Carole King's Tapestry and the Neighborhood That Made It

Laurel Canyon produced a neighborhood, and the neighborhood did the rest. Between roughly 1965 and 1974, a small wooded enclave in the Hollywood Hills became the most concentrated creative community in American popular music, and the records that came out of it, confessional, warm, built around acoustic instruments and close harmonies, defined what FM radio would sound like for the rest of the decade. The mechanism was cheap rent and proximity to the Sunset Strip, and what grew from those conditions was something that could not have been engineered.

The incubation started before anyone called it a scene. Chris Hillman of the Byrds arrived in 1965; David Crosby and Roger McGuinn followed. Frank Zappa bought a home there not long after, and his house became a permanent open party. Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas functioned, in the words of one contemporary account, as "the Gertrude Stein of Laurel Canyon," and when Graham Nash arrived in Los Angeles from England in 1968 without knowing a soul, she immediately brought him into the fold. Buffalo Springfield formed in a manner that captures the canyon's logic perfectly: Stephen Stills persuaded Richie Furay to come to California, and once they started playing on the Strip, Neil Young, who had been living in his Pontiac hearse, moved up to Lookout Mountain. The canyon was affordable, central, and set opposite the east end of the Sunset Strip, where clubs like the Troubadour and the Whisky a Go Go gave its residents a stage a short drive from their front doors. You moved there because it was cheap and in the middle of everything, not because you had a plan.

What made the geography generative rather than merely convenient was the density of talent and the culture of open doors. Residents bumped into each other at the Country Store, held court after shows, and dropped into each other's houses without much ceremony. Jackson Browne spent an early period in the laundry room of a canyon home, writing songs for Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and Nico before David Geffen signed him to Asylum Records and he released his eponymous debut in 1972. The Eagles began their existence as Linda Ronstadt's backing band; their first hit, "Take It Easy," was a song Jackson Browne started and Glenn Frey finished, the two of them canyon neighbors trading a half-written lyric across the hill. When Mick Fleetwood moved to the canyon in 1974, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham came to visit, met Fleetwood, and agreed to join his band on New Year's Eve. These were the natural result of putting the right people in the same small radius and letting them run into each other. Crucially, the businessmen were close by too: Asylum's David Geffen and Elektra's Jac Holzman were content to develop their rosters from within the community they were watching form around them.

Carole King's arrival in the canyon crystallized what the scene was becoming. She had spent the previous decade writing hits for other people out of New York's Brill Building, a professional songwriter in the Tin Pan Alley tradition, and when she moved to Los Angeles she landed at 8815 Appian Way, a Laurel Canyon address that would end up on one of the most important album covers of the era. In November 1970, she and James Taylor performed together for the first time at Doug Weston's Troubadour on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, a club that had opened in 1957 and had become, by then, the place where the canyon community gathered to be seen and heard. Linda Ronstadt later described it as the place where "you wanted to make yourself known to the record community at large." King had written "You've Got a Friend" partly in response to Taylor's "Fire and Rain," and Taylor recorded it for his own album that same year. That exchange, two canyon residents sharing a song between sessions, is the scene in miniature.

The record that resulted from all of this was Tapestry, released on February 10, 1971, on Ode Records, produced by Lou Adler. King recorded it in January 1971 at A&M Recording Studios' Studio B in Hollywood, engineered by Hank Cicalo, with a band drawn almost entirely from her canyon circle: guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Danny Kortchmar, bassist Charles Larkey, drummers Russ Kunkel and Joel O'Brien, with James Taylor on acoustic guitar and backing vocals, and Joni Mitchell contributing backing vocals. The session was a portrait of the community in microcosm. While King was in Studio B, the Carpenters were recording their self-titled third album in Studio A, and Joni Mitchell was recording Blue in Studio C. Several of the musicians on Tapestry were simultaneously working on Taylor's Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon in the same building. Three records, three rooms, the same building, all within weeks of each other. Adler's production philosophy matched the material: spare, clean, almost demo-like in its intimacy, built on the idea that the songs were strong enough to stand without ornament.

The lead single, "It's Too Late" backed with "I Feel the Earth Move," spent five weeks at number one on both the Billboard Hot 100 and the Easy Listening chart. Tapestry itself sat at number one on the Billboard 200 for 15 consecutive weeks, a record for most consecutive weeks at number one by a female solo artist at the time. At the 14th Annual Grammy Awards in March 1972, Tapestry won four prizes: Album of the Year, Record of the Year for "It's Too Late," Song of the Year for "You've Got a Friend," and Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female. King was the first solo female artist to win the Grammy for Record of the Year and the first woman to win for Song of the Year. The album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998, and the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry in 2003. It has since been certified 14 times Platinum.

What the canyon produced, in the end, was a set of conditions: affordability, proximity, an ethic of collaboration over competition, and a cluster of labels willing to sign artists who were still figuring out who they were. The FM radio dial of the early 1970s is the sound of those conditions bearing fruit. "Fire and Rain" and "You've Got a Friend" and "Take It Easy" and the whole of Blue all came from the same few square miles of Hollywood Hills, from people who were sleeping in each other's houses and finishing each other's songs. The cover photograph of Tapestry, shot by A&M staff photographer Jim McCrary in the living room of King's Laurel Canyon home, shows her barefoot on a bench beside a window, holding a tapestry she had hand-stitched herself. It is a domestic image, quiet and unhurried, and it is exactly the right cover for a record made by a community that built something extraordinary by simply living close enough to talk.