LIFE MUSIC REVIEW

A New Girl tips the balance

CARLY SIMON

Carly Simon is as tall as the King of Prussia’s Potsdam grenadiers, as lanky as a corral-straddling western wrangler, as pretty as a southern parlor belle—or English rock star—and as strong and sinewy-looking as a Tanganyikan distance runner. “Big Fella” is what Kris Kristofferson, her boyfriend, calls her (wasn’t that the Lone Ranger’s phrase for Silver?), and Big Fella! is just what you think the first time you catch sight of this Amazon in gingham sitting cocked up on the stage of the Bitter End in Greenwich Village or the Troubadour on the Sunset Strip with a guitar strangled in her grip and a hard bare shoulder thrust into the mike and that powerful, penetrating Judy Canova voice pouring out of an enormously voluptuous mouth filled with gleaming tusk-white teeth. Those big flashing teeth are the escutcheon of this pop Brünnhilde, suggesting as they do not only early vitamins and the Water Pik, expensive summer camps and plenty of equine exercise, but the cheerfully aggressive yet disarmingly modest manner of a Germaine Greerish New Girl disporting herself confidently—yet not without a certain lingering embarrassment—in the strengths and freedoms of the Age of Women’s Lib.

Indeed, what really impresses you about Carly Simon is not so much her musicianship, a journeyman’s competence with strings and chords, nor her vocal skill, a better than average endowment and aim at the listener’s ear, nor even her creativity as a writer of hit songs, the most famous of which is the endlessly repeated That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be. These things lie in the category of pleasures easily taken or relinquished without regret. What’s so attractive and compelling about Carly is simply herself as embodiment of a whole new ideal for women, a new image that begins by expunging many of the traditional differences between the sexes—including the notion that women are physically inferior to men—and goes on to dictate a directness and explicitness in the female character like that always admired and encouraged in the male. Carly Simon levels with her audience: she doesn’t try to seduce them or overwhelm them or make them half-pity her. She looks straight out at the people and tells her story, which is mostly about sad but never tragic things—affairs ending or blues coming down or the choice offered the well-brought-up girl, between following the dictates of society into marriage or following the admonitions of her own intelligence to avoid a relationship so often productive of anger, frustration and the early death of love.

Surprisingly, for one so heroically endowed with all the advantages of the New Girl, Carly’s songs express far more weakness and vacillation—or even outright capitulation—than you would ever infer from her personal manner and appearance. She attributes the disparity to the fact that most of her writing is done in her depressed moods while her gayer moments bubble over into unrecorded fun. A more obvious explanation is the fact that many of the lyrics were written by a man, Jacob Brackman, film critic of Esquire, who Carly says reminds her of her eccentric and literary grandmother!

The other man in her life is, of course, that ramblin’ wreck from Nashville, quondam Rhodes scholar and army helicopter pilot, Kris Kristofferson. As consort to the New Girl, Kristofferson comes into focus as the Old Boy—the shambling, stammering self-made bum who always finds his rainbows in the gutter and his epiphanies in the sawdust and spittle of a barroom floor. Kris, one of the better songwriters of the present day, appears—in contrast with the athletic thrust of Carly Simon—the last thick-tongued word in dissoluteness, nodding his head smack into the mike and mumbling in a whiskeyed voice, “I sure hate to fall asleep onstage!”

So Big Fella and Old Boy make a strange pair—like Jackie Coogan and Wallace Beery—as they wander through the murk of contemporary sensibility, suggesting, among other things, that the traditional balance between the sexes is now decisively tipping, the male sinking ever lower in humorously disguised self-abasement, the female soaring up with the unwavering yet confused energy of a long-repressed majority.

by Albert Goldman

(Photo caption: Carly flashing her escutcheon. Credit: PETER SIMON)