40 Year Itch: A Royal Rock N Roll Wedding

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There are two stories that explain why superstars Carly Simon and James Taylor got married in Simon's tiny Manhattan apartment on November 3, 1972. There's the story the couple told Rolling Stone Magazine ( in which JT quotes the title of Carly's first hit)

ROLLING STONE: Do you want to talk about why you decided to get married?
 JAMES: That's the way we always heard it should be.
CARLY: I mentioned one morning to James in London that I thought we should get married, and James was kind of hesitant in his response. He said, "Oh well, there's really no reason to get married. We love each other and we've been living together." And then later on in the afternoon, James said, "You know I've been thinking about it and maybe we should get married." I said, "Well, what's happened between this morning and this afternoon?" He said, "This afternoon it was my idea."



And there's the more salacious version that involves Bianca Jagger calling JT to tell him Mick and Carly were having an affair in LA. He defended Carly and when she returned, he popped the question. Carly has said
"There's nothing that gets men so crazy as other men pursuing their women. Boy, did we decide fast!"

In any case, it was a small affair. There were only three guests at the wedding. Carly's songwriting partner Jake Brackman was best man for both the bride and groom. That night, during his concert at Radio City Music Hall JT announced the marriage to cheers of approval from the crowd.

That same month Carly released her third album No Secrets, a gold record that would top the album charts in the US for five weeks and wind up in the collection of my childhood home. It begins with a song, "The Right Thing To Do" , written directly for James, who had fallen back into a heroin addiction at the time so the line "nothing you can ever do will ever turn me away from you" has quite a lot of resonance.

There are songs that examine Carly's childhood ( "The Carter Family") and her relationship with her late father ( "Embrace Me Your Child" which James called the strongest song on the album) and songs that confess a bit more bed-hopping than even the most confessional of singer songwriters would usually admit to ("We Have No Secrets" and "Waited So Long"). And of course there was "You're So Vain" (discussed in a May post). All immaculately produced by Nilsson's main man Richard Perry.