King as Queen?

The Beatles were still relative unknowns playing stale-smelling dives in Liverpool, and Bob Dylan was staring hopefully into the spotlights at Greenwich Village folk clubs. The vogue back in 1960 was something known as "uptown rhythm and blues"--the first attempt to make R. and B. more palatable to the white audience. Uptown R. and B, was so named not because any downtown brand existed, but because in the offices of what had once been New York's Tin Pan Alley, some of the best young white producers and writers were turning out new song material for all-black groups like the Shi-relies, the Drifters and the Cookies. The results were fascinating: though R. and B. lost some of its ethnic honesty, it still had considerable emotional sweep, plus a new sophistication.

No one wrote fancier uptown R. and B. than a young Jewish girl from Brooklyn named Carole King. Fast approaching 20, she and her first husband, a lyricist named Gerry Goffin, caught on early with songs like the Shirelles' Will You Love Me Tomorrow (1961) and the Drifters' Up on the Roof (1963). Masters at making their point quickly, their lyrics were predominantly simple, sentimental statements about love and loneliness, their melodies ingeniously brief.

Low Profile. The era of Dylan and the Beatles came--and now seems gone. Carole King remains. Neither she nor her music has changed all that much. Only now she is singing it herself, and seems about to become the new Queen of Rock. Her rise stems most immediately from her success as a soloist on a March-April national tour with her friend James Taylor (TIME cover. March 1), as well as the joyful delights to be found in a new King album, Tapestry (Ode). In less than two months, Tapestry has become the No. I album in the U.S., and a coupling of two of its songs, It's Too Late and I Feel the Earth Move, the No. 1 single.

As a performer, Carole has what might be charitably called a low musical profile. At a recent Carnegie Hall concert, she came out in an unpretentious print dress and sat down at the piano, alone on the stage and looking somewhat frail and plaintive. All that changed in seconds as she began thumping out a mesmerizing uh-uh, UH-UH, uh-uh, UH-UH bass rhythm, and then began to wail:

I feel the earth move under my feet I feel the sky tumbling down, I feel my heart start to tremblin', Whenever you're around.

Hue and Cry. Hers is far from a great natural voice, but it has the deceptive thin strength of a whip antenna. Its basic hue is a Canarsie twang that suggests Judy Holliday negotiating The Party's Over. But hue is one thing and cry another, as proved by Carole's pile-driving thrust in a number called Smackwater Jack, or her tender, searching way with the line, "Sometimes I wonder if I'm ever gonna make it home again."

Mostly, Carole writes songs that are well suited to today's nostalgia for old-fashioned romance, loneliness (So Far Away), love (Where You Lead) and fondness for children (Child of Mine).

In content, they are not so very different from the late Janis Joplin's, but worlds apart in style.

So, too, is Carole's way of living. In the early Tin Pan Alley days she and Goffin, whom she has since divorced, led a hectic life, and had to bring their baby to the office. Now she lets very little disturb the life she has arranged for herself in the Laurel Canyon house in Los Angeles where she tends to her nine-and eleven-year-old daughters by her first marriage; she is expecting the first child of her recent marriage to Bass Player Charles Larkey.

Strange are the ways of pop taste. When Janis died last fall, it seemed for a while that women had lost their one stronghold in the world of rock. Now not only Carole but a number of other girls are trying to fill it. Among them: > Carly Simon, 26, offspring of a branch of the publishing Simons (& Schuster). At Sarah Lawrence, she and Sister Lucy had a popular folk duo called the Simon Sisters. Carly's debut album on Elektra shows her to be an adept composer in a fair range of styles (folk, country, pop). As a singer, she can be dusky and down-home simple in One More Time, or full of poised wisdom in her top-20 single That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be. >Linda Ronstadt, 25, has had two Capitol LPs out in less than a year. Born in Tucson, Ariz., she is basically a country-rock stylist. Her musical interests (Cajun and mariachi among them) are broad, and she can somehow get as much kick into singing a slow blues number as into a wailing rock version of Wayne Raney's We Need a Lot More of Jesus (and a Lot Less Rock and Roll). -- Rita Coolidge, 26, is a Baptist preacher's daughter raised in Nashville, Tenn. She began singing as a pre-schooler in Daddy's choir, later polished her technique on four-part harmony in a Memphis jingle factory, learned country-rock as a back-up singer with Delaney & Bonnie. Such rock celebrities as Leon Russell, Stephen Stills and Ry Cooder were happy to play back-up on her new (and first) A & M album --perhaps because of the sensational way she can bend a slow romantic ballad to a voice of pure honey and magnolia.

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