John Sheldon remembers first hearing Something in The Way She Moves sitting at his family's kitchen table. Many fans of James Taylor's music might be able to say the same, but for this fact: Sheldon wasn't listening to a recording.
Taylor, then a teenager, was sitting in the Sheldon family's Boston-area kitchen, playing the song he had written for Sheldon's older sister, Phoebe, who was Taylor's steady at the time.
Decades later -- this March in fact -- Taylor invited Sheldon to a Boston studio to listen to another song. This time it was one Sheldon had written, September Grass, and Taylor had recorded it for his upcoming album, October Road. He and producer Russ Titelman wanted Sheldon's thoughts on Taylor's rendition of the song.
The drive to Boston from Sheldon's home in western Massachusetts takes about 90 minutes. On that day in March, that was 90 minutes of prime fretting time.
"I'm thinking: 'What if I don't like it?' " Sheldon, 51, recalled in a recent interview after the release of October Road. "That would be hard."
Taylor, meanwhile, was nervous too.
"He was very apologetic when he played it for me. 'It's a lot mellower than yours, John. I hope you like it.' "
John Sheldon and James Taylor
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Both men could have spared themselves the worry.
"I love the way he does it. I absolutely love it," Sheldon says.
"When they played it, it was overwhelming. It sounded great, but it was an overwhelming experience," he says, admitting he was close to tears by the time the song ended. "It was a very emotional thing for me."
"I especially like the vocals on it. He's just with every word. It's just amazing to hear your own song painted that way."
When Taylor and Titelman asked Sheldon's opinion, he did raise one small point. His own version of September Grass featured a background guitar melody that answers the vocals; Taylor hadn't incorporated it in his rendition. The backing melody is subtle and sparingly used - "a very transparent sound," Sheldon explains. Listen for the occasional guitar chords that add a chime-like quality to the song after Taylor sings "blade of grass," "winter to come" and answering "September grass" in the second chorus.
"I wanted it there, and Russ, JT, and I decided on doing it with the harmonics," says Sheldon, who ended up adding those chords to the final track. "I think it helps the mood of the song.''
Contributing a song and some guitar work to his old friend's latest record is something Sheldon describes as "a completion of a circle" -- one that was a long time in the making.
After all, Taylor bought his first guitar, a Gibson acoustic, from Sheldon's father, Stanley. Taylor was in boarding school at the time, at Milton Academy in suburban Boston. Nearly every weekend, he'd leave the school to stay with the Sheldon family in nearby Cambridge. Taylor was taking guitar lessons, and his rapid progress impressed young John Sheldon.
Sheldon, in 1964, playing the guitar he bought from James Taylor.
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"He got really, really good, really fast." Sheldon recalls being enthralled by Taylor's unusual style of playing and insisting: "You've got to show me that!" Taylor did. "It's one of the ways I learned to play."
Later, Taylor sold John Sheldon his first electric guitar, the candy apple red Fender Duo Sonic that Taylor played in his older brother Alex's band, the Fabulous Corsairs. "I loved that red guitar," Sheldon says, recalling he spent an entire summer mowing lawns on Martha's Vineyard to raise the $100 asking price.
So many ties, so many twists of fate. Sheldon marvels at them. After all, who could have guessed that decades after that kitchen-table concert, after the weekend visits and the guitar sales, "the kid he taught to play the guitar would write a song he would do?"
Truth to tell, the threads tying the Taylor and Sheldon families together are long ones. Trudy Taylor, James's mother, and Sheldon's mother, Sayre, were best friends from college. Both had big broods -- "They had more boys and we had more girls." When the children were young, the two families would vacation together, eventually hitting on Martha's Vineyard as the site for their annual gathering.
The Vineyard is where Taylor started to make his name as a musician, where he and friend and future collaborator Danny Kortchmar first started to hone their craft together, playing wherever they could. Sheldon, who is three years Taylor's junior, was too young to be part of the action. In the age-old tradition of younger children, he trailed after the older boys, going to see Taylor and Kortchmar wherever they'd perform, hoping for a chance to play a famous electric guitar - Taylor's first non-acoustic - that Alex Taylor had spray-painted blue.
Sheldon with James Taylor
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Taylor and Kortchmar's budding success spurred Sheldon on. "It was kind of like I was chasing these guys, so it made me work harder." For some of their contemporaries, Taylor's rocket ride to fame had the opposite effect. "A lot of us who were doing music around James were blown out of the water. He was so far ahead of all of us."
But Sheldon was a quick study too. By the time he was in his mid-teens, he was getting regular work in music clubs around Boston. When he was 17, he was hired as lead guitarist for Van Morrison, who was making waves with his latest release, Brown Eyed Girl.
For a time, Morrison hung out at the Sheldon home in Cambridge. Morrison's band was rehearsing in the basement, in a "band room" Stanley Sheldon had built for his son years before. Sheldon recalls fooling around one day on a chord progression he liked, while Morrison was behind the drum kit. "He started bashing away to my chords, then swung a microphone around and started singing nonsense into it, something about 'domino,' " Sheldon says. "I thought it was because of the Domino brand sugar which was by the hot plate where we made coffee." Morrison liked what he was hearing and they played the future classic at their next gig.
"He was doing a lot of writing, and I remember him sitting in our backyard and playing through songs that would later come out on Astral Weeks," Sheldon adds, referring to one of Morrison's seminal early albums.
"I think the thing I took away from that experience was that Van actually believed in me. He didn't care that I was an upper middle-class kid living in a big house in Cambridge, that I was only 17 and weighed a hundred pounds, that I myself was shy and moody. He listened to me play, and that was it."
Amazing stuff - especially considering Sheldon was still in high school. ("I quit Van Morrison so I could finish high school,'' he recalls.) But by that time, Sheldon was used to being "the whiz kid guitar player."
"I became a player who could always get a job."
