Costa Mesa Show : Carole King Seeks Balance on the Road

For a good part of the 1980s, Carole King pursued the quiet, private existence of a homebody on the range.

While life on her 118-acre ranch in Idaho may have nourished King’s soul, it did not feed her creative urge as a songwriter. More than five years elapsed from 1984, the time of her last album, until the release of “City Streets,” the new record that has prompted King to go back on the road for a tour that reaches the Pacific Amphitheatre tonight.

“I was feeling too much peace,” said King, 47.

“For a while I was writing about the only conflict I was dealing with”: a long court battle against the federal government, which wanted access to a private road through King’s property so it could speed development of a neighboring mining tract. Songs inspired by the environmental dispute (eventually decided in King’s favor) “didn’t seem to resonate with the mainstream of popular music,” she said.

Instead of writing a new album, King devoted her artistic energies to acting. She took a couple of small film parts and played more substantial roles in plays staged in New York and Los Angeles. As a New York City teen-ager, King had studied acting at the city’s famed High School for the Performing Arts. She continued to attend acting classes and workshops as her musical career unfolded.

In 1987, she returned to Manhattan to play the lead in a play called “A Minor Incident.”

“I really got back in touch with the energy and the emotional turmoil of the city,” King said. “That is what really inspired the writing of the “City Streets” album, and its energy.” Feelings of loneliness and romantic yearning, set against a chilly urban landscape, form the emotional core of the album.

Now, King said, she parcels out her time among New York, Los Angeles and the Idaho ranch where she and her fourth husband raise horses, mules and goats.

“It’s very important to me to have that place to go and recharge and have the natural beauty,” she said. “Just get on my horse and ride, go into the mountains and contemplate a stream. I need both. My work is very important to me, and that takes place best in the city.”

As one of pop’s preeminent songwriters, King has written definitive musical evocations of both the country and the city. With lyricist Gerry Goffin, the former husband with whom she still collaborates, King wrote “Up on the Roof” for the Drifters, achieving the height of urban romanticism. “Wasn’t Born to Follow,” recorded by the Byrds, speaks of rural wanderings with rippling beauty.

If King’s muse responds to both the tenement and the forest, her psyche never has been geared very well to the demands of the road. She summed up her problem with touring in “You’re So Far Away,” one of the many enduring songs from King’s 1971 soft-rock album landmark, “Tapestry.”

Traveling around sure gets me down and lonely,

Nothing else to do but close my mind.

I sure hope the road don’t come to own me,

There’s so many dreams I’ve yet to find .

King said she had some of those old misgivings as she started out last month on her first tour since 1984. But, for the first time, she has found that the road can be fun.

“This is the first (tour) I have thoroughly enjoyed every minute,” King said, her grainy speaking voice taking on extra brightness. “I don’t mind the hotel rooms, the travel, any of it. I love the band, and I love the response I’m getting on stage.”

She also likes the audience mix she is seeing at her shows: the Baby Boomers who all bought “Tapestry” during the ‘70s, making it one of the best-selling albums in pop history, and the younger fans who are also turning up.

Oldtime King fans who go to the shows at the Pacific and at the Universal Amphitheatre on Thursday will get to hear eight selections from “Tapestry,” which King plays without fear of being considered stuck in the past: “I’m aware that people want to hear it. Most of the songs from that album are personal favorites of mine, so it was easy to say, ‘I’ll do these eight.’ Whichever ones are the most fun for me to play--that is the overriding criterion.”

King said she also has fun with a more rocking, contemporary-sounding segment of the show in which she steps out from behind her piano (she has her son-in-law, veteran New York City session musician Robbie Kondor, to look after the keyboards) and either straps on an electric guitar or bops with a hand-held microphone. That segment includes a new version of “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” in which King lets fly with a bona fide rap.

“The song (a No. 1 hit for the Shirelles in 1960) has been around so long, I looked for a way to have fun with it and make it contemporary,” she said. “I see the audience’s collective jaw drop when I begin the rap. Then they get into it.”

King said she is not just using rap as a gimmick but has a genuine liking for it--a taste that is a little surprising in a songwriter whose forte, an exquisite sense of melody, is foreign to rap.

“I do draw the line,” she said. “I do not have any affinity for (rap) lyrics that advocate violence. Although I’m aware that as a white woman I did not grow up under the same circumstances as a group like NWA. If there is anger, anger most definitely should be expressed, but it should focus on how (one) can take this anger and make this situation better.

“My 15-year-old son listens to rap. We listen to some of the music together. We discuss it. I tell him my opinion of the violence, and he agrees with me. The sexual stuff we just laugh at. It opens up a dialogue. The parents who are seeking to have that music banned are making a big mistake.”

(King, who is Jewish, said one rap group she has not heard, and knows nothing about, is Public Enemy, the militantly political ensemble that has been embroiled in controversy because of flagrantly anti-Semitic interviews given by a member of its performing entourage.)

King said her teen-age son and daughter live in Idaho with her former husband, musician Charles Larkey. Louise and Sherry Goffin, the two daughters from her first marriage, are both pursuing their own musical careers. Louise has been a recording artist since her teens. King said Sherry, who is married to her mother’s touring keyboard player, Kondor, fronts a New York City band called Sherry and the Sugar Beats that is working on “an album of children’s music sort of like the ‘Little Chill.’ It’s music from the ‘Big Chill’ era, the ‘60s and ‘70s,” geared for contemporary kids and their musically nostalgic parents.

Of all the Goffin-King songs from that era that became pop standards in performances by other singers, King says Aretha Franklin’s reading of “(You Make Me Feel Like) a Natural Woman” gives her the biggest chill.

“That would stand out in my mind as the all time blow-me-down pinnacle of how a song of mine could be sung,” she said.

King, who sounds well in touch with the current pop scene, said she also gets a kick out of knowing that “The Locomotion” has been a hit in three different decades (in the ‘60s for Little Eva, who was baby-sitter for King and Goffin before they made her a star, in the ‘70s for Grand Funk and in the ‘80s for Kylie Minogue). She is also happy to hear that Martika, a hot pop newcomer whom King likes, is planning to release “I Feel the Earth Move” as a single.

With all those famous or imposing versions of her songs that other stars have sung, has King ever felt nervous about tackling any of them herself?

“Never,” she said. “I always figure I wrote it, I have the validation to sing it any way I want.”

Carole King and Wayne Toups & Zydecajun play tonight at 8 at the Pacific Amphitheatre, 100 Fair Drive, Costa Mesa. Tickets: $24.75, $22 and $16.50. Information: (714) 634-1300.