Vanity is in the Flannel

And we were all so young and semi-vain

Recently I decided to bolster my vinyl collection with several Joni Mitchell albums. For me, Joni is like a glass of single malt scotch. I appreciate it and will certainly accept it, and to some extent, even enjoy it.

But I prefer bourbon, especially Four Roses Single Barrel.

So if we’re talking about music from the very early 70’s, I do prefer Carly Simon over Joni. Think what you want to, and I have no intellectual rationale for this preference. What I do know is that so many Simon songs have stuck with me, and when I hear them, I sing along readily, even if I can’t quite attune to her pitch (though it’s far easier than trying to synch with Mitchell’s voice, of course, even if my 9th grade choir practiced and performed “Both Sides Now” seemingly for months).

Somewhere in an American Crisis Playlist from last year, I likely mentioned “That’s the Way I Always Heard It Should Be,” the first Simon song I ever heard, and how its loneliness and anxiety over “couples [who] cling and claw and drown in love’s debris” made me think of friends’ parents who slept in separate bedrooms — something my own parents did toward the end of their marriage, and something my wife and I do occasionally when the snoring gets to be too much. My wife has to remind me that nothing is wrong with us, because the fears from that old song can weigh me down even from this fifty-plus year window.

Simon’s “Anticipation” was a bigger hit that, as many of us remember, got subsumed within and by that infamous ketchup commercial. And if you think that’s not a knock on the capitalist spirit, then I don’t know what else to say here.

My Pop spirit, though, got ignited when, in late ’73, Simon released “You’re So Vain,” from her No Secrets album. From the very first bass notes and that whisper — “Son of a gun” — I was hooked, and so were most of my high school friends, that is, except the ones who were into Sabbath.

You just couldn’t NOT hear the song in those weeks — a time before most of us ever thought of listening to FM and the advent of album rock radio.

I feel that time of flannel shirts, of cold December days even in Alabama, when we’d head to the mall for afternoons of cruising, in the teenaged fashion, and then retreating for supper at home, before heading back out to the local pizza parlor or “game room.” Our room was called “CT’s” and it was full of foosball and air hockey tables, some pinball, and too many kids in flannel reeking of pot and, for some, spinning like the foosball levers from something called crystal meth that back then, I didn’t know or care much about. Worse, a substance called Angel Dust was making its rounds, and some of us got fooled into thinking it was powdered THC (it soooooo wasn’t).

This was the year I began smoking pot, though people who knew me only vaguely thought I’d been smoking for years, what with my grunge-y flannel look and hair way down past my ears. In ninth grade I was sent home from school because my hair touched my collar and came halfway across my ears. I recently read somewhere in Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s Please Kill Me that in some circles — school boards and local governing bodies — hair that touched those places was a signifier of the wearer’s being gay, and god knows we’d want to eliminate that, or at least keep it sight unseen.

So… “GET A HAIRCUT SON” was never just a request.

By the time “You’re So Vain” was released, though, hippies, freaks, and fairies were everywhere, and it was near impossible, from my experience, to tell which was which and who was who, even if you wanted to do so. And back then, no one much in my circle wanted or cared to.

I remember so many nights and winter break days of riding around in Buick Skylarks, getting as stoned as we wanted to be, listening to mono car radios playing tunes that we couldn’t have known would mark, signify, our lives and be the touchstones of soundtracks we still play all these years after.

Crammed into cars, six, eight, of us, screaming and singing and believing that this gang of ours would endure whatever breakups came our way, and whatever distances college would engender.

So when Carly Simon sang,

“You’re so vain You probably think this song is about you…”

did she secretly know that this song was about us? We knew it was even if we didn’t know whether the antagonist was James or Mick or Warren Beatty (and for some reason I kept seeing George Hamilton in the starring role).

“Well you’re where you should be all the time and when you’re not you’re with some underworld spy or the wife of a close friend, wife of a close friend…”

We all knew where to be, making the rounds of known locales where our underworld could play freely, could exchange partners, could pair up, pair down, and find excuses for what damage we might have done on the next morning when we remembered, or didn’t, the things we said the night before, the lives left lying under the flannel.

And then, sometimes I’d go it alone, because I still loved a high school girl who seemed to like me but couldn’t find her way out of the broken-ness of her home. She was never vain, just broken, but I had no way of understanding that then.

But she loved Carly and James, especially James, and later gave me Walking Man for Christmas. I wore a suit for her once, too, my long hair contrasting with the black formality. I don’t look so good in the photo and I never wanted to watch myself do or be anything.

I would have preferred my flannel shirt; I would have rather been riding in my car, with her, and my friends, somewhere in that murky night between an official, formal romance and its beckoning possibility.

But this was high school. Top 40.

Songs, romances — they came and went.

And stranger still, I never owned either the album, No Secrets, or even the single, “You’re So Vain,” and back then I bought everything I could afford, when I wasn’t throwing quarters at air hockey machines. I can’t explain why, because it was a song I always loved — one that didn’t define me, but that played through my life as a complement, as a way to understand that so much of what we love can never be possessed. Even when we think we’re attuned.

Thank you for reading. One of my goals this year is to get back to writing “songstories” for this pub and its cousins across Medium. I hope Christopher Robin is returning from his hiatus soon, and that Steven Hale, Jessica Lee McMillan, Sarah Paris, Danielle Loewen, Jessie Waddell, Zsófia Vera, David Acaster, Kathy Copeland Padden, Karla Clifton, Paul Mansfield, Paul Combs, Chris Zappa, Pierce McIntyre, If Ever You’re Listening, TheWellSeasonedLibrarian, JP Timko, Reuben Salsa, Nicole Brown, L Burton, Alex Markham, Kevin Alexander, Judy McLain, and Alexander Briseño can relate.

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