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Celebrating Carole King s Tapestry 50 Years Later

How a talented pop songwriter took on the rock world and became a legend

The cover image for Carole King's album, 'Tapestry.' Jim McCrary/Redferns It's early February of a suddenly extremely new-feeling year, after four tumultuous ones when riots broke out, youngsters embraced a new technology and women shattered glass ceilings. The year is 2021, right? Get instant access to members-only products and hundreds of discounts, a free second membership, and a subscription to AARP the Magazine. Nope. It's 50 years ago: 1971. The new medium isn't TikTok, but FM radio. The tumults are grave: the 1968 assassinations of and Bobby Kennedy, the chaotic Democratic National Convention in Chicago that same year, and deaths at Altamont and Kent State in 1969 and ‘70. And in this case, the female breakout star is Carole King. While King had already made her way as a composer of pop both jaunty (1962's “The Loco-Motion") and soulful (1962's “Up On The Roof,” 1967's “A Natural Woman" written with her then-husband Gerry Goffin), it was her album , released Feb. 10, 1971, that revealed her to be a stunning, venerated purveyor of serious rock. Her visage on the album cover defined a new form of beautiful — natural and makeup-free — and rallied the counterculture FM generation. Tapestry was the most Grammy-winning album of 1971, just about the most successful album of the decade, and proof that women could rule rock's formerly male-dominated world.

A new road a new start

Tapestry's success starts with a pivotal journey of King's. In 1967 she moved, with two young daughters, to L.A.'s new young-rock mecca, Laurel Canyon, after divorcing Goffin. She fell in with a musical family of friends including and poet Toni Stern (who wrote lyrics for “Where You Lead” and “It's Too Late"). Her new, younger friends were intrigued with her professionalism, lack of artifice and earth-motherliness, a term just coming into use. “You'd go to Carole's house and she was already making stuffed peppers for dinner ... at 11 a.m,” said Betsy Asher, first wife of Peter Asher, the producer who discovered Taylor. “I think Carole was comforted and inspired by the freedom and the closeness she found with us — she blossomed,” her best friend Stephanie Fischbach told me. “She seemed happy. She told me this was the right life for her.” At 29, King was personifying the Dylan lyrics made famous by her Laurel Canyon neighbors the Byrds: “I was so much older then; I'm younger than that now." Carole King playing the piano in 1971 in Los Angeles. The four Grammy Awards she won for her album 'Tapestry' are visible on top of the piano. Jim McCrary/Redferns

From life to lyric

Flowers & Gifts 25% off sitewide and 30% off select items See more Flowers & Gifts offers > "Home Again” makes the same point, if more worriedly, but “Way Over Yonder,” set to a deep-gospel melody, seems to say: Yes, a crew of renegades from dysfunctional traditional homes can create its own nurturing community! “You've Got a Friend” is a vow of loyalty. The arrangement King wrote for it opens it with the solemnity befitting a congregation's favorite hymn. Fischbach says, “I think Carole wrote ‘You've Got a Friend’ for all of us.”

Striking gold with Tapestry

The album, recorded in less than two weeks, sold slowly at first; by June it sold a million copies, hitting No. 1 for 15 weeks, and its single “It's Too Late” hit No. 1 for five weeks, followed by James Taylor's No. 1 hit cover of “You've Got a Friend.” It stayed on Billboard's Top 100 for six years and sold 24 million copies. King's success made sense: There was a uniting quality to the album. It was hummed along to by working-class young marrieds pushing strollers and Ph.D.-laden back-to-the-landers, by teenage girls and their mothers. “There was hardly an under-30 soul in the Western hemisphere,” wrote The Washington Post's Alex Ward, “who couldn't hum at least a few bars of ‘It's Too Late.'” King performing at the 2019 Global Citizen Festival: Power The Movement in Central Park in New York City. John Nacion/STAR MAX/IPx

A vibrant legacy 50 years later

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