered herself one of those “funky types from the streets of Queens.” In her brief February 1973 New Yorker review of No Secrets, which was buried in a rumination on Joni Mitchell’s Blue, Willis took aim at Simon’s “father fixation,” and wrote disparagingly of her penchant for “wide-eyed lyrics” that “inevitably aroused my class antagonism.” She then declared, “…I would never have predicted that one of my favorite singles of the past year would be a Carly Simon song.”

Referring to “You’re So Vain,” Willis praised the song as “great rock and roll; the inspired sloppiness of its language is positively Dylanesque….” She also found the song had “a lot more feminist verve than Helen Reddy’s manifesto” (referring to Reddy’s anthem, “I Am Woman”), and appreciated the “good humored nastiness in Carly’s voice.”

What’s telling here is her throwaway use of the phrase “a Carly Simon song.” It indicates something to be dismissed out of hand, for no other reason than that it is a Carly Simon song, and it assumes the reader knows and agrees with this assumption. With the lyrics and vocal delivery of “You’re So Vain,” however, Simon won Willis’s respect, even though the columnist did remain a skeptic.

The Woman You Think You See

Another factor was the pop rock landscape of the decade. Today, we can take for granted that there’s plenty of room for scores of female music artists to operate within and outside the business. Back then though, for women at least, the “landscape” was less a landscape, and more the lopsided stage of a 99-seat theater on an obscure New York City side street no one’s heard of. I’m exaggerating, but in relation to the actual pop rock landscape of the time, which had been designed, and was run and populated by, a vast majority of men, the exaggeration is only slight.

Simon’s pop rock contemporaries during the decade were Linda Ronstadt, Joni Mitchell, Carole King, and Olivia Newton-John. Each had her own commercial trajectory, and some sold more records than others, but they each symbolized different facets of the female pop rock solo artist mold of the era. Simon and her peers each had a persona that was singular. They each fulfilled a very specific role within the pop rock landscape as female artists, and the landscape at the time only had room for one of each.

Linda Ronstadt was the interpretive sales juggernaut whose concerts sold out stadiums. She was also the Instrument, wielding her powerful voice to interpret the songs of others. This made her persona somewhat chameleonic; even though her vocal delivery was reliably consistent throughout the decade, the songs she sang were by and large not her own. Her persona adapted slightly, depending on which song she was singing. She was also “one of the boys,” a constantly touring professional who was adept not only at commanding the stage, but at effectively managing her all-male supporting bands.

Joni Mitchell was the “queen of artistic integrity” (as Weller puts it, again in Girls Like Us). She was the Artist who often inspired awe with her output. Her work was by turns beautiful, daring, experimental, meticulously executed, and increasingly cerebral as the decade wore on. Mitchell’s persona resided at a safe remove from the public. Her art was something to be observed and admired, but from a distance, like that of Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Beautiful to behold, but not necessarily something to be inhabited.

Carole King was the seasoned vet with a stellar track record, including Tapestry, the biggest-selling pop album of all time, until it was supplanted by Saturday Night Fever in 1979. At the outset of the decade, King was the Friend, an established artist whose persona was primarily the absence of a persona. The Tapestry album cover perfectly conveys this: she’s seated barefoot in a window seat, hanging out with her cat in what could be the bed- or dorm room of any number of typical young high school or college women of the era. That’s it. Married and a mother by the time Tapestry dropped, she appeared to be settled into domestic adulthood with a sense of quiet satisfaction.

Olivia Newton-John was the blond-haired, blue-eyed girl next door. She was the Sweetheart who reassured you with her warmth and affability, and for most of the decade, she remained comfortingly uncomplicated while her peers were busy complicating things in one way or another. Newton-John’s persona was rooted in the ideals of 1950s femininity, and it chafed against the “I Am Woman” self-image many of the decade’s women had of themselves as they strived to manifest newly embraced feminist ideals. She’s what cultural conservatives wanted a woman to remain: wholesome, agreeable, non-threatening, and if not non-sexual, then at least not overtly sexual. Even after her transformation from Good Sandy to Bad Sandy in 1978’s Grease, and the release five months later of her album Totally Hot, on which she appeared dressed head to toe in (gasp!) black leather, her music maintained its level of safety for her fans, or at least the fans who could bring themselves to forgive her radical post-Grease costume change/”transformation.”

While the personas of Ronstadt, Mitchell, and King each offered something for audiences to admire, and Newton-John’s offered reassurance that old-school femininity wasn’t dead yet, Simon’s offered audiences something different: a persona they could not only identify with, but project themselves onto. Carly Simon was the Proxy. The seemingly naked candor of her lyrics and vocal delivery revealed a consistent level of vulnerability being shared through her music that the others didn’t achieve or maintain over the course of the decade. Simon seemed to be confessing her innermost feelings to the listener through her songs, and in that pre-internet age, her image and music fused in a way that felt like she was providing audiences with a level of personal access that her contemporaries didn’t come close to offering.

Simon’s career trajectory over the course of her first three album cycles fed this dynamic: from the cautious ambivalence of “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be” to the sly mockery of “You’re So Vain;” from viewing marriage through a lens of wary single womanhood to falling in love with and marrying the most prominent prince of the singer/songwriter genre; and from the vintage, ankle-length dress-wearing bohemian on the cover of her debut album to the chic, liberated woman who appears on the cover of No Secrets.

Simon was making progress, as were many of the women who saw themselves reflected in her evolution, and the progress from one album cycle to the next was measurable. Carly Simon became the pop rock Proxy for an audience of women who connected with her just as feminism’s second wave crested, broke, and washed over the rest of the decade.

The problem with being a proxy for so many people (as Simon was about to learn) was that, sooner or later, the trajectory she was assumed to share with them would inevitably diverge from that of the collective. Audiences assumed they knew where Simon would or should go next. Some pop stars choose, once stardom is achieved, to prioritize meeting the expectations of their fans, the press, and the public as the guiding force in the creation of new artistic output and career management as they move forward. Carly Simon was not that kind of pop star.

Which meant things were about to get complicated.

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Links of interest:

This is the first in a 3-part series called “Saucy Schemes” that explores Carly Simon’s career and my lifelong affinity with her music. You can read Part 2 here.

Carly Simon’s website offers access to the new album, including a “Behind the Songs” feature that offers images of draft lyric sheets, photos, and other ephemera. It also offers a first look inside the extensive multimedia archive she’s building.

Walter Neff’s Carly Simon-Album Covers blog celebrates Carly’s career through analysis of each of her album covers as representations of the evolution of her artistic expression and public persona.

My Spotify playlist Saucy Schemes-Carly Simon Vibes provides hours of Carly Simon listening enjoyment. My personal taste is the driver behind the playlist. Forgive me if I left out one of your favorites.