Neil Crossley
In early 1969, copies of a demo recording by Brooklyn-raised songwriter Carole King began circulating among LA record producers and A&R executives.The recordings had been submitted by Lou Adler, producer, talent manager and head of the West Coast office of King’s publishing company, Aldon Music. Adler was convinced there was a future for King as a performer, as well as a songwriter, and his suspicions were reinforced when he started to make follow-up calls. “I couldn’t get the demos back,” he told Variety in 2012. “They were collecting them as part of their record collection. there’s something about the piano feel and the fact she was doing a lot of the parts and the vocals and the background vocals that just captivated all of these people.”
Two years later, on 10 February 1971, many of the songs from the demo appeared on King’s second album, Tapestry. Adler’s instincts had been proved correct. King’s prodigious talent as a songwriter, combined with her raw, uncontrived vocal delivery, resulted in an album of rare quality and depth.The album sold 25 million copies, spent 15 weeks at No. 1 in the Billboard charts, remained in the charts for 313 weeks and was voted No. 36 in Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time. Almost five decades on, it remains a work of abiding artistic merit.
Few people listening to Tapestry would’ve made the connection between the barefoot, baggy-jumpered woman on the front cover of the album and the jobbing New York songwriter of a decade earlier.
But by the time Adler first peddled her songs around LA’s music-industry elite, King had already written numerous hits for other artists. Rolling Stone magazine once calculated that King’s chart entries from her days as a staff songwriter would run to five hours if they were played back to back. Her career from songwriting alone is so expansive that it dwarfs even the monster sales figures achieved by Tapestry.
Carole King’s chart entries from her days as a staff songwriter would run to five hours if they were played back to back
King during sessions for Tapestry at A&M Studios in LA in January 1971
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Childhood sweethearts and husband-and-wife songwriting team King and Goffin pose for an early publicity shot
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HITSVILLE HIGHS
King started early. Born Carol Joan Klein in 1942 in Manhattan, she had perfect pitch at the age of four and an insatiable appetite for music. Her mother Eugenia taught her music theory and elementary piano technique. “My mother never forced me to practise,” she recalled in her 2012 autobiography A Natural Woman. “She didn’t have to. I wanted so much to master the popular songs that poured out of the radio.” At high school in Brooklyn, she changed her name to Carole King, formed a band called the Co-Sines and made demo records with her friend Paul Simon for $25 a session. She attended Queens College in Brooklyn, and it was here that she met Gerry Goffin, who would become her songwriting partner.
At the age of 17, King became pregnant by Goffin and the pair married in August 1959 at a Jewish ceremony on Long Island. They quit college, took day jobs and began writing songs together in the evenings. that same year, they wrote their first hit Will You Love Me Tomorrow, which yielded a US No. 1 single for The Shirelles in 1960. It was a landmark moment, allowing the couple to give up their day jobs to focus on writing.
By now, music publisher Don Kirshner had signed them to his Aldon Music empire, based at 1650 Broadway. Goffin wrote the lyrics, King wrote the music, and they worked regular office hours in one of the company’s tiny songwriting cubicles.
Natural Woman
An outtake from the album-cover photoshoot shows King in relaxed mood, clutching her self-made tapestry prop
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Within seconds of Jerry Wexler asking Goffin and King to write a song called ‘Natural Woman’ for Aretha Franklin, the couple began formulating ideas as they drove home, out of Manhattan. King wrote in her autobiography: “We kissed [the girls] goodnight and headed up to the red room. I sat down at the piano, put my hands on the keys and played a few chords. It was unbelievable how right they were, and we both knew it. Four decades later, Gerry remembered it this way in a phone call as we reminisced about writing this song: ‘You sat down at the piano and out came some gospel chords in 6/8 tempo. Those chords were exactly where I thought the song should go. You made it really easy for me to come out with the lyrics. You made it effortless’. If Gerry thought my chords were exactly right, I was blown away by his lyrical imagery. ‘A soul in the lost and found… you came along to claim it…’ How did he come up with these things?”