Originally published in Uncut Take 155 (April 2010 issue)…
“When you come up with a line like, ‘You’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you,’ there’s a facile, crunchy quality about it,” says Carly Simon, of one of pop’s most famous put-downs. “It’s there in your pocket and you say, ‘Oh, how clever. Oh yeah, of course, that’s right, that’s what he was like.’ He was also fascinating and great and brilliant. But I couldn’t forsake that phrase. And by the time the record was finished, it came out very imperatively, where it had started out more… goofy.”
The identity of the man Simon is referring to on her 1973 single “You’re So Vain” is one of pop’s great mysteries. And it isn’t, of course, one she’s going to reveal at this late date – well not quite, at any rate. Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman propositioned her during her early days as a folk singer in New York, but she soon found herself with more appealing lovers – Cat Stevens, Kris Kristofferson, Warren Beatty and eventual husband James Taylor among them. “I had the good fortune to have a lot of opportunities to meet very interesting people,” she says. “Maybe because I was the new, young girl on the block, and they were able to get into my dressing-room.”
People have speculated for years as to which of her famous exes the song might be about. Simon has dropped playful clues in recent years, even auctioning the answer for $50,000 at a 2003 charity auction to NBC executive Dick Ebersol, on condition of secrecy. She’s also occasionally revealed letters of the name – all of which, so far, appear in ‘Warren Beatty’.
“Oh, well – I’m happy with that lovely coincidence,” she laughs. “You, like everybody else, are missing the point. You know what, I’m just going to tell you this. The answer is on the new version of ‘You’re So Vain’, on my new record. There’s a little whisper – and it’s the answer to the puzzle.”
And the whisper? “David.” Ah. The mystery continues, then.
THE KEY PLAYERS
CARLY SIMON
Singer, songwriter
RICHARD PERRY
Producer
KLAUS VOORMAN
Bass
PAUL BUCKMASTER
String arrangements
RICHARD PERRY: I’d met Carly in New York, and then she came to my home in LA. I think that’s where she played the song for me for the first time. And it was my feeling that she should have more of a rock edge than the folky things she’d been doing.
CARLY SIMON: There was no question about it. He was going to make this song a hit. It was going to be called “The Ballad of a Vain Man”, and it was a ballad. I played it in a much slower tempo, which he raised. I didn’t take the song as seriously as all that. It wasn’t vengeance – it wasn’t Anna Karenina. It was, “From this point of view, you don’t necessarily look as good as you think you look.” There’s not an iota of hate in it. There may be much more of an iota of feeling hurt or rejected. I was brought up by a mother who was adamant that you didn’t even kiss a man unless you were in love with him. So I was in love with a lot of men! I was definitely a romantic and my hopes were dashed. That led to the song. But I admired all those candidates, for their great artistic sensibility. I was besotted by the lads!Of course, I’ve never established whether I was attracted to that person. I don’t think I would be now.
KLAUS VOORMAN: Carly was very big, a very striking woman. And when she started playing a song, she was in some way shy about it. Concerned if we liked it, if it was any good. I don’t think “You’re So Vain” was the first we recorded in London, but Carly thinks it was. I heard the lyrics, and I thought, “This is about some flashy guy. So let me try something flashy.” And I tried this classical guitar bit, which you normally don’t do on the bass. Richard Perry came down immediately from the control room and said, “This is great.”
PERRY: Klaus was just getting his fingers loose, and I said, “What was that you just played?” he said, “I was just fooling around.” I said, “That’s how we’re going to open the record.”
VOORMAN: Carly was sitting at the piano. We did lots and lots of takes.
SIMON: Richard Perry demanded, by sheer will-power, that the song was going to be a hit. We did 100 takes.
VOORMAN: It’s very, very difficult tempi, this particular song. And the problem was that Carly tends to slow down a little when she plays. You need a backing group that pulls her straight.
PERRY: Carly tried the drummer from her band [???]. My next choice was the top session drummer in London, Barry Morgan. It came out much better. However, whenever a track didn’t feel 100 % right, I would get this knot in the pit of my stomach. There was divine intervention when I got a phone-call from Jim Gordon, who later co-wrote “Layla” in Derek and the Dominoes [currently serving a life sentence for murdering his mother]. He was in London to do a concert with Frank Zappa the following evening. I said, “Meet me at 7 o’clock.” He was right on time. And I knew it was a No. 1 record the minute I heard Jim Gordon playing it. The drum-part is very special, it’s in three sections. In the opening verse, the drums are minimal, quiet. Then they open up a little bit. And then when she says, “I had some dreams/ They were clouds in my coffee, clouds in my coffee”, I put in the big, throbbing, jungle drum build as it goes into the chorus. Then at the end of the chorus, where it says, “I betcha think this song is about you, don’t you, don’t you,” there’s a drum-fill popular on Motown records, and that kicked the song into the next verse, three or four times. And every time Jim plays that fill, it gives the record another shot in the arm.
PERRY: I told Carly that we were going to re-record the track. She asked to speak to me privately for a moment upstairs. And she burst into tears, and said, “What are you doing to this song?” And I told her to just try to relax, and that finally we are in the position to make the record I’ve been dreaming about. So she wiped away the tears, marched herself into the studio, and started singing. We recorded it very quickly then.
SIMON: I’ll never forget doing the brilliant guitar solo with Jimmy Ryan, we were just jumping up and down [shouting]: “Hit a higher note! No, higher!” We were a little dumb. Dumb, but great.
PERRY: I went in with Jimmy Ryan over a weekend and put down that solo that’s 16 bars long – twice the normal length. It had to have just enough rock edge, and be melodic. Then two more elements had to come into play. First were the strings. I had worked with Paul Buckmaster on “Without You”, and we had developed a close relationship.
PAUL BUCKMASTER: The track had been laid, and I was called in to do the arranging. I’d worked with Carly before that. I met her fiancée at the time [James Taylor] at Miles Davis’s house in LA, where I was working on On the Corner. One day James came over to say hello – he and Miles were friends. And he said, “Oh, come and work with Carly.” The string hook-line which was one of the things that made it a hit – that “bo-bo-bah, bo-bo-bah” – was hers.
PERRY: It’s kind of a take-off of The Four Tops’ “I Can’t Help Myself”.
SIMON: I was singing backing vocals with Harry Nilsson. And then I got a call from Mick Jagger saying: “What are ya doing, baby?” And so I invited him down. Harry said, “I’m going to excuse myself – because the two of you sound so bloody good together.” It had been written before I met Mick. So he’s not a contender. But I owe more to Mick Jagger than anybody in the music business – the fact that he sang on that record, and brought it over the top. Richard had me do the whole lead vocal again, that he had tortured me into singing 100 times, because he thought Mick had lifted it to a new level. At the time it annoyed me, because I was so heartily sick of the song. But that backing vocal was so right on.
PERRY: On each chorus, I made it ever so slightly louder, to have a cumulative effect. Carly was so inspired she insisted on doing another vocal. The record was complete.
SIMON: Richard bet me that it would be a No. 1 single, after the background parts with Mick. The deal was that I was going to fly us both to Hawaii for a fantastic, magical weekend – on a Lear Jet! [laughs] Except I’ve never lived up to my end of the deal. I’m not a Lear Jet kind of girl. But it went from No 39 to No 1 in one week, and it supplanted Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition”. It was very heady, and I didn’t feel great about it, because James [Taylor], who I had just gotten married to, had a song called “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight” which I felt was far superior. I’m just too old-fashioned to feel that I can be ahead of any man that I’m with. I didn’t feel as worthy as my husband. And that sounds like Lady Jane Grey speaking…
BUCKMASTER: Richard and Carly, and Robert Cable, the engineer, were joking about the lyrics in the studio. Robert was crazy about her, in the nicest way, and he was asking the question. Carly never said who it was, and no one insisted on it.
SIMON: The questions started immediately, because I had just gotten married to James, and people thought, could it be about James? And is it about Mick, because he sang on the record? And they knew I had gone out with Warren Beatty, and Kris Kristofferson, and they pretty much limited it to those people.
PERRY: I discussed it with her, sure. I knew who it was about before we started cutting the track. It didn’t matter one iota. But it was primarily Warren Beatty. That’s the truth. That’s what she told me.
SIMON: There is an answer.When I gave it to that executive for charity in 2003, it was one that he was quite satisfied with. He just had another sip of Cognac. He actually brought his wife and four friends with him, so I had to tell everybody. But I also said, “If I ever hear it back from you, I’ll say I told you a lie.” But if you think of the really important things in life, that’s not one of them.
FACTFILE
Written by Carly Simon
Performers Carly Simon (vocals, piano), Jimmy Ryan (guitar), Klaus Voorman (bass), Jim Gordon (drums), Mick Jagger (backing vocals)
Produced by Richard Perry
Recorded at Trident Studios, London
Released as a single November 1972
Highest UK chart position 3
Highest US chart position 1
TIMELINE
1964
Carly Simon, 19, begins playing New York clubs in a folk duo with sister Lucy
April 6 1971
Gets her break opening for Cat Stevens at LA’s Troubadour
Autumn 1972
“You’re So Vain” is recorded in London, for the No Secrets album
November 1972
“You’re So Vain” is released
November 1972
Simon marries James Taylor, the first popular candidate in a decades-long guessing game to identify the subject of the song