From: owner-hotcakes-digest@smoe.org (hotcakes-digest) To: hotcakes-digest@smoe.org Subject: hotcakes-digest V3 #18 Reply-To: hotcakes@smoe.org Sender: owner-hotcakes-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-hotcakes-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk hotcakes-digest Sunday, June 18 2000 Volume 03 : Number 018 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Grassrooting TBT [B4INSF@aol.com] Globe and Mail interview part1 [B4INSF@aol.com] Interview part2 [B4INSF@aol.com] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 17 Jun 2000 19:18:12 EDT From: B4INSF@aol.com Subject: Grassrooting TBT Hello everyone my name is Bill Faure. I am organizing an internet grassroots movement for CARLY'S The Bedroom Tapes. It is being all but ignored by Arista here in the States. I am hoping members of this group will supply us with email addresses of media radio, print, television in the Unitied States and abroad. So far we are concentrating with radio, but have started to email 'friends' of Carly---Oprah and Liz Smith. there is also a push to the The Recording Academy for Grammy nominations for TBT.......I am going to enclose a great interview that Carly gave to THE GLOBE AND MAIL in Canada and a link for AMERICAN RADIO Rad io Guide USA Top 100 Cities Here is the email of the Media Contact at The Recording Academy adam@grammy.com he is........ Adam Sandler Vice President of Communications The Recording Academy 3402 Pico Blvd. Santa Monica, CA 90405 310.392.3777 The Recording Academy - Press Room I'll send the article in another email Bill Faure ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 17 Jun 2000 19:43:21 EDT From: B4INSF@aol.com Subject: Globe and Mail interview part1 Scarred by wisdom (Carly Simon's latest album reveals a singer-songwriter newly gifted with a sense of life's fragility) By Simon Houpt New York -- CARLY SIMON doesn't want to talk about breast cancer. Perhaps some background is necessary. In the fall of 1997, doctors discovered a lump in the singer's left breast. Shortly thereafter, a tabloid reporter discovered the discovery, throwing a reluctant Simon into the spotlight. For two and a half years, she has been something of an unwilling poster girl for the disease, dutifully offering the public occasional updates on her condition and urging women to have regular mammograms. Catching her cancer early, Simon underwent a mastectomy and chemotherapy. Now it is time to move on; continuing to talk about cancer makes her melancholy. In the weeks leading up to an interview in anticipation of her new album, nervous publicists arranging the sit-down repeatedly insist on a ban on questions about the C-word. But here's the problem. The Bedroom Tapes, which arrives in stores today, is s uffused with the blue spirit of Simon's recent experience. In 1998, after the mastectomy and still weak from treatment, she retreated to her sprawling homestead on Martha's Vineyard and sought comfort in familiar things. Alone in the house after her children had fled the nest and with her husband spending most of his time in New York, Simon turned to music. Converting her daughter's old room into a studio, she loaded it up with recording equipment and instruments she could play whenever the mood struck, regardless of the hour. She rolled the tape unconcerned with how the music might play on the radio. Two of the resulting tracks directly address Simon's bout with cancer. The other pieces have been written by a singer-songwriter newly gifted with an awareness of mortality and the fragility of life. So when she appeared last Friday afternoon in the funky administrative offices of a New York City-based television network for an interview with The Globe and Mail, the issue of breast cancer danced in the air like lightning looking to touch down. to be continued ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 17 Jun 2000 19:43:30 EDT From: B4INSF@aol.com Subject: Interview part2 The Bedroom Tapes is Simon's first album of original material in almost six years. Her last issue, 1997's Film Noir, was a collection of standards by Cole Porter, Hoagy Carmichael, Frank Loesser and others. The disc helped complete her obligations to Arista Records, while circumventing Simon's struggle with writer's block. After that, with no record contract in hand, she was able to withdraw from the usual demands of record execs and focus on making music she wanted to hear instead of the banal market-driven tunes she had been under pressure to produce. The result is one of Simon's richest efforts in more than a decade, though in a landscape littered with manufactured pop hits, she knows she stands little chance of even making it onto the charts. "The record company [she re-signed with Arista] is not willing to spend any money on me at all," Simon sighed as she took her seat, getting straight to the point. "There's no video. They just won't do anything for me." Her shaggy blond hair a little washed out from the years, she nevertheless looks in fighting trim. She is tanned and fit, lanky in skateboarding pants and a floral print blouse thrown over a one-piece bathing suit. She is trying not to take the snub from Arista, where she has made her home for the last 15 years, too much to heart. She is working hard to ignore the fact that there are no posters of her up at the recording company's headquarters, while the office walls are lousy with posters of just about every other Arista artist. Even Barry Manilow. She knows that kind of stuff shouldn't matter. It seems that cancer has a way of imparting wisdom, of drawing heavy lines between what is important in life and what is trivial. Simon is trying to prevent her self-regard from being affected by things over which she has no control. "Every time I'm beginning to feel that maybe I'm consequential, I have the record company who pays absolutely no attention to me and thinks I'm nothing. So I see that and say, 'Oh yeah, I am guess I am nothing to my peers,' " she offers. "Say for the purpose of argument that my record became a hit, and all of a sudden there's a picture of me up at Arista, because all of a sudden they're proud of me. Why would I believe that any more than I believe the inconsequentialness of me right now?" Yes, she admits that she believed she was important back in the days she was at the top of the charts. She recalls the period following her triumph with No Secrets, the 1972 album that contained her biggest hit up to that point, You're So Vain. At the time, she was literally at the top of the pop world, playing queen to James Taylor's king after the two married that year. Her follow-up album, Hotcakes, was released in January, 1974 and went to No. 3 on the charts. But Simon was furious with David Geffen. He had released her album at the same time he brought out Bob Dylan's Planet Waves and Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark, and those other discs were hogging the top two spots. "I called David Geffen in a rage. Of course, that was pretty laughable. I was complaining about being No. 3. It just shows that it's all relative. If you're used to being No. 1, chances are you're going to have a tougher time gaining humility about being No. 3." Since those days, of course, Simon has had more than enough time to gain humility. She and James Taylor divorced in 1982, pop music morphed into something else and her career has never again experienced the highs of those early years. When everything changes, how do you hold on to what matters? "The answer is there has to be something far more important, on another plane that you trust," she says. But judging by the album, there are few things Simon feels secure enough to trust. In a sharp quartet of songs, she savages the patronizing pretensions of fame and friendship. One number, titled We Your Dearest Friends, is a vitriolic take on a former friend's behind-the-back sniping. "Nobody wants you / And we the least of all / It's been a long time / Since you had those famous lovers," Simon sings, mimicking harsh words originally aimed at her. Faced with cancer, an ambivalent record company, writer's block and the betrayals of friends, Simon's world was upended. She questioned first principles. Eventually, she turned to the mark left behind by her mastectomy and wrote perhaps the most poignant number on the album, Scar. "Wisdom is ephemeral," Simon remarks. "There's a wise woman in Scar. She says 'Lead with your spirit and follow your scar.' My scar points in the direction of my heart." Lightning touches down. Simon lets her blouse fall away from her left shoulder. A riverbed of tissue runs along the side of her rib cage. "My scar seems to have a wisdom," she says, touching it gently. "It's something that I've learned to be really proud of. I don't hide my scar. If I wear a low-cut dress you see it. I love it. I suppose it's not that different from a soldier's scars. They're signs that you've survived. "There are these creams that are supposed to get rid of your scar. You're supposed to rub them in and your scars will go away. I have no desire to get rid of my scar. Why would you want to cover up a scar?" Like a character in a Michael Ondaatje poem, she recognizes the only thing that can be known for certain is the geography marked on our own bodies. She figures her outlook comes from something her mother once said. "She had arthritis in her joints, really knobbly joints, like a gnarled tree," Simon recalls with a smile, imitating her mother's prematurely clenched fists. "One day she held up her hands and said, 'Don't you just love my hands? Look at this -- it's not always comfortable, but don't you think it's beautiful?' " Copyright 2000 | The Globe and Mail ------------------------------ End of hotcakes-digest V3 #18 *****************************