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Tapestry at 50
In the late 1960’s, before the invention of “playdates,” I was allowed to just be a kid.
My afternoons were filled with bike riding, exploring the stream that ran behind my house, and playing Wiffle ball with the kids who lived across the street. If it rained, I’d meander over to the house of an elderly neighbor. We’d sit on her porch for hours while I drank lemonade and cheated at cards. If she knew I could see her gin rummy hand in the reflection of her eyeglasses, she never let on.
But by 1971 I had entered tweendom.
Flashlight tag made way for pre-pubescent activities like singing into my hairbrush. Surrounded by posters of David Cassidy and Bobby Sherman, I spent hours in my bedroom crooning along with the saccharine hits of John Denver and The Beach Boys.
All that changed on February 10, 1971, the day Carole King’s album Tapestry was released. It took just three weeks and $22,000 to record the twelve songs that comprised the album. But it would be all King needed to launch her into the singer-songwriter stratosphere.
Fifty years later, many are now familiar with her journey. Born Carol Klein, she was raised in Brooklyn by Jewish parents. A child prodigy, she entered college at the tender age of fifteen, where she met and married Gerry Goffin. By eighteen King was a mother. But that wasn’t the couple’s only…
