#773: K is for King, Carole

As a child I must have heard her
songs on the radio hundreds of times,
and I remember distinctly that while
my older brother was in his reel to reel phase
he had the album Tapestry in that format.
Yeah, that was a thing: commercially available
reel to reel tapes of the great artists
of the day, late 60’s, early 70’s,
a precursor to the absolutely terrible
8-track tape format, but maybe sonically
even slightly superior to vinyl. It didn’t
last in the home stereo market, as it
was likely unwieldy and vulnerable
to damage. My brother only had his long
enough to amass a small collection of
titles, but I remember this album cover,
the unassuming and straight forward
singer songwriter sitting in a window seat
in bare feet, jeans, and knit sweater, no
make-up, no gaudy adornments, and a
cat in the foreground looking straight at
the camera. It strikes me as the absolute
best, most representational cover art for
this music: unassuming, straightforward,
unadorned, lyrically personal, comforting,
sometimes sad, and melodically masterful.
By my count, there are at least 6 gigantic
hits on this album, three in a row right out
of the gate, “I Feel the Earth Move,” “So Far Away,”
and “It’s Too Late,” tracks one, two, and three.
On side two of the album: “You’ve Got A Friend,”
“Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” and the album
closer, “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural
Woman.” This is astounding. Most artists would
give up an arm to have a single hit on an album
with 12 songs; Carole had six. And I find
the deep cuts are also strong, music that I’m
not sure I ever heard, or certainly don’t
remember, wafting from my brother’s room.
I think, even though I remember the hits
well as part of the soundtrack of my childhood,
I was drawn in 1971 to my sister’s portable
record player, and while my brothers were
listening to “serious” music, I was sitting on
the floor of my sister’s bedroom spinning
The Monkees. I would have to wait decades,
five of them to be precise, before I would
give an entire album by Carole King my close
attention. Totally worth the wait. Worth
the close attention.

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Notes on the vinyl edition: Tapestry, Ode Records (CBS subsidiary), 1971, black vinyl. Found it used somewhere, within the last decade. Price tag: $3. Oddly, the condition of this album looks pretty bad, but it plays back perfectly well, proving the point, again, that it’s hard to tell how a record will sound just by looking at it. Despite the scratches, I must have thought that it was still a steal. It sounds way better than I expected it to.

In case you don’t already know: I’m listening to almost everything in my vinyl collection, A to Z, and writing at least one, sometimes two or three long skinny poem-like-things in response for each artist, and on a few occasions, writing a long skinny poem-like-thing in response to more than one artist. As a poet and a student of poetry, I understand that these things look like poems, but they don’t really sound much like poetry, hence, I call them “poem-like-things.” I’ll admit that they’re just long, skinny essays that veer every now and then into the poetic or lyric.