Carole King and the Music That Moved a Nation - Jane Eisner

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1:10See blinds.com for details. I was there on an evening in December 2015 when she was honored at the Kennedy Center. I went to law school with President Obama and I was good friends with David Rubenstein and that combination got me an invite to the White House. I can't say that I met her. She was on the dais with them and she was being honored with George Lucas and others. But when we went over to the Kennedy Center and there were many people being honored, I don't think anybody emotionally pulled at the audience the way her music did. Of course, Aretha Franklin was there. You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman, the 1967 song that Carole King wrote for her, she gave quite a rendition.

1:47I mean, I remember the president actually crying that night. And of course, James Taylor was there. I bring this up to you because for your generation, which is my generation, she was one of the heartbeats of our personalities. If we felt blue, we listened to her. If we felt love, we listened to her. If we felt happiness or friendship, we listened to her. And so she was really the dial that we turned to when we were feeling different things. Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining us now is Jane Eisner. She's an accomplished journalist, educator, nonprofit leader, consultant, and public speaker.

2:22and boy, what a great book. Carole King, She Made the Earth Move. Well, first of all, congratulations on the book, Jane. I loved it. My staff loved it. And what a great career you've had. So I want to start with you, if you don't mind. Tell us a little bit about your career, how you got into writing and why you picked Carole King as your subject. Well, I'm one of these dorky people who decided to become a journalist back when I was in what they used to call junior high school and continued that career path. For most of my career, I did take a few breaks from journalism, but always seemed to come back to it.

3:05And I approached this book as a journalist. I have a lot of experience covering women and covering the Jewish world. I worked for 25 years for the Philadelphia Inquirer. I ran the Forward, the national news organization for more than a decade. But I really wanted to do something different. I wanted to stretch and challenge myself. And when I had the opportunity to write this book, I was asked to make a book proposal for Yale University Press as part of the Jewish Live series, and they liked it. And it took off in my mind. Lots and lots of research, a lot of things to learn. But it was a pleasure, especially with all the craziness going around right now to kind of just delve into music.

4:01Well, I mean, but this is an interesting type of music because it's got a lot of elements of folk music. It's got a lot of elements of pop music. It's got a lot of elements of love song music and heartbreak. I mean, there's just so much going on in her music. She's literally a kaleidoscope of emotions and arguably one of the best songwriters ever, certainly in her generation. I mean, you sort of answered, but I want a little more from you if you don't mind. So what draws you to her? I mean, there's a lot of subjects in the category, but I write about Carole King because, and you fill in the blank.

4:39Well, first of all, I have loved her music ever since Tapestry came out in - That was the 1971 album, right? Yes, exactly. And I followed her career long after that. She had a number of really good albums that succeeded Tapestry. I was interested in her because she's older than I am, but kind of like me like she grew up in Brooklyn. I grew up in the Bronx. I also have curly hair. I also came from modest background. And like, she did it, you know, she broke through and she did it as herself. And that really interested me. And as I mentioned before, you know, I've written about so many other subjects, but not music.

5:34And I was a little nervous about that. Obviously, the publisher knew that I wasn't a music critic and still agreed from, you know, offered me the contract. But it was a chance for me to grow into her songs more deeply. And I did that by studying piano for two years so that I can play some of the songs. I am not a great pianist at all, but the process enabled me, I hope, to describe what's going on in her music. Too often we think about musicians and we focus just on the lyrics. And there are a few musicians like her who really were very innovative when it came to the actual melodies and chords and the music behind the lyrics.

6:29I was there on an evening in December 2015 when she was honored at the Kennedy Center. I went to law school with President Obama and I was good friends with David Rubenstein. And that combination got me an invite to the White House. And I can't say that I met her. She was on the dais with them and she was being honored with George Lucas and others. But when we went over to the Kennedy Center and there were many people being honored, I don't think anybody emotionally pulled at the audience the way her music did. Of course, Aretha Franklin was there, a very late and great, you make me feel like a natural woman.

7:09The 1967 song that Carole King wrote for her, she gave quite a rendition. I mean, I remember the president actually crying that night. And of course, James Taylor was there with You Got a Friend. And I bring this up to you because for your generation, which is my generation, she was one of the heartbeats of our personalities. If we felt blue, we listened to her. If we felt love, we listened to her. If we felt happiness or friendship, we listened to her. And so she was really the dial that we turned to when we were feeling different things. Tell us about that, about her. Tell us about the mechanisms of creativity, the mechanisms of bringing our emotions, these universal emotions that we all have to light.

7:58How did she pull that down from the emotional cloud? How did she download that from the universe? You know, you really absolutely pinpointed, I think, what was special about her and especially about tapestry because she did sort of write about the range of emotions, you know, loneliness, love, regret, heartbreak. And she did it in a way that was very accessible, very beautiful when it comes to the music itself. And what you notice in her song, subtly in the lyrics is that even though she's expressing these emotions that are really difficult, she does it in a way that kind of gently gives you some optimism at the end of the song.

8:52So you think of a song like It's Too Late, which is describing this breakup. And then the last verse, you know, There'll Be Good Times Again for Me and You. She's kind of coming out of it and offering this little pearl of optimism at the very end of a song that's talking about really something difficult. And she performed these with such authenticity. You know, she doesn't have a gorgeous, gorgeous voice like her contemporary Barbara Streisand. And she didn't have the sort of lasting iconoclism of another contemporary, Paul Simon. But what she did was have a pretty good voice, and she made it her own.

9:43So you mentioned the Kennedy Center Awards and Aretha Franklin singing A Natural Woman. That's right. That song by her and her then husband, Jerry Goffin, was written expressly for Aretha Franklin. And there's nobody that did it better than she does. And I've watched the video of that part of the ceremony a thousand times. and it still gives me shivers. You know, here's this Jewish woman from Brooklyn performing this song written by a black woman from the South and there's the president crying and all of that. And yet she also performs Natural Woman at the end of tapestry just herself. And, you know, she knew that she could never do it like Aretha, but she doesn't like herself.

10:41And that rendition is kind of slower. And she doesn't, I don't think she has any accompaniment. It's just her. And so it's that sort of sense of not being afraid to be yourself that I also think touches a lot of people. And it's timeless. If I say the words It's Brill Building. The Brill Building. What do you think? I see you smiling. For those people listening on their podcast from Spotify, Apple, et cetera, she's smiling. So I say the word Brill Building. What do you say? Well, it actually is a building. You can go to Broadway just north of Times Square, and it says Brill Building on the building.

11:36but it also signifies an era in music history in America. So people may be familiar with Tin Pan Alley, which is also a real place in more southern Manhattan, and that was the center of musical production. And then it sort of moved to the Times Square area. And that's when in the late 50s and through 60s, music like Carole King's was composed and produced. It's important to remember that when music was produced and created in that era, it was like a factory. One person did the lyrics, another did the music, another produced it, another performed did. And they were all working in these little cubicles.

12:29I'm told that they had a tiny stand-up piano and always an ashtray. I guess there was a lot of smoking then. And there was much collaboration. You could hear some of what your neighbor was doing. And there was also a lot of competition to get the songs out fast and to feed this teen audience that was just growing and bursting at that time. And so it was a very exciting era. Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann, Burt Bachrach and Hal David, I could go on. There were all these pairs in either working in the Brill Building or as Carole King did across the street and over a block once. And it was a moment when a lot of things came together.

13:22And so that you had these young people, a lot of them Jewish kids from the outer boroughs, writing music often for, in Carole King and Jerry Goffin's case, their breakout song, Will You Love Me Tomorrow, was written for the Shirelles, a black women's group. And there were Latin influences happening with the immigration from Puerto Rico into the city. There was just a real mixture of styles and music, and that sort of resegregated again in the 70s. But for that moment, it was just a very exciting time. I mean, you described it so beautifully. When I read the book, I was thinking that there was a golden age happening.

14:14You know, some of it was happening in Motown in Detroit. Some of it was happening in the Brill Building. Some of it was happening across the pond in the UK. And it was a super exciting time because, you know, we had more limited access to things. And so we would wait on lines to buy 45 records or vinyl albums. I mean, we're talking about even before the cassette came out. Maybe the 8-tracks were there. But the point being, she was right on the pulse of it. And of course, you know, it's very famous, the relationship with her and Jerry Goffin is rendered in the musical Beautiful, the Carole King story.

14:54Tell us from your perspective. I learned a lot about, you know, I went to that musical, of course, like many of us New Yorkers did. But I learned a lot about her relationship with him and the subtle, you know, there were subtleties in that story. And there was also things that she had to do to adapt herself, which I think also influenced her music. So tell us a little bit about their relationship, how it got started, some of the trials and tribulations, and then where it ended up. Well, you're right about the musical. I've actually seen it three times. And it is terrific. So they met at Queens College.

15:31She was a freshman. He was three years older than she was. She describes having a little picture in her wallet of her kind of ideal boyfriend. And Jerry Goffin looked a whole lot like that. So she was a bit starstruck when she first met him. And they soon became collaborators because he wanted to try to write a Broadway show. And she was interested in doing more rock and roll music. And then they became romantically involved. She was pregnant. They got married, had two children in quick succession, her oldest daughters. And for a time, they were just an amazing partnership. They really understood each other in a very, very deep way.

16:22And yes, she wrote the music and he wrote the lyrics, but they were so intertwined. Sometimes she would write the music and then he would write the lyrics afterwards. That's how Will You Love Me Tomorrow happened. Sometimes, like Natural Woman, they wrote it together. Sometimes they imagined things. One of Jerry Goffin's actually favorite songs, and mine too, was Up on the Roof. Now, neither of them actually lived in buildings, in apartment buildings that had a roof, but they imagined it. And there was just such a synergy with them for quite a while. And even after they broke up, and it was pretty devastating for her.

17:10He had been involved with another woman. There was a child. He had drug problems. There was a lot going on. They still retained an affection for each other. They, you know, made sure they raised their daughters well. They even collaborated on a few songs after their divorce. So I think it was a really lasting relationship for her. The way she talks about him, you kind of feel that even though she had three more husbands and he had a bunch of wives too, that there was something lasting and very special about that relationship. This is an obvious question. I'm dying to ask it of you because you're a researcher into the creative process.

17:57These are very creative people and they're drawing from our socials, I guess. They're drawing from our emotions. And do you think people need people? Not to use the lyrics, but people need people in the sense that they need to draw from each other and one, be a muse for each other. And then maybe she's a muse for Jerry, Jerry's a muse for her. Oh, absolutely. And I think that wasn't just the way you could describe her and Jerry Goffin's relationship. I think it's very, very true of her relationship with James Taylor. They really supported each other in so many ways. one example. He writes Fire and Rain about the loss of a dear friend.

18:45She writes, you've got a friend, kind of in response to that. So musically, they really created a dynamic. They also collaborated with each other. She played them in many of his concerts. And for example, in Mudslide Slim. That's Carole King playing on the piano. James Taylor played on Tapestry and also sang. He and Joni Mitchell sang like backup to Will You Love Me Tomorrow. So there's that. I think he really supported her career in the beginning. He literally like nudged her out on stage when she preferred to just be in the background, writing songs and playing the piano. And, you know, James Taylor had a pretty rough life there in the beginning, drug addiction and other issues.

19:44And she really stood by him then. So they have lasting affection for each other. She's not really performing much anymore. He is. And every time he does, he always mentions her you know the email again i i remember that was 10 years ago now but i remember him vividly on the kennedy center stage the curtains reopen and he's on the roof the proverbial roof and he's sitting there with the guitar and he's singing and he's singing directly to her i don't think there was a person in that room that wasn't moved and her music had that But her music is so catchy. You and I know the lyrics just by, you can hear, like in a name that tune, you can hear a few bars of the notes and you know the music and you can recant the whole thing.

20:33That was her catchiness. She sort of dropped out a little bit. Again, this is something I didn't know about her. So you write about it. I'd like to have you tell us about it. She drops out and goes to Idaho at the height of her fame. Why does she do that, Jane? Well, you know, she's a mystery and a complicated woman, which is why I wanted to write about her. It's kind of boring to write about somebody who doesn't have that mystery about their lives. So she divorces her second husband. That marriage ends. His name was Charlie Larkey. He was a bass player. He was a musician himself, five years younger than she was, needed his own space.

21:19It looked like they had had two children together. So those were her last children. She has four altogether. And she was really struggling under the spotlight. You know, she was trying to, you know, now we think of it as juggling work and home life. But it was like revolutionary then. I mean, you know, all these people in Laurel Canyon who were writing songs, there were plenty of women there and none of them were married and none of them were mothers. And that was meant a lot to her to do that. And yet she had this driving ambition. uh and you know i suspected it kind of collided on her uh at that moment and she meets this man named rick evers and it's like whoa they the night they meet they're together and he was never not by her side and he was a really um he he was a very difficult man uh she acknowledges that he abused her before and after their marriage.

22:32But he was very dominating and probably really charismatic. And he persuades her to move to Idaho with him. And she was enchanted by it all. And so she does that with her three younger, she left her oldest daughter in LA with her father and then moves with her three other children. And Rick Evers became more and more erratic and dominating, and he eventually died of a drug overdose. And then she meets and marries another Rick, Rick Sorensen, whose nickname was T.P. Rick, so it gives you a little idea of his vibe. And he was really a mountain man. And they go off into like the wilds of Idaho, live in this community that's totally off the grid.

23:25You have to ski to get there. I mean, it was about as remote as it gets. It was about as far away from, you know, the pressure cooker of fame in New York and L.A. And I guess she wanted that. You could describe it as an escape. you could describe it as a very independent decision just to go her own way probably both of those things and she has retained that connection to that part of the country she calls her main residence in Idaho you know sure she goes to different places New York Washington LA and other places when asked. But in the end, she divorces Sorensen. She has a few other serious relationships.

24:20None ended in marriage. She's single now. And it seems that she really loves that place and has become very attached to it. And it's now part of her personality. Related to Carole King, 100%. This is more of a generic question, if you don't mind me asking, because I know you're a great researcher and you have a little bit of an empathic personality as I'm getting to interview you here. Do you think that creative people who come up with these beautiful, the music that your soul feels when you're tuned into it, do you think it takes some energy from them? Do you think it drains them a little bit and then they end up growing attachments to people that sometimes may or may not, they may not be right for them?

25:04Is that something that happens a lot? And I can give a lot of different examples, you know. Well, that's a really interesting question. I do think that so much energy goes into creating that it is hard to also work in to maintain a family, if that's what you have, or certainly a partnership. Yeah. You know, and you think of her contemporaries, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon. I mean, they had multiple marriages. Although some of them, I think, have been steady, like James Taylor, and, you know, have that going for him. And I also think that all of those people and others share this. They had success really early on and in a big, big way.

26:06And I think that also affects you. And some, like Paul Simon, just keep on creating and stretching themselves in their work. and others like Carole King, large part because she was a mother, chose a kind of different path. And I imagine it must be really, really hard after you've had that kind of success. I mean, she's nearly 30 years old. She has, at that point, three children, and she just won four Grammys. And that's a record that stood for decades. and the Grammys were being televised for the first time in New York City and you know you don't know until you're there whether you win but it was pretty clear that tapestry was going to be a huge hit and she was home she she was home in Laurel Canyon with her newborn baby her third daughter had just been born at the very end of December we actually share a birthday January December 31st, which is how I remember it.

27:20And that, you know, that was a big statement. And, you know, I think it's indicative of this dynamic that I mentioned between pulling from her personal and professional life. But I think it also signals like she didn't want to get swept up in the spotlight. And I think really creative people have to make that decision. You know, when are you going to give in to fame? When are you going to pull back? How do you deal with the setbacks? And do you accept that perhaps your best work came early on? And, you know, in the course of this book, I try to actually find out whether people have studied are artists and creators who have great success when they're early in their career and those who have it later in their career.

28:22And it's really interesting. You can't quite pinpoint what the differences are, but they're there. Those descriptions, there's a lot of people who can be described that way. And I think very few continue in the way that, say, Paul Simon and James Taylor have. I think that's rare. Yeah. I mean, I think it's a, I wanted you to address it because I think, you know, you're that talented. It burns brightly for a moment and it caused disruption in some levels of dysfunctionality. So, so we, we took five themes, five words out of your book. And so this is the end of our podcast. and what we ask our authors to do, I'm gonna say the word and then I wanna get you a one or two sentence reaction to the word.

29:16Okay, you ready? Okay. If I say the word journalism, Jane, you say what? I deeply researched the book and I think I took an analytical perspective to her life. That's interesting, yeah. You know, when I hear the word journalism, truth-seeking, this is a really truthfully told book. I mean, I could feel that you love her music and you are fond for the person, but it was a very true story in the book, which I greatly enjoyed. If I say the word culture, you say what? I think it's the creative aspect of our society. Music, art, dance, theater. And it is something that artists contribute to and are shaped by.

30:03Okay, love that. I say the word activism, which for our viewers and listeners, she sort of became a little bit of an activist later in her career. I say the word activism, you say what? Advocating for something you believe in, whether it's out on the streets, which was not her thing, or trying to shape laws in state and federal governments. well and again the thing i love about her be bold enough to say this she didn't care about the commercial implications of her activism you know and she's true to that and i admire that for a lot of different reasons jane i admire that okay last word i'm going to give you the last word uh i say jane eisner what do you say oh i did my best i have an insatiable curiosity I love words.

31:00I still cling to the idea that they can shape who we are and hopefully make the world a little bit better. Okay. Well, that was a terrific answer. So we're going to leave it right there. We're hearing from Jane Eisner, the author of Carole King. She Made the Earth Move. What a great book. What a great story. And I look forward to your future works, Jane. and thank you so much for joining us on Open Book. It was a pleasure. Thank you.

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