Cracking the Whip with Carly Simon – Saucy Schemes Pt. 2
From Hotcakes to Spoiled Girl, Carly Simon Steered Her Career and Persona over the Stormy Seas of Change
Welcome back to Saucy Schemes, my 3-part series on Carly Simon’s career and my lifelong affinity with her music! When last we left our heroine, she’d enjoyed unfettered career momentum over the course of her first three album cycles, despite the cynicism shared by a certain contingent of hipster NYC music critics who felt her privileged upbringing diminished her authenticity. Following her blast into the pop culture stratosphere, a result of her marriage to James Taylor, and the subsequent release of “You’re So Vain” and No Secrets, Carly emerged as a 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. Rather than prioritize meeting public expectations with her music and her persona, Carly followed her artistic and personal intuition in shaping her life, her creative output, and her image. This confluence of factors set the stage for the unpredictable, often stormy years of her career through the 1970s and 1980s.
Misfit
The first Carly Simon album I came into possession of was Boys In the Trees. It was gifted to me by a family friend named Shauna, a beautiful high school girl who gave it to me to make up for having been mean to me earlier in the day. When I approached my mom and said, “Mom! Look what Shauna gave me!” she frowned, because at first glance she thought Carly was topless on the cover. At the time, the album was a bit hit and miss for me because many of the lyrics explored themes I could barely wrap my head around. But “You Belong to Me” and “You’re the One” became instant favorites, and they’ve remained so to this day.
Despite my inability to connect with some of the tracks, there was something in Carly’s voice that continued to speak to me, the way she had over the course of my mom’s Best of Carly Simon 8-track that I was so familiar with. I knew I had to find out more about this mysterious and alluring woman’s work.
From that point forward, I frequently talked my grandparents into driving me to Tower Records during weekend visits. One thing I’d do while there is browse through the Carly Simon section, carefully examining each album. She was famous for her provocative album covers, and I’d study them closely, along with the song titles, looking for recognizable hits and trying to get an idea of what each one might sound like.
After examining her albums for what must have felt like hours to my grandparents, I’d make my choice, purchase the album, and when I got home, I’d lose myself in the musical world she’d created for it. I discovered No Secrets, Anticipation, Hotcakes, and Playing Possum in this manner, all out of time with when they’d initially been released. My grandfather was scandalized on the first of these excursions by the cover of No Secrets, which was the first of her albums I purchased. “You can see her NIPPLES!” he scolded, just in case I hadn’t noticed.
By 1978, most middle school students were preoccupied with Andy Gibb, Leif Garret, and Shaun Cassidy (if they were girls), Kiss, Foreigner, and Van Halen (if they were boys), or some sort of mix and match if they were queer like me. Even though I was used to being out of step with my middle school cohort, my musical tastes were not, except for my aversion to Kiss and my affection for Carly. According to my peers, Carly Simon was irrelevant. Ancient history. Someone your mom, aunt, or grandma might listen to. Uneager to attract more unwanted attention than I was already prone to attracting, I kept my Carly Simon fanboy proclivities to myself.
Inside Out/Upside Down (Hotcakes, 1974)
Simon’s follow up to No Secrets was Hotcakes, released in January 1974, when the former was finishing its run in the lower reaches of the charts. Carly’s image on the Hotcakes album cover is a complete 180 from the chic, liberated glamazon captured on No Secrets.
On Hotcakes, the setting is monochromatic domesticity: Simon, bun clearly about to pop out of the oven, is seated at a kitchen table, wearing a Bohemian maternity dress and flashing a toothy grin. Everything but her hair is white. She’s positively beaming, and the warmth of her smile mitigates the undeniable visual impression that she’s boxed into a corner.
Though her feet aren’t visible on the album cover, to assume she’s barefoot as well as pregnant doesn’t require much of a stretch, especially given the existence of a delightful outtake from the session in which she’s standing before a vintage “Atomic Girl” sideshow banner (“Dangerous! Exciting! Educational! Thousands of Volts!”), her palms joined at her chest as if in prayer. She’s wearing the same floor-length dress, the same toothy grin, and she is, indeed, barefoot. Second wave feminism’s existence was, in part, a result of women rejecting the barefoot and pregnant trope (among others) of the 1950s and 60s, as dictated to them by the patriarchy. I can’t help but assume that Simon’s choice to inhabit this trope in the moment she did was deliberate.
The dichotomy between No Secrets and Hotcakes is not just symbolic or conveyed through her image. The LP’s first track, “Safe and Sound,” directly addresses the tension between the two versions of herself (the one beheld by the public eye, and the one she was constructing for herself). The song’s verses provide a laundry list of tongue in cheek examples that signify an unstable social order: Roman whores seeking a better way, Mexican toreadors turning gay, doped up Buckingham Palace guards, naked motorcycle gangs on Hollywood Boulevard.
In the song’s last verse, Carly sings “New York women want me sounding off like a suffragette.” This line finishes her list of bizarre circumstances evidencing the outside world’s insanity, and its placement at the end of the list is telling, as if she’s created the examples that precede it only so that she could arrive at this point. She comes off as dismissive and amused by the expectation, but she’s also acknowledging her status as a feminist proxy. Carly is anticipating the derision of feminists, many of whom already found her suspect as a feminist figure. She’s preemptively pushing back against the women who expect her to behave like a feminist, or more accurately, their idea of one.
If we can equate feminism with Carly exercising her agency as an adult woman, pursuing marriage and motherhood when she did was one of the most feminist things she could have done; she was making a choice to build the life she desired by way of marriage and motherhood. What she desired didn’t comport with how contemporary feminists were defining feminism, though. To many of them, Carly’s choice looked like two steps back.
Nevertheless, Hotcakes was a huge hit upon its release and enjoyed a warm critical reception. It peaked at №3 on the Billboard albums chart and went gold (sales of over 500K) just 11 days after its release. Its lead single, “Mockingbird,” an energetic duet between Simon and Taylor, peaked at №5 on the Billboard pop singles chart, and was certified Gold (sales of 1M+) by the RIAA. The album’s success indicated that audiences were willing to follow Carly down her traditional, domestic fairy tale path; they wanted to believe that falling in love, getting married, and starting a family was still a dream worth having. As long as she could successfully pull it off, they were with her.
Hotcakes was also the first indicator that Simon felt no obligation to map her life or artistic course based on what was expected of her. Her audience was going to have to chase her, rather than the other way around. The dichotomy between the personas projected on No Secrets and Hotcakes was enough to induce whiplash, especially given the time and context of their releases. And while the whip was definitely curled at this point, she hadn’t even cracked it yet!
Free Up Your Spirit (Playing Possum, 1975)
Playing Possum, released in April 1975, is remembered for its cover more than for its music, which is unfortunate because it’s a solid collection of tracks that hold up to 21st century scrutiny. The album is primarily a celebration of the body, physical intimacy, and Carly’s comfort with inhabiting her sexuality.
The album’s first single (“Attitude Dancing”) was a disco-flavored dance song that picked up sonically where the Hotcakes track “Haven’t Got Time for the Pain” left off, with a horn section added and a more propulsive, danceable beat. “Attitude Dancing” was the only Top 40 single the album produced, peaking at №21, and while it’s a fun song to get up and boogie to, it isn’t representative of the album’s overall vibe, which was closer to the acoustic and piano-based ruminations of her previous work.
The controversy over the album’s cover was real, but Carly was in no danger of being canceled, and she shrewdly navigated the backlash. Simon appears to have known enough about playing the long game (something she’s never spoken of directly but has shrewdly demonstrated for decades) to safely assume any blowback she received over Playing Possum’s cover wouldn’t tank her career. And it didn’t.
Carly handled the controversy with finesse. An item in Time magazine’s 5/5/75 People section opined that Carly’s “folksy laments and ginghamy good looks were a staple of the early ’70s;” that she “shows some new angles” and has “switched to a skimpy chemise and earthier songs on her new record.” (btw I love how they refer to the early 70s-in 1975-as if they’re already the distant past). The Time piece quotes Simon alone, who calls Playing Possum “a body album,” and describes the vibe she and photographer Norman Sheef created during the shoot by playing funky music, which led to her performing a strip tease for him. In other words, the Time item is a promotional piece, placed in the nation’s dominant weekly news magazine at the time, which enjoyed a weekly circulation of over four million. Not quite evidence of a backlash.
In a cover profile for a May 1975 issue of Rolling Stone (no longer the counterculture rag it had once been, but still a harbinger of “hip capitalism”), Carly was the source of the claim that Sears (the Walmart of the 70s) refused to stock the album before it was even released. She also conducted part of the interview while browsing in a NYC erotic art gallery, casually telling the dealer about one piece, “Quite nice, but not erotic enough.” As Sheila Weller recounts in Girls Like Us, after passing on the too-tame erotic art piece, Carly defiantly stood her ground when asked about the album cover’s image, asserting there was a distinction to be made between being treated like a “piece of meat” by others and expressing her own carnality: “Being attractive sexually is not something which I feel guilty about or embarrassed by in any way. I feel that it’s great.”
Despite the feminist energy that fueled her early solo career trajectory, audiences were willing to embrace her detour into domesticity, as long as she reaffirmed the pre-feminist fairy tale version of the life trajectory she’d chosen by going the marriage route. Glowing, expectant mother-to-be and hot wife were both parts of the same fairy tale, and so far, she seemed to be pulling it off. Playing Possum was her third consecutive Top 10 album, peaking at №10 in June 1975, but the album had a relatively short shelf life, falling off the charts after just 17 weeks.
Even though her sexualized image on Playing Possum irked some feminists, no one could make the claim that Playing Possum wasn’t a hit. But her commercial momentum was on the downturn, which her label must have sensed. When they released The Best of Carly Simon in November 1975, they chose to include an album cut (“Night Owl”) and a B-side (“We Have No Secrets”) from No Secrets, rather than the 2nd and 3rd singles from Playing Possum (both of which charted), a choice that was most likely sales-driven, but didn’t show much confidence in her recent output.
Hotcakes and Playing Possum effectively captured the euphoric emotional and sexual aspects of her honeymoon phase with Taylor, but the ambivalence of the Playing Possum track “Slave” would come to act as a bridge to the darker side of marriage she’d explore in subsequent releases. In the song, she’s still lost in her love and infatuation for Taylor, but she’s starting to come out of her daze and contemplate an unnerving realization: I love how this feels, but it might not be good for me.
Leaving Your Heart Out (Another Passenger, 1976)
By 1976’s Another Passenger, the cracks in her marriage weren’t just beginning to show through her work, they were on full display, and the foundation was looking unstable. Just four of the album’s dozen tracks focus on things unrelated to marital strife. Most of the 8 tracks that do are performed as theatrical music vignettes, lending some credence to Carly’s dubious claim at the time that they were not autobiographical. “Half a Chance,” the hairline crack that opens the album, finds her timidly begging her partner to not check out on their marriage without trying to save it first. You need look no further than several of the other song titles (“It Keeps You Running,” “Fairweather Father,” “He Likes to Roll”) to give you an idea of where her head and emotions were during this period.
Simon’s denial that Another Passenger’s tracks had anything to do with her marriage is hard to swallow. She may have written those songs at a remove, and perhaps convinced herself she’d made their observations through characters she’d invented (her own imaginary proxies, if you will), but the issues they explore are clearly not only important to her, but lived in. Her confusion, her fear, and her anger are all on display. Her expectations of what being married to James Taylor would be like are shattering over the course of this album, and she’s still so caught up in it that she hasn’t seemed to realize yet that she’s watching them shatter.
Despite comparatively lukewarm sales (a chart peak of №29 and no top 40 singles), it was notably well-reviewed in the quarters that tended to dismiss her work, and her core fan base didn’t ignore her. But for Carly’s mainstream audience, the casual fans happy to come along for the ride, so long as she kept singing “Mockingbird” with James and didn’t make them think too hard about what it meant if this marriage thing didn’t work out, the songs about marital problems wouldn’t do. The honeymoon phase presented over the previous two album cycles should be followed by the nesting phase; the part where you dig in, raise your kids, and fill your home with the furniture and tchotchkes that will come to reaffirm the already-mapped-out phases of the life path you’ve chosen. All this marriage angst appeared to be off putting.
Shaken, Not Stirred (Boys in the Trees, 1978)
Carly rebounded in a very big way with the July 1977 release of the James Bond theme “Nobody Does It Better,” which became an international hit that peaked at №2 in the U.S. and remained there for three weeks. It couldn’t snatch the top spot out of the death grip Debby Boone had on it with her monster hit “You Light Up My Life,” which parked at №1 for 10 consecutive weeks. “Nobody Does It Better” became Carly’s longest-charting hit, spending 8 weeks in the Top 10 and remaining on the Hot 100 for twenty-five consecutive weeks. The song received a Grammy nom for Song of the Year at the 20th annual ceremony in 1978, Oscar and Golden Globe noms for Best Song, and Simon herself received her own Grammy nom for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female. Even though all the awards went to “You Light Up My Life,” (damn you, Debby Boone!), the single’s massive success thrust her back into the cultural zeitgeist in a way she hadn’t been since Hotcakes.
Enter Boys In the Trees and Carly as a sexy, East coast sophisticate for the disco era. The album cover sexualized her again, but the photographer this time was a woman, the photo not a spontaneous candid but staged and artistic. There was no controversy, no feminist pearl clutching over a sexualized female body this time out, even though the Danica leotard she’s wearing up top was airbrushed onto the photo (she was topless in the original image). The album won the Grammy for best album package at the 21st Annual Grammy Awards in 1979.
Carly flirted with disco on the album’s Top 10 hit “You Belong to Me,” and embraced it fully on the track “Tranquillo (Melt My Heart).” The rest of the tracks fit safely within the singer/songwriter wheelhouse her base and casual fans enjoyed most from her, even as she continued to expand the scope of her sound. “You Belong to Me” peaked at №6 on the Billboard Hot 100 and earned Carly a Grammy nom for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female (the award went to Anne Murray, for “You Needed Me”). Boys In the Trees was certified platinum just four months after its release, peaked at №10, and remained on the Billboard albums chart for 29 weeks.
In a June 1978 cover story for Rolling Stone, in which the author starts off by wishing he was Carly’s toddler son Benjamin because “all he has to do is cry and Carly Simon sticks her breast in his mouth,” (see how far we’ve come?) Simon gave her takes on morality (“Morality is what I can do and still live with myself.”) and sexual infidelity (“…I’ve never bought that open-marriage thing. I’ve never seen it work. But that doesn’t mean I believe in monogamy. Sleeping with someone else doesn’t necessarily constitute an infidelity.”).
These disco-era takes on marriage-related topics would fall out of favor at the dawn of the 80s, but in the late 70s they sounded sophisticated and pragmatic. At the same time, she spent much of the interview in her kitchen, cooking up a batch of deli-style comfort food, demonstrating that, despite her sophisticated airs and her ability to navigate contemporary sexual mores with aplomb, she was still just a grounded mama bear at heart.
That Cruel and Lovely Valley (Spy, 1979 to Spoiled Girl, 1985)
1979’s Spy marked the start of a commercially diminished period for Carly that lasted nearly a decade, but it was also a period in which she was the most creatively adventurous she’d ever been. It’s also worth noting that her persona became more consistent (if not fixed) moving forward, as an artist and a woman coping with the dissolution of her marriage, and later finding love in new relationships while discovering and exploring other aspects of life through her work.
Expectations for Spy were high, as it appears to have been designed to be Boys In the Trees Part 2 (Upbeat lead single? Check. Arif Mardin producing? Check. Disco song for the clubs? Check.). But it never caught fire on the charts. Despite an entertaining performance video for its lead single, “Vengeance,” wherein Carly hams it up like only she can, the album peaked at №45, remained on the charts for a mere 13 weeks, and was relegated to the indignity of the cut out bins in short order.
She moved from Elektra to Warner Bros. for a fresh creative start, resulting in 1980’s Come Upstairs, a foray into new wave pop that fared better than Spy, peaking at №36 and enjoying a 32-week chart run. The album produced the hit single “Jesse,” which was a stylistic throwback to her 70s work, but with country-flavored guitars added. It was certified gold by the RIAA (1M+ copies sold), peaked at №11, and remained on the Hot 100 for nearly six months.
Her standards album, 1981’s Torch, was the first of its kind by an American artist that decade, establishing a trend that wouldn’t catch on commercially until Linda Ronstadt’s What’s New a couple of years later. Her 1983 release Hello Big Man was considered a return to form on which she also dabbled in reggae with Sly and Robbie, but it stalled at №69 during its brief 17-week chart run.
1985’s Spoiled Girl, a glossy 80s synth-pop experiment that credited no less than 9 producers (including Don Was, Phil Ramone, and Arthur Baker), was an unmitigated critical and commercial disaster. Its poor reception (Rolling Stone deemed it “utterly inconsequential”) resulted in her new label Epic Records dropping her from its roster; Simon later stated that once sales figures came in, she couldn’t even get them to return her calls. As most Simon fans know, however, Spoiled Girl boasts some of the best hidden gems in her catalog.
It was a new era, though, right? Madonna and Janet Jackson had arrived, and while VH1 provided an outlet for pop stars of a certain age, most of them were forced to design and inhabit new lanes that the main stage no longer had room to accommodate. Several artists from the prior decade were struggling to maintain relevance before admitting defeat and accepting relegation to legacy act status. Other artists, such as Heart, Fleetwood Mac, Aerosmith, and Elton John stumbled commercially at the dawn of the 80s, but regained their momentum as the decade unfurled. Some even enjoyed commercial success that eclipsed their 70s output.
The perception of the general public (and the industry) of Carly as a 70s relic was going to be hard to shake. That whip in her hand appeared to have gone slack, what with all the musical genre-hopping she’d been throwing at the wall over the first half of the 80s, with nothing appearing to stick.
The question for her fans (including me because, despite Spoiled Girl, I never doubted her) wasn’t “Why?” (see what I did there?), but “When?” When was Carly Simon going to coil up that whip, spin it over her head, and crack it again like we knew she could, and would, do?
What would she be serving the next time she came around?
This is the second 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 1 here.
Carly Simon’s website offers access to the new album, Comes In Waves, 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.