Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. That is Carole King singing the title track to her 1971 album, Tapestry. This summer on the show we're looking at or rather listening to, some iconic albums that turn 50 this year and digging into the political and social context in which they were made and their impact on both music and culture.

The music historian say 1971 was a particularly important year. Joining me now to talk about Tapestry and we'll hear some more track excerpts is Loren Glass, Chair and Professor of English at the University of Iowa and author of several books, including most recently, Carole King's Tapestry for Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 series. Professor Glass, thanks so much for doing this. Welcome to WNYC.

Loren Glass: Thank you so much for having me, Brian. It's an honor to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Before we get further into this album, Tapestry, let's get a little bit into who Carole King was before Tapestry. She wrote really famous songs for other singers, right?

Loren Glass: Indeed. Her and her husband, Gerry Goffin, worked for Al Nevins and Don Kirshner at Aldon Music, which was on Broadway down the street from the Brill Building. They wrote a series of teen rock and roll hits, including Don't Bring Me Down, and Take Care of My Baby, Chains, One Fine Day, The Loco-Motion, I'm into Something Good, Up on the Roof. Together, they created part of the teen rock and roll sound of the early '60s.

Brian Lehrer: For people who know that list of songs that you just gave, and know the hits of that day, that's so many of the giant songs sung by different kinds of artists. One big hit-

Loren Glass: Absolutely.

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead.

Loren Glass: Yes, absolutely many folks did those songs.

Brian Lehrer: One big hit from their time together was Will You Love Me Tomorrow, which was made famous in 1960 by the girl group, The Shirelles. King recorded it for Tapestry another big hit that King recorded finally herself for the album was (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman, and let's listen to a bit of that, originally recorded by Aretha Franklin.

[music]

Brian Lehrer: I'm just going to leave now and listen to the rest of the song. No. First of all, that's a mind-boggler for some people, "Wait, Carole King wrote songs for Aretha Franklin, including that?" What's the story behind that song?

Loren Glass: It's an actually an industry legend, the story behind that one. King and Goffin were apparently walking down Broadway, and this was late in the Brill Building era. There wasn't as many jobs or songs to write. A huge limousine pulled up with Jerry Wexler, and then he rolled down the window, stuck his head out and said that he needed a big hit for Aretha because Atlantic had just acquired her from Columbia, and Wexler actually proposed the title. He said that they should call it a natural woman.

They went home that night and wrote it, and delivered it to Wexler the next day. Wexler loved it, Aretha loved it. It really became one of the biggest hits of what would be Aretha's rocket to popularity. She'd been in the music industry for four or five years already, but this was the beginning of her string of hit albums and singles that really, made her the queen of soul.

Brian Lehrer: Is there a larger story to tell there about the relationship between mostly white, mostly Jewish songwriters, and Black singers like Carole King and Aretha Franklin?

Loren Glass: Indeed. Carole King, a Brooklyn Jew entered into a tradition that goes back at least to Leiber and Stoller, Al Jolson, Chess Records of Jewish producers and songwriters producing the music and facilitating the production of music by mostly African-American performers. It was a relationship that had its exploitative elements, the African-American formers didn't have rights then to the songs.

It was also on another level of richly collaborative culture, that in some ways was ended by the rise of the singer-songwriter era when you no longer had those kinds of collaborations, labor split, between, composition and performance. It's very interesting to look back at the way that Carole King would sing demos of her songs, partly imitating R&B sounds.

That was actually a trend in the industry at that time. As a Jewish singer, she was imitating, African-American singers who would then get her songs, and sometimes imitate her demos. There was a complex dialectic of composition and mimicry between Jewish Americans and African-Americans in the music industry at this time.

Brian Lehrer: What made that begin to change?

Loren Glass: Partly it was the rise of the singer-songwriter. Once Bob Dylan and The Beatles came onto the scene, it became less respectable and less profitable to split the job in that way. True artists were seen as writing their own work. This affected both sides of the, shall we say, the racial divide. We have the trend into R&B with Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and those folks writing their own songs, and then a trend more into easy listening, or folk rock, or rock where you have mostly white musicians also writing their own song.

There was a ironically post-civil rights, in some ways the music industry became more racially divided and encoded than it had been before. Although, anyone will tell you that the music industry, in terms of the charts and the culture, has always had racial divides and divisions defining how it operates.

Brian Lehrer: Absolutely. We are talking about Carole King's Tapestry album at 50 with Loren Glass, Chair and Professor of English at the University of Iowa, and author of the book Carole King's Tapestry. Listeners, we may or may not have time to get in a few phone calls on this. If anybody has Carole King stories or questions, we want to be able to get to a lot of the material with Professor Glass and some more music. 646 435 72 80. If you want to give it a shot, 646 435 72 80.

You're right. The passage from the wistful and anxious, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow to the soaring affirmation of (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman on side two of Tapestry encapsulates the passage from girl to woman, both for King personally, and for the generation of women too, and for whom she wrote and sang. Do you want to elaborate a bit more on that?

Loren Glass: Sure. It's part of my major thesis. Partly, I see Tapestry as what you might call a building's album. That is to say an album which is about growing up and becoming an adult. In fact, Carole King's whole career starting out writing like singles and AM radio songs basically for, "Teens or for girls." And then coming out with this album which is obviously for women during the era of women's liberation, actually indexes and represents the very development from a culture which actually called women, girls.

In the early '60s, girls was a very common term to use in the office, in common parlance, and part of the achievement of women's liberation -and I see the song for Aretha as representing this- is the insistence actually on being acknowledged as adult female, as a woman. I see part of the power of Carole King's album, Tapestry, is that it represents that. Not only a declaration of independence, she was newly divorced, but also a statement of adult maturity. What made Carole King so able to do that is she had written the songs for girls. She had written the songs that were more about first love and being a Virgin. Writing songs about full adult sexual experience with the term woman, I think that really represented that for really a whole generation.

Brian Lehrer: You write about how your personal story aligns with King's family's story, like, "My mother left my father and joined the Women's Liberation Movement in 1970. I was six and my sister was four. Like Carole King and her children, we had just moved to California from New York City. From that point on my sister and I were counter-culturally co-parented." Can you talk a little bit about the environment that you grew up in and how it relates?

Loren Glass: Absolutely. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the 1970s divorce was the norm. I don't remember any married parents of my friends. Of course, my mother listened to Tapestry. The hook that I have for writing about Carole King is I feel like I experienced the revolution in parenting and the revolution in domestic relationships that was partly represented by that album. Carole King was, in fact, not a single parent, but her public image was as a single parent. It always was about her and her daughters.

The idea of having less conventional relationships, in other words really breaking away from the two-car garage nuclear family model of the '50s, and basically experimenting in what might work better because my parents, that generation didn't have clear models of what the better way was to raise their kids. It was like being in a massive domestic social experiment in terms of sexual, and social, and personal relationships. I feel a great affinity with the album, not quite as if my mother wrote it, but as if it represented a soundtrack to the new family setups that we were trying to forge and music was really important to that.

In the '60s, kids listened to different music than their parents. Their music always irritated their parents or offended them, but I grew up listening to The Beatles with my parents, and listening to Tapestry and Carole King, and Don McLean, and Marvin Gaye. We shared the rock revolution, the album era experience, and I think it was part of what-- It wasn't just a soundtrack, it was part of almost the ideology or the cultural messaging that helped us try to figure out what were some better ways to raise kids and to have romantic relationships.

Brian Lehrer: Let's listen to a little bit of one Carol King song that hits the sentiment home. It's a little bit of the classic breakup song. It's too late.

[music]

Brian Lehrer: One thing that might help people to get through rough breakups are good friends, the song You've Got a Friend open sides too at the vinyl album and you're right, that it's a true musical masterpiece. Let's listen to a little bit of that.

[music]

Brian Lehrer: There it is. You've got a friend for people of that era. One huge song after another from this album. Let's get one caller in here anyway. Sarah in Jersey City, you're on WNYC. Hi Sarah.

Sarah: [inaudible 00:12:50] Yes, hi, I'm a big fan of Carole King and in fact, I went to see the Broadway show twice on Broadway, it was Beautiful. I wonder how accurate was the Broadway show to her actual life. Was any of it [inaudible 00:13:11] or did they lost over something.

Brian Lehrer: Sarah, I'm going to leave it there because the connection is so bad, but if you couldn't hear her Professor Glass, she was asking was the Broadway show Beautiful, true to life, genuine? Or how much was it fictionalized about Carole King?

Loren Glass: It was basically true to life and in fact, it was based on Carole King's autobiography, A Natural Woman. There were, I think, some of the darker elements of the slow-motion breakup with Gerry Goffin that happened over the course of the '60s. Not all of that was included and I think that was probably appropriate as respect of King's privacy. All the biographical elements that were in it are confirmed in her autobiography.

Then one interesting story about that musical, originally, they intended to make it just about the '60s, but folks immediately realized that they had to bring Tapestry and they had to have it end with Tapestry in order to remind everyone and also I think to appeal to a broader audience. That was accurate and King was present at a number of the rehearsals. I don't think she collaborated on the actual composition, but she was consulted and as far as I know, approved of that representation. Entirely accurate, but not totally. There were a number of things that it didn't cover.

Brian Lehrer: For this series, we've been talking about a variety of the most iconic albums of 1971, some more commercially successful than others. Joni Mitchell's Blue. Marvin Gaye's, What's Going On, Shaft by Isaac Hayes. Here's the soundtrack less well-known at the time, Journey in Satchidananda by Alice Coltrane, but it's held up and become a classic. This one, Tapestry by Carole King was the most popular of all of these at the time. In fact, you write about the triumph of Tapestry at the Grammys. Talk about that a little bit as we start to run out of time.

Loren Glass: Absolutely, it was a record-breaking triumphant. It swept all of the major categories, which I'm not sure has been done before or since. You asked why it wasn't maybe quite as popular, why it was a little less controversial than some of those other classic 1971 albums. If we can quote Jon Landau gushing review, he starts, "It's an album of surpassing personal intimacy and musical accomplishment in a work infused with a sense of artistic purpose." Then he adds, "It's also easy to listen to and easy to enjoy", and without dissing the album at all, I think we can say that the album did look forward to that category easy listening.

The album is a comfort. It makes you feel better. It makes you feel like you've got a friend, makes you feel like you've got someone who's like you out there. While it is definitely a political album, I think it aligns exactly with women's liberation. It's not an album maybe that challenges you in the same way that What's Going On or Blue might and created more of a controversy than Tapestry. There was no controversy over Tapestry. Everybody loved it.

Brian Lehrer: Loren Glass from the University of Iowa is the author of Carole King's Tapestry. Thank you so much for joining us.

Loren Glass: Thank you for having me.

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