The supergroup Carole King formed with Paul Simon
There’s always a gamble when someone mentions the word ‘supergroup’ when talking about any act.
While it’s nice to see familiar faces coming together to write a hit song, any band that gets together already famous from another group is going to have a mantle of pressure on them before they even play a note of music together. But for a brief second, it looked like Carole King had the chance of working with another industry giant.
But when King first began writing tunes, she never envisioned being at the front of the stage. She may have had the kind of tunes that built up what modern pop could sound like, but even then, it was easier for her to give her tunes to someone like Aretha Franklin or James Taylor than have to worry about carving out her own musical persona whenever she took to the stage.
After all, this was the era when some of the biggest stars in the world needed to be larger than life. Even if The Beatles had the boyish charm that anyone could have related to, there was no way that King wanted to compete with the other female crooners of the day like Dusty Springfield or anything. Then again, she wasn’t the only one looking to test out her songs with other artists.
The golden age of the singer-songwriter was about to happen, and some of the best writers of the time didn’t necessarily need to be a massive star whenever they went out onstage. Cat Stevens and Laura Nyro were never going to be competing with the theatrics of Jimi Hendrix or Led Zeppelin, and when King was first woodshedding her songs, there was a real possibility that she could have had Paul Simon in her ranks as well.
At the beginning of Simon’s career, he was already a fan of rock and roll, but it wasn’t until listening to people like Bob Dylan that he started to take his craft seriously. There was a different avenue for him to work in that didn’t need a showstopping voice, but when he was honing his craft at Queens College, the music world came dangerously close to having King and Simon collaborate in a group together.
Both of them had been helping each other out on songs, and before Simon and Garfunkel, King remembered her and Simon having a group, saying, “Paul and I sort of got together and formed this little group that we called The Cousins. We didn’t actually do anything except help other people with their demos or, you know, play – he played bass and guitar, I played piano, we both sang and we helped people out making demos. But Paul and I never wrote together. It is astonishing to me now, but he – when I asked him years later, he said he wasn’t much of a collaborator, and he didn’t think he could write very good lyrics.”
Had that version of history come to pass, though, that could have meant missing out on a few great songs as well. No matter how much Simon could write fantastic melodies, King was never going to top what Art Garfunkel did on ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, and even if they turned the duo idea into a trio, there’s something wonderfully pure about the way King sings ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’ that is almost too beautiful for words.
All the pieces were there for music to go in a new direction, but that kind of supergroup was far from the fireworks show that anyone would have expected. Besides, even if their collaboration didn’t work out, it’s worth it knowing that we got two stellar songwriters for the price of one in the 1970s.
