| |||||
|
Arts & Entertainment Books Comics Health & Body Media Mothers Who Think News  PeoplePolitics2000 Technology - Free Software Project Travel & Food  Columnists
- - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - Also Today For a full list of today's Salon People stories, go to the
People home page. - - - - - - - - - - - - Search Salon - - - - - - - - - - - - Recently in Salon People Nothing Personal People Feature Nothing Personal Rogues' Gallery Nothing Personal - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
Will you still love me tomorrow?
- - - - - - - - - - - -
June 19, 1999 |
Her 1971 album "Tapestry" (estimated to have sold as many as 20 million copies worldwide) made her an international star, but King was always more comfortable backstage, offering her songwriting genius to those more interested in the limelight and accolades. These days, the 57-year-old mother of four seems to have come full circle in her varied, 40-year career. She began as a songwriter, moved on to solo albums, took up environmentalism, starred in several New York musicals, then came back to songwriting. Recently, Celine Dion, Natalie Merchant, Rod Stewart, Trisha Yearwood and Courtney Love have all covered her songs, and she co-wrote the themes to the movies "One Fine Day" and "You've Got Mail." Though she's released albums only sporadically in the past 15 years, King never fell into obscurity like so many of her contemporaries. Born in 1942 in Brooklyn, King grew up listening to the first wave of rock 'n' roll to hit mass audiences in America. Her earliest songs reflected a pop-rock sensibility geared to a white teen market. At Queens College in Brooklyn, where she trained to be a teacher, she met Gerry Goffin, with whom she would form one of the most successful songwriting teams of the '60s (classmates included Paul Simon and Neil Diamond). A trained chemist, Goffin wrote lyrics to accompany King's deceptively complex arrangements. They married when King was 18 and had their first child, Louise, just after they'd had their first No. 1 hit. "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," recorded by the Shirelles in 1960, stayed at the top of the charts for three weeks. The song's subject matter was considered racy by some in the music industry. Its chorus was a post-coitus interrogative, bringing to the surface a sensibility far more modern than many in the post-World War II era cared to acknowledge.
Find books on Carole King at BARNES & NOBLE Before "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," Goffin and King wrote more than four dozen songs that were never recorded. They lived in a basement apartment in New York City, and when King finished her secretarial day job and Goffin finished his chemist job, they'd sit in a tiny office belonging to Don Kirshner at Aldon Music and toil over songs. After they gave "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" to Kirshner (whom they'd met through King's childhood friend Neil Sedaka), Goffin recalled King, then seven months pregnant, driving up to his lab in a limousine and telling him to hang up his white coat, they wouldn't have to work again. Kirshner had given them each a $10,000 advance. Goffin and King came from an era when performers rarely wrote their own material but relied heavily on songwriters to provide them with hit singles. The most famous factory for this songwriting talent in the '50s and '60s was New York's Brill Building. It housed more than 20 music companies off and on throughout the decades, and songwriters knew they'd made it when they found themselves working inside its cubicles. Goffin and King worked around the corner, at Aldon Music, where they were considered part of the same happening scene. In Rolling Stone, Jon Landau wrote: "The songs of Goffin and King are superb examples of the songwriting craft of the '60s. Finely honed to meet the demands of the clients who commissioned them, and written with the requirements of AM radio always firmly in mind, they still managed to express themselves in a rich way. Like Hollywood directors who learned how to make the limitations of the system work for them and in the process created something of their own pop vision." Most of the more than 100 hits penned by Goffin and King in the '60s had a thin, bubble-gum sentimentality to them, like "Pleasant Valley Sunday," "The Loco-motion," "One Fine Day," "Take Good Care of My Baby," "Crying in the Rain" and "Up on the Roof." Recorded by artists such as the Beatles (John Lennon and Paul McCartney cited the pair as one of the group's major influences), the Monkees, the Drifters, Bobby Vee, the Everly Brothers and the Chiffons, the songs contrast sharply with the more mature, complex work King began producing after her split with Goffin in the late '60s, when she relocated with their two daughters from New York City to Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles -- breeding ground of another burgeoning music scene.
| ||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
||
Next page |