16
It turned out that [Cat Stevens] had an impeccable sense of timing,” wrote journalist Bud Scoppa in May 1971. “At the time, everybody was too busy with Elton John and James Taylor to pay another new one any attention (at the time, I couldn’t even talk my good friend the editor into letting me review Tea for the Tillerman, Cat’s then brand-new album). Two months later, as the populace wearied of all that hyper-aggressive promotion, what should quietly float into the choked atmosphere but ‘… ooh, baby, baby, it’s a wild world, and it’s hard to get by just upon a smile,’ words and melody so beautifully unprepossessing that hardly anyone could resist it.”
“Honestly, I didn’t expect things to happen in the States like they did,” the object of Scoppa’s devotion told Hit Parader in 1972. “But when I got there everything just felt right.”
He was angry, he would admit, that Mona Bone Jakon didn’t get off the ground either at home or in the U.S. (although it was a big hit in France), but he allowed his disappointment to fuel his dedication. “I was really upset about that, so when I went over I was really determined to make it on my first trip. I wasn’t into like doing three trips and like they say earn money gradually. I earned money on the first tour. Even though it was only $250, it was enough to come out and say, ‘I’ve done it.’ You don’t have to do loads of tours and like you don’t have to go through all that hassle. Not if you really mean what you say.”
While Chris Blackwell told all and sundry that Tea for the Tillerman was the best album Island had ever released, ears began to prick up. “America was like a sleeping beauty for me,” Stevens continued. “I never thought it would ever get to this point. I’ve always wanted to get into America because so much influence has come from there and it’s always a great challenge to make it in America. I thought I’d get to the same stage as perhaps I am in England but things have really gone so much wider than that because there’s no pre-conception about who Cat Stevens is. They’re really taking it on music value and whatever comes out on record.”
It was not, after all, the concerts and the radio that pushed Stevens into the local consciousness. “They got onto the lyrics very strongly,” Stevens pointed out, and he admitted that that might well have been his greatest point of pride. After all, he said, “they have James Taylor [who] is similar, except that I still get the feeling he’s very insulated within himself, he hasn’t opened up that much.”
Stevens, on the other hand, “had no reason to hold back, no inhibitions on the record, and I think they see that and I think they like the hot and cold of it, too, the change of level.”
James Taylor might not have had a competitive bone in his body. But he would still have sensed Stevens coming up on the inside, a new singer-songwriter (though he loathed that phrase as well), a new oddly introspective one-man band; and there was that personal connection too, through Peter Asher’s Marylebone Productions.
Taylor was not strictly at the Troubadour to pet the Cat, however. Russ Kunkel, his drummer for the previous year, was taking advantage of the break in the tour schedule to appear alongside the evening’s opening act, a young female singer named Carly Simon. She had specifically asked for his presence; almost made her performance contingent upon his availability, and Taylor wanted to cheer his old friend along.
The daughter of the president of the Simon and Schuster publishing company, Carly Simon had just seen her debut album released by Elektra. A familiar face on the coffeehouse circuit in early 1960s Massachusetts, where she performed with her sibling, Lucy, as the Simon Sisters, she had already scored a minor hit (the Sisters’ “Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod” reached #73 in 1964) by the time she gravitated to the Greenwich Village solo rounds. There she was just another, admittedly distinctive, face in the crowd, until the evening one of her friends threw a party and arranged for a very special guest to attend.
Jerry Brandt, destined to become one of the lions of seventies rock management, was now best known as the proprietor of the Electric Circus, the venue that picked up Andy Warhol’s old lease on the Dom. Before that, he was the Rolling Stones’ go-to guy at the William Morris Agency (home, too, to the young David Geffen). He had just quit the club when, he explained, “I was invited to this party by a boy named Jacob Brachman. He was a songwriter with Carly, and it was all a setup, although I didn’t know it.
“I heard this girl singing. I was playing pool and I heard this singing—I thought it was the radio, actually, because he had no furniture so it was great acoustics, so I said, ‘What station is this?’ And he said, ‘It’s Carly Simon, she’s sitting on the floor behind you.’ So I said, ‘Come by my house tomorrow and do it again,’ and that’s how it started. The next day at my place she still sounded good, but a little flatter, because I had carpeting.”
Carpeting or not, Brandt wasted no time. Tapes of Simon’s songs had already circulated around the New York music industry, but they tended to rest unplayed, just one more unsolicited delivery from an unknown name. Brandt, however, had his foot in several doors and one of the first ones he pushed open was Jac Holzman’s. Now her first album, Carly Simon, was fresh on the shelves; her first single, “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be” (cowritten with Brachman) was knocking on the door, and she was also what the press would call Cat Stevens’s girlfriend, although their relationship was scarcely any older than the tour that Stevens was undertaking.
In fact, brand-new in her repertoire was a song called “These Are the Good Old Days,” written about her first date with Stevens, how he kept her waiting long after the appointed time, and she responded by grabbing her guitar and writing a song on the spot. (“These Are the Good Old Days” would soon be renamed “Anticipation,” and became the title track to Simon’s second LP, recorded in London with Stevens at the sessions, and Paul Samwell-Smith producing.)
Her meeting with James Taylor at the Troubadour, on the other hand, was filed away more as a chance encounter with a ghost from her past. She too had grown up around Martha’s Vineyard, gigging with her sister around the same circuit Taylor and Kootch used to play, and always making a point to catch their performances when she could. But she never plucked up the courage to do more than admire them from afar, which, it transpired, was the same thing that Taylor had been doing.
Taylor recalled, “She was professional at that point and I wasn’t, so we never sang on the same show. I thought she was quite attractive, but she was, and still is, four years older than I was, so back then when she was eighteen and I was fourteen, she was a bit less approachable then she was when I was twenty-four.…”
More recently, Taylor told Rolling Stone, “we passed once in the parking lot of my house. Out in front of my mother’s house were [Carly’s brother] Peter Simon and Carly, going to talk to my brother Livingston about a job that she and Livingston were going to do together. I passed Peter and Carly and said, ‘Hi,’ and Peter said, ‘Hi, this is my sister Carly,’ and then I left. I guess I had one album out by then.”
Simon’s set was short, just half a dozen songs plus an encore of “That’s the Way,” and fraught with difficulty. Alone at her piano, she spent the set battling with a microphone that kept slipping out of position. But the audience had already been won over as they arrived at their tables to find each one decorated with a rose, and a note that read, “With love from Carly and Elektra.”
Tonight, Simon and Taylor swapped telephone numbers, arranged to see each other again soon, and then got back to their own careers. Simon and Stevens would continue touring until June washed them up at Carnegie Hall; while for Taylor, the release of Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon was imminent, and he was already bracing himself for the inevitable media backlash. He knew that the new record had been a struggle to complete; knew that every word in every song was going to be pored over and psychoanalyzed by literally millions of listeners worldwide, and that the full-page review that Rolling Stone accorded the LP was only the tip of the critical iceberg that this generally unassuming gaggle of songs would have to scale.
In the event, the faithful old Stone remained faithful. True, reviewer Ben Gerson admitted that “the first few times…it is dull listening,” but then, he acknowledged, its “subtle tensions begin to appear.” The album did offer “pleasant, absorbing listening,” he celebrated. But still, “there is a terrible weariness to it which is part of its artistic statement”—and which, of course, was precisely what Taylor’s audience demanded.
On May 8, 1971, Mud Slide Slim entered the Billboard chart at #22, the highest new entry on a listing that was dominated by such soundtracks as Woodstock and the chart-topping Jesus Christ Superstar, by TV fodder like the Partridge Family and the Jackson Five; by Black Sabbath, Grand Funk, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer; and, nestling a few places above, Elton John’s Tumbleweed Connection (#16) and Cat Stevens’s Tea for the Tillerman (#9). Mud Slide Slim would eventually rise to #2, but, as so many other artists found that year, there was no passing Carole King’s Tapestry, which hit #1 on June 19 (the same day as “It’s Too Late” topped the singles listings) and remained there for the next fifteen weeks, the longest uninterrupted span at the top since the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper four years earlier.
There was no rivalry, though. The day before that impressive streak began, June 18, Taylor was alongside King when she played her solo headlining show at Carnegie Hall, stepping out late in the set to accompany her first through a sweet rendition of “You’ve Got a Friend,” and then through a trilogy of King’s own greatest compositions, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” “Some Kind of Wonderful,” and “Up On the Roof.”
And Cat Stevens remained unimpressed.
“I think music at the moment is going through a mediocre stage,” he told Sounds that September. “I don’t mean mediocre in the bad sense of the word, but simply that it is no longer confusing. It’s now the complete expression of an artist that is becoming the medium, a period where Carole King emerges because she’s beautiful but very plain and simple lyrically, where James Taylor becomes huge even though his voice isn’t anything ultra-extraordinary, where Joni Mitchell and all these people can simply express themselves. So that instead of the music holding them up, they hold the music up.”
Of course, he could have been accused of doing the precise same thing himself, but that was somehow excusable. “It’s exactly the way I feel comfortable,” he said, and the insinuation that those other sensitive souls were doing things for less-than-pure motives was not hard to avoid. “It’s the only way I can do it at the moment. I mean, there was a stage when I’d have loved to play sixty-four semi-demi quavers in one bar on a guitar. At the time when the main feat was to be as fast, slick, and technical as possible. But now I’ve found I can create the same feeling in a song on one chord.”
He admitted, of course, that the breakthrough of King and Taylor had helped his own career along. “Because now you don’t have to connive, you don’t have to be a fantastic brain to be able to communicate.” He told Sounds in May 1971, “You don’t have to be clever in that respect. Whereas my greatest hang-up I think—and a lot of people’s hang-ups—were that they always had this fear of intellectualism. A terrible fear that ‘I can’t really talk about that because I don’t know too much about it.’ So what we’re doing now is we’re getting back to the point where we accept we don’t know that much about it, but what do you have to know? All you really have to know is about yourself. Know yourself and you can know other people too, then you can know about your environment and what you are and who you are.”
Besides, Cat Stevens could sing a great song when he wanted to, even when the studio lights were out. On the one hand, he could wax poetic about his status in the firmament that was the singer-songwriter boom, confident in his audience’s ability to hang on his every word as though it were a new heavenly Commandment; proud of his ability to express the softest sentiment and see it transformed into a mantra for the masses.
And on the other, he raged against the invasiveness of audiences who, because they identified with a few of his songs, felt that somehow they knew the songwriter. “One thing, Americans try to make too much of my songs. They’re lust songs. I don’t know why I write them. But they try and find all kinds of hidden meanings in my songs,” when he almost teasingly pointed out that his own meanings were bizarre enough. “Longer Boats” (which was actually one of the lesser songs on Tea for the Tillerman) was written about the night he was lying in bed, gazing out of the window, when suddenly a flying saucer “[shot] across the sky and stop[ped] over me. And it sucked me up into it. When it put me down, I shot up in bed. I knew it wasn’t a dream, It didn’t feel like a dream. It was real, I know it was real.”
Yet even as he railed against the cult of contemplation that autopsied his art with scalpel-sharp precision, he was not about to change. Work on Stevens’s third Island album (and fifth overall), Teaser and the Firecat, was now under way, and it was as relaxed as its contents were, at least in hindsight, archetypal.
Once again, Paul Samwell-Smith took charge of the proceedings, and many of the musicians who appeared on the two earlier albums returned. But their approach to the business of getting the songs down on tape would alter, just as Stevens’s approach to songwriting had shifted.
Mona Bone Jakon and Tea for the Tillerman, Stevens explained, were inward-looking. For Teaser and the Firecat, however, he reversed the polarity. “Now I’m thinking outward.… I feel like I want to help more, simply because people are helping me. I want to help others by my own experiences. I don’t want to lay any heavy idea on anyone. No matter how much good advice I get, I still have to go through it myself.
“For me there are no shortcuts.”
It was not easy. In the past, Stevens told Hit Parader in late 1971, the moment he had a song completed, “you want to put in drums. You want to put in bass. You think ‘How am I going to…?’”
That didn’t work anymore. “At least not for me. I like to be surprised. It has to fit perfectly. Not just drums, rhythm. It has to be much more than that. That’s why sometimes I break in to the middle, completely, suddenly. You’ve got people. The moment it stops, it begins. It’s like you don’t have to play so loud. In fact, the quieter you play, the more people will listen.”
Amidst this new musical discipline, there was room for a handful of new faces; string arranger Del Newman, bouzouki maestros Andreas Toumazis and Angelos Hatzipavli, and (though he would not be credited on the original LP) pianist Rick Wakeman, a member of the folk band the Strawbs.
Wakeman was introduced to the proceedings by Stevens’s road manager, after he overheard Cat complaining about his own piano playing one day. Still several months from his emergence as the extravagant wizard who would soundtrack many of the prog band Yes’s finest moments, Wakeman was nevertheless a modestly in-demand pianist at the time, who happily added organ and harmonium to the tapes as well.
But Stevens sought more esoteric instrumentation, too. “Obviously if you want a certain sound you have an idea in your head like the bouzouki. I couldn’t play it that well so I found someone who was really good. In fact, the guy I picked…we never found out till afterwards…but my half brother used to play bouzouki about ten, fifteen years ago, and this was the guy who went around with him playing violin. It was a really strange coincidence. He’s really good and he’s going to play me a few songs, and if he’s got enough good songs, I’m going to do an album with him.”
Still, Teaser and the Firecat took shape, a generally louder and rockier record than its predecessors, which culminated in what would become Stevens’s most commented-upon statement yet, the rousingly anthemic “Peace Train.”
It was, he said, one of the hardest songs he had ever tried to record. Three separate attempts were made to drag the song into life, but it was not until producer Samwell-Smith suggested that the musicians abandon their tried and trusted method of playing the song “live,” and piece it together instrument by instrument, that it came together and, “by some freak,” said Stevens, “we got a live feel to it. It shouldn’t have happened but somehow it did.”
The flip side of that particular coin was the sweetly contemplative “Moon Shadow,” an almost cripplingly simplistic but deliciously ironic song that looked back to Tim Hardin’s “If I Had a Hammer” or “El Condor Pasa” (an old adaptation of a Peruvian folk song that Simon and Garfunkel included on their final album) to list all the things Stevens wouldn’t have to do anymore if he lost his arms, legs, brain, and so on.
As a reflection of the dissection that his music routinely received, it was a remarkable piece of satire with which to introduce a new LP to the public. But it proved a fine follow-up to “Wild World” in America in June, and it finally reintroduced him to the British chart as well. “Moon Shadow” reached #22 in Britain that fall, more than a year after “Lady D’Arbanville” made the Top 10.
Yet the album’s peak was neither of these, nor was it one of the album’s other thoughtful glimpses inside the Stevens mind. Rather, that honor was reserved for a beautiful rendering of Welsh writer Eleanor Fareon’s “Morning Has Broken,” a Victorian-era hymn that writer Colin Irwin later described as being “stripped of its pomposity but not its dignity.”
The song’s inclusion on the album was a surprise, not least of all to Stevens. Not since “Portobello Road” saw him amend what was essentially a Kim Fowley composition had he attempted to write around somebody else’s lyric, and he acknowledged, “I don’t think I can. I tried that once and I think I can only write for myself basically. I’m very strange about that because, ever since I played guitar, I’ve never sung anybody else’s songs.” Back when he was first starting out, he said, he had tried. “But it never worked out because I didn’t do it so well, so I thought, ‘To hell with it, I’ll write my own.’ So I’ve never really sung anybody else’s.”
But browsing in a bookstore one day, he suddenly felt an inexplicable urge to walk upstairs to the religious section, where he came across a hymnal “and started to read the words. It took me about forty-five minutes to really understand them. Then it was all getting very heavy, so I left and learned the melody later, because I can’t pick up a melody from looking at printed music.”
Sadly, he never elaborated on precisely what it was about his chance discovery of this simplistic children’s hymn that engendered that feeling of heaviness. But this “old Welsh melody” captivated him. “It’s just beautiful. I just fell in love with the melody.” If “Morning Has Broken” was to be regarded as his first cover version, it was one of which he could be immensely proud.
Teaser and the Firecat was a cosmopolitan album. “Moon Shadow,” he explained, and “The Boy with the Moon and Star on his Head” were both written in Spain. “And I went to Sicily. I just thought I’d go to Sicily, and stayed in a place with dead dogs on the beach and flies in the room. I wasn’t going to make friends with anyone, but I ended up making fantastic friends with people. A lady who had this love affair going with Mount Etna. I’m writing a song about her.”
Elsewhere, too, he was in demand. He appeared on British television’s Old Grey Whistle Test on October 5, while an appearance on the soundtrack to the movie Deep End reminded him of his own ambitions to step into the realm of moviemaking, as he told Creem.
“I’d…like to do a film of my own because it’s hard to write for someone else. It’s a strange thing, either you do the whole film yourself or you can’t really have that much control over it—the vision’s already there. But I just love the idea of visual and music because it brings a spark to it. You can have the most diabolically boring piece of film and the same kind of music and when you put them together you get something else—friction and a kind of movement, show and time and everything. It suddenly gives it more of a whole, you know, a roundness. Whereas just music on its own or just visual on its own doesn’t work. It fits together so perfectly.”
He had learned from past mistakes, however, from those nights when he would thrill passing journalists with the details of his latest musical notion, or projected protégé. “I’ve got ideas for my own film, but I’m going to think it over first before I say anything ’cause I’ll most likely change my mind. That’s one thing I must admit I do do. I change my mind an awful lot. I can be inspired about something and then I look really into it and I say, ‘Well, no, that’s wrong,’ and I’ll change my mind on that.…”
Besides, he already had his hands full writing a score for another upcoming movie. And, of course, promoting an album that had advance orders of over half a million in the United States alone. A recent poll of America’s top radio programmers, conducted by Billboard magazine, had established Stevens firmly in the upper echelons of their favorite performers (Stevens ranked sixth; James Taylor and Carole King tied for third). Now he was preparing for his third U.S. tour in less than a year, going out with the duo of Mimi Farina and singer Tom Jans as support, and when it did get under way, Circus magazine was swift to remind readers again just how impossibly intimate a Cat Stevens performance could be.
“Stevens always arrives hours ahead of time to rehearse. Since he is not the world’s greatest guitarist, he takes great pains to be as good as he can possibly be. In his dressing room, he is surrounded by the people who make the tour click. Manager, booking agents, second guitarist Alun Davies, and bass guitarist Larry Steele. The concert was due to go on at eight, but when eight o’clock arrived, about twenty or thirty people were scattered through the first few rows listening to a private concert, while outside 3,000 waited in the cold wondering what the hell was going on. The few people who were inside watched with mixed feelings. The concert was being held up due to a faulty P.A. system. There was a sadness throughout the crowd because the quality was so poor. But there was joy too, because the worst sound system cannot kill a Cat Stevens performance.”
Billboard, too, drooled. The Greek Theater in Los Angeles had recently hatched the idea of winter matinee shows, outdoor “picnic-in-the-park”-type events at which “the bearded, head-bobbing Stevens” and his “gently rhythmic repertoire” were the ideal guest.
It was that intimacy and immediacy that Stevens wanted to capture as he talked of his next album being a live set; a notion, he then shrugged, that was crushed when he discovered that one of the highest-selling bootleg albums of the age was an illicit recording of one of his own shows, the Trademark of Quality label’s Father and Son recounting of a recent FM radio broadcast. Even his plan of including some otherwise unheard songs on the set (the newly written “Lord of the Trees” had recently entered his repertoire) could not overcome that disappointment for him.
His awareness of the importance of live performance had certainly sharpened. He told Hit Parader, “The secret is to keep away, well away, from the larger venues, because in these places it is so very easy to lose contact with your audience. I insist on playing halls that hold no more than five thousand people. Frankly, I’d rather do two shows a night in a smaller hall than one a night in a larger venue.
“Records are private things, personal things, and it doesn’t always mean the same thing to everyone who is listening, yet it has to be heard. You see, in America a large proportion of the audience comes for the event instead of the artist. Elton John got caught up in this trap and he didn’t know it at the time. I guess that’s what festivals were really all about. It didn’t matter who was on; it was a nice summer and you’d go along to dig it because you knew other people would be there.”
Yet he could not completely avoid the larger venues and, on December 12, 1971, Stevens played the very same venue he used to pass every day on his way to and from school, the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane.
The event was a charitable affair, all proceeds to the drug rehab agency CURE, and the watching press themselves were feeling more than generous as Stevens took the stage. “The concert began in a most enthralling way,” joked Sunday Times critic Philip Norman. “On time. Stevens hitched his guitar across his knees, and with the hollow bump it made the audience wanted, almost physically, his every word. He spoke little, except to say what he would sing: the audience, at such a phenomenon, gasped. He declined to give an encore and they, though renewing the demand out of politeness, seemed to acknowledge he was right. Pop is either starvation or surfeit. Only rarely is it satisfactory.”
Stevens, the venerable Norman was saying, was satisfactory. More than satisfactory.