Boys in the Trees by Carly Simon

Author:Carly Simon
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250095909
Publisher: Flatiron Books

Me and Kris Kristofferson: “I’ve got to have you.”

“Come let us drink again, before the second show …” Cat Stevens and me in London, 1971.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

soft summer gardens

I had done something very much like jumping into the deep end of the pool when I knew only the doggie paddle. Dr. L said: “Just jump in, and don’t even think about it.” That’s really good advice if you’re psychologically stuck and if you’re absolutely sure there’s water in the pool. It worked. I had gotten on the plane, rehearsed one day with the band at hand, and then opened myself up to the competition, politics, and envy of show business, filled with smilers concealing knives, and the sound of whispering behind closed doors. But I had met Arlyne Rothberg through David Steinberg. She took me on as her client and protected me. For fourteen years, I had the best.

I would be slow to understand the trap of showbiz, but by the time I had done a few more shows at the Troubadour, opening for Harry Chapin, Don McLean, and Kris Kristofferson, and then opening up at Carnegie Hall, Symphony Hall in Philadelphia, and in Boston Symphony Hall for Cat Stevens, I was caught under the udder of the cow. The smell of the crowd and the roar of the greasepaint. It was dangerous, but so very heady. As long as I was the opening act and the audience wasn’t really expecting something from me, I could deliver a small set. I got comfortable speaking between songs. I didn’t stutter very much. I can’t explain it, though I think it had to do with having a good number of word substitutions. If I had had scripted introductions to songs, I wouldn’t have had the easy mobility of being able to pause or to change a word. My stammer and I weren’t paying quite the same kind of attention to one another. Maybe doing something that I admired myself for brought me out of it? With the exception of one review I remember that compared me to a whinnying horse, I was getting the kinds of reviews that said, “Watch out for Carly Simon, she’s heading for the stars.”

While in New York for our Carnegie Hall concert, I made a date with Cat Stevens. I invited him to my apartment for dinner. We had gotten to know each other while in L.A., but there had been other new friends there. Cat Stevens is a very cerebral and quiet-spoken man who dances out of that serene persona in his music when he goes for emphasis, for dynamics, for the big bang in a song. It has something to do with beauty by mistake. That chord that your fingers go to by accident and that takes the emotion around another corner from the one you expected, like the rock walls on the Vineyard. I learned it from listening to him while he was onstage, and from the hours and hours I listened to Tea for the Tillerman—till I was on my third vinyl copy.

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