Carole King - The Carnegie Hall Concert 1971
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Music CD Cover
Artist: Carole KingEdition: Music CD
Format: Live
CD Release Date: 1996-10-29
Music Label: Sony
Soundtracks:
- I Feel The Earth Move
- Home Again
- After All This Time
- Child Of Mine
- Carry Your Load
- No Easy Way Down
- Song Of Long Ago
- Snow Queen
- Smackwater Jack
- So Far Away
- It's Too Late
- Eventually
- Way Over Yonder
- Beautiful
- You've Got A Friend
- Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow/Some Kind Of Wonderful
- (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman
Free Music Notes for The Carnegie Hall Concert 1971
Free Music Review: "a black arrow of death"
Hit: 5 Stars
It takes a lot of courage for a man to admit liking the music of Carole King. It takes a great deal of courage for a man to admit owning a copy of Carole King: The Carnegie Hall Concert. Lots of men own a copy of Tapestry, because it was a very popular record, and it's always a good idea to see what the other side is up to. Carole King's music is foreign territory for men, she was a woman's musician. She was not a sex kitten, or a disturbed witch woman, she was just a normal sensible nice person of a kind that men do not generally go for. Nonetheless she sold lots of records and made a fortune, and so clearly she appealed to a lot of people, hidden secret normal people that should not exist, and that are not usually targeted by the record industry. It is therefore understandable that a man would own a copy of Tapestry, so that he could understand this phenomenon, and perhaps pretend to like it, in order to impress women. The Carnegie Hall Concert is not Tapestry, however, it is an archive release of a long-gone live show. The only people who buy archive releases of long-gone live shows are fans, and most men would not admit to being a fan of Carole King, but I am not like most men. I am better than most men. I have courage. I own this album. I like it. I am not scared of you, or of Carole King, or women. Your words bounce off me, because I have the pure light.
The Carnegie Hall Concert is the most likeable record I have heard in a long time. On the record Carole King is endearing, she comes across as a bit overwhelmed by the audience, a bit scared and uncertain. I am not sure if the concert predates or postdates the first million sales of Tapestry. Perhaps Carole King's humility is an act, I imagine she had an iron will to get where she got, but if it is an act it is a superb act. The audience is clearly on her side, they like her, and applaud. The songs zip past, and even though I am not a fan of Carole King, I find nothing to dislike in her music. She isn't an obnoxiously flashy vocalist like Mariah Carey. Her voice wobbles a bit, and it shreds on "Song of Long Ago", but it doesn't matter. Carole King's music wasn't about virtuoso performance, it was about songwriting craft and extremely professional artificial sincerity.
The first half of the concert is basically Carole King singing and playing the piano. The recording tapes have nothing wrong with them. The song choice is heavy on material from Tapestry (it has the whole album, except for the title track) with some songs from her debut album, Writer, sprinkled here and there. The minimal piano-and-voice arrangement doesn't hurt, because King plays a lot of notes. I believe she plays all of the notes, several times over, even the black ones. I wonder; when she toured, did she have groupies? Did she tour the United States in a Boeing jet, with in-flight debauchery? Did she have a rider that specified only green M&Ms? I'm genuinely curious.
Towards the end of the record Carole King brings on James Taylor, and the audience applauds like mad. It is this, more than anything else, that anchors the album in the early 1970s. James Taylor is not the star he was. Neither is Carole King, but Tapestry will probably go into the time capsule, whereas James Taylor will remain buried. Carole King interests me in one particular way. Her lyrics and music were deliberately simple and universal, and this is one of the reasons why she was so popular at the time. The newspapers and magazines of 1971 and 1972 liked to run features about how Carole King was the harbinger of a new age of honesty in music, and in society. She emerged at a time when sincerity was valued in serious rock music, and her image was one of wholesome genuineness. At the same time, she was a professional musician and hitmaker, and her music was thoroughly constructed and artificial. She was a fake that seemed real, and it didn't seem to matter. I have no idea if she had experienced the emotions and sensations described in "I Feel the Earth Move" or "So Far Away" or "It's Too Late". I get the impression that she sat down in front of her piano at 09:00 each morning with the goal of writing a song about being in a love, another song about being lonely, a third song about a failed relationship, and the end result could not have been more artificial if it had been constructed by a computer program. But, again, it doesn't matter, and I do not intent this as a criticism of Carole King's music. There is an art to fakery.
The Carnegie Hall Concert scuffs up this artificiality, because of its live nature; the minimal production style and wobbly vocals help the material. In comparison, the studio recordings from Tapestry sound a bit early-70s, with early-70s bass and drums, whereas this record is timeless. Even though I know that the songs are from the early 1970s, I cannot tell just from listening that this is a concert from that period, it could just as easily be a modern-day Carole King concert with a retro setlist. Except that she probably doesn't sound like this nowadays. Although having said that, I believe that she basically repeated the piano-and-voice concept in 2004, with another live record called The Living Room Tour. I wonder what it's like?
DJ Crystal's Warpdrive / Meditation 12" is the greatest 12" drum'n'bass single of all time, and one of the greatest singles of all time in any genre. That has nothing to do with Carole King, I just thought I'd say it. And it's true.
The Carnegie Hall Concert 1971 Poster
Anyone who took the gray-striped kitty on the cover of Tapestry as a totem, from your hip junior-high English teacher to Ben Folds, will recognize the import of Carnegie Hall, recorded the week "It's Too Late" went to No. 1. Mostly solo at the piano, King brought home 10 of that already emblematic album's tunes with a smattering of other numbers. Some of the latter are more callow than absolutely necessary, with "Carry Your Load" way too bouncy and "Snow Queen" too glib. But when she digs out "No Easy Way Down" (immortalized by Dusty Springfield on Dusty in Memphis) and "A Natural Woman," it's a little bit of heaven, even when her voice starts cracking. Actually, her nervousness is charming, though some of her between-song wisecracks fail to wow the very partisan crowd, much less the CD listener a quarter-century later. Guess that's only natural for someone just coming into her own in public after a decade or so behind the curtain, and no one seems to mind much anyway. As the history books tell us, this was a pretty polite rock moment; to further prove it, James Taylor shows up for the encores. Though Tapestry remains the essential item, this one gets by on the grace of King's heart. --Rickey Wright2008 archive live album from the songstress, an unmissable Tapestry-era performance recorded live at Carnagie Hall. With her album Tapestry on it's way to selling millions upon millions of copies, Carole sounds relaxed, joyful and in total control of her audience. During this set, King performs 17 of her most well-known songs including, "I Feel The Earth Move", "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman", "It's Too Late" and "You've Got A Friend" (performed with James Taylor, who joins her for her encore). Sony/BMG.
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