Playing Possum (1975)

"Being attractive sexually is not something which I feel guilty about or embarrassed by in any way", Carly told a Rolling Stone reporter soon after Playing Possum was released in 1975. The album cover and her defence of it represented a brave, although perhaps unintentional, intervention in that decade's earnest debates about sexual politics and the objectification of women in popular culture. Prior to Playing Possum, bands such as the Ohio Players and Roxy Music featured women in erotic poses on their album covers, but in that context - illustrating albums by all-male bands - eroticism could easily look exploitative or even degrading.

Carly's singer-songwriter contemporaries certainly took a more ascetic approach to album art. Has there ever been a frumpier album cover than Tapestry? Carole King is pictured knitting, and even her nearby cat looks bored by this predictable attempt at illustrating the album's title. Meanwhile, Joni Mitchell pursued her reputation as The Queen of Artistic Integrity by featuring her own paintings on her album covers. The cover of Playing Possum was startling in this context, and so too was Carly's insistence that it was fine for her to pose this way if it was her choice, her call and under her control.

 

"I think it is the containment of emotion that is exciting about this particular picture", she said of the cover photograph, admitting that there were "much wilder" shots from her session with photographer Norman Seeff. You can see what she means. That clenched fist suggests she is holding back rather than giving all, and her dance to the edge of the studio backdrop also indicates a border that will not be passed. True, her hair is untamed, and the mind reels at the sight of those pursed lips, but this is an image of her own controlled abandon and strength. Her sexual expressiveness comes from within, and it serves as an extension of what she imagines beneath her closed eyes. There is not the slightest awareness of a viewer, and certainly no sense of pandering to a lascivious male gaze.

By all accounts, none of this was planned, and when the session began her skimpy black teddy was entirely covered. But with the wine flowing in Seeff's studio, and the sound system cranked up, Carly began dancing and lost herself in the moment. Later, when she and her manager, Arlyne Rothberg, looked across the contact sheet at a succession of the photos, they both landed on the cover shot: "that's it!". The shot fits with the album's title, at least insofar as it is playful, and it fits even better with the album's first single, "Attitude Dancing", which urges listeners to find their own groove (even if that means finding a new attitude).

One could also say the cover suits an album that features so many songs about sex - or songs about "the body at play" as one critic delicately put it - but the songs on Playing Possum are exotically ("Look Me in the Eyes"), languorously ("More and More"), and at times broodingly ("After the Storm", "Slave") sensual. There are giddy ("Waterfall") and flirtatious ("Are You Ticklish") moments too, but anyone looking for the raunchiness suggested by the cover was likely to be disappointed, and in fact it probably hurt more than helped sales. Some stores refused to stock the album, while others would not display it.

To a world that had yet to encounter Madonna or Prince, the sight of Carly, in her black teddy and knee-high boots, strutting across an album cover, was positively avant garde in its frankness. After all, she was - famously - a married woman and a new mother as well. No wonder, then, that the back cover (below) featured a less powerful pose, and one that assured the viewer that a sense of humour and proportion were still very much intact.

In later years, Playing Possum would regularly featur in rankings of the best-ever album covers, and this makes it all the more maddening that when Elektra Records finally released the album on CD in the 1990s, the cover was so carelessly printed that the top of her head was cut off (see the image below).  That is no way to treat a landmark album, and especially one that, initially at least, was greeted with as much dismay as appreciation.

Hotcakes (1974)

 

Beatles fans refer to the 1968 album, officially titled The Beatles, as The White Album. But for Carly Simon fans "the white album" is unmistakably, undeniably Hotcakes. On the cover, the heavily pregnant singer glows with happiness in a setting so gleamingly white that it immediately conveys sun-drenched domesticity. Once again, the photographer was Ed Caraeff, but this was not another session on the smart streets of fashionable London. There is nothing jet set here. Instead, she is pictured in the kitchen of the house she shared with James Taylor, and in the months before the birth of their daughter, Sally.

The photograph and design concept perfectly represent a set of songs that opens by observing the madness of the world outside the home ("Safe and Sound"), and then extolls the virtues of daydreaming about love ("Mind on My Man"), of having a baby rock on your knee ("Think I'm Gonna Have a Baby"), of looking forward to looking back on a happy marriage ("Forever My Love"), and turning away from angst and accepting happiness ("Misfit", "Haven't Got Time for the Pain").

This is not to say that the album represents a turn to the conventional or conservative. Her full-length white linen kaftan is one sign that the bohemian spirit lives on. Her broad smile also suggests the playful, intelligent humour found in many of these songs. And we should recall how unusual it was - and still is - for a singer to appear fully pregnant on an album cover. Had this ever been done before Hotcakes? Has it been done since?  It seems unlikely, and this cover is all the more remarkable given that, on the heels of No Secrets, she was the most popular and best-selling singer around. The autobiographical intensity of her singing and her songs has always been at the core of her appeal, though, and so it was entirely right that her pregnancy should be pictured in all its glory. Any thought of attempting to be discreet about it - for example by using the head-and-shoulders shots on the left, which came from the same session - was wisely rejected. Thankfully, the sixties-psychedelic backdrop was discarded too.

Some commentators have observed that Hotcakes can be seen as a marker of a wider social trend; that it emerged as American baby boomers, exhausted by the upheavals of Vietnam and Watergate era, settled down and hoped for quieter times. Yet the idea that this album somehow blended in or reflected a wider zeitgeist, underestimates its originality. American rock music was driven by testosterone in the mid-1970s: by phallic guitars, crashing drums, and strutting popinjays. Even its more acoustic domain was dominated by drugstore cowboys. Carly Simon's music always served to expand the horizons of rock, and this ambition is proudly celebrated on the cover of Hotcakes.

No Secrets (1972)

On the covers of her previous two albums, Carly was pictured within carefully composed settings. By contrast, the image on the cover of No Secrets could almost be a paparazzi shot. It is much more immediate, engaging, and informal than its predecessors. Her clothes are crucial to this effect: the handbag over the shoulder, the velour jeans, floppy hat, and loose jersey are as casual as her glance. She is caught in mid-stride, and, with a light breeze blowing and her nipples showing through her top, it is as though we have just bumped into her on the street.

Of course, not everyone we bump into in the street is so finely formed, so arresting. Hence, the captivating effect of this album cover. It offers an image many women would aspire to: youthful, confident, and chic without any stuffiness or contrivance.  Men are also captivated, and for obvious reasons. Indeed, the cover instantly became reknown: six years later, a Rolling Stone reporter based a lengthy profile of Carly around his fascination with this image, and he scarcely had to explain it to his readers. Yet for all the lusty comments, there is another aspect of the image that might have been reassuring for both men and women in the 1970s. It suggests that feminism - and not wearing a bra in 1972 was a clear feminist statement - could be sexy and stylish. It could represent something more than political rhetoric. 

The photographer was Ed Caraeff, and the session took place in London while she recorded No Secrets at Trident Studios in Soho. As the other photographs (below) demonstrate, they went through a number of settings and changes of clothes, some of which nodded to the album's first single by featuring a hat that could be strategically dipped below one eye and a scarf that was apricot. At the end of the session, however, Caraeff was not convinced that he had finished the job. Hence, he followed her as she returned to the Portobello Hotel, on Stanley Gardens in Notting Hill, and he continued snapping on the street. It was this impromptu session, unplanned and late in the day, that ultimately yielded the album's cover shot.

The papparazi style of the cover proved to be a perfect match for the album's title. It was No Secrets that set in motion the mystery of the subject of "You're So Vain".  Carly looks appropriately glamorous (for a woman involved with that song's jet-set playboy) and only the delicate way in which she holds her left hand suggests the refinement of her wealthy family background. At the same time, though, the candid nature of the photograph, her everyday clothing and the visibility of her nipples suggest that there is no snobbery or exclusivity at work here. There are no barriers, and - as the album title promises - there are no secrets between artist and audience. The distinctively spiky balustrading in the background may serve as a reminder of the exclusivity of class and celebrity, but it represents no real obstacle to the viewer. We will be allowed access, metaphorically speaking, to the other side of these elegant railings.

Of course, "You're So Vain" does not actually reveal all. It is a marvellously convoluted puzzle, with a chorus (You're so vain/ I bet you think this song is about you) that goes in circles, and lyrics that are filled with references that sound like clues but actually are some of the most intriguing red herrings ever put to music: the apricot scarf, the gavotte, the cloud-filled coffee, and the total eclipse of the sun in Nova Scotia. The tension here, between revelation and concealment, is perfectly captured in the cover photograph, which reveals so much, so discreetly.

There is much more to the album than its stellar, centerpiece song. The theme throughout is confessional but the other songs are more direct in their allusions. The album's opening lines - There's nothing you can do to turn me away/nothing anyone can say from "The Right Thing To Do" - set the scene for confidences that are as warm and open as they are studied and thoughtful. Her hushed delivery of the first lines of "Embrace Me You Child" (At night in bed I heard god whisper lullabies/while Daddy next door whistled whiskey tunes) brings this scene to vivid life. The admission in "The Carter Family" - And now at night I think of you, and the way that you undressed/and I find that I miss you more than I'd ever guessed - sets the stage for what immediately follows: "You're So Vain" and its frank recollection that You had me several years ago/when I was still quite naive. Another confession is made in the title song, where the singer admits to her lover that, as desirable as it is that We have no secrets/we tell each other everything, she finds that his revelations can be deeply unsettling. Sometimes I wish that I never, never knew/some of those secrets of yours are the song's closing lines, and her voice gets ever lower and darker as she sings them.

 

The songs on No Secrets are as autobiographical as popular music can be: disarmingly personal and yet infectiously melodious. The album's success marked the apex of the singer-songwriter movement, and also the moment it was infused with glamour, sex appeal and intelligence. The cover played a key role in this. As she walks down the street, Carly Simon looks effortlessly chic and ready to confide everything, or, as the song "No Secrets" puts it, in a final, off-the-cuff coda, almost everything.