Originally published in Uncut Take 230 [July 2016 issue], Uncut revealed the making of Carole King’s intimate, emotionally mature masterpiece, Tapestry. As King prepared to play the album in London’s Hyde Park, we explored how a fêted songwriter found herself, surrounded by candles, incense and the gifted community of Laurel Canyon…

“We were all hanging out together, everybody knew everybody else”

If there is a moment when the wave generated by California’s growing ranks of singer-songwriters rises to a natural crest, it comes during the first days of 1971. In A&M’s studio B on the corner of sunset Boulevard and La Brea in Hollywood, Carole King is recording what will shortly become the most successful album ever made by a female artist.

Across the hall in studio C, Joni Mitchell is making Blue. seven blocks away, at Crystal sound on Vine street, James Taylor is putting together his No 1 album, Mud Slide Slim And The Blue Horizon. The friends sing and play on each other’s records, and use many of the same musicians, including guitarist Danny “Kootch” Kortchmar. “We were all hanging out together, everybody knew everybody else,” says Kortchmar. “We all recorded with each other, but it was spontaneous. Joni or James would pop in and it was, ‘Let’s go!’ it was a utopian way of making music.”

“The tunes were extraordinary, there was no question about that”

Of the three, King appears the least sure of where she is heading. At 28, she is struggling to transition from being one half of the peerless husband-and-wife writing team Goffin & King to becoming a solo artist. she has already made two albums, neither of which have made much impact. Nobody really expects her third attempt to buck the trend. “the tunes were extraordinary, there was no question about that, but the tunes on her previous two albums were extraordinary, too,” says Kortchmar. “We just thought, ‘Yeah, this is Carole. She writes great songs, that’s what she does!’”

“At one point making Tapestry I went into the control room, and Carole said, ‘Do you want to hear the single?’” recalls David Campbell, who played violin and cello on the record. “the song was ‘It’s Too Late’. she said, ‘Well, i hope we can put out a single at least!’ there was no expectation of it doing much. Of course, not long after that, it all blew up. All the forces came together.”

“Everybody wants to continue to listen to it”

In a time of what King calls “generational and cultural turbulence,” the 12 songs on Tapestry fed a hunger for unaffected intimacy. Deploying “a new kind of personal poetry” and a loose, organic tilt at pop, rock’n’roll and soul, Tapestry is defined by a funky, heartfelt mood of longing.

It was the record that helped explain the baby boomer generation to itself, as their need for personal freedom and self-expression rushed headlong into the responsibilities of marriage, parenthood and citizenship. It continues to cast a powerful spell. In America, it has accumulated a total of 313 weeks in the Billboard Hot 100. In Britain it spent 42 consecutive weeks in the chart immediately following its release, and has since spent a further two years in the top 100. “Every time there’s a new way to access music, Tapestry takes a big bump in sales because everybody wants to continue to listen to it,” says its producer, Lou Adler.

“People felt that it told a story that they understood”

Coming 45 years, four months and 23 days since its release, King’s forthcoming performance of the album in London’s Hyde Park on July 3 is one of the most anticipated live events of the year.

Even in the exhilarating days of January 1971, Lou Adler sensed it was a work that would cut deep. “The feeling was not that it was a big hit, but how much meaning it had,” he says. “People felt that it told a story that they understood. It was different from a so-called hit. It was more than that. That’s why it has endured. That was my feeling right away, that it was very, very special. I still feel that.”

King has written or co-written 118 songs that have appeared on the Billboard charts

Carole King arrived in California in March 1968, following the breakdown of her marriage to Gerry Goffin. They had married in 1959, when she was just 17, and formed a songwriting partnership in which King set her husband’s words to music and melody.

Living in suburban New Jersey, they raised two children and wrote some of the greatest pop songs of the ’60s or any other era. “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow”, “Chains”, “Up On The Roof”, “The Loco-Motion”, “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman”, “Goin’ Back”, “Pleasant valley Sunday”, “Wasn’t Born To Follow” and scores more. To date, King has written or co-written 118 songs that have appeared on the Billboard charts.

By the spring of 1968, however, both the marriage and creative alliance was over. Wanting her two daughters to be near their father in LA, King rented a two-bedroomed house for $225 a month on Wonderland Avenue in Laurel Canyon. built into the hillside, the house had pale peach adobe walls, tiled floors, and a sense of light and space. If her new home was the antithesis of the creeping claustrophobia of her native New York, similarly King’s music began to stretch out and breathe.

“A confluence of pals, great artists and musicians”

She was part of a widespread exodus to the west. Among the many musicians heading for the sun were two men King knew well from New York studios and Greenwich village coffee houses: Kortchmar and bassist Charles Larkey. “It was a confluence of pals, great artists and musicians all congregating in Los Angeles,” says Kortchmar. “It was so different to New York. So open and sunny, and friendlier. Everyone lived in rented houses rather than apartments, so it was easier to have band rehearsals. That made it easier to play.”

Hooking up with Kortchmar and Larkey in LA, King decided to try her hand at being a recording artist. Her solo demos of Goffin & King songs had long been admired within the industry for the way they showcased King’s strong, natural voice and rhythmic piano. “What I found is that when I’d give demos to an artist, A&R man or producer, I couldn’t get them back!” says Lou Adler.

As a successful publisher, Adler had serviced Goffin & King demos through much of the ’60s, and became friendly with the couple. Relocating to LA, he founded ode Records and was involved in the careers of The Mamas & The Papas, Spirit, Scott McKenzie and Johnny Rivers. When he learned that King had moved west, he immediately set about signing her to ode.

“She wanted to record but she didn’t want to be a solo artist”

“I always felt she could be a solo artist,” he says, but King had other ideas. She insisted that she would only sign as part of a band, and on condition that she would not be asked to undertake any promotion. King had had a minor hit single in 1962 with the Goffin-King composition, “It Might As Well Rain Until September”, and hadn’t enjoyed even the relatively small amount of exposure it brought.

“She wanted to record but she didn’t want to be a solo artist,” says Adler. “She was shy and she didn’t want to go on the road and perform. So she put herself in the middle of this group. That was her cover, so to speak.”

Featuring King, Kortchmar, Larkey and drummer Jim Gordon, The City recorded Now That Everything’s Been Said in 1968. “It was really a solo album,” says Kortchmar. “She wrote all the songs, and they were all great. That was her entrée into being an artist.” Despite its merits – and it’s a fine record – the album vanished without making any discernible impact. King’s public profile was virtually non-existent, and her identity somewhat muddled.

“James Taylor introduced her to his audience”

“Everyone knew who she was as a songwriter, but it took a while for her to establish herself as a performer,” says Kortchmar. “She was very against playing live at that point. She was nervous. The City were supposed to do a gig at the Troubadour and she cancelled it, she had such stage fright. We never did any gigs. It wasn’t until James [Taylor] invited her to accompany him that [she found] a way into being a performer. He introduced her to his audience.”

King and Taylor had begun their lives and careers poles apart, but slowly spun towards one another. She was an earthy, diminutive Jewish girl. He was the long, cool product of wealth and education. Taylor had arrived in LA following unhappy spells in New York and London, where he’d cut an overbaked debut album for Apple. He was now managed by Englishman Peter Asher, formerly of Peter and Gordon. Asher hired King as Taylor’s pianist.

“I had heard some of Carole’s original publishing demos, just her and a piano,” he says. “I realised how great she was, as a singer and particularly as a pianist, and hired her because of that. So I asked her if she would play on James’s second album, and she said she would. We would rehearse at my house in Hancock Park in the afternoon, and go into Sunset Sound [to record Sweet Baby James] in the evening. It very quickly fell into place. She and James shared a harmonic consciousness. Still do. They’ll go for the same chord changes instinctively.”

“A complete mutual admiration society”

Using a core band of Taylor, Kortchmar, King and drummer Russ Kunkel, all of whom would later appear on Tapestry, Sweet Baby James was recorded in December 1969 and released in February 1970. As well as launching Taylor into the mainstream, on the back of a top three single, “Fire And Rain”, it offered King a route map.

“She absolutely loved James’s music,” says Kunkel. “It was a complete mutual admiration society. It was a time in her life when she was reinventing herself, and James was very encouraging to her to do her own thing.”

King toured as part of Taylor’s band throughout 1970. In May she released her first solo album, the pointedly named Writer. “That’s a really good record, but it didn’t go anywhere,” says Kortchmar. “I’m not sure why.” The fact that King was still unwilling to promote it with any solo live performances didn’t help.

“That was the beginning of it”

Her breakthrough came in the last week of November 1970, when King was persuaded to open for Taylor during a weeklong residency at the Troubadour. Doug Weston’s West Hollywood club provided not only a hip symbiosis of artist and audience, but an arena where folk, rock and country met and merged. The club made careers. Kris Kristofferson supported Linda Ronstadt there “and never had to work a proper job again”; after playing the club in 1970, Cat Stevens and Elton John became US stars almost overnight.

King’s week-long stint [see panel] was less immediately seismic, but equally impactful. backed by a string quartet – bass, cello, two violins – her 20-minute opening set “went down brilliantly,” says Kortchmar.

“Everyone started to realise that this is the same woman who wrote ‘Natural Woman’ and all those amazing songs. That was the beginning of it.”

“Before the Troubadour, people didn’t know who she was,” says David Campbell. “She’d had one album out as a solo artist, but it didn’t get a lot of attention. So after every show people were like, ‘Wow! Her songs, her presentation!’ It was all very novel.”

“You felt she was sitting at the piano singing to you”

A little over a month later, filled with a new confidence, King went into A&M Studio b to make Tapestry. Rather than a great leap forward, King has always viewed the album as the last part of a trilogy that had begun with Now That Everything’s Been Said and continued with Writer. The difference was one of emphasis.

“Mostly what you hear on those [first two] albums is the song quality, but they pretty much cover Carole up,” says Adler. “When we got to Tapestry, what I was trying to do was really put her out there, so you felt she was sitting at the piano singing to you. That was the basis of the feel I was after, which was the way that her demos sounded. I wanted it to be as if somebody listening to the LP felt that Carole was sitting at the piano singing the song for them.”

The final track on Writer was a slow, unadorned reading of the Goffin & King classic “Up on The Roof”. A hit for The Drifters in 1964, this almost radically subdued deconstruction provided a template of sorts for Tapestry, pointing towards the home-cooked feel that Lou Adler sought. It was a trick King repeated on new readings of “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” and “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow”, previously hits for Aretha Franklin and The Shirelles respectively.

“It gave it depth and resonance”

“Once you take everything out and slow it down, revealing the beauty of the song in that way really helped in getting her recognised,” says Kortchmar. “It gave it depth and resonance.”

King had found her metier: a soulful, uncluttered, emotionally direct form of pop music for the album age, with her voice and piano front and centre. The selected songs were a blend of three established Goffin-King classics, seven new compositions, and two collaborations with a new lyrical partner.

“Carole had to make the transition from writing early ’60s bubblegummy pop songs to being taken seriously as a singer-songwriter, although no one yet used that term,” says Kortchmar. “Instead of writing straight ahead pop songs that anyone could sing, she started writing more personal songs that were about her.”

“A free woman looking to express herself”

The Brill Building prodigy had already realised that self-composing pop artists had made her role as a writer-for-hire increasingly redundant. With her proximity to James Taylor she recognised, and acted on, the new cultural hunger for what she describes as the “personal authenticity of someone telling their own story”. Attuned to the changes in her own life and an evolving cultural shift from communal exuberance to confessional intimacy, the songs on Tapestry speak directly to the needs, wants and fears of a modern mother and divorcée who is both independent and a traditionalist.

“She’d made the separation from New York to California,” says Adler. “Her  attitudes were more of a free woman looking to express herself. She was developing into a singersongwriter, but her primary responsibility was still as a mother.”

Having married her bass player Charles Larkey, King became pregnant within weeks of Tapestry coming out; her third child, Molly, was born in December 1971.

“She gave away what was clearly a hit song”

David Campbell recalls his wife and baby son, the artist now known as Beck, visiting the house in Laurel Canyon many times. “She really had that Mom thing going on, that was a big part of that time period. That’s partly why the album was so hugely successful, because she had a genuineness in her voice, and in the way the songs were presented. A warmth.”

The warmth was never more evident than on “You’ve Got A Friend”, a simple, heartfelt declaration of unconditional loyalty during troubled times that she had debuted at the Troubadour in November. Watching her soundcheck from the balcony on the opening night, Taylor and Peter Asher heard the song for the first time.

“James loved it so much, he asked Carole if she would mind awfully if he learned it,” says Asher. “She said she would be honoured. Then I had the nerve to ask Carole how she would feel about us recording it. And she said, great. To her credit, with incredible generosity, she basically gave away what was clearly a hit song.”

“It so much explained where she was at the time, but also the times themselves”

Taylor’s version of the song reached No 1 in the US and No 4 in the UK, but King’s more stately reading would become one of the central pillars of her next album. It was joined by several more powerful new songs. “So Far Away”, “Way Over Yonder” and “Home Again” acknowledged the human need to leave while aching for a place to belong, physically, emotionally and spiritually.

The sentiment resonated not only for King personally, but within the group of travelling musicians she was working with, and for a generation yearning for its roots. “It so much explained where she was at the time, but also the times themselves,” says Adler. “Beautiful” was a song of optimism in the face of daily struggle, while the unabashed “I Feel The Earth Move” captured the good-bad physical tremors of sexual attraction. “Emotionally those songs go right to the heart, and intellectually they are very smart.”

There were also two songs written with her new writing partner, Toni Stern, a young LA woman with literary aspirations with whom she had started working in 1968.

“It’s personal experiences and observation intermingled”

“I’d just hand Carole a lyric and she would come up with the musical medium,” says Stern. “We’d go to each other’s houses. I’d either sit next to her on the piano bench or stand next to her, and within an hour she would write a melody, including all those great licks and musical hooks.”

The album’s lead single, “It’s Too Late”, was created this way. Stern wrote the lyric – allegedly about James Taylor – and King quickly came up with the music and melody. “It’s personal experiences and observation intermingled,” Stern says of the words. “Blurred lines. I wouldn’t say I wrote [it] for her specifically, as we still considered we were writing songs that could be covered by other artists, but I don’t think I’d have written anything absolutely against Carole’s grain.”

Produced with the lightest of touches by Adler, Tapestry was recorded in January 1971 in A&M’s Studio B. The core band was King on vocals, piano and keyboards, Kortchmar on guitar, Charles Larkey on bass and Russ Kunkel on drums. David Campbell, who had played the November shows at the Troubadour, was one of several string players. A handful of other exemplary musicians added further, subtle textural touches.

“It happened very quickly”

The easy, organic feel that still pervades the album today was not a construct. They were happy sessions. The band recorded live, forming a semicircle around King and her piano, enabling everyone to see each other and the musicians to respond to her head movements and facial gestures.

The studio was low-lit, the atmosphere thick with candles and incense. King’s young daughters, Sherry and Louise, would be allowed to come and go as long as the ‘Record’ light wasn’t lit red.

“It happened very quickly,” says Kortchmar. “We sometimes did three tunes in a day. Carole would write out a lead sheet and she would play the tunes maybe one time through and then we’d do a take. She’d done a lot of rehearsing with Charlie at home, working out bass parts in advance, which helped, and the rest of us just fell in. I played a couple of solos off the floor, live. They weren’t overdubs. If I’d known 20 million people were going to be listening to it, I ’d have shit my pants! But I just went for it.

“The tracks were cut in 10 days, if that”

“She was very friendly, open and sweet, very New York – but she was all business in the studio. She knew what she wanted, she was never overbearing, but like all great musicians she knows what she wants and how to describe it to musicians she works with.”

“The tracks were cut in 10 days, if that,” says Kunkel. “She might run a song through once on the piano, but then we needed to play it, because we knew that it was all about early takes. She was in complete control of the arrangements. If she asked you to do something, she always did it in a very polite way, but she knew exactly what she wanted and she had a vision of what each song would be and what she needed from every instrument.”

At the centre of it all was King’s percussive piano playing and raw vocals, stripped of any of the polite formality often expected from solo female vocalists at that time. It was the voice of a lover on the pillow, a mother at the kitchen table, a friend on the sidewalk. She was seeking not technical perfection, but emotional truth. Adler’s role was simply to let it come through.

A scene had developed

“We worked as a team,” he says. “She had so many talents that I was able to be the catalyst for, or the instigator in some cases: as a piano player, arranger, vocalist, background vocalist, vocal arranger. The musicians all bought into what we were doing.”

“Lou was the consummate producer,” says Kunkel. “He knew what to do to keep things moving, but he knew not to get in the way of the artist, which is key. He saw her amazing talent and he wanted to bring her into her own.”

It was a febrile time. Laurel Canyon was the spiritual – and often actual – home to a variety of musicians, among them Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne and David Crosby. A scene had developed.

“A sense of cohesion and something happening”

“People always think that in any movement the people all know each other and hang out,” says Asher. “Usually it’s not true at all, but in this instance it was. Based around the Troubadour bar, there was a sense of cohesion and something happening. It was non-competitive. We all felt there was room for everyone. And there was.”

In this atmosphere of co-operation, lovers Mitchell and Taylor popped in to add backing vocals to King’s pared down reading of “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow”, sitting so closely together on two stools their heads touched. King repaid the favour by singing on Taylor’s version of her own “You’ve Got A Friend”.

“Carole showed up at the end to listen to it and, as I recall, she cried,” says Asher. Taylor also played guitar on several songs on Tapestry, including “So Far Away”, while many of the musicians were working on both LPs at once. “Sometimes,” King felt, “it seemed that James and I were recording one massive album in two different studios.”

“A beautiful tableau”

“Everyone was so young, yet so accomplished,” says Toni Stern, who was invited into the studio to hear the recordings of the two songs she co-wrote, “It’s Too Late” and the goodtime roll of “Where You Lead”. “The playing, the writing, the professionalism was very, very impressive. I recall looking through the studio window, seeing all these young people, so focused and concentrated. It was a beautiful tableau.”

On one particular evening, when Mitchell had exited Studio C for a short time, King ducked in to use the studio’s much coveted redwood Steinway. In the three-hour window before Mitchell returned, King recorded the basic tracks for “I Feel The Earth Move”, “You’ve Got A Friend” and “Natural Woman”. She would then slide effortlessly into writing and arranging string parts. David Campbell recalls the violin and cello overdubs being recorded in a single afternoon.

“It was all worked out. It reminded me of Paul McCartney or what I’ve heard about Brian Wilson. Everything is there before you even recorded, ready to show you. She was lovely, but absolutely certain about what she wanted.”

“The first review was bad!”

Tapestry was released with almost unseemly haste, on February 10, 1971. The cover photo by Jim McCrary showed a barefoot, dressed down King sitting on the window sill of her home, clutching a handstitched tapestry, as her cat Telemachus engaged in one of music’s most famous photo-bombs.

“It just seemed that her sitting there, working on that tapestry with the cat around the house, so much represented how easy going she was about everything she was dealing with,” says Adler. “I’d love to have that tapestry back! She gave it to me with a thank you, and it disappeared somewhere.”

It was a slow burn rather than a quick hit. “The first review was bad!” says Adler. “There was a review out of Long Beach that was just terrible.” The album didn’t reach the Top 20 until May 1, 1971. In mid-June it finally displaced Sticky Fingers at the top of the charts, remaining there for a record-breaking 15 consecutive weeks. “It’s Too Late” went to No 1 at the same time, and stayed for five weeks, swiftly followed by James Taylor’s version of “You’ve Got A Friend”.

“It became one of those everybody-must-have-it records”

Suddenly, Tapestry was everywhere. “We started hearing it on the radio every five minutes,” says Kortchmar. “It was ubiquitous. In every shop and clothing store, from cars and windows – everywhere. You could not get through a day without hearing two or three tracks of it wherever you went.”

“It became one of those everybody-must-have-it records,” recalls Peter Asher. “There was a point where every self respecting person of a certain age would have it. Exactly how that happened is hard to say.”

Songs like “It’s Too Late”, “I Feel The Earth Move”, “You’ve Got A Friend” and second single “So Far Away” entered the bloodstream of the culture and never left. Though at heart it is a gentle reckoning of all that King had lived through as a woman, and a recognition of the challenges to come, it also spoke for a generation. “She’d moved away from home, her marriage had broken up, and she was trying to find herself,” says Kunkel.

“Nothing interfered with the emotion”

“A lot of people related to that, especially women. The arrangements and music matched the lyrics so well. It was intimate and uncluttered, you could get close to it. Nothing interfered with the emotion. Any listener could imagine themselves singing those songs. It kicked off the singer-songwriter thing. Tapestry opened a lot of doors that are still open today.”

“She just hit it at the right time,” says Kortchmar. “There was a lot of political and social conflict going on when that album came out in the United States, and I think her music represented a kind of island of peace for people.”

Tapestry made King a star, a development that did not necessarily impress her. “Her head was not turned, let’s put it that way,” says Kortchmar. “She never talked about, ‘Oh isn’t this fabulous, it’s a hit!’ She didn’t think that way. She’d already had a million hits and No 1s that she wrote. Did she enjoy it? I’m not sure. She was not thrilled at being famous. I don’t think she’d anticipated that, and it was not her goal.”

Tapestry has now sold north of 15 million copies

By the end of 1971, a year of almost constant touring, Kingfelt that “normal life was a distant dream”. The album’s success would prove impossible to outrun. When the follow up, Music, went to number one in January 1972, Tapestry was still in the top ten. Its songs dominated her set when she played a free concert to 100,000 people in Central Park in 1973.

By the mid-’70s King had headed off-grid to the wilds of Idaho. She has continued to make and release music, with decreasing frequency, as well as tour, act and write film scores, all in the certain knowledge that nothing she does will ever have the cultural or commercial impact of Tapestry, which has now sold north of 15 million copies.

“I always like playing those songs”

As if to prove the point, she is performing the album in full for the first time in July. Now, as then, Danny Kortchmar will be playing guitar. He understands what people want. Those songs, that voice, the piano. The sense that, no matter what tribulations life may through at us, things will work out all right.

“We’ll stay true to it,” he promises. “We’re doing the whole album, probably in order, and we’ll stay faithful to the album arrangements. I always like playing those songs. Every time I play them I get a good feeling.”

Him and the rest of the world.