Original subtitles

# You've got to get up every morning

# With a smile on your face

# And show the world all the love in your heart

# And people are going to treat you better

# You're going to find Yes, you will

# That you're beautiful

# As you feel. #

I think I was kind of innocent

and I had the notions of the world

and what being a girl was from the '50s.

We were all brought up to be cute and popular

and marry the nice boy who was going to make a lot of money

and there wasn't an emphasis on what WE were going to do.

I was brought up to know that I was probably going to be a teacher.

I had teachers in my family.

# I feel the Earth move under my feet

# I feel the sky tumbling down

# I feel my heart start to trembling

# Whenever you're around. #

I became Carole King and I was confident about what I could do.

I liked the idea of writing songs so that I would be recognised

and respected by the people who sang them.

And that's really what drove it - I can do that.

And I did.

# You just call out my name

# And you know, wherever I am

# I'll come running. #

BARACK OBAMA: By the age of four,

Carole was already mastering the piano.

By 15, she'd already conducted her first orchestra.

By 17, she'd already written her first number one hit.

To date, Carole has written more than 400 compositions

that have been recorded by over 1,000 artists,

resulting in over 100 hits.

# You've got a friend. #

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

APPLAUSE

# Tonight, you're mine completely

# You give your love so sweetly

# Tonight the light

# Of love is in your eyes

# But will you love me tomorrow? #

My mother had a piano, you know, right from before I was born.

And so I was able to play it

and work on it by ear and write little ditties.

But my mother also had been trained in piano, so she trained me.

She loved music and conveyed that to me

and I was born with the receptive gene!

So she would be the single most important influence.

She had a great record collection. She loved show tunes.

So early on, I got familiar with, you know, South Pacific, Oklahoma,

the great Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals,

and I would even sing commercials.

# Winston tastes good like a cigarette should. #

I had no idea what I was singing about.

My dad was a good father.

He nurtured in me that sense that I could do anything

and I better do it with excellence.

My parents, they never made me think

I couldn't do anything because I was a girl.

I played with the boys on the street. I was kind of tomboyish.

In high school, I was the girl who the guys wanted to be friends with.

I wasn't the one that they wanted to date.

Every high school in Brooklyn during the '50s had a rock and roll group.

They were all over the place. They were proliferating.

Danny and the Juniors were singing in the Bronx

and Neil Sedaka, at that time with The Tokens,

were singing at a Lincoln High School.

I think I was 15 when I formed my first group,

which was The Cosines.

It was, you know, we had math books - oh, cosines.

So whatever year I took trigonometry.

We performed at school dances and parties.

Anywhere we kind of had a chance or, you know, school shows.

She was the singer, she was the writer,

she was the piano player for the group

and she wanted this, she wanted this as a career.

I was inspired by the Alan Freed shows.

I saw these shows and I'm like, I can do that.

And I didn't ever want to be a singer.

I didn't want to be famous.

Fame didn't appeal to me.

I liked the idea of writing songs so that I would be recognised

and respected by the people who sang them.

In those days, you could be a kid, as Carole was,

16-years-old, coming from Brooklyn

and go into 1650 Broadway or into the Brill Building,

one of the two buildings that people think of

when they're talking about the Brill Building sound in Times Square,

that used to be where the Tin Pan Alley songwriters

came in the '20s to sell their songs.

You could walk in and they had a piano in the room

and you'd sit down and you'd play and they'd go,

"That's great, kid. I'll take that song. Here's $25."

And I was in the waiting room and there was this kid there.

She looked like she was about 15-years-old. In jeans.

And I started to talk with her.

And I thought to myself, God, this girl is so confident.

And I said to myself,

if this girl has talent, she's going to be a huge star.

And it happened to be Carole.

She was simply being paid to write songs

for top groups that needed songs

because in those days, there were very few singer-songwriters.

That phenomenon had not yet really occurred.

It was made-to-order songwriting.

You know, you were either writing for a specific artist

or you were writing a song that the publisher you were working for

would go out and shop to various singers.

You know, there was a breakdown in those days

between who wrote the song and who sang it.

# I don't remember just exactly how it started. #

I just saw him and I was like,

"Oh, my God, he looks like the picture of a boy

"I've been carrying around in my wallet,

"that I...was a drawing in a magazine!"

He was very handsome.

# It doesn't make a bit of sense to me

# Why should two people in love have to be

# Like little children. #

They were married very young.

Very, very young, when they were teenagers, because she got pregnant.

# Who just can't help but fight

# Why should two grown people... #

He definitely came at a time in my life

when I needed somebody to write better lyrics than "Baby, baby".

Aldon Music was a music publishing company that was started

by two fellas - Don Kirshner and Al Nevins.

So the Aldon is Al and Don together.

And they built up such a great reputation.

Don Kirshner was the best publisher that I've ever come across.

And the company became so powerful that he would get record companies

to promise him the backside of a record just to get our material.

In those days, records had two sides.

That's right, there were things called records too, I forgot! Yes!

They had two sides. Right.

So it really became THE publishing company in New York City.

Donny Kirshner, who was a great publisher,

who had a really good ear.

That group of writers -

Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil, Howie Greenfield,

Neil Sedaka, Carole, Gerry, and some others in that group,

they had 36 top ten records in three years.

You know, it's historic.

# One fine day

# You'll look at me

# And you will know our love was meant be

# One fine day

# You're going to want me for your girl. #

All of us then were fans of American music

and would study every detail of the label.

And of course, the names Goffin and King

kept occurring in those little brackets

under some of our very favourite songs.

Goffin and King wrote songs to order.

It was like, OK, somebody needs a hit,

you know, you write the song.

I hate the word "factory". I really hate it.

It was a songwriting school.

You went in in the morning and you know,

went to your cubicle or your little office,

there was a piano there and one of you sat there

and the other one, you know, jotted down some words

and you both sang or one of you sang

and you tried to come up with songs.

Like that, but it's got to be harder.

You know, when we write the lyric to it, it will be different.

# La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la. #

Then sing again.

# La-la-la-la-la-la. #

On the right side of the main room,

there were about four different cubicles

and the cubicles would have, like, an upright piano and a piano stool

and one chair and an ashtray

because everybody smoked like crazy back then.

And it's amazing that we didn't get cancer.

And... There's still time.

Yes. Thank you!

Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann, who is her husband,

and Gerry Goffin and I, were a pair of writing teams

that wrote for Don Kirshner.

Up On The Roof for them, On Broadway for us,

You've Lost That Loving Feeling for us...

Walking In The Rain for us,

Blame It On The Bossa Nova for us...

Natural Woman for them.

Right. Hey Girl for them.

Yeah. Don't Say Nothing Bad About My Baby was them.

They'd start and finish and there was no like,

"Well, let's work on it for a few days and see what we come up with."

There was none of that. It was, like, they'd start, they'd finish.

And some of the best songs you ever heard done in 20 minutes.

Carole always said, "If they didn't write it, we wrote it."

The thing that is incredible and the thing that I love

about Carole King coming out of this world

of kind of factory songwriting,

is that she managed to both create songs

that have this deeply personal feeling

and that are so idiosyncratic and interesting,

but also were mass pop hits.

# What should I write?

# What can I say?

# How can I tell you how much I miss you?

# The weather here has been as nice as it can be

# Although it doesn't really matter much to me

# For all the fun I'll have

# While you're so far away

# It might as well rain until September. #

At that time, one child, it was in '61.

That was Louise. Sherry wasn't born until '62.

Gerry was working as a chemist to support the family.

I was at home with the child,

the traditional male female roles.

We were also writing, you know, to try to make it,

to free ourselves of the nine to five,

except I was still taking care of the child and the house as well.

But that was...that was fine.

It worked out fine.

On the day Carole wrote Will You Love Me Tomorrow,

Gerry was at work because they didn't make enough money yet

for them to live off their writing.

He worked as a chemist.

She was at home. She wrote the song. He doesn't get home till later.

She leaves the song on the piano

and she goes out to play canasta with her mother's friends.

That's how hip she was.

You know, she said to me,

"You'll find out that even when I was a teenager,

"I was an old Jewish lady.

"That's what I was right from the beginning."

And once you hear the canasta story, you can kind of believe it.

We would be trying to write the follow up for a hit artist, right?

Barry and I are both musical and receptive

to what it was that made that first song a hit.

It would be very competitive.

With Carole and Gerry we ended up being really good friends,

but at the same time, we'd be jealous of each other

if the other team got the record.

But...

And that was very confusing to us because as friends, we loved them.

But if they got the record, we hated them!

Will You Love Me Tomorrow,

it was the follow up to a hit by the Shirelles.

Their hit was Tonight's The Night

and in writing Will You Love Me Tomorrow,

we tried to write Tonight's The Night sideways and upside down,

so it had some of the same feeling and yet was a new idea.

# I'd like to know that your love

# Is a love I can be sure of

# So tell me now

# And I won't ask again

# Will you still love me tomorrow? #

Gerry Goffin wrote those words from a woman's perspective.

But Carole wrote this incredibly beautiful music

that has this drama of that moment of, you know,

making your sexual passage.

# So tell me now

# And I won't ask again

# Will you still love me tomorrow? #

It went to number one and we were delighted

because then we could devote ourselves

to working on songs full-time.

There's a reason why that song has lasted

and why people keep coming back to it.

There's an extraordinary beauty in it

and a kind of emotional texture that you might not ordinarily hear

in something that you would think of as a pop hit.

There's a simplicity to her melodies,

not unlike Richard Rodgers in his time.

And...

And the words just belong to those melodies.

Carole's melodies are sometimes more joyful than Gerry's lyrics.

The lyrics can sometimes have a lot of darkness in it

that she sets off with a more optimistic melody.

# Take good care of my baby

# Now don't you ever make her cry

# Just let your love surround her

# Paint a rainbow all around her

# Don't let her see a cloudy sky

# Once upon a time

# That little girl was mine

# Oh, if I'd been true

# I know she'd never be with you

# So take good care of my baby

# Be just as kind as you can be

# And if you should discover

# That you don't really love her

# Just send my baby back home to me. #

It got to the point where we were spending a lot of time

in the studio making demos,

and I used to bring Louise to the studio in her little play pen.

And you know, it got to be kind of hard to do both,

so Little Eva came to stay with Louise.

And people had the impression

that she was pushing a broom around the kitchen one day

and he heard her sing and said, "Stop, we must record that voice!"

But the fact of the matter is,

we knew that she could sing when she came to work for us,

and it was just a matter of time

before we were going to have her sing on some of our demos.

# Everybody's doing a brand-new dance now

# Come on, baby, do the loco-motion

# I know you'll get to like it if you give it a chance now

# Come on, baby, do the loco-motion

# My little baby sister can do it with me

# It's easier than learning your ABC

# So come on, come on

# Do the loco-motion with me. #

There never was a dance, the loco-motion,

until after it was a number one hit record.

And everybody says, "How does this dance go?"

So Little Eva had to make up a dance!

This is pre-Beatles,

so a lot of pop music was bubble gum music

and a lot of it was...

I don't know, there wasn't a lot going on in pop music,

and they stood out completely.

When the Beatles started to write songs,

I have no question they looked to Goffin and King,

and they overtly spoke of Goffin and King as among their inspirations.

# I want to tell you, pretty baby

# I think you'll find

# I'd like to love you

# But darling, I'm imprisoned by these chains

# My baby's got me locked up in chains

# And they ain't the kind

# That you can see. #

I thought it was really neat when the Beatles did my song, Chains,

because they were this big phenomenon in this country

and everybody was going, "Oh wow, and they're great songwriters."

And Gerry and I had written Chains for The Cookies

and had a record with it here.

The original image was, you know, that old street corner music,

you know, three people standing there and just doing it in harmony,

which we do in concert sometimes.

# Chains

# My baby's got me locked up in chains

# And they ain't the kind

# That you can see

# Whoa-oh, these chains of love

# Got a hold on me

# Yeah. #

I sort of feel like I'm still learning things about Carole King.

I mean, this woman wrote so many amazing songs.

# I walked her home and she held my hand

# I knew it couldn't be just a one-night stand

# So I asked to see her next week and she told me I could

# I asked to see her and she told me I could

# Something tells me I'm into something good

# Something tells me I'm into something

# Something tells me I'm into something

# Something tells me I'm into something good

# Something tells me I'm into something

# To something good, oh, yeah. #

I remember making a suggestion about writing something

about a secret place, some place somebody goes.

You know, where do you go?

And in New York, where we lived at the time,

one of the few places you could go at the time to get away

was up on the roof.

# When this old world starts getting me down

# And people are just too much for me to face

# I climb way up to the top of the stairs

# And all my cares just drift right into space

# On the roof's the only place I know

# Where you just have to wish to make it so

# Let's go

# Up on the roof

# Up on the roof. #

She wanted to live in the suburbs

and the reason they lived in the suburbs is she was always like,

"Let's move to the suburbs. That's where it's happening."

We would never think of moving to the suburbs.

This wasn't a thought in our mind. We lived in Manhattan.

FORCED ACCENT: We were just so hip and they weren't!

So she wanted a house and the tree

and the yard and the kids and the dog, the cat.

She just wanted to be a normal housewife.

So all I remember is this house in West Orange, New Jersey,

and having these two kind of weirdish parents

compared to the other parents on the street.

"Another Pleasant Valley Sunday here in status symbol land."

You know, lyrics like that, that...

..are a comment.

Goffin is trying to say something.

He wanted to be cool and live in the Village or something, you know.

So he hates it.

# Rows of houses that are all the same

# And no-one seems to care. #

I think he felt that he was trapped in suburbia

and Pleasant Valley Sunday was his anthem of rebellion.

# See Mrs Gray, she's proud today

# Because her roses are in bloom

# Bloom

# And Mr Green, he's so serene

# He's got a TV in every room... #

Morning, Frank. Hi, Marv.

# Another Pleasant Valley Sunday

# Sunday

# Here in status symbol land. #

I remember being so impressed when my mum and dad had a song

on The Monkees album because The Monkees were all that then.

And I do remember that Davy Jones came over to our house one time,

which just floored me.

At six-years-old, Davy Jones was...

You know, he was the perfect height for a six-year-old!

But he was...

He was just the whole world to me.

Those songs are...

I mean, to my mind, they're masterpieces, you know.

I think that, you know...

You know, without the self-consciousness

of, you know, like, Dylan or something like that.

You know, you can go back and revisit those songs

and, you know, really enjoy them and find a lot of meaning in them.

Carole was writing music that, you know,

had a sophistication that elevated it.

And, you know, Gerry Goffin also was writing lyrics

with a sophistication that elevated the songs

at the same time as, you know, these were pop songs.

Natural Woman, that's a Gerry Goffin lyric.

That's a man writing about what a woman feels,

which is, you know, incredible.

That's how great he was as a lyricist.

"When my soul was in the lost and found, you came along to claim it."

Those words, how he packed all that emotion in those words,

is a miracle.

# When my soul

# Was in the lost and found

# You came along to claim it

# I didn't know

# Just what was wrong with me

# Until your kiss helped me name it

# Now I'm no longer doubtful

# Of what I'm living for

# Cos if I make you happy

# Do I need to do more?

# Because you make me feel

# You make me feel

# You make me feel like a natural woman

# Woman. #

Aretha Franklin's version is peerless.

I mean, there's an extraordinary kind of passion

and, erm, you know,

intelligence to her delivery of what that song was.

When Carole revisited it later, you know,

it was, in a sense, more timely,

where it wasn't just about, you know,

going off and getting married and having the kids.

I mean, it was about, like,

I think women wanting to find somebody who got them.

# Looking out on the morning rain

# I used to feel uninspired

# And when I knew I'd have to face another day

# Lord, it made me feel so tired

# Before the day I met you

# Life was so unkind

# But your loving words are the key to my peace of mind

# Cos you make me feel

# You make me feel

# You make me feel like a natural woman. #

Carole's voice is so personal.

It really seemed as if you were reading, you know,

something written in someone's soul.

# You make me feel so good inside

# And I just want to be

# Close to you

# You make me feel so alive

# You make me feel

# You make me feel

# You make me feel like a natural

# Natural woman

# You make me feel

# You know you make me feel

# You know you make me feel

# Like a natural woman

# You make me feel

# Like a natural woman

# Natural woman. #

There's a lot of forgiveness in her music.

There's a lot of compassion in her music,

but forgiveness is a key thing.

She goes through a real break-up in her life.

Her husband has been unfaithful to her more than once.

She loved him a lot.

He loved her too, but it couldn't work.

And that infidelity came out of a real frustration

that they'd been married for four years and Gerry was still only 23.

You know, he was a very handsome guy.

There were a lot of beautiful women around all the time.

And he told Carole about it before he did it.

It's one of the interesting things about the story -

he kind of asked for her permission.

There was a point where I just went...

..I deserve to have a better...

..better treatment than this.

I deserve to have a husband who is faithful.

I remember the divorce happened simultaneous with the move to LA.

They were splitting up and moving into separate houses

as we moved to LA from our house together.

And I just thought, "Oh, cool, we're going to have two houses,

"that's going to be so cool."

It didn't hit me like, "Oh, my God, my parents are splitting up."

It was like part of our family was being taken away from us.

It was very disturbing for us.

And I worried about her and I worried about the kids

and I worried about him and what was going to happen to everybody.

I moved to California in about 1968 and James Taylor

was just in the process of coming over with Peter Asher.

When a year ago, you were cycling home from school in London

at 4:00pm in the afternoon and it was raining and dark,

and suddenly, you're in a Mustang convertible and it's not raining,

it's not dark and there's beautiful blondes everywhere,

you're going to go,

"This is probably an improvement. I think this is a good move."

It was a very exciting scene at the time.

We were all friends and liked to play the same music.

And before too long I found myself teamed up professionally

and personally with Charles Larkey.

Charles Larkey, he moved in with us.

He was my stepdad and he moved into Wonderland with us.

Can we just go over the first part again

so I can get some continuity of how it's going to feel because...

How about if I come in in the second half of the intro there?

Oh, OK. All right, that would be better.

# So when the sun goes down

# On the city

# Don't give in to feeling self-pity

# Your lover may be knocking on the door

# And it may be like knowing

# Someone you never met before. #

I was contacted by Carole when she moved out here from New York.

She didn't know a lot of people out here

or a lot of people in the music industry, for sure.

And she had gotten together with Danny Kortchmar

and Charlie Larkey as a group called The City,

and that's the first thing that I recorded with Carole

on the West Coast.

Carole had just divorced from her husband.

And we just got along well and I remember feeling good about it.

And obviously she did too.

She became my writing partner from that night on

and we worked together for around five years.

I would write the lyric first, I would give it to Carole

and she would write the melodies to my lyrics in an hour.

Including the arrangement.

The first thing that I envisioned with Carole after The City album,

which I had to treat as a group,

was a solo artist that you always felt

she was sitting at the piano and singing to you.

By then I had met James and I was starting to sing on his album.

I think he was recording Mud Slide Slim by then.

He had already had Sweet Baby James. I had played on that.

It was great and we played on each other's records.

We just had a common mind, you know.

He just made it look so easy,

so I did Tapestry in the same spirit.

The Carpenters were in Studio A.

Joni Mitchell doing Blue in Studio C.

Carole was here, we were making a good record.

And that's all we knew then, and it was a simple record.

Records like Tapestry could be overproduced in a minute.

You know, oh, let's add more guitars.

Let's add more this, more that.

Lou and Carole wanted that simplicity.

They wanted it to be just nice and warm

and a very comfortable record for people to enjoy.

# I feel the Earth move under my feet

# I feel the sky tumbling down

# I feel my heart start to trembling

# Whenever you're around. #

I wanted to stay that simple and always have that feeling

that Carole was singing to you.

We turned all the lights down in the room,

all the lights that we're seeing

and all of the background lights down and all that stuff.

And after a while, they got so comfortable with that

that they were like playing in their living room.

Will You Love Me Tomorrow, Joni and James sang background on.

James was on a lot of Tapestry.

If he wasn't singing, he was playing.

They were all friends, Joni and James. They all were friendly.

And it was fun.

You know, they would come in and Carole knew what she wanted.

We were doing two or three tunes a day. It's hard to imagine now.

It took us three weeks to make Tapestry.

$22,000.

She got involved in every single part.

I mean, she had specific ideas of what she wanted me to play,

specific ideas for the bass player to play.

Carole just said, "You play a solo here". And I did!

Vinyl used to have two sides.

There used to be a logical place for a pause.

And we, as the creators of that product,

had to build in a place for that pause.

It would be like the intermission in a play.

Sequencing at that time was very, very important.

You go through one side, you turn it over,

and all of that was based on one person listening to it.

# As I watched in sorrow

# There suddenly appeared

# A figure grey and ghostly

# Beneath a flowing beard

# In times of deepest darkness

# I've seen him dressed in black

# Now my tapestry's unravelling

# He's come to take me back

# He's come to take me back. #

Tapestry was one of those albums.

That it came out and it was everywhere, immediately.

Tapestry hit a nerve with people at that time.

This became their soundtrack of their life.

It was the right songs at the right time

for the audience that was ready for them.

They said everything that people were feeling

and couldn't really express.

Here, you know, the Vietnam War was still raging.

You know, there were 550,000 American troops in Vietnam in 1969.

Vietnam's not that big a country. It's half a million troops.

There were still the after effects of the assassinations.

You know, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

And there's still a lot of anger in the atmosphere.

The great '60s ambitions, great utopian hopes,

clearly weren't going to materialise,

so people began looking inward

and that was the singer-songwriter movement.

It was the moment of the singer-songwriter in America,

in its purest and most magical form.

# Stayed in bed all morning just to pass the time

# There's something wrong here

# There can be no denying

# One of us is changing

# Or maybe we've just stopped trying

# And it's too late, baby

# Now, it's too late

# Though we really did try to make it. #

This is a song about disappointment,

but the ever youthful optimism of youth.

And I'm an optimistic person, so the last verse addresses that,

that we both have a future, though not with one another.

# There'll be good times again for me and you

# But we just can't stay together

# Don't you feel it too?

# Still, I'm glad for what we had

# And how I once loved you. #

I think it really hit home for so many people, especially women.

It was my go-to record for any time I wanted to feel better.

It was like a friend.

There was a lot of luck involved. Right place, right time.

I mean, picture a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn

coming out in today's market without the, you know,

the body, the costumes, the whole thing.

She was reluctant to go out on the road for months

and leave her daughters and to be gone.

So she was very reluctant to go out, she didn't want to tour.

I've always had confidence in the fact that when I played music,

it touched people in some way.

And the place I didn't have confidence was as a performer.

And that's where you came in.

It was James and me saying to Carole,

"Look, would you sing some of them", you know, "open the show?"

And she agreed to do so.

She was very nervous. She was scared.

She got over her stage fright very quickly

because she had an incident that happened

when she was performing at The Troubadour.

So she sits down and she plays,

I don't know, one song, one-and-a-half song,

and then Doug Weston, who owns The Troubadour, says,

"I'm sorry, we're going to have to empty the building.

"We've had a bomb threat."

So we walked out and then we came back in

and Carole sat down at the piano,

they cleared it and she said about the bomb, she says,

"As long as it's not me!"

And that cracked the audience up and from then on she was not nervous.

It turned out we spoke the same language.

We sat down and we slipped back into the mother tongue, really.

It was great.

# So far away

# Doesn't anybody stay in one place any more?

# It would be so fine to see your face at my door. #

What's your take on how difficult it is

for a woman to have a career in the performing arts

and also maintain a family?

I mean... Very difficult. Very difficult.

The only time, I guess, when I had really young children

that I ever was on tour was with you.

And I remember we were, I think, away for six weeks,

home for two weeks and then away for another six weeks.

And that six weeks, it was very difficult.

I remember crying, listening to So Far Away,

like she was singing it to me.

# But you're so far away

# Doesn't anybody stay in one place any more?

# It would be so fine to see your face at my door

# Doesn't help to know

# You're so far away. #

Leaving California was something that didn't come easy,

but I don't think I was running away.

I was running TO something.

I was running to a simpler life.

I was running to a place where I could be on the land, grow a garden.

I know you can do that in LA too, but it's not the same.

I'm pretty sure I was 14

when Rick Evers met my mum

and quickly took us to Idaho.

Rick was from Idaho and I saw him as my interpreter.

The person who would bring me to Idaho,

the person who would show me what it's like to live out there.

And, you know, I fell in love with him.

I fell in love with the idea of him.

I fell in love with what that meant to me.

And when he... He just hit me one day, just out of the blue.

I'm like, "What?!"

He had a really scary temper.

When he would get angry, I would feel scared.

I would.... I would, like, run in a room and lock the door.

Even though he'd never hit me, I felt like he was going to.

Sometimes he actually fist... Hit me with his fist.

At one point he hit Danny Kortchmar coming off stage and hit him hard.

He was obviously a troubled, deeply, deeply troubled,

screwed up individual and was making Carole's life miserable.

They hated him and they had every right to.

And as a person, they didn't like him

and they didn't like the way he treated Carole.

I'd go down and be, you know, crying or whatever,

he'd be, "Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry."

Now I have the power.

That is a dynamic that happens sometimes and then the making up.

My mum just said, "I've had enough. I'm leaving. Sherry, come on."

And we flew to Hawaii and when we got to Hawaii

we got a message that Rick died.

He killed himself.

He actually shot up too much drugs and he did it to himself.

It's not like, you know, some tragic thing happened to him.

He just... He just was stupid.

# And all I want is a quiet place to live

# Where I can be free in a world of my making... #

She fell in love with Idaho.

# What they decided to give

# I wouldn't want what they have, no

If I could only find... #

She fell harder for Idaho than she fell for Rick Evers.

'78, after Rick Evers died,

I decided that I was definitely going to go back to Idaho

with my two younger children, Molly and Levi.

She's still in love with Idaho. She loves the mountains.

She loves the air.

Living in Idaho, which is part of the northern Rockies ecosystem

and what it means in my area of the country

is that a bear doesn't get to a state line and say,

"Oh, that law in this state means I'm protected here,

"so I'd better not go into the next state where I'm not protected."

I think the wide open spaces were...was calling to her.

This is where she wanted to...

..I think have her sort of, her life.

We treat the northern Rockies as an ecosystem

and there's a piece of legislation that I work on

called The Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act.

She's come to Capitol Hill just not to get the door open.

She understands the landscape.

She understands the politics.

She's telling them about the science.

She's talking about what the habitat destruction is doing.

She understands the economics of it.

This is my other life, my other world.

So, I don't know...

I could go on much longer than anyone wants me to,

but I'm going to keep working on that until it is signed into law.

She's happiest with a quiet life in Idaho.

She will still tour and play shows and she records from time to time.

But if she could, she'd be there all the time.

# You got to get up every morning

# With a smile on your face

# And show the world all the love in your heart

WHOOPING

# Then people going to treat you better

# You're going to find, yes, you will. #

When I first heard about the idea of the show

that is now Beautiful - The Carole King Musical,

I was like, I don't want that to be made.

I don't want a Broadway show about me.

But then to read this great book by Doug McGrath,

in which he does tell the story so compellingly.

The idea started of making a musical based on all four of us,

based on our friendship and our competition with each other

in the early '60s.

I thought, these are four interesting people.

I'd met Carole, Gerry, Barry and Cynthia,

and they were really interesting, charming and funny and smart.

After the first reading, the feedback that they got was,

well, you're stopping before Tapestry. Right.

You can't do that. We feel cheated.

We want to hear those Tapestry songs. So it switched.

So the focus became more on Carole and we became supporting players.

We used to joke that they were Lucy and Desi

and we were Fred and Ethel.

# You've got to get up every morning

# With a smile on your face

# And show the world all the love in your heart

# Show the world

# Then people going to treat you better

# You're going to find, yes, you will

# That you're beautiful

# You're so beautiful

# You're beautiful So beautiful

# So beautiful You're so beautiful

# As you feel

# As you feel. #

I think Beautiful is a hit because the music

is the soundtrack of people's lives,

and younger people, it's been the soundtrack of their lives,

but they didn't realise that, you know,

it was attached to me necessarily or attached to the writers.

When I was told that I was going to win the Gershwin Prize,

I was floored.

First of all, I was the fifth recipient.

I was going to be the first woman, which in itself is amazing.

And I was going to be presented with the award by President Obama.

As Carole tells it, the secret to her success is that,

"I try to get out of the way

"and let the process be guided by whatever is driving me."

So tonight, it is my great pleasure

to present America's highest award for popular music

to a living legend.

APPLAUSE

The coming together of my two worlds,

of the political world and all the people I knew in Washington,

that was a different kind of amazing to me.

I would tell people, not just in music,

I would just say to anybody, if you want to do something, go for it.

Try. Don't tell yourself you can't make it.

Don't let your parents tell you you can't make it.

Let the world tell you you can't make it, after having tried.

Or maybe let the world discover you,

but don't fail to try.

Because if you don't try, you can't succeed.

Her legacy may be like a Gershwin legacy

or a Rodgers and Hammerstein legacy,

because there is a generation now that just adores her stuff.

# When you're down

# And troubled

# And you need some loving care

# And nothing

# Oh, nothing is going right

# Close your eyes and think of me

# And soon I will be there... #

Her songs will last, which is really the test of time.

That's all we have, really, is what songs remain

and which fall away.

And I think Carole's songs will be here for a long time.

# You just call out my name

# And you know, wherever I am... #

Her singing is not...

It doesn't have a lot of artifice in it or ornamentation.

It's pure. It's like, here's who I am.

And I think people... I think that's what they love about her.

The emotion that's in Tapestry is not foreign to people now.

I mean, women are still thinking about,

will you love me tomorrow, the next day, you know.

It's just such a universal language for the human heart.

# Hey, now

# Now, ain't it good to know that you've got a friend... #

I would think honesty is a prevailing emotion of Carole

as a writer and a performer.

She said exactly what I was going to say.

Yeah, but I'm the lyricist, so I said it.

If Tapestry never existed,

Carole King would still be among the handful

of most important songwriters in pop music history.

So let's just say that.

I've had hopeless times in my life about different things

and you just have to persevere because one day, that door does open

and if you don't persevere, you won't be there when it does.

# Oh, yes, I will

# To see you again

# See you again and again

# Winter, spring, summer or fall

# All you've got to do is call

# And I'll be there, yes, I will

# You've got a friend

# You've got a friend

# Ain't it good to know

# Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

# You've got a friend. #

# One fine day

# We'll meet once more

# And then you'll want the love

# You threw away before

# One fine day

# You're going to want me for your girl

# One fine day

# Oh-oh-oh

# One fine day

# You're going to want me for your girl

# One fine day

# You're going to want me for your

# Girl. #