From: owner-hotcakes-digest@smoe.org (hotcakes-digest) To: hotcakes-digest@smoe.org Subject: hotcakes-digest V1 #75 Reply-To: hotcakes@smoe.org Sender: owner-hotcakes-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-hotcakes-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk hotcakes-digest Sunday, November 15 1998 Volume 01 : Number 075 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Carly article [catman ] carly article pt 2 [catman ] carly article pt 4 [catman ] carly article pt 3 [catman ] Calry's Corner Link [catman ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 15 Nov 1998 01:04:52 +0000 From: catman Subject: Carly article I found this article on the carly Board at JTonline Carly Simon: The trip up from West 11th Street to Carnegie Hall by Patricia Kennealy One of the few present wrinkles in an otherwise deadly rock fabric is the sudden emergence of women as composer-performers. (Long overdue, and welcome, if for no other reason than that everybody else seems to be sounding as if they've been dipped in hand lotion.) There's more to it all than that, though. This particular greening runs from an all-woman hard-rock band (Fanny--receiving excellent reviews) to such established entities as Carole King and Mary Travers now feeling the need to try themselves out as soloists, and a spate of newcomers in between, all effecting their art with grace and authority. Carly Simon, for one, and one of the very best. Carly, the new crown princess up at Elektra Records (Queen Judy Blue Eyes still--and impressively, after ten years--holding down the top spot at the Big E), looks like a very well-brought-up cross between Mick Jagger and Lily Tomlin, and is probably one of the coolest-headed individuals around. All in her own undertoned way: and if superstar signs can be correctly read so early on, Simon seems more than a sure thing. What else can you say, after all, about an artist who has made at this writing only four public concert appearances and has had people standing on their hands every time out, who has only one album (in release for about three months, now going up the charts like an Otis elevator), the bell-voiced lady with the gypsy shag and the spacious smile who knocked Carnegie Hall on its ear last week in her first appearance at a major venue, who speaks in intelligent sentences and who never says "Far out!"? Carly at the Troubadour with Cat Stevens, at the Bitter End with Kris Kristofferson, in Boston and back again here at Carnegie, sharing the bill both places once more with Cat. Carnegie on an early summer Saturday night, the Westchester-North Jersey axis out in force, surprisingly well-mannered for a change. Maybe they know something. Carly, lissome in a long brown silky dress, green suede boots, Ukrainian shawl tied round her hips. (Later, in the dressing room, she seems more pleased about having looked "thin" onstage--as if she should worry--than about the concert itself.) - -- CARLY SIMON DISCUSSION LIST http://www.ethericcats.demon.co.uk/ethericcats/index.html TANTRA’S/ETHERIC PERSIANS AND HIMALAYANS http://www.ethericcats.demon.co.uk ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 15 Nov 1998 01:05:43 +0000 From: catman Subject: carly article pt 2 Her band has been together as a unit all of several weeks, but it would be hard to ask for a better meld. They complement, not supplement: Jim Ryan on guitar and a flash see-through bass, Andy Newmark on drums, pianist Paul Glanz; Ryan and Glanz also contribute ensemble vocals. The program comprises five or six of the songs off the album plus a couple of newies, one of which, "Anticipation," will probably be the new single. The Carnegie audience is aware and approving of Carly, responsive, amazingly up, eager for their usual "More!" but not being piggy about it. Three songs along, Carly observes, "There's nothing to be afraid of in Carnegie Hall," plainly delighted that there isn't. She takes to the piano for her current airplay hit, "That's The Way I've Always Heard It Should Be": she plays authoritative piano, and exuberant, though uncomplicated, guitar. The weight, of course, is the voice--clear, balanced and astonishingly strong. Not all of her songs measure up, but you get a well-founded feeling Carly Simon could sing a shopping list and make it sound good. It all comes natural to her, having been involved in music of one sort of another since her very early childhood. (Her family is the Simon of Simon & Schuster, but she does not particularly care to talk about it, nor do you ask.) Down on West 11th Street when she was a kid, one of her uncles had an orchestra in which family members participated. What it eventually came to, according to Carly, was "Get those Simon girls the hell out of here, they may be nice but they can't sing." The lie was later put to this avuncular judgment, as oldest sister Joanna became a successful opera singer; middle sister Lucy and Carly had themselves a folk duet called The Simon Sisters in the early 60's. Classical music still plays a large part in Carly's listening life: she comes out for Bach and Beethoven, and professes a deep affection for Poulenc, who, she says, heavily influenced her earlier compositions. Now, it's mostly personal experiences that cause and affect her songs; she writes most of them herself, with pretty much of a through-composed approach. "Though I used to like to find sad Spanish poems about lovers dying in apple trees and set them to music." - -- CARLY SIMON DISCUSSION LIST http://www.ethericcats.demon.co.uk/ethericcats/index.html TANTRA’S/ETHERIC PERSIANS AND HIMALAYANS http://www.ethericcats.demon.co.uk ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 15 Nov 1998 01:07:09 +0000 From: catman Subject: carly article pt 4 She admits to severe nervousness about Carnegie; onstage, she is only a little stiff, and only around the edges. She has that grab-your-attention-and-nail-it-to-the-wall magnetism shared by all true performers, and claims to (logically enough) prefer live to studio work. "There's a rapport about a live performance that you just canNOT get going anywhere else, definitely not in a studio--the bad thing now, at least Elektra will maybe think it's a bad thing, I don't know, is that performing live has sort of put me off records. I've gotten not too happy with the idea of studio recording--you know, singing with phones on, a track here, lay it over a track there--it's not real to me. What I'll do is try for as live a sound as possible in my next album." Watching her sing, head back, eyes closed--undoubtedly that is what Carly Simon would call real: the joy of the feeling of song in her throat, and she can pull the audience into the joy of feeling it as well. "I like to be able to see the audience," she frets. "In small clubs like the Troubadour and the Bitter End, I could see them, and I could sing to the faces and the reactions. This is so different--a big black nothing with red lights in it that makes a lot of noise and you can't see it." No matter. Carly Simon is a blast of cold air in a shut-up house. She enjoys what she does, and it shows. It would be much the same if there were no audience, but then again not the same, for she makes the audience as much a participant as she is herself; and these days, when most performers think of their music as truly commodity and no more, that quality which Carly Simon embodies is a rare commodity indeed. Copyright 1971 by Patricia Morrison - -- CARLY SIMON DISCUSSION LIST http://www.ethericcats.demon.co.uk/ethericcats/index.html TANTRA’S/ETHERIC PERSIANS AND HIMALAYANS http://www.ethericcats.demon.co.uk ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 15 Nov 1998 01:06:25 +0000 From: catman Subject: carly article pt 3 Some of her most sensitive songs are done in collaboration, to one degree or another, with Jacob Brackman, moonlighting from his movie critic's gig at Esquire magazine: "Dan, My Fling", a Brackman-Fred Garner effort, was originally something that ran "Ruth, my truth is all sung out/Now I've got to fall back on dreams." Carly liked the music, asked for a re-work of the lyrics, and "Dan" was the happy result. Her songs are for the most part non-categorizable, which is all to the good. Spare, simple and highly personal, a little bit like Jacques Brel, a little bit like more current impressionists James Taylor and Carole King, Simon puts a slow-motion poignancy into a song like "The Best Thing." Of her other songs, "Alone" is equipped with a skewer accuracy ("My going has nothing to do with you/I'm planning a trip all alone") and the Simon-Brackman collaboration "That's The Way I've Always Heard It Should Be" is set out with acupuncture precision. Other people's songs, she allows, come hard, but she takes Buzzy Linhart's beautiful "The Love's Still Growing" and makes it entirely her own. Would you call yourself a prolific songwriter, Carly? "NOOOO!" She shakes her head, wide-eyed with denial. "Three songs a month--which I've just written--is a lot for me, really a lot, and sometimes, very often, I won't be able to use any of them, I'll hate them. Of course I much prefer to sing my own songs--naturally, if I wrote more, I'd have more to sing...but you really can't push it. Songwriters get just as blocked as any other writer." Backstage between shows at Carnegie is a family party, a Taylor-style trip (with whom the Simons used to share summers up on Martha's Vineyard). Roses and relatives in the dressing room. Carly's mother, looking astoundingly like Katherine Hepburn playing Eleanor of Aquitaine, recounts her wish to stand up in her seat during the concert and shout "Brava, brava!" Did you, Mrs. Simon? "Of course!" Carly comes over to be introduced, looks you in the eye, takes your hands as if she's honestly glad to make your acquaintance. In the Carnegie Tavern, a discussion of roots. Two years of limbo spent working at Newsweek after the fold-up of The Simon Sisters preceded a solo musical commitment and the present flowering. Influences: "The people I really love, oddly enough, are not the ones who influenced me. Maybe I love them too much to be influenced by them--Aretha, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, and more than anyone else, Odetta. Men--Kristofferson, James [Taylor], Cat Stevens--have had much, much more of a direct impact on my style than women." - -- CARLY SIMON DISCUSSION LIST http://www.ethericcats.demon.co.uk/ethericcats/index.html TANTRA’S/ETHERIC PERSIANS AND HIMALAYANS http://www.ethericcats.demon.co.uk ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 15 Nov 1998 01:10:12 +0000 From: catman Subject: Calry's Corner Link http://members.aol.com/SColl10248/index.page2.html - -- CARLY SIMON DISCUSSION LIST http://www.ethericcats.demon.co.uk/ethericcats/index.html TANTRA’S/ETHERIC PERSIANS AND HIMALAYANS http://www.ethericcats.demon.co.uk ------------------------------ End of hotcakes-digest V1 #75 *****************************