It began in the plush bedroom of a fashionable Riverdale home,
one week before James Taylor and Carly Simon became Mr. and Ms.
Simon-Taylor. Mrs. Andrea Simon was hosting a party for her son Peter
whose book of photographs, Moving On/Holding Still, had just been
released. Up in the bathroom, Carly and Peter were diligently trying to
synchronize two battery-operated cassette recorders so that a few guests
could enjoy a closed-door preview of "You're So Vain," in reasonable
facsimile of stereo.
The song lodged itself in my cerebral cortex and had me twitching
and humming for the next few days. By mid-week, the twitch turned to an
itch, which could only be soothed by getting a copy. Carly said there
was nothing she could do until Elektra sent her a copy, but in the
meantime she wanted me to come to a party at 3AM on Friday in the Time
Magazine Building (then known as the Time-Life Building) following James' midnight concert at Radio City Music Hall.
James' last tour had not been an artistic success. He had become
sluggish and more distant from his audience. Rumor had it that this was
due to mounting heroin addiction. His live appearances over the previous
six months had been limited to stints for George McGovern. I figured
this concert and the subsequent tour would serve as a gauge for how much
we could expect from him in the future.
The concert disarmed me of any vestiges of critical judgement. I
was drawn smoothly into the pleasure of the music and James'
performance. And, to a great concert, he added his announcement that
earlier in the evening he and Carly had married.
After that evening, a Rolling Stone Interview with the
Simon-Taylors seemed like a natural, and well-worth the delicate approach it inevitably entailed. James and Carly both had reservations about doing one, stemming from past experiences with the press. James had not done an interview for two years, and what he had done before that had been basically lip service. After Howard Hughes, one would be
hard-pressed to find anyone who said less to Time and still got his
picture on the cover. Carly had always been as open as possible, only to
find sensationalized stories of rock& roll romances, once reserved for
Screen Secrets, thrown back in her face.
After speaking to Carly on the phone, I was invited over to
dinner (Carly is an excellent, provocative cook, James is fair on the
dishes) and in a light group-therapy session we worked out the process
for the interview. James remarked that his good friend John McLaughlin
had once said that he does as many interviews as he can, because they're
a way to clean out the soul: "So what the hell. Let's see."
The first session was conducted on Thanksgiving Eve, in the
living room of the East Side Manhattan apartment in which they were wed
and are still honeymooning. Carly's brother Peter engineered and
co-conducted.
The second session was held a week later minus Peter. Once we
got started, they took it as seriously as they would a concert or album.
Even though James would later say, "Dammit, interviews are not what I
do," it was what they were doing, and they were going to do it right.
When the deadline that they greatly resented finally approached, they
switched into high gear and what amounted to a third session was
conducted by phone from a Maryland Holiday Inn to my New York apartment,
following one of James' concerts - and running until 5AM.
Jon Landau stayed up with me for 30 straight hours turning 200
manuscript pages into cohesive form. Robert Flaherty couldn't have put
more effort into editing his documentaries. The result is a collective
effort: James and Carly Simon-Taylor present themselves.
STUART: Do you want to talk about why you decided to get married?
And then later on in the afternoon, James said, "You know I've been
thinking about it and maybe we should get married." I said, "Well,
what's happened between this morning and this afternoon?" He said, "This
afternoon it was my idea."
STUART: And when did you first meet?
JAMES: That's the way we always heard it should be.
CARLY: I mentioned one morning to James in London that I thought we
should get married, and James was kind of hesitant in his response. He
said, "Oh well, there's really no reason to get married. We love each
other and we've been living together."
CARLY: It was my first opening night ever.
JAMES: It was the fall of '71.
CARLY: No, no, the first time we met was April 6, 1971.
JAMES: We passed once in the parking lot of my house - it's not really
like a Kinney System parking lot, it holds about three cars - out in
front of my mother's house were Peter Simon and Carly going to talk to my
brother, Livingston, about a job that she and Livingston were going to do
together. I passed Peter and Carly and said, "Hi" and Peter said, "Hi,
this is my sister Carly" and then I left. I guess I had one album out by
then.
STUART: So when was the first time you were really introduced?
CARLY: When we were officially introduced it seemed as though we'd known each other for a long time as we knew about each other from the summer place [Cape Cod, Mass.]. James came up and embraced me upon first meeting, and then we went into the bathroom and fucked.
JAMES: Actually, we never made love until after we were married.
[Laughter] I saw Carly on the street shortly after I met her, and I
followed her, thinking she was another woman. I was thinking, "what a
fine looking woman that is." Then I discovered it was Carly. It makes
you very happy when you do that. The same thing with this picture from
Carly's first album. I saw it on the wall - "Hey, that's a fine looking
woman," said I, and someone said, "That's your girl." I said, "What?"
They said, "It's Carly." I said, "Oh, so it is."
STUART: Are there instances when you wrote a song because you didn't want to say something?
JAMES: Often you can express things in songs where other
modes of communication are hopeless. Often you can express a feeling in a song that you can never get down any other way. Perhaps that's why songs are written. Perhaps that's the way paintings are painted or photographs taken.
STUART: Do you ever feel vengeance behind some of the songs, or some
sort of emotion that you just don't want to express any other way?
CARLY: Not until "You're So Vain."
STUART: Some people think "You're So Vain" is about James.
CARLY: No, it's definitely not about James although James suspected that
it might be about him because he's very vain. No, he isn't but he had
the unfortunate experience of taking a jet up to Nova Scotia after I'd
written the song. He was saved by the fact that it wasn't a Lear.
JAMES: A small twin prop.
STUART: You've mentioned various people who've downgraded your music.
CARLY: Not down graded it, but their career was always more important
than mine. But the anger in that song is not necessarily about anybody
whose put down my music or wanted me to be subservient to them. It's at
a certain type of man, very into themselves, that I've been very affected
by, adversely, in the past - a man whose more concerned with his image
than the relationship.
JAMES: The fact that she and I are married means that one is more apt to
work these things out rather than let them chase us away from each
other. In other words, the fact that there are feelings that I have
about dealing with Carly's profession and her career that I would
ordinarily not talk about for fear of chasing her away or chasing myself
away. That's one good reason to get married.
STUART: You both spent your childhood summers on the Cape. How did that
originate?
CARLY: My parents started going there in 1934 on their honeymoon. The
first summer I was there was the summer I was born and then at least once every summer. I heard a lot about James - he was referred to as Jimmie Taylor.
JAMES: I saw you on stage there once.
STUART: When was that?
JAMES: It was '62, '63 or '64.
STUART: Was that with Lucy [Carly's sister]?
JAMES: Yes, they were billed as the Simon Sisters. I used to sing down
there occasionally on Hootenanny nights. She was professional at that
point and I wasn't, so we never sang on the same show.
STUART:Do you remember what you thought of her the first time you saw her?
JAMES: I thought she was quite attractive, but she was, and still is,
four years older than I was, so back then when she was 18 and I was 14
she was a bit less approachable then she was when I was 24...
CARLY: You didn't know that I had a hankering for a 14-year old man.
JAMES: As it turns out she actually did. But at any rate, I plan to
pass her in age in about three more years. I want to send her to Alpha
Centauri aboard the first ship that goes there. The law of relativity is
gonna finally do it for us. When she comes back I'll be 60 and she'll be 30.
CARLY: When I get to be about 45, I shall freeze for five years because
James will be about 40 then and just wanting to get into all the young
women. But I don't want to know about it.
STUART: How do you feel about your both being stars affecting your
marriage, the kind of adjustment it requires?
JAMES: In the beginning of our relationship I very seldom listened to
music at home, seldom played the tape recorder or the record player and I
never played my own albums. I think Carly felt I wasn't taking enough
interest in her music. She might have felt that there's some competition
involved. I was afraid to say anything negative about her music. Any
criticism that I had, I felt would make her dislike me. So I didn't
mention either side of it.
STUART: Carly, would you criticize something that James was doing if you
didn't like it?
CARLY: I'm very wary, especially with somebody who takes you seriously
as I think James takes me. (I take him seriously.) You become sometimes
overly cautious about saying something that you think might hurt even
though it could be constructive criticism, so sometimes I feel as though
I'm walking on hot coals. I would be more careful about what I would say
to James than I would to somebody that I knew casually. Now I think this
will probably change.
It worried me terribly that James had never heard any of my
songs. I took that as an indication that he wasn't interested in my
music and therefore I somehow got a lower opinion of my own music because of that.
JAMES: I heard as few songs of yours as I'd heard of Dylan's or
Kristofferson's or Prine's or of anyone's. I just don't listen to music.
CARLY: But it's a different thing with somebody you're in love with.
I'm not Dylan or Kristofferson. Up until this album, you never listened
to my other albums.
JAMES: I never listened to mine either. I don't know, honey...
CARLY: It's a strange situation. i think it's one that has to do with
fear of competition. but I definitely feel that James is involved now.
It's still a precarious thing. Sometimes I feel it's a male-female
thing. Because any male that I've been involved with in the past has not
liked my success, has not wanted me to be successful, has felt threatened
by that fact.
JAMES: I'm very much interested in not seeing Carly behind the Kitchen
stove because I see females live totally vicariously through their
husband and it drives them crazy and it drives the husbands crazy, too.
STUART: Carly, your father [the president of Simon and Schuster, a book
publishing company] comes up a lot in your works and the lyrics Jacob
Brackman writes with you. is it subconscious or accidental?
CARLY: No, I don't think any lyric is by accident. The things that you
dream aren't by accident either, and the things that come out, even
though they might be a stream of consciousness, are there for some
reason. Particularly in "Embrace Me, You Child," there is a very
clear-cut picture of my father as a frightening and devilish kind of
figure. That's not the way I consciously see him, but somewhere in my
mind he must have seemed that way to me.
JAMES: I guess "Knocking Around The Zoo," which I wrote in MacLaine's
Hospital with a friend named Larry Stein. I think there are negative and
angry feelings expressed in that song.
STUART: Can we take 'Embrace Me, You Child' as a fairly autobiographical
statement of your feelings at your father's death?
CARLY: Yes. I felt abandoned, and I was angry at the thought of being
abandoned by him. At the same time as I was abandoned by Daddy, I was
abandoned by God, because losing my father also meant losing my faith in
God who I had prayed to every night that I wouldn't lose my father. From
the time that he had his first heart attack to the time that he died I
used to knock on wood 500 times every night, thinking that my magic was
gonna keep him away from death. I feared his death incredibly, and in
fearing his death, moved away from him, fearing that I might die.
JAMES: Anger at a dead parent is really hard to deal with. It's really
tough not to feel guilty about.
STUART: You say "I pretended not to know I had been abandoned."
CARLY: I pretended not to know. At the time I refused to blame anybody
for it. I didn't blame God; I didn't blame my father; I didn't blame my
mother. I was so careful about being fair I just refused to blame
anybody and therefore I suppressed a whole lot of emotions which
currently surfaced in such symptomatic expressions as wishing to mutilate mannequins.
STUART: There are religious overtones in a lot of your songs. I was
somewhat surprised you didn't get married in a church.
JAMES: Oh, we may be religious, but that doesn't necessarily have
anything to do with the church. Religion starts at home for us. The
word "religion" means "relinkage." The actual word means to reassociate
yourself with your roots or with whatever base, whatever you feel like you came from. It can be a religious experience to look at the ocean, or it
can be a religious experience for you to perform a certain kind of dance
or for you to sit around a table at Thanksgiving time. That can be
relinkage of a certain sort. It doesn't need to connect itself with any
legal deity.
STUART: Dancing, as you said, comes up a lot on your album. 'Dance' is
the title of the last cut. Does this have a spiritual meaning?
JAMES: I was thinking of two titles for the album, the first one was
Farewell to Show Biz, which Carly and Peter Asher both didn't like. We
finally settled on One Man Dog; I thought of calling it Throw Yourself Away.
I think it's religious to throw yourself away. It's interesting
that a lot of religious phenomena involve really surrendering oneself,
like in the film Marjoe where people are transported and go to pieces.
And it's religious sometimes when you take acid and lose your ego and
dissolve completely. I think what people are trying to get away from in
their religious experiences is the isolation of the conscious mind, away
from the idea proposed by Western civilization that the self is located
somewhere in the cerebral cortex and that self and consciousness are tied
together. Actually, one is much more comfortable locating oneself in the
earth or in your body as a member of the species. At least you're
immortal there.
There's something lonely, very unpleasant and very isolationist
about the idea of self that Western civilization has. Being a conscious
being means that you divorce yourself from certain aspects of life that
are worthwhile. Look at the body taboos: Don't defecate in public, don't
fart, don't burp, don't smell, don't cry, don't become overwhelmed, don't
lose control.
These things frighten people because they're symptoms of the
unknown right inside themselves. The unknown represents death to men,
represents that which he does not control and which eventually kills him;
and what you're left with is a very lonely and isolated place. Any idea
of religion is just the opposite of that. It's the idea of throwing
yourself away.
My love for Carly is a very religious thing, to me, because
sometimes I just exchange with her completely and I don't know where I
end off and she begins. The idea of religion is very important to me,
and I think I'm a relatively spiritual person, but every time someone
starts to pin me down on it they're just barking up the wrong tree
because it has nothing to do with anything specific.
CARLY: I am wondering what connotation Jesus had for you.
JAMES: Rhymes with cheeses, Jesus, pieces actually, in "Fire and Rain" -
"look down upon me, Jesus." "Fire and Rain" has three verses. The
first verse is about my reactions to the death of a friend. The second
verse is about my arrival in this country with a monkey on my back, and
there Jesus is an expression of my desperation in trying to get through
the time when my body was aching and the time was at hand when I had to
do it. Jesus was just something that you say when you're in pain. I
wasn't actually looking to the savior. Some people look at it as a
confirmation of belief in Christ as the one true path and the one sole
way, which I don't believe in, although he can certainly be a useful vehicle.
And the third verse of that song refers to my recuperation in
Austin Riggs [a Massachusetts hospital] which lasted about five months.
STUART: Since this has come up, why don't we talk about how you first got
involved with junk.
JAMES: I got involved with junk in New York after getting out of
MacLaine's, about halfway through the year which I spent with the Flying
Machine. I got involved peripherally for a while, getting off a couple
of times a week. At that point my addiction to it was more psychological
than it was physical, but it's very difficult to separate the two of
them. I kicked junk for about a half a year and then spent a while in
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where I had some growths removed.
That half-year was the fall of '67 through the beginning of '68.
I was clean. Then I started to take a lot of codeine. I went to Europe
and started to take opium and then I got into smack heavily for about
nine months. I got into it real thick there. I came back to this
country and kicked, over about a period of five months in Austin Riggs.
They're not equipped to deal with junkies and I wasn't called a junkie.
I wasn't admitted or dealt with as a junkie, but that was my problem.
That was the manifestation of my problem. Junk, in itself, isn't the
problem with me. It's a symptom of unexpressed and inexpressible anger,
in a nutshell. It's a way of retreating from the world. It's a way of
finding a comfort and a consistency in a chemical and I guess I have an
addictive personality.
Anyway, a year and a half ago I found myself on the road with a
Jones. When I got to Chicago I got in touch with a doctor who was a
friend of mine. He got me off smack and onto methadone. I've been on
methadone maintenance for the past year. After I got out of Austin
Riggs, I was clean for almost a year and a half. But by the summer of
'71 I was getting high again.
Sweet Baby James was out and Mud Slide Slim was out. I had just
kicked when I recorded Sweet Baby James and I was still clean when I
recorded Mud Slide Slim, but I was just getting back into it at that point.
STUART: You were seriously addicted during the recording of the Apple album?
JAMES: Yeah.
STUART: Was it because of pressure to do that album?
JAMES: I'm not sure. The album was strange. Carly and I talked a lot
about performing and what it means to us as adults and as children and as
adolescents. The idea of performing is something that's central to all of
us. What kind of show do you make for whoever you want to love you? In
a way, performance is what all of us do in order to get what we want.
I remember when I was a child I performed a lot. I didn't strum
on the banjo or sing minstrel songs, but I did perform. I tried to
impress my parents and through the time I went away to school I tried to
perform in terms of grades. Whatever I could find that they wanted me to
do, I would try to do it. Some people come on this way and others
don't. Carly and I both had a lot of that.
The idea that I have to perform makes me angry. And I think that
anger is in ways inexpressible because it's not really at anything
specific. It's like an old anger. And in that way recording an album
might have made me very angry and might have made me turn to drugs as an alternative... as a way to stomach that anger. Obviously, if you can't
express it, you'll have to swallow it somehow.
And I got into it a year ago last fall, when I found myself on
the road with no drugs and quite a habit, so I went to Richmond. The
first gig I had was in Williamsburg and I was sick for the job and it
went lousy. And I ran into a chick who I had scored from in London
earlier that summer and she took me to Richmond and we copped from this
guy there named Hangdown. I don't know if he'll get in trouble if I
mention him, but I don't ever plan to go back to him again. At any rate,
he sold me about enough to keep me until we got to Chicago. It kept me
for about two weeks...I was high all the time.
STUART: Was this the tour with Carole King and Jo Mama?
JAMES: No, this is last fall's tour with just myself. I wasn't high for
that tour with Carole and Jo Mama. I was straight for that.
Occasionally, I would take ups if I got too weak or sick to go onstage.
But I was straight for that gig. When I got to Chicago I got in touch
with a doctor who was a friend of mine and he got me methadone somewhat
illegally. He figured it was either he'd break a law or else I'd go down
so he straightened me out. I stayed on that methadone he gave me for
almost a month.
STUART: How do you relate to it, Carly?
CARLY: It was very harrowing for me. In the beginning of our
relationship, I didn't really understand the extent to which James was
addicted or needed drugs. It just kind of confused me that there was a
wall up between us and I didn't know exactly what it was, because I had
never been close to anybody who was really addicted to anything before.
I was aware of remoteness with James, that I couldn't depend on him. In
a sense, he could depend upon me more, but I was terribly confused
because all of a sudden there seemed to be this barrier that I couldn't
break through.
STUART: What caused James' remoteness?
JAMES: It was partly drug abuse and it was partially that instead of
communicating what feelings I had, I would get off on a drug instead. My
mind was occupied by the drug, the idea of getting off on a drug, the
idea of keeping it from Carly. But I still needed her very much. I threw
out three separate sets of works saying this is the end. The last time was
about six or eight months ago, so I guess it should be finished now.
CARLY: There are certain addictions that are much more acceptable by
society. Junk happens to be one of the unacceptable ones. It happens to
be one the most self-destructive ones, too.
STUART: It seems that the times when you went to junk besides those you
mentioned were at a point of reaching a new level of success. With the
first album becoming more successful, the Time magazine cover, getting
close to a woman, where there seemed to be some sort of permanence -
these seemed to be the times that turned you to junk.
JAMES: Maybe that's true. I don't know what the idea of success means to
me. It carries with it an inherent quality that if I actually get what I
want, I'll have to pay for it. In other words, success carries with it
almost a sense of inherent and impending retribution. It's strange...
STUART: Are there precedents for this in your growing up?
JAMES: Yeah. There was a period of time when my father was away. He
went away for two years when he was drafted into the Navy when I was six years old. He spent two years in the Antarctic which i about the same to a six-year-old child as being on the moon. At that time I got very much
into my mother as did all of us, and I think the idea of success would be
to have her love me instead of my father. That kind of Oedipal idea,
that kind of an Oedipal striving, carries with it the idea if your
successful you'll have your eyes pulled out. It's the kind of thing
which you know you can't be successful at. And you know you mustn't be
successful at it because you're not a man, you're a child.
On the other hand, being successful might have carried with it an
inherent anger at my mother or father for their wanting me to perform,
their wanting me to do well, and therefore if I'm successful there's an
element of having done it for them and not wanting to have done it at all.