CAROLE KING: SIMPLE THINGS (1977)
1) Simple Things; 2) Hold On;
3) In The Name Of Love; 4) Labyrinth; 5) You're The One; 6) Hard Rock Cafe; 7)
Time Alone; 8) God Only Knows; 9) To Know That I Love You; 10) One.
The start of an era: Carole's first album for
Avatar Records, with a completely new team of musicians and a seriously
different sound, even if, from the very first track, it is quite obvious that
most of the change has been external and superficial. Her voice and piano,
fortunately, are still at the core of the sound, but on the whole, the
arrangements become tougher and more electric: strings and horns are still in,
but acoustic guitars are mostly out, largely because of Carole's new partner,
Rick Evers, who sort of steered her in a slightly heavier direction.
Critical reception for Simple Things was frigid at best: common consensus seemed to imply
that Carole King had become a stubborn dinosaur, refusing to evolve and adapt
to the times — allegedly, Rolling Stone
dubbed it «the worst album of 1977» (with Kansas and Uriah Heep still on the
prowl? you sure ain't no gentleman, Mr. Wenner!), and the bad reputation still
persists, seeing as how all of Carole King's pre-Avatar record catalog still
remains in print, whereas some of those later albums seem to have never even
been released in CD format. Indeed, like most of the American soft-rockers of
the first half of the decade, Carole was in trouble — it would have been very
hard to imagine her as a disco dancer, let alone a punk rocker, and her natural
shyness and reclusiveness was becoming less and less convenient in an epoch
that was placing more and more emphasis on flashiness and visual imagery. In a
way, it is quite amazing that she still had enough credit left for the album to
go gold, by pure inertia...
...especially
if you also take into consideration the arch-ridiculous decision to take the
worst track off it and release it as a single. See, not only does Carole King
have no business writing a track called ʽHard Rock Cafeʼ — a bit like seeing
Judas Priest at the local Renaissance Fair — but even if it is just business and she was paid by the
Hard Rock Cafe for promotion or something, why write and arrange it like a
friggin' mariachi band number? All of a sudden, in the middle of this still
very personal and intimate bunch of ballads and soft-rockers, you get the
artificially «happy» and utterly generic atmosphere of a banal carnival. As a
corny B-side outtake or a publicity jingle, it would be okay, but as the first
public announcement of The New Carole King, it was a highly predictable
embarrassment, a serious lapse of taste that could only alienate the critical
community — most of the members of which were far too busy in 1977, anyway, to
listen to a new Carole King album from top to bottom.
Which is too bad, since there are at least some good songs here, and overall, I
would consider it a significant improvement over the consistent mediocrity of Thoroughbred — on the first go, at
least, the change of creative environment did Carole some good. First and
foremost, we gotta give some credit to the guitar players — particularly Robert
McEntee and Mark Hallman (I am not sure how much credit should be actually
given to Rick Evers, who is co-credited on three songs with Carole and also
listed as a guitar player). On two of the album's most uptempo numbers, the guitars
kick up a real storm. ʽYou're The Oneʼ is a dark and melancholic song, a little
reminiscent of Fleetwood Mac's ʽYou Make Loving Funʼ in terms of tempo, basic
rhythmic structure, and the impact that the sharp, intrusive guitar licks make
on the rest of the song — but this one's more disturbing and, at times, even
more desperate, in strange contrast with Carole's former peace of mind. The
other number is ʽGod Only Knowsʼ — not a cover of the Beach Boys song, but a
completely different and, this time, bouncy and uplifting song, with a
ʽRunawayʼ-ish "I wonder..." hook.
Both songs are decent as far as composing goes,
but the real reason I am singling them out is that both are extended with an
unusually long (for Carole) coda, where the guitarists are given complete
freedom, and they are not afraid to use it. On ʽYou're The Oneʼ, the two
players battle each other, contrasting a sharp, shrill tone with one muffled by
a talkbox effect; and on ʽGod Only Knowsʼ, one of the soloists (no idea who
exactly) delivers a fluent, super-melodic blues-pop solo that Dickey Betts
might have envied. Really, this marks a first — never before did Carole allow
her supporting players to carry on with their guitar solos for so long, and she
couldn't have chosen a better opportunity to start: the electric guitar on both
these songs is as perfect a companion for her and her piano as the sax solo was
on ʽJazzmanʼ.
As for the less guitar-dependent songs, I'd say
that the title track is quite lovely, despite the unnecessary overreliance on
synthesizers, and gets its programmatic message ("simple things mean a lot
to me") across quite convincingly. Little else stands out (although, other
than the abysmal ʽHard Rock Cafeʼ, little else is openly irritating), until
she gets to the very end and delivers one of the most ambitious songs she ever
wrote: ʽOneʼ is a micro-macro-cosmic anthem that somehow manages, over a measly
five minutes, to touch upon everything, using the magic number as a starting
point — a song about being "one" as a person, as a family unit, and
as "one" with the universe, and about all the emotions that go with
it, from joy and amazement to bewilderment and confusion (the pertinent
refrain is "what am I gonna do?... what am I gonna do?..") Perhaps it
is far from her best in sheer melodic terms (although I really like the
structural games she plays with the bridge section, going from super-quiet
"I am one" to super-loud "WE ARE ONE!"), but it really pays
off to see her combine deep personal honesty and vulnerability with sonic
bombast in this manner, and in any case, it's a fresh approach to finalizing
the album, after three nice, but generic-predictable straightforwardly
optimistic codas in a row — this time, the ending is more ambiguous and
intriguing.
Bottomline is, the critics were wrong: in a
world that does not necessarily expect each and every one of its master songwriters
to adapt to new trends, but allows them to follow their own path of spiritual
and artistic evolution, Simple Things
should have been as welcome as any other B-level Carole King album, and it does
have more high points than either Rhymes
& Reasons or Thoroughbred,
to name but a couple of truly middle-of-the-road albums for her. I am not sure
that three very good songs (two of them mostly because of the guitar work), one
awful song, and 5-6 unremarkable tunes are really worthy of a thumbs up, but don't
let me discourage you from trying the record out anyway — if you see it in a
corner, give it a spin, just to be assured that as late as 1977, Carole King
did not betray and abandon her muse, even if she still left her going around
somewhat underfed and unwashed behind the ears.
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