Carole King - Tapestry-Legacy Edition (2-CD)
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Free Music Notes for Tapestry-Legacy Edition (2-CD)
Free Music Review: Good reissue that could have been much better
Hit: 4 Stars
Tapestry is, of course, one of the ten most important singer/songwriter albums ever released, no matter how you cut it. If you don't own it, you should, and this is a good package to buy.
But if you're one of the umpteen million of us with at least one copy somewhere in your collection, the question is whether the newly-released material on the Tapestry Live bonus CD makes it worth repurchasing.
Even before CD sales began their stunning decline, record labels were eager to sell us beloved albums over and over again, adding snippets of rare, unreleased or live material seemingly every few years in a new iteration. If the added material were significant in quality and/or amount, it was worth it; more often, not. Some of Carole's reissues have been well worthwhile (The Ode Collection box set, the rare The City album); others less so (the '95 Tapestry re-release with 2 added tracks).
Long-time Carole King fans know of remarkable and interesting performances that, while preserved, have emerged from her vault only slowly and sporadically. One of her remarkable '71 duets at Carnegie Hall with James Taylor emerged on the Ode Collection in '93, but the full show didn't see the light of day until '98 - and remains the single finest Carole release to date. By contrast, none the other brass-laden '73 Fantasy tour tracks have emerged since "Believe in Humanity" on the Ode Collection in `93.
"Tapestry Live" opts to use only solo piano versions of the album's songs. Some of these are excellent, especially "Way Over Yonder," and the title track. And the absence of other musicians preserves the intimate, personal quality of the original album. It does at times resemble an unblemished, superb songwriter's demo tape. Carole is in great voice, and characteristic command of her piano. This alone makes Tapestry Live a worthwhile CD for true fans.
But if I set out to compile Carole's best live Tapestry recordings, most would come from other sources. It is hard to imagine a better Tapestry-era performance than the previously-released 1971 Carnegie Hall show. Perhaps one or two other performances from her '71 BBC-TV concert that is occasionally re-aired ("Way Over Yonder" with Abigail Hanness). Though Tapestry Live features a fine version of "Beautiful," both the violin-laden one from Carnegie Hall '71 and the slow, jazzy version from her '94 live CD are even better.
Another complaint is simply that the disc could have easily included more unreleased material. Tapestry live clocks in at only 38 minutes. It uses only performances of the 11 (out of 12) original album songs, recorded in the years following Tapestry's release. It might have included other solo performances of Tapestry-era songs and concert mainstays (e.g., Song of Long Ago, After All This Time, Child of Mine). Carole's '76 tour (used here in part) also featured some great performances of Tapestry-like Thoroughbred material like "So Many Ways" and "Only Love is Real," not to mention a great "Up on the Roof" with Waddy Wachtel on acoustic guitar. For that matter, the disc might even have allowed Carole to finish the song she is plainly segueing into after the CD abruptly cuts her off at the end of "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow."
The only Tapestry song that Tapestry Live omits is "Where You Lead." Producer Lou Adler explains the omission by noting that Carole did not perform the song live at the time. Carole herself noted (during her wonderful '05-'06 Living Room Tour shows) that she stopped performing the song soon after recording it because she grew uncomfortable with the notion of women following their men around. She didn't perform it for 30 years, and resumed only after tweaking the lyric in the late 90's to serve as a TV show's theme song.
Fair enough. But if you had told me that the tone of a Tapestry song bothered its author enough to embargo it for 30 years, I would have guessed a different title. How about Smackwater Jack? A lighthearted rocker about a frustrated guy who "shot down the congregation," only to be hanged on the spot by local law enforcement (with whom the song seems to take even greater issue than with Jack himself). I admire Carole a lot, but Smackwater Jack's theme bothers me more than yet another song about someone wishing to follow their true love to the ends of the earth.
The disc's liner notes are sparse, and don't even indicate which performance came from which show and venue. And the "new essay" is nice, but considerably less informative than even this review (ahem).
Fan can cite bigger gaps in Carole's catalog than the one that Tapestry Live addresses. We still await the release of the vaunted (and vaulted) audio and video from Carole's '73 Central Park show before 250,000 people. And nothing did more to peak interest in Tapestry-era material that Carole's shows last November with James Taylor and the original Tapestry studio band to celebrate the L.A. Troubador club's 50th anniversary, all which were recorded as well. Hopefully her next archival release will delight fans even more by addressing these omissions.
Happy listening! - Ken
Free Music Review: Why, oh why can't the record companies do it right?
Hit: 4 Stars
I'll admit -- I'm one of those people who feel that TAPESTRY is one of the greatest albums of all time. So my review of this new 2-CD edition is colored by that view.
TAPESTRY is one of only a handful of albums ever released that contains only total winners (in terms of songs). Many artists produce great albums, but there are always a couple of songs that I don't like as much as the others. Not so with TAPESTRY. Every song on the album deserves five stars.
This 2-CD set contains the complete original album, along with a second disc of previously-unreleased live recordings of (most of) the songs from the album. These live versions were chosen because they strip the songs down to their pure essence -- Carole at the keyboard and on vocals, with nothing else. This is a fantastic thing to have paired with the original album. Sound quality is excellent, performances are inspired and passionate.
The set loses a star, though, because it's just not as good as it COULD have been. TAPESTRY has already been issued in a remastered, expanded edition. (This version appears to be the same mastering as the previous one.) However, the first expanded edition included two bonus tracks (one a previously-unreleased studio track, the other a live recording), and neither of those bonus tracks were included in this new edition. So if you want to have a "complete" TAPESTRY, you have to own both versions of the album. To me, this smacks of record company greed -- let's see how many times we can get these suckers to buy the same album. Sony has done this same thing recently with Michael Jackson's THRILLER. And Elvis Costello fans know all about this sort of thing...
If you're a Carole King fan, you will definitely want this set. If you don't care about live versions of the songs, you can stick with the single-disc remastered version from a few years back. But if, like me, you're a die-hard aficionado, you'll have to have both. It's only shelf space!
Free Music Review: Good value for 2cd set
Hit: 4 Stars
I'd heard a public radio piece on Carole King and they mentioned this CD set. It has her most known pieces, and is a great value for the content provided.Free Music Review: Carole King
Hit: 4 Stars
If you were alive in 1970-71 what's to say? It's classic Carole King at her finest!!!!! BUY IT!!!Free Music Review: From the high school years
Hit: 3 Stars
I used to sit around and listen to this with my hippy pals as if it were philosophy. Now, nearly 40 years later, I must admit that I found a lot of extremely callow - it hadn't aged well, unlike many of my old favorites like Freewheelin Bob D or Rumors by Fleetwood M. The ideas - get up every morning with a smile on your face, you make me feel like... -are about as deep as hippy speak. Even her voice seems limited in range to me, without a certain depth that I expect from jazz or soul vocalists. While some of the extra tracks on this are interesting and indeed raw, it is still the same old stuff. On the positive side, I did like to tap into the emotions I was feeling then and remember intimately, but again this will not enter my pantheon of much replayed favorites. I admit, this has more to say about my taste, so I don't pretend it is objective.
I would recommend this to old fans so long as they don't expect to love it the way they did as teenagers. Alas, it was disillusioning to me to listen to it critically.