Carly
and her daughtersOut of the most humiliating corner of your record collection, Carly Simon is rising again -- and this time, she's got a posse.
Illustration by Eric White
By JOYCE MILLMAN
The December 11 issue of The New Yorker carried a "Talk of the Town" item about a rare and very hush-hush New York nightclub concert given by Joni Mitchell to celebrate her 52nd birthday. Among those in the audience were a possibly inebriated Chrissie Hynde, who frequently shouted encouragement to Mitchell, and Carly Simon, who tried once too often to shush Hynde up. The article ended on an amusing and perhaps apocryphal note, with bantamweight Hynde grabbing Amazonian Simon in a chokehold and stage-whispering, "That's a real singer up there!", after which Simon fled the scene.
For those of us who have intently followed the careers of Mitchell and Simon, the Hynde incident was as fraught with meaning as that photo of Nixon and Elvis shaking hands in the Oval Office. Mitchell and Simon were the Twin Towers of '70s female singer-songwriters, the inspiration to every aspiring femme folkie poet or moony teen teaching herself chords in her bedroom.
The Joni Way was introspective, ladylike, minutely observed, an Emily Dickinson kinda thing. The Carly Way was exhibitionistic, actressy, mega eroticized, a Cosmo girl kinda thing. Sometimes you were in a Joni mood, sometimes you were in a Carly mood; it was real hard to mix-and-match. Joni was Joni and Carly was Carly, and never the twain shall meet, except in James Taylor's memoirs, but that's another story.
How fitting and inevitable that Chrissie Hynde, whose clear-eyed, writerly observations on the ways of the heart mark her as a true Joni disciple, should be the one to rassle Carly out the door. Poor Simon is the skeleton in every Joni-Girl's closet. It's like, how many times have you been in the Safeway and caught yourself singing along to "Anticipation" or "Haven't Got Time for the Pain" on the piped-in FM-Lite tape, and looked around sheepishly, hoping nearby produce-squeezers hadn't picked up on your spasm of uncoolness?
Next page: Carly: Dysfunctional ahead of her time
