The Rolling Stone Interview:  James Taylor and Carly Simon
			   by Stuart Werbin
		    Issue No. 125, January 4, 1973

	It began in the plush bedroom of a fashionable Riverdale home, 
one week before James Taylor and Carly Simon became Mr. and Ms. 
Simon-Taylor.  Mrs. Andrea Simon was hosting a party for her son Peter 
whose book of photographs, Moving On/Holding Still, had just been 
released.  Up in the bathroom, Carly and Peter were diligently trying to 
synchronize two battery-operated cassette recorders so that a few guests 
could enjoy a closed-door preview of "You're So Vain," in reasonable 
facsimile of stereo.
	The song lodged itself in my cerebral cortex and had me twitching 
and humming for the next few days.  By mid-week, the twitch turned to an 
itch, which could only be soothed by getting a copy.  Carly said there 
was nothing she could do until Elektra sent her a copy, but in the 
meantime she wanted me to come to a party at 3AM on Friday in the Time 
Magazine Building (then known as the Time-Life Building) following James' 
midnight concert at Radio City Music Hall.
	James' last tour had not been an artistic success.  He had become 
sluggish and more distant from his audience.  Rumor had it that this was 
due to mounting heroin addiction.  His live appearances over the previous 
six months had been limited to stints for George McGovern.  I figured 
this concert and the subsequent tour would serve as a gauge for how much 
we could expect from him in the future.
	The concert disarmed me of any vestiges of critical judgement.  I 
was drawn smoothly into the pleasure of the music and James' 
performance.  And, to a great concert, he added his announcement that 
earlier in the evening he and Carly had married.
	After that evening, a Rolling Stone Interview with the 
Simon-Taylors seemed like a natural, and well-worth the delicate approach 
it inevitably entailed.  James and Carly both had reservations about 
doing one, stemming from past experiences with the press.  James had not 
done an interview for two years, and what he had done before that had 
been basically lip service.  After Howard Hughes, one would be 
hard-pressed to find anyone who said less to Time and still got his 
picture on the cover.  Carly had always been as open as possible, only to 
find sensationalized stories of rock& roll romances, once reserved for 
Screen Secrets, thrown back in her face.
	After speaking to Carly on the phone, I was invited over to 
dinner (Carly is an excellent, provocative cook, James is fair on the 
dishes) and in a light group-therapy session we worked out the process 
for the interview.  James remarked that his good friend John McLaughlin 
had once said that he does as many interviews as he can, because they're 
a way to clean out the soul:  "So what the hell.  Let's see."
	The first session was conducted on Thanksgiving Eve, in the 
living room of the East Side Manhattan apartment in which they were wed 
and are still honeymooning.  Carly's brother Peter engineered and 
co-conducted.
	The second session was held a week later minus Peter.  Once we 
got started, they took it as seriously as they would a concert or album.  
Even though James would later say, "Dammit, interviews are not what I 
do," it was what they were doing, and they were going to do it right.  
When the deadline that they greatly resented finally approached, they 
switched into high gear and what amounted to a third session was 
conducted by phone from a Maryland Holiday Inn to my New York apartment, 
following one of James' concerts - and running until 5AM.
	Jon Landau stayed up with me for 30 straight hours turning 200 
manuscript pages into cohesive form.  Robert Flaherty couldn't have put 
more effort into editing his documentaries.  The result is a collective 
effort:  James and Carly Simon-Taylor present themselves.

STUART:	Do you want to talk about why you decided to get married?
JAMES:	That's the way we always heard it should be.
CARLY:	I mentioned one morning to James in London that I thought we 
should get married, and James was kind of hesitant in his response.  He 
said, "Oh well, there's really no reason to get married.  We love each 
other and we've been living together."  
	And then later on in the afternoon, James said, "You know I've been 
thinking about it and maybe we should get married."  I said, "Well, 
what's happened between this morning and this afternoon?"  He said, "This 
afternoon it was my idea." 
STUART:	And when did you first meet?
CARLY:	It was my first opening night ever.
JAMES:	It was the fall of '71.
CARLY:	No, no, the first time we met was April 6, 1971.
JAMES:	We passed once in the parking lot of my house - it's not really 
like a Kinney System parking lot, it holds about three cars - out in 
front of my mother's house were Peter Simon and Carly going to talk to my 
brother, Livingston, about a job that she and Livingston were going to do 
together.  I passed Peter and Carly and said, "Hi" and Peter said, "Hi, 
this is my sister Carly" and then I left.  I guess I had one album out by 
then.
STUART:	So when was the first time you were really introduced?
CARLY:	When we were officially introduced it seemed as though we'd known 
each other for a long time as we knew about each other from the summer 
place [Cape Cod, Mass.].  James came up and embraced me upon first 
meeting, and then we went into the bathroom and fucked.
JAMES:	Actually, we never made love until after we were married.  
[Laughter]  I saw Carly on the street shortly after I met her, and I 
followed her, thinking she was another woman.  I was thinking, "what a 
fine looking woman that is."  Then I discovered it was Carly.  It makes 
you very happy when you do that.  The same thing with this picture from 
Carly's first album.  I saw it on the wall - "Hey, that's a fine looking 
woman," said I, and someone said, "That's your girl." I said, "What?"  
They said, "It's Carly."  I said, "Oh, so it is."

STUART: Are there instances when you wrote a song because you didn't want
to say something? 
JAMES: Often you can express things in songs where other
modes of communication are hopeless.  Often you can express a feeling in a
song that you can never get down any other way.  Perhaps that's why songs
are written.  Perhaps that's the way paintings are painted or photographs
taken. 
STUART: Do you ever feel vengeance behind some of the songs, or some
sort of emotion that you just don't want to express any other way? 
CARLY:	Not until "You're So Vain." 
STUART: Some people think "You're So Vain" is about James.
CARLY:	No, it's definitely not about James although James suspected that 
it might be about him because he's very vain.  No, he isn't but he had 
the unfortunate experience of taking a jet up to Nova Scotia after I'd 
written the song.  He was saved by the fact that it wasn't a Lear.
JAMES:	A small twin prop.
STUART:	You've mentioned various people who've downgraded your music.
CARLY:	Not down graded it, but their career was always more important 
than mine.  But the anger in that song is not necessarily about anybody 
whose put down my music or wanted me to be subservient to them.  It's at 
a certain type of man, very into themselves, that I've been very affected 
by, adversely, in the past - a man whose more concerned with his image 
than the relationship.
JAMES:	The fact that she and I are married means that one is more apt to 
work these things out rather than let them chase us away from each 
other.  In other words, the fact that there are feelings that I have 
about dealing with Carly's profession and her career that I would 
ordinarily not talk about for fear of chasing her away or chasing myself 
away.  That's one good reason to get married.
STUART:	You both spent your childhood summers on the Cape.  How did that 
originate?
CARLY:	My parents started going there in 1934 on their honeymoon.  The 
first summer I was there was the summer I was born and then at least once 
every summer.  I heard a lot about James - he was referred to as Jimmie 
Taylor.
JAMES:	I saw you on stage there once.
STUART:	When was that?
JAMES:	It was '62, '63 or '64.
STUART:	Was that with Lucy [Carly's sister]?
JAMES:	Yes, they were billed as the Simon Sisters.  I used to sing down 
there occasionally on Hootenanny nights.  She was professional at that 
point and I wasn't, so we never sang on the same show.
STUART:	Do you remember what you thought of her the first time you saw her?
JAMES:	I thought she was quite attractive, but she was, and still is, 
four years older than I was, so back then when she was 18 and I was 14 
she was a bit less approachable then she was when I was 24...
CARLY:	You didn't know that I had a hankering for a 14-year old man.
JAMES:	As it turns out she actually did.  But at any rate, I plan to 
pass her in age in about three more years.  I want to send her to Alpha 
Centauri aboard the first ship that goes there.  The law of relativity is 
gonna finally do it for us.  When she comes back I'll be 60 and she'll be 30.
CARLY:	When I get to be about 45, I shall freeze for five years because 
James will be about 40 then and just wanting to get into all the young 
women.  But I don't want to know about it.
STUART:	How do you feel about your both being stars affecting your 
marriage, the kind of adjustment it requires?
JAMES:	In the beginning of our relationship I very seldom listened to 
music at home, seldom played the tape recorder or the record player and I 
never played my own albums.  I think Carly felt I wasn't taking enough 
interest in her music.  She might have felt that there's some competition 
involved.  I was afraid to say anything negative about her music.  Any 
criticism that I had, I felt would make her dislike me.  So I didn't 
mention either side of it.
STUART:	Carly, would you criticize something that James was doing if you 
didn't like it?
CARLY:	I'm very wary, especially with somebody who takes you seriously 
as I think James takes me.  (I take him seriously.)  You become sometimes 
overly cautious about saying something that you think might hurt even 
though it could be constructive criticism, so sometimes I feel as though 
I'm walking on hot coals.  I would be more careful about what I would say 
to James than I would to somebody that I knew casually.  Now I think this 
will probably change.
	It worried me terribly that James had never heard any of my 
songs.  I took that as an indication that he wasn't interested in my 
music and therefore I somehow got a lower opinion of my own music because 
of that.
JAMES:	I heard as few songs of yours as I'd heard of Dylan's or 
Kristofferson's or Prine's or of anyone's.  I just don't listen to music.
CARLY:	But it's a different thing with somebody you're in love with.  
I'm not Dylan or Kristofferson.  Up until this album, you never listened 
to my other albums.
JAMES:	I never listened to mine either.  I don't know, honey...
CARLY:	It's a strange situation.  i think it's one that has to do with 
fear of competition.  but I definitely feel that James is involved now.  
It's still a precarious thing.  Sometimes I feel it's a male-female 
thing.  Because any male that I've been involved with in the past has not 
liked my success, has not wanted me to be successful, has felt threatened 
by that fact.
JAMES:	I'm very much interested in not seeing Carly behind the Kitchen 
stove because I see females live totally vicariously through their 
husband and it drives them crazy and it drives the husbands crazy, too.
STUART:	Carly, your father [the president of Simon and Schuster, a book 
publishing company] comes up a lot in your works and the lyrics Jacob 
Brackman writes with you.  is it subconscious or accidental?
CARLY:	No, I don't think any lyric is by accident.  The things that you 
dream aren't by accident either, and the things that come out, even 
though they might be a stream of consciousness, are there for some 
reason.  Particularly in "Embrace Me, You Child," there is a very 
clear-cut picture of my father as a frightening and devilish kind of 
figure.  That's not the way I consciously see him, but somewhere in my 
mind he must have seemed that way to me.
JAMES:	I guess "Knocking Around The Zoo," which I wrote in MacLaine's 
Hospital with a friend named Larry Stein.  I think there are negative and 
angry feelings expressed in that song.
STUART:	Can we take 'Embrace Me, You Child' as a fairly autobiographical 
statement of your feelings at your father's death?
CARLY:	Yes.  I felt abandoned, and I was angry at the thought of being 
abandoned by him.  At the same time as I was abandoned by Daddy, I was 
abandoned by God, because losing my father also meant losing my faith in 
God who I had prayed to every night that I wouldn't lose my father.  From 
the time that he had his first heart attack to the time that he died I 
used to knock on wood 500 times every night, thinking that my magic was 
gonna keep him away from death.  I feared his death incredibly, and in 
fearing his death, moved away from him, fearing that I might die.
JAMES:	Anger at a dead parent is really hard to deal with.  It's really 
tough not to feel guilty about.
STUART:	You say "I pretended not to know I had been abandoned."
CARLY:	I pretended not to know.  At the time I refused to blame anybody 
for it.  I didn't blame God; I didn't blame my father; I didn't blame my 
mother.  I was so careful about being fair I just refused to blame 
anybody and therefore I suppressed a whole lot of emotions which 
currently surfaced in such symptomatic expressions as wishing to mutilate 
mannequins.
STUART:	There are religious overtones in a lot of your songs. I was 
somewhat surprised you didn't get married in a church.
JAMES:	Oh, we may be religious, but that doesn't necessarily have 
anything to do with the church.  Religion starts at home for us.  The 
word "religion" means "relinkage."  The actual word means to reassociate 
yourself with your roots or with whatever base, whatever you feel like you 
came from.  It can be a religious experience to look at the ocean, or it 
can be a religious experience for you to perform a certain kind of dance 
or for you to sit around a table at Thanksgiving time.  That can be 
relinkage of a certain sort.  It doesn't need to connect itself with any 
legal deity.
STUART:	Dancing, as you said, comes up a lot on your album.  'Dance' is 
the title of the last cut.  Does this have a spiritual meaning?
JAMES:	I was thinking of two titles for the album, the first one was 
Farewell to Show Biz, which Carly and Peter Asher both didn't like.  We 
finally settled on One Man Dog; I thought of calling it Throw Yourself Away.
	I think it's religious to throw yourself away.  It's interesting
that a lot of religious phenomena involve really surrendering oneself,
like in the film Marjoe where people are transported and go to pieces. 
And it's religious sometimes when you take acid and lose your ego and 
dissolve completely.  I think what people are trying to get away from in 
their religious experiences is the isolation of the conscious mind, away 
from the idea proposed by Western civilization that the self is located 
somewhere in the cerebral cortex and that self and consciousness are tied 
together.  Actually, one is much more comfortable locating oneself in the 
earth or in your body as a member of the species.  At least you're 
immortal there.
	There's something lonely, very unpleasant and very isolationist 
about the idea of self that Western civilization has.  Being a conscious 
being means that you divorce yourself from certain aspects of life that 
are worthwhile.  Look at the body taboos: Don't defecate in public, don't 
fart, don't burp, don't smell, don't cry, don't become overwhelmed, don't 
lose control.
	These things frighten people because they're symptoms of the 
unknown right inside themselves.  The unknown represents death to men, 
represents that which he does not control and which eventually kills him; 
and what you're left with is a very lonely and isolated place.  Any idea 
of religion is just the opposite of that.  It's the idea of throwing 
yourself away.
	My love for Carly is a very religious thing, to me, because 
sometimes I just exchange with her completely and I don't know where I 
end off and she begins.  The idea of religion is very important to me, 
and I think I'm a relatively spiritual person, but every time someone 
starts to pin me down on it they're just barking up the wrong tree 
because it has nothing to do with anything specific.
CARLY:	I am wondering what connotation Jesus had for you.
JAMES:	Rhymes with cheeses, Jesus, pieces actually, in "Fire and Rain" - 
"look down upon me, Jesus."  "Fire and Rain" has three verses.  The 
first verse is about my reactions to the death of a friend.  The second 
verse is about my arrival in this country with a monkey on my back, and 
there Jesus is an expression of my desperation in trying to get through 
the time when my body was aching and the time was at hand when I had to 
do it.  Jesus was just something that you say when you're in pain.  I 
wasn't actually looking to the savior.  Some people look at it as a 
confirmation of belief in Christ as the one true path and the one sole 
way, which I don't believe in, although he can certainly be a useful vehicle.
	And the third verse of that song refers to my recuperation in 
Austin Riggs [a Massachussetts hospital] which lasted about five months.
STUART:	Since this has come up, why don't we talk about how you first got 
involved with junk.
JAMES:	I got involved with junk in New York after getting out of 
MacLaine's, about halfway through the year which I spent with the Flying 
Machine.  I got involved peripherally for a while, getting off a couple 
of times a week.  At that point my addiction to it was more psychological 
than it was physical, but it's very difficult to separate the two of 
them.  I kicked junk for about a half a year and then spent a while in 
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where I had some growths removed.
	That half-year was the fall of '67 through the beginning of '68. 
I was clean.  Then I started to take a lot of codeine.  I went to Europe
and started to take opium and then I got into smack heavily for about 
nine months.  I got into it real thick there.  I came back to this 
country and kicked, over about a period of five months in Austin Riggs.  
They're not equipped to deal with junkies and I wasn't called a junkie.  
I wasn't admitted or dealt with as a junkie, but that was my problem.  
That was the manifestation of my problem.  Junk, in itself, isn't the 
problem with me.  It's a symptom of unexpressed and inexpressible anger, 
in a nutshell.  It's a way of retreating from the world.  It's a way of 
finding a comfort and a consistency in a chemical and I guess I have an 
addictive personality.
	Anyway, a year and a half ago I found myself on the road with a 
Jones.  When I got to Chicago I got in touch with a doctor who was a 
friend of mine.  He got me off smack and onto methadone.  I've been on 
methadone maintenance for the past year.  After I got out of Austin 
Riggs, I was clean for almost a year and a half.  But by the summer of 
'71 I was getting high again.
	Sweet Baby James was out and Mudslide Slim was out.  I had just 
kicked when I recorded Sweet Baby James and I was still clean when I 
recorded Mudslide Slim, but I was just getting back into it at that point.
STUART:	You were seriously addicted during the recording of the Apple album?
JAMES:	Yeah.
STUART:	Was it because of pressure to do that album?
JAMES:	I'm not sure.  The album was strange.  Carly and I talked a lot 
about performing and what it means to us as adults and as children and as 
adolescents.  The idea of performing is something that's central to all of 
us.  What kind of show do you make for whoever you want to love you?  In 
a way, performance is what all of us do in order to get what we want.
	I remember when I was a child I performed a lot.  I didn't strum 
on the banjo or sing minstrel songs, but I did perform.  I tried to 
impress my parents and through the time I went away to school I tried to 
perform in terms of grades.  Whatever I could find that they wanted me to 
do, I would try to do it.  Some people come on this way and others 
don't.  Carly and I both had a lot of that.
	The idea that I have to perform makes me angry.  And I think that 
anger is in ways inexpressible because it's not really at anything 
specific.  It's like an old anger.  And in that way recording an album 
might have made me very angry and might have made me turn to drugs as an 
alternative... as a way to stomach that anger.  Obviously, if you can't 
express it, you'll have to swallow it somehow.
	And I got into it a year ago last fall, when I found myself on 
the road with no drugs and quite a habit, so I went to Richmond.  The 
first gig I had was in Williamsburg and I was sick for the job and it 
went lousy.  And I ran into a chick who I had scored from in London 
earlier that summer and she took me to Richmond and we copped from this 
guy there named Hangdown.  I don't know if he'll get in trouble if I 
mention him, but I don't ever plan to go back to him again.  At any rate, 
he sold me about enough to keep me until we got to Chicago.  It kept me 
for about two weeks...I was high all the time.
STUART:	Was this the tour with Carole King and Jo Mama?
JAMES:	No, this is last fall's tour with just myself.  I wasn't high for 
that tour with Carole and Jo Mama.  I was straight for that.  
Occasionally, I would take ups if I got too weak or sick to go onstage.  
But I was straight for that gig.  When I got to Chicago I got in touch 
with a doctor who was a friend of mine and he got me methadone somewhat 
illegally.  He figured it was either he'd break a law or else I'd go down 
so he straightened me out.  I stayed on that methadone he gave me for 
almost a month.
STUART:	How do you relate to it, Carly?
CARLY:	It was very harrowing for me.  In the beginning of our 
relationship, I didn't really understand the extent to which James was 
addicted or needed drugs.  It just kind of confused me that there was a 
wall up between us and I didn't know exactly what it was, because I had 
never been close to anybody who was really addicted to anything before.  
I was aware of remoteness with James, that I couldn't depend on him.  In 
a sense, he could depend upon me more, but I was terribly confused 
because all of a sudden there seemed to be this barrier that I couldn't 
break through.
STUART:	What caused James' remoteness?
JAMES:	It was partly drug abuse and it was partially that instead of 
communicating what feelings I had, I would get off on a drug instead.  My 
mind was occupied by the drug, the idea of getting off on a drug, the 
idea of keeping it from Carly.  But I still needed her very much.  I threw 
out three separate sets of works saying this is the end.  The last time was 
about six or eight months ago, so I guess it should be finished now.
CARLY:	There are certain addictions that are much more acceptable by 
society.  Junk happens to be one of the unacceptable ones.  It happens to 
be one the most self-destructive ones, too.
STUART:	It seems that the times when you went to junk besides those you 
mentioned were at a point of reaching a new level of success.  With the 
first album becoming more successful, the Time magazine cover, getting 
close to a woman, where there seemed to be some sort of permanence - 
these seemed to be the times that turned you to junk.
JAMES:	Maybe that's true.  I don't know what the idea of success means to 
me.  It carries with it an inherent quality that if I actually get what I 
want, I'll have to pay for it.  In other words, success carries with it 
almost a sense of inherent and impending retribution.  It's strange...
STUART:	Are there precedents for this in your growing up?
JAMES:	Yeah.  There was a period of time when my father was away.  He 
went away for two years when he was drafted into the Navy when I was six 
years old.  He spent two years in the Antarctic which i about the same to 
a six-year-old child as being on the moon.  At that time I got very much 
into my mother as did all of us, and I think the idea of success would be 
to have her love me instead of my father.  That kind of Oedipal idea, 
that kind of an Oedipal striving, carries with it the idea if your 
successful you'll have your eyes pulled out.  It's the kind of thing 
which you know you can't be successful at.  And you know you mustn't be 
successful at it because you're not a man, you're a child.
	On the other hand, being successful might have carried with it an 
inherent anger at my mother or father for their wanting me to perform, 
their wanting me to do well, and therefore if I'm successful there's an 
element of having done it for them and not wanting to have done it at all.
STUART:	Carly, coming from a family with success as a precedent, did it 
give you some sort of an ambiguous view of success?
CARLY:	They really do parallel James'.  What he just said about it was 
very much what happened to me.  I felt as if I always had to perform in 
order to get any love at all.  I had two older sisters who were both very 
talented and very beautiful and very much the apple of my father's eye, 
and I suppose my mother's too.
	I remember very early on, when I was four and Peter had just been 
born, Lucy was seven and very angelically shy, very attractively 
innocent, reticent, and Joey was very sophisticated - maybe ten years 
old, and a budding actress and singer.  Friends of my parents would 
really ask Joey to sing.  I remember Peter had a nurse that came when 
he was just born, named Helen Gaspart.  She came and she was introduced 
to the rest of the family, to the three girls in order of age, and Joey 
came first and I remember Joey in a very dignified voice said, "How do 
you do?" and then Lucy just kind of stood back and said "howdoyoudo?" and 
I thought, my God, here I have two sisters who seem to have taken up the 
whole road.  You know they've got all the corners.  Where do I stand in 
order to be different from them?  I remember jumping up on what I think 
is this same coffee table and I had just seen The Jolsen Story.  I jumped 
up on the table and spread out my arms and said, "Hi!"
	I obviously felt that I had to e different - in a performing 
sense - in order to make an impression upon anybody.  The pressure was put 
on me at the age of four, to stand out in my own way, not just to be 
whatever I felt like being, which was, I guess, somewhere middle of the 
road.  It had to be some kind of performance.
JAMES:	The idea of being a pop star is a very regressive thing.  It's 
like all of a sudden anything you want to do is allowed.  You become a 
spoiled child when you become a pop superstar.  You really get spoiled 
something awful.
STUART:	We talked earlier about James' addiction.  One thing that has 
happened historically when one lover had an addiction was the other lover 
picking it up.  Were you ever tempted to try heroin or cocaine, the 
things that James had been doing?
CARLY:	Never.  It had a reverse effect on me.  I snorted cocaine a 
couple of times but it was never as bad to me as it seemed when I saw 
James getting into it.  Now I have a horror about cocaine.  I was never 
tempted to try heroin or acid.  I've just never been into drugs.  I 
haven't smoked grass for the last four months.  I just haven't been into 
ingesting anything into my system.  Occasionally I smoke a cigarette.
	I've often felt in our relationship that I've been addicted to 
James and I have a dependency upon him that's almost like a drug I 
couldn't do without.  Maybe that's what addiction is all about.
JAMES:	I think if you look at any junkie or budding junkie, of any sort 
of addiction, there are feelings that the addict feels he cannot 
control.  It gets so involved, a vicious circle that gets so tied up, 
that aside from the physical addiction there's also an emotional guilt 
about being strung out in the first place and then all the things you 
have to do to get bread and that kind of business, that after a while it 
perpetuates itself as nothing perpetuates.
	It's an amazing downhill slide.  It's fast, too, but the initial 
thing is trying to get away from a feeling that you cannot control and 
that in any way you cannot express.  That's at the basis of most 
addictions.  Either it's anger or fear or a combination of the two.
	The other thing about addiction is that it's consistent.  What 
the junkie is looking for when he picks up his syringe or goes out to cop 
is something that will be the same every time and that will completely 
supersede all other goings-on.  And smack does that.  It's the 
circumstances around it that kill you.  Heroin maintenance has worked 
well in England.  But, it's like being dead.  It knocks out your 
sensitivities at the same time that it gets rid of the suppressed 
emotion that you can't stand anymore.
	I was incapable of writing on heroin.  I imagine methadone does 
that to me, to an extent, except that after a while the presence of 
methadone disappears.  You can't feel it.
STUART:	What about cocaine?
JAMES:	Sometimes it can be refreshing.  If you do it once a week, for 
instance, or once a month, when someone comes around, you're having a 
party, you're doing this thing, that thing, and say here, have a little 
blow of this.  But the trouble is that the damned things always escalate, 
so it's better left behind.
	I always used to watch TV and hear some newscaster say, "300 
pounds of pure heroin seized in Newark," and I would think of it as being 
deprived of a score.  i used to curse when a big dope bust had gone on.  
But nowadays, when I see they've picked up some large shipment of heroin 
I say carry on.  Gee, man.
STUART:	Who have been the most essential people in your lives?
JAMES:	As far as my meandering through the music business, and also what 
music I was effected by, and what I learned, a lot of it came from Danny 
Kortchmar.
CARLY:	For me, I would say that Peter, my brother, is definitely one and 
Jacob Brackman is another.  Jake, over a period of about four or five 
years, influenced me more than anybody did.
	Meeting Jake was an auspicious event that changed my life because 
he changed my thinking about myself and also brought me into contact with 
many people who are now my friends.  Jake was like a brother that I never 
met until I was 23, and Peter, my real brother, has been one of my 
closest friends, a person that I can rely upon for the truth, even though 
I don't want it sometimes.  He's been full of good cheer around the 
Christmas holidays.
	Jimmy Ryan, who plays guitar with me, is the person who really 
got me to perform.  It just kind of happened accidentally that we got 
together and he said, "Now you've got to play The Troubador.  I won't let 
you chicken out of that.  I'll do it with you."  I always relied upon 
Jimmy.  Every time I went onstage, he's the person that I kind of looked 
to, to be there on my left side and take over if my voice fails, or whatever.
	Another person is Arlyne [Rothberg], who has been the finest 
manager that I could ever want.  She's been so perfect in that she's been 
as much a friend as a manager, really, and she hasn't pushed me into 
anything for the sake of the business.  She encourages me to do things 
that she thinks that I would be happy in rather than what will make money 
and what will promote my career on a show business level.
	Russell Kunkel is another person who's important to both of us. 
If it wasn't for Russell I wouldn't have played The Troubador and I
wouldn't have met James there... Russell was the first drummer that I ever
played with, and the way it happened is that i said I wouldn't play The
Troubador unless they could get me drummer like Russell.  I didn't have
any musicians with me; but I had the opportunity to play The Troubador
opening bill to Cat Stevens, so I said if you can get me a drummer as good
as Russell, then I'll think of doing it, and a day later they called back
and said, "We got Russell."  Russell is like a saint, he's made me feel so
sure of myself. 
JAMES:	Russell is an enigma, especially among drummers.  He's amazing.
CARLY:	I was talking about Russell at length in an interview in London 
that I did for Disc, and I went on about his experiences in Scientology 
which he had described to me for several weeks before I did the 
interview, and I spent about fifteen or twenty minutes on the subject of 
Russell and how clear he was.  The interview came out and it said James 
Taylor, who is Carly's boyfriend, was able to kick junk because of his 
faith in Scientology.
JAMES:	Joe O'Brien interested me in funk and in Latin music and educated 
me.  I guess the guy who's mainly responsible for my beginning interest 
in music is my brother, Alex, who taught me to sing and who played a lot 
of record for me.  He is the first person in my family to really be 
interested in music.  Alex isn't very successful at this point, but he 
could be, and he has an amazing amount to offer.  He doesn't have a very 
high opinion of himself, but I think he's as good a white male singer as 
exists anywhere.  I really mean that.
CARLY:	Now that we're talking about it, I think of Joey and Lucy and my 
mother, too, and Peter Dean... there are just too many people.  It's 
really hard to single out a few.
STUART:	What about Lee Sklar?
JAMES:	Lee is the bass player in my mind, he's amazing, he is.  A lot of 
bass players are frustrated guitarists.  Someone who has been a guitarist 
and has turned to bass isn't necessarily a good bass player.  The name of 
the bass is quite apt.  It's the most important musical instrument on any 
track that I know of.  I used to play the cello, that's a sort of quasi-bass.
	Lee plays the bass like Caruso sings.  There's no way to analyze 
how he plays the bass.  He just knows what the basis of the music is.  He 
can hit it right on the head.
CARLY:	Nat Weiss [James' manager] is the person that introduced James 
and me.
JAMES:	Nat is incredible.  Nat is an amazing man.  I think he's a 
prince.  I really love Nat Weiss.
STUART:	How do you relate to the difference between your personal and 
more public identities at this stage of your lives?
JAMES:	It's interesting to me that no one ever recognizes me on the 
street.  I'm very seldom recognized.  Often I can walk into a bunch of 
kids that I know, one or two of them my own my records, and have a 
picture of me or maybe have listened to me or been to a concert of mine.  
I can look them straight in the eye and they won't recognize me.
CARLY:	People don't recognize you out of context.  If you were to go to 
a concert at the Fillmore East or something like that everybody would 
recognize you, but people don't expect to see James Taylor out in Sayville.
JAMES:	Yeah, but people recognize you.  I think it's also a matter of my 
face.
STUART:	"Hey, Mister That's Me Up There On the Jukebox," recognizes that 
distinction between public and private lives...
JAMES:	It's happened before where I've been in a place and they played 
it on the jukebox without knowing about it.  That song was actually as 
much as anything else to Peter Asher, who bore the brunt of my discomfort 
about the deadline aspect of Mudslide Slim.  I wrote that song in the 
studio.  The bridge, which was "Do you believe I'll go back home / Hey, 
mister, can't you see that I'm dry as a bone?" is about having to write a 
song.  It's an album cut about having to make an album cut.  It's kind of 
a rip-off, except that it's a really nice tune.
	After a while, a novelist who does nothing but write novels is 
going to end up writing a novel about writing a novel.  The first chapter 
will say, "I wrote these words upon my typewriter," or pretty soon "my 
vision is going to be turned right... I'm going to be looking at my feet."
STUART:	How do you feel onstage?
JAMES:	My brother Livingston saw me feeling uncomfortable once onstage 
about the applause that I was getting, and he said, "What the fuck are 
you doing?  These people love you.  Why don't you enjoy it?"  He was 
really angry at me on one occasion at the way I was coming on.  And I 
read an article by Jon Landau on a concert in which he assumed that the 
way I had come on was on purpose, that I actually controlled that, 
whereas in actuality I really had no control over it at all.  I'm glad 
when I can be happy onstage too but sometimes I just don't know how to act...
STUART:	Carly, let's talk about the events leading up to your current 
album.  What were your thoughts after finishing 'Anticipation'?
CARLY:	Well, after I finished it, I was tired of the whole self-pitying 
thing that was going on in many of my songs.  I didn't like to see myself 
talking about disenchantment as much as I had.  The whole album was about 
things that never quite happened, things that didn't turn out the way I 
wanted them to, things that were disillusioning.  I wanted to wipe out 
all that melancholia and come up with something more positive, more 
interesting, subjects that hadn't been delved into.
STUART:	What came out of feeling that way, which songs?
CARLY:	"You're So Vain," which was kind of an accusative song that came 
out of my write something else.
STUART:	Did you have some idea that could be a single?
CARLY:	I thought that song was good.  I didn't think of what would or 
wouldn't be a single.  Sometimes when you play a new song for somebody 
they say that sounds like a single, but I certainly didn't write it as 
one.  In fact it was originally called, "Bless You, Ben," and it was 
about thanking an imaginary man named Ben who came into my life.  Thank 
you for coming in when I was mournful up in my loft, just watering my 
plants.  And it was a morose subject that I didn't want to have anything 
to do with.  So I scrapped those lyrics but kept most of the melody, and 
I had one line that had been in my notebook for a long time which was, 
"You're so vain, you probably think this song's about you," and I used that.
STUART:	You mentioned the "contest" going on about who it's about.  What 
would be the clearest statement you would want to make on who the song 
was about?
CARLY:	The contest is run by this man in Los Angeles named Winkler and 
he had his listeners call in to cast their ballots as to who they thought 
the song was about.  Kris Kristofferson is leading.  A lot of people 
think it's about Mick Jagger and that I have fooled him into actually 
singing on it, that I pulled that ruse.  And some of the people think 
it's about James.  But, I can't possibly tell who it's about because it 
wouldn't be fair.
JAMES:	It's none of the people who were mentioned.
STUART:	James, how did you feel about the song when you first heard it?
JAMES:	Well, I thought it was a nice song.  I heard it played on the 
piano and sung.  I didn't hear the production of it that's out now.  I 
like the tune.  It has an interesting turn.

CARLY:	I was thinking about writing some new songs now and for me 
"You're So Vain" is, I guess, the favorite of my songs and it's hard to 
think about doing something that I like as well.
	There are lots of general songs that one can write, but I like 
the specificity of "You're So Vain."  It's really a little about anybody 
who suspects it may be about them.  But the examples were really taken 
from my imagination.  I don't know anybody who went to Saratoga and I 
don't know anybody who went to photograph the total eclipse of the sun.
	The point of that verse is that the person was where they should 
be all the time.  That that's the hip thing to do and so the person is 
doing it... I had about two or three or people in mind.
STUART:	How did Jagger get involved with it?
CARLY:	Last May I got this idea to do an interview with Mick Jagger.  I 
had an idea to start a career in journalism until I found out just what 
it was like.  I mentioned my interview idea casually to Arlyene who spoke 
casually to Seymour Peck, who edits the Arts and Leisure section of the 
Sunday Times.  He said of Jagger was willing it would be great.  Somebody 
got in touch with Chris Odell and she got in touch with Mick who really 
liked the idea.
	So I casually went out to L.A. and I ended up hanging around 
there waiting for Mick for five days, waiting for him to show up.  And 
when he finally did show, he had been on an airplane for 13 hours and was 
exhausted.  All we talked about that night was how much how much we both 
hated airplanes and then I had to leave for New York the next morning.
	i still had ideas about doing the article when I met him again in 
June.  Or at least I hadn't totally given up on the idea, but we became 
friends and I felt it would be too difficult to write an objective piece.
STUART:	Was he well acquainted with your music?
CARLY:	I don't think he can recite the lyrics verbatim, but he was 
familiar with my album covers.  It was very strange that first 
meeting.  I expected to look so much like him, because people were always 
commenting on the resemblance.  I expected to walk into a mirror.  But 
then I didn't think we looked anything alike.
	We're the same height, but first of all he was wearing a cotton 
turquoise suit, and very short white socks and saddle shoes, and kept 
apologizing for how tired he was.  I couldn't imagine myself wearing 
that.  After I saw him in June, I didn't see him again until he called up 
at the session when we were about to do the vocals.
STUART:	Are there any songs on your first album that were written when 
you did that first demo with Albert Grossman in 1966?
CARLY:	Oh, my God, no.  I wasn't into writing songs at all then.  We did 
a song that Dylan... changed the lyrics around for me - "Baby Let Me 
Follow You Down."  It's really a guy's song, and a song that Bob Johnson 
wrote with Wes Farel called "Goodbye Lovin' Man," a song they'd never 
heard me sing until I got into the studio.  It was just one of those "all 
right, we'll make a B side quick."
	Grossman never had heard me sing and it was just on either 
hearsay or intuition that he thought that I could do something.  On 
"Baby, Let Me Follow You Down," I really got into him and into an 
arrangement that we both worked out.  Albert Grossman kept on coming into 
the studio and directing me, and I was just a piece of meat really.  When 
we went in to do the B side, Bob Johnston had become the producer in the 
meantime, and it was really meat city because I felt only like a sex 
object, not a musician at all.
JAMES:	Someone expected you to put out for him in payment for...
CARLY:	It's the old Hollywood trick!  "Honey, if you're nice to me, I'll 
make you a nice record."
STUART:	Were you disappointed when nothing happened?
CARLY:	I was terribly disappointed.  I let myself get brought down a 
lot, thinking that they didn't like me, that I wasn't worth much.  My 
expectations were to be the female Bob Dylan.  No, they weren't that, but 
I mean, Al Grossman led me to believe that I was hot shit, and basically 
none of them had ever heard me sing and they just thought they could mold 
me into whatever they wanted.  I just wasn't ready to be molded, even 
though I tried out of desperation because I wanted to be wanted.  It was 
a super-studded, star-studded session.  It was with the Band, Robbie 
Robertson and all those guys and Al Kooper and Mike Bloomfield, and 
Richie Havens singing background vocals.
STUART:	On "No Secrets" you found yourself as the front woman for another 
star-studded male cast.  Were there any similarities?
CARLY:	Oh, it was totally different.  I was an instrument in their hands, 
in the Grossman session.  And in the sessions I didn't feel like a woman 
amongst a group of men.  I felt like one of a group of people who are 
working on a joint project, with me taking a lead.  The fact that I'm 
female and they're male really made no difference.
STUART:	How did you come up with "That's The Way I Always Heard It Should 
Be"?
CARLY:	I wrote the melody of it two years before Jacob Brackman wrote 
the lyrics, because I was writing a television special called Who Killed 
Lake Erie?  They wanted a theme song and that was the melody that I wrote 
for the theme but they never used it.  Instead, they used a song that was 
written by Malvina Reynolds, called "From Way Up Here."  I wasn't really 
into writing lyrics much then.  I met up with Jacob Brackman when I was 
teaching at Indian Hill, a camp in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
STUART:	How old were you then?
CARLY:	23 or 24.  That was when I first met Jake.  And a couple of years 
later, he was writing for the New Yorker.  Just about six months before I 
did my first album I just kind of felt that Jake might write some 
interesting songs and so I gave him that melody and asked him to see what 
he could do with it.
STUART:	It's such a woman's song.  Did he surprise you?
CARLY:	No, because Jake is that sensitive to me.  Every song he has 
written has been a song which I could identify with.  He writes for me.  
He doesn't write with it in mind that Jack Jones will sing it, even 
though, in fact, Jack Jones did record "That's the Way I Always Heard It 
Should Be."
JAMES:	Carly got a letter from some people sincerely wanting to play 
that tune at their wedding, in the Midwest.  They're obviously straight.  
They think the song is a lovely tune about the joys of marriage but it 
reminds me of getting married in the middle of January in bare feet in 
the snow, in Maine, with the wind blowing all around you.  It's a groovy 
tune to get married by.  It's great.
CARLY:	We kind of got married by it.  We couldn't avoid it.  All the 
radios were playing it.  "Ironic twist, isn't it, that James and Carly 
got married." - "My father sits at night..."
STUART:	James, what were your feelings about the Apple sessions?
JAMES:	I got over to London in January '68 and I expected to work, just 
to play some and travel around England for a while.  Somewhere I got 
obsessed with the idea of making an album.  So I took eight pounds and I 
went down to a studio in Soho where they had a little two track setup.  I 
gave the guy the $20 and he said you can have 45 minutes.  He put me in 
there with an engineer, turned it on and I recorded 10 songs in 45 
minutes, just one right after the other, and it came out quite well.
	I took it and peddled it around to a number of different people.  
Finally Peter Asher took it to the Beatles.  I took a loft in an Apple 
building that was on Baker Street there, and I started auditioning.  They 
owned the building and they were doing a lot of business out of it.  I 
would put ads in the New Musical Express and Melody Maker, saying that I 
required a bass player and a keyboard player, would people please show 
up.  So people started to show up and we worked for about two months up 
in that attic putting together arrangements.  I made basic arrangements 
for everything.
STUART:	How much involvement did Paul McCartney have with you?
JAMES:	Paul would listen to what we had.  He had a sort of exterior 
interest in it, and I think more than any of the other Beatles, he was 
interested in what I was doing, although George Harrison also sang backup 
on one tune.  Paul played bass on "Carolina."  He thought it was the best 
thing we had.  We did one version of it, and he didn't like it, so we did 
it again with him, recorded it a number of times, and he was instrumental 
in producing that track.
STUART:	Did Apple seem like an organization that was gonna do what it was 
saying in the press it was going to do?
JAMES:	Well, Brian Epstein was dead, and I don't know what their 
feelings were about him.  I guess they thought, really, as much as they 
were brought down by his death, that they were glad to be on their own in 
a way.  A lot of people have told me that Brian Epstein saved them, sort 
of filtered out a lot of the bullshit that would have gotten to them and 
brought them down and sapped away a lot of their energies.  At any rate, 
Apple was open pickin's for a long time there.  Anybody who had an 
interesting sounding idea would go up there and hit on the Beatles for 
bread, and an awful lot of money started going out.
	I think I was the first artist to sign, anyhow, so I was there 
near the beginning of it.  It was a very high scene.  It was as though 
finally here are some people who have a company and at the same time 
they're sympathetic to the artist's point of view.  They're not just 
stock owners or chairmen of the boards.  They're actually musicians and 
artists and it sort of had that feeling to it.  It was a very exciting 
company to work for, but I guess there was really no one there who was 
looking out for the budget, and an awful lot of money went out, and they 
just about went broke and had to slow it down.  When Allen Klein came in, 
that's where I got out.

STUART:	Carly, what did you want to accomplish with this new album?
CARLY:	Going into it I felt a lot of pressure on me that it had to be 
good.  I suppose it's because I didn't want to do anything less good than 
my last album which is just a whole show business syndrome that you get 
caught up into, that you must surpass yourself all the time in order to 
be in the ballgame.
STUART:	James, you flew to London while she was working on the album?
CARLY:	So I went into the album quite frightened of working with 
somebody - Richard Perry - that I didn't know.  I didn't know if I would 
get along with him or not musically because he was from a different 
borough.  I'm not joking about the boroughs.  He's from Brooklyn and I'm 
from the Bronx and there was always the color war going on.  Richard is 
so strong and he's so strong in a different area.  I was very concerned 
that there would be a great many conflicts.  And as it did turn out, 
every song that I had written for the album I reacted to as if it were a 
child of mine (I've used this analogy before but it's the best one I can 
think of) and that each of the songs were children going away to college, 
meeting all sorts of different people who influenced them in different 
ways and some of the ways they were influenced I didn't like.  And they 
come home for Thanksgiving wearing mini-skirts or chewing gum.  Some of 
them had dyed their hair...
JAMES:	Some of them were driving Cadillacs.
STUART:	Carly, how did you and Richard get together?
CARLY:	Jac and Richard Perry apparently approached each other on the 
same day and it was like a light bulb for both of them.  Richard said, "I 
want to produce Carly."  And Jac said, "I want you to produce Carly."  I 
was against the idea because while I think Richard is a fine producer, 
his work with Nilsson and Barbara Streisand was too slick for me and I 
didn't want to have that kind of a sound.
STUART:	James, you flew to London.  While she was working on the album?
JAMES:	I spent about a week there, but I didn't do any work on the 
album.  The work I did in London was either redone later or else cut out 
of the album.
STUART:	What songs sound the way you want them to?
CARLY:	"Loving You Is The Right Thing To Do," "You're So Vain," "Robin," 
"Embrace Me, You Child"... I would say those four are my favorites.
"Loving Is The Right Thing To Do"... I wrote it specifically for James.  
I wrote that on an Air New England flight coming down from the Cape.  I 
wrote the lyrics, and the melody, and James helped me with a lot of the 
changes.
JAMES:	I liked it a lot.  The only thing I didn't like was the third 
verse that doesn't exist anymore.  She asked me and I told her.  But I 
like the third verse that's there now.
	"Embrace Me, You Child" is the strongest thing on the album.  I 
think that the things that sound best on the album are the strongest, 
melody and composition-wise.  The stronger they are the more they shine 
through Richard's style of production.
STUART:	When you talk about the problems Carly had, I get the feeling 
that there was something you've gone through more than vicariously with 
her problems.
JAMES:	Well, I went through it vicariously with her, and I've also gone 
through it myself and seen a lot of other acts go through it, too.  
There's a translation process between writing a song and singing it in 
the shower or whatever and then getting it out on records.  An awful lot 
of things can go wrong along the way and an awful lot of things can be 
done to help it along the way.  It's just that I think that there is a 
priority involved, and that's how well the artist can sound.  And if the 
producer is more interested in getting his licks in on an album, then he 
isn't making the artist sound as good as he or she can... from the 
artist's point of view.
STUART:	Carly, how did you wind up feeling about Richard Perry?
CARLY:	Richard Perry is like a movie director.  He sees himself as 
holding the camera, as directing the players, as calling the final shots, 
as doing a theme, rather than an interpreter.