James Taylor Cover Story Guitar Player, May 1984 "The Instrumental Side of James Taylor" By Dan Forte Over 10,000 people patiently file into an amphitheater on a sunny summer’s day as a prerecorded tape of current chart-toppers blasts over the PA system. The crowd is composed largely of grad-school-aged couples (many lugging toddlers and diaper hampers), and small clusters of undergraduate females hang out at the T-shirt concession. All in all, it is one of the most well-behaved, all-American groups of concert-goers one could hope to encounter these days-no drunks, no fistfights, no primal screams for "rock and roll!" As David Bowie’s halting voice fades out in the middle of "Let’s Dance," a tall, slender man in blue workshirt and pith helmet carries an acoustic guitar to center stage. The audience buzzes momentarily, unsure if this is the man they came to see or just a stage hand. As he straps on the guitar and checks his volume, the crowd comes to its feet en masse. Their ovation sounds somehow more like a greeting reserved for an old friend than the hero-worship thunderclap one normally expects at a "rock concert." The guitarist doffs his helmet, revealing a high, sunburned forehead that used to be covered with long brown hair. As he delicately begins to fingerpick two alternating chords, the crowd breathes a collective sigh of recognition and sits. There’s something in the way she moves Or looks my way or calls my name That seems to leave this troubled world behind And if I’m feeling down and blue Or troubled by some foolish game She always seems to make me change my mind. "Something In The Way She Moves" James Taylor, c. Blackwood Music, Inc. For 15 years James Taylor has done the unthinkable in pop music. Not that singing one’s own songs to the self-accompaniment of an acoustic guitar is anything new or unusual-artists have been doing it since the instrument’s invention. But few have commanded as large and loyal a following or influenced as many players as Taylor. When Taylor arrived on the scene in 1969, the prevailing trend in post-Beatles pop music was to have self-contained bands with several members sharing vocal, instrumental, and compositional chores. It was also the era when the Lead Guitarist was becoming a fixture (often the most prominent element) in seemingly every rock group. Taylor’s mass acceptance ushered in the era of the Singer/Songwriter-like Lead Guitarist, the term referred to a role, a stance, rather than a specific genre. As stated in the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia Of Rock & Roll: "James Taylor was the archetypal ‘sensitive’ singer/songwriter of the 70’s. His songs, especially his early ones, were tales of inner torment delivered in low-key tunes featuring Taylor’s understated tenor and his intricate acoustic guitar accompaniments that drew on fold and jazz. Taylor came across as relaxed, personable, and open; he was imitated by a horde of would-be confessionalists, although his best songs were as artful as they were emotional. They weren’t folk songs; they were pop compositions with folk’s dynamics." Taylor was born March 12, 1948 in Boston, the next to oldest son in a wealthy, highly musical family (brothers Alex and Livingston and sister Kate have all recorded solo LPs). The family moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, when James’ father became dean of the medical school at the University of North Carolina. The Taylors spent summers on Martha’s Vineyard off the coast of Cape Cod, where at 15 James met guitarist Danny Kortchmar. The two performed in Greenwich Village as an acoustic duo before forming a rock band, the Flying Machine. After unsuccessfully shopping a demo tape of his original material, Taylor moved to London in 1968 where he hooked up with his current manager, Peter Asher, who produced the singer’s self-titled debut album on the Beatles’ Apple Records. Though the LP was largely overlooked, it provided ample evidence of James’ intricate fingerpicking and slightly nasal vocal delivery, and included two songs later re-recorded for his 1976 Greatest Hits package, "Something In The Way She Moves" and "Carolina On My Mind," featuring back-up work by Paul McCartney and George Harrison. "Circle Round The Sun" and "The Blues Is Just A Bad Dream" serve as early examples of J.T.’s bluesy side. Upon returning to the States, Taylor signed with Warner Bros. and recorded Sweet Baby James. Released early in 1970, the album went almost unnoticed until September of that year, when ‘Fire and Rain" climbed to #3. The LP reached Billboard’s Top Ten in November and stayed on the album chart into 1972. In March of ’71, James Taylor appeared on the cover of Time magazine, and by that summer his third album, Mud Slide Slim And The Blue Horizon, was #2 with his version of Carole King’s "You’ve Got a Friend" topping the singles chart. By now he had graduated from a solo club act to a major concert draw that included King, Kortchmar, bassist Lee Sklar, and drummer Russ Kunkel. At the peak of his popularity, Taylor withdrew from the spotlight and didn’t perform again for the next three years. In 1975 his version of the Holland-Dozier-Holland classic "How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)" [from Gorilla] began a string of hit R & B covers - Jimmy Jones’ "Handy Man" [J.T.]; the Drifters’ "Up On The Roof" [Flag], written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin; Sam Cooke’s "Wonderful World," which he sang with Simon & Garfunkel on Art Garfunkel’s Watermark LP; and Inez and Charlie Foxx’ obscure gem, "Mockingbird," recorded on then-wife Carly Simon’s Hotcakes album. Meanwhile, his own songs have been covered by artists ranging from John Denver to the Isley Brothers, from Willie Nelson to Al Jarreau. James dueted with George Jones on the country legend’s recording of Taylor’s "Bartender’s Blues," and the King himself, Elvis Presley, turned in a lowdown reading of James’ tongue-in-cheek blues parody, "Steamroller Blues." While mentors, contemporaries, and followers (such as Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Jackson Browne, and Dan Fogelberg) have moved camp to rock and roll in recent years, Taylor has never strayed far from his folk roots. The focus remains on his fingerstyle acoustic guitar work, with all-star sidemen adding fills and harmonic textures. Like Simon, he debunks the stereotype of the hoot-night hummer/strummer, instead employing a unique melodic approach filled with passing chords, countermelodies, and moving bass lines. Since signing with Columbia, Taylor has released only three albums in seven years, the most recent being Dad Loves His Work, yielded the hit "Her Town Too." Although he has a reputation of a recluse and interviews with him are rare, the 36 year-old tunesmith took a break from writing material for his next LP to conduct the following interview. This marks virtually the only time Taylor has talked at length about his guitar playing. Here he discusses his early influences, his association with the Beatles, his fingerstyle technique, his custom-made guitars, and his composing and recording processes. These days there’s a whole school of so-called singer/songwriters, but when you came along the trend was to have self-contained bands. Did you think you’d have a chance commercially as a solo acoustic act? It was only until we released Sweet Baby James, in that year after I came back from London, that I did any real time playing by myself. After that I started to work with Kortchmar and Kunkel and Sklar and Carole King. It just started off being a matter of economics - because I couldn’t keep a band going. So I picked up club work, in fold clubs like the Troubadour, the Unicorn, the Main Point, the 2nd Fret. After that I stated to get some opening slots on shows. I think the first job I had playing for a concert-sized audience was at Princeton, with Laura Nyro. Then I played in Cleveland, opening for The Who, with just my acoustic guitar and a chair. There was an audience of about 10,000 - not many of them facing the stage during my set. But as things progressed, we started being able to book concert halls, instead of clubs, with just me. I think the first time I ever played with a band was at the Troubadour, probably ’69 or ’70. Then Sweet Baby James did real well. In the summer of ’69, I broke both my arms and legs in a motorcycle accident, and I was in plaster until ’70, about a week or two before we went into the studio to do Sweet Baby James. Because of that, I couldn’t work, and missed playing Woodstock. Even though you usually play in a band context now, the focus still seems to be on your acoustic guitar, with the supporting musicians more or less coloring and filling out the arrangement. Well, usually my material is written on guitar, and I’m usually playing on the road or in my performance or on an album or whatever. The guitar arrangement is always central to it. When you fingerpick, you seem to grab specific strings and notes, usually pertaining to the melody. I think that’s accurate enough. I don’t really feel comfortable above the 5th fret, and I don’t often go up there. My style is sort of complex. Sometimes I get the complaint that it’s over-busy, but in a narrow framework, you know. Do you use many nonstandard tunings? No. I sometimes use a G tuning [D G D G B D, low to high]. I like to mess around with a Fender lap steel that Peter Asher gave me for Christmas a few years back. I use a regular E major triad when I play slide. But occasionally I’ll use a G tuning just to fingerpick. "Love Has Brought Me Around" [Mud Slide Slim] and a couple of new tunes are in that. I often drop the low E string down to D. "Millworker" [Flag] and "Country Road" [Sweet Baby James] are like that, and "Sugar Trade" [Dad Loves His Work]. Has your writing or guitar playing changed much since you began composing with a band in mind? No, it really hasn’t changed very much at all. I don’t write in a band context. I almost always write on my own - occasionally on keyboard, but almost always on guitar, and usually acoustic. Are you disciplined enough to sit down and attempt to write a certain amount of songs over a period of time? I’ve been dealing recently with kind of a massive block, so I haven’t written anything in a while. I have a deadline to be back in the studio to finish up this album that I’ve had on the shelf for a number of months. We cut 12 tracks, but I’d like to recut some stuff, and I’d like to include some other new material. We got pretty far with it, but I’m having a little bit of lyric trouble. It’s never really too much of a musical problem. How do you deal with that sort of writer’s block? I don’t know. I’ve never really had this kind of silence before. This is about as bad as it’s gotten. I really don’t know the cause - maybe it’s a transitional period. What I’m kind of counting on now is, I’ve gotten myself a place to write, and I’m to the point of desperation where I’m actually giving myself about four hours a day to just sit there and either come up with something or go crazy with boredom. I’m hoping that in the next couple of months I can finish the stuff that I really want to touch up. I can’t think of any other way to deal with it, aside from just waiting it out. I’m not too worried about it one way or the other. If I haven’t gotten my material in the shape I want it in, if it doesn’t suit me yet, then I’ll postpone again. I’m not going to put anything out until I really feel good about it. When did you first realize that you had a knack for coming up with melodies? I don’t know exactly when it was. I suppose the first song I can remember writing was when I was 14 years old. I just continued to do it. Sometimes it’s been a little bit sparse, and sometimes it’s been real prolific. It really varies. Were the first songs that you tried to write more or less folkish, or were you trying to do rock and roll stuff, too? The very first things I wrote were folk music-influenced. I still consider myself pretty much a folk musician, or commercial folk musician, or popular folkie, or whatever. It wasn’t until I started playing in a band with bass, drums, and guitar that I started to write for that and to think in those terms. Aside from a couple of blues progressions and stuff early on, it started off being all folkie stuff. Did you take any lessons from the neighborhood guitar teacher? No, I didn’t. When I was 13 or 14, I took about four lessons from a blind man whose name I can’t remember at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. We’d just sit down and play sort of nonspecific folk music - some blues, some rudimentary jazz. Then various people would show me stuff. I just wanted to become more familiar with the instrument. Did you ever go through the teenage rock band period? Yeah, I was in a couple of rock and roll bands when I was 15 and 16. Then when I was 18 I moved to New York City and played with what I suppose would be called a rock band. It wasn’t particularly heavy rock. It was blues-oriented. Were you playing electric then? Yeah, I was playing a Fender Duo-Sonic for a couple of years. Back when I was 15 and 16, with a group in North Carolina, I played a single-pickup Silvertone electric guitar, may it rest in peace. Those are coming back in vogue a little bit. Is that right? I noticed in Manny’s music store [New York City] that Danelectros are selling for exorbitant prices, all beat-up and funky looking as they are. How did you start playing in the first place? My folks bought me a guitar when I was 12. And then a couple of years later, I saved up enough money to buy this Silvertone and an amplifier for 40 bucks, I think it was. A couple of years later I bought a Gibson J-50, and I used that guitar until I was 20 or 22. The next guitar I bought was made by Mark Whitebook [See accompanying article] He lives south of L.A. now and hasn’t made guitars in a while. But he was the best. He made me a sort of Martin-style guitar, like a dreadnought-style, except that his workmanship and the tolerances to which he made these things were extremely fine. They were just great instruments. I’ve got four of his guitars now. Two that I use onstage have Takamine pickups. I used a Barcus-Berry for a while and a FRAP, but the Takamine pickup is isolated into six posts underneath the six strings. It’s a real responsive, good-sounding pickup. They changed their preamp a couple of years ago, and I like the older, brighter preamp sound a little better, so I managed to hold onto a couple and put them in the Whitebooks. The combination is really very good. Did you ever get those guitars from Whitebook himself, or did you go around collecting them? He made them for me, because I kept pestering him. He has difficulty making them, because he’s sensitive to the dust and the fine spray and stuff that’s involved in making guitars. And also he put in suck an immense amount of time that he was just below subsistence level when he was trying to be a professional guitar maker. He shaves all his parts down real fine, so it’s extremely work-intensive. John McLaughlin turned me on to him. He had a cedar-topped Whitebook, and I asked Mark to make me one, too. And that’s the one I still use today - a cedar top and a rosewood body. Were these designed to Whitebook’s specifications, or did you have some input as to what you wanted the guitar to play and sound like? Well, he and I had a number of long talks about how I played and what I liked, what sort of fretboard, what kind of neck shape, what kind of string tensions I’d be using, and how much force I’d be using on the guitar. It was a back and forth dialog for a number of years to come up with it. He is very responsive. I think it is partly a Martin design, but he changes the strutting a little bit underneath it. There are a number of innovations with the intersection of the supports underneath the soundboard ad stuff that he’s responsible for that are real good. Were the specific features of the Whitebook guitars things that you or he borrowed from other models? Well, we really didn’t discuss the tone. That was kind of agreed on by both of us. I don’t know what goes into getting the best tone out of a guitar. I think you want to go for as light and delicate and responsive a soundboard as possible - on that responds evenly to the range of the guitar. The only variables we could talk about were the gauge strings and how high I like my action and the width and shape of the neck. Did you request a Gibson-type neck radius? Yeah, that’s what I had been using, a Gibson with wider frets and kind of a round neck. Eventually, we settled on something in between that round neck and the triangular shape of a Martin neck, with the thinner frets that Martin puts on. It’s about average width for a steel-string neck. Did you record and perform live with the Whitebook guitars? Yes. Nowadays I’m back to using the cedar one. It’s really whichever one the engineer or soundman prefers. Recently, the cedar one has been finding a lot of favor. Both have the Takamine pickups. And I usually do guitar and vocals live at the same time. We seldom overdub either guitar or vocal - we try not to, anyway. This past time I’ve been so weak with lyrics, and I had laryngitis when we started to record this thing, so I find myself in the unfortunate position of having to overdub lead vocals in many cases. I don’t like to do it; it doesn’t have the same feel for me. Before the Whitebooks, did you record with the Gibson? Yes. I used it for the first three albums. Sweet Baby James is a Gibson. I changed over probably on Mud Slide Slim. Did you use a pickup on the Gibson for recording? No, no pickup for recording then. We put a Barcus-Berry underneath the bridge, but we didn’t use it to record with - just for live use. Does your style of playing require that you have an especially durable guitar, or are you light enough on it? I’m pretty light on it. I usually use Guild Phosphor Bronze light-gauge strings, and sometimes Martin strings. If I can get them, I occasionally use custom strings from a guy who works out in New Jersey called Phil Petillo. Because you play so lightly, do you require an especially loud instrument? It’s not really all that important. There’s a kind of a boxy middle section of a guitar’s tone that’s an unfortunate sound, for me. I like a lot of high-end and substantial bass response, too, but the curve should be a little flattened out, even a little drop, in the mid-sections. There’s that kind of boxy sound, like National steel guitars get - that sort of oinky, scranky sound. It’s good for some things, but it’s real limited. That’s the only thing we really discussed in terms of the sound. The first one Mark made me was a cedar-top, and following that he made me a sitka spruce one. Do the light-gauge strings require that you raise the action at all? I use a pretty low action, because my touch is not very hard. I never use a pick at all; I use ails, and no fingerpicks. Occasionally I’ll glue on some kind of carcinogenic fake nail, but I don’t if I can avoid it. Do you use a thumbpick? No, I don’t. I just grow my thumbnail. What happens if you break a nail? Well, it’s trouble. I usually have to glue on one of those artificial nails. I never could use fingerpicks. They all seem to cover the ball of your finger, the tip. I could ever get the dampening and response I needed out of my fingertips that way. I use my thumb and my first three fingers, and I could never really feel it properly by using fingerpicks. Zack Weisner - the bass player with the Flying Machine - and myself were working on some fingerpicks that basically tried to do the same things as your fingers. But I’ve been lazy about it. It’s been a slow and long process, but at some point maybe we’ll come up with something. About how long are the fingernails on your picking hand? I like to keep them about an eighth of an inch beyond the tip of the finger - a little bit longer maybe with the thumb. I don’t follow the line of the quick with the thumb; it’s a little bit longer on the outside of the thumb, so it acts a bit like a thumbpick. The light-gauge strings and bare fingers definitely make a difference in the tone you get. Well, I think that medium-gauge strings are a better sound, but I really don’t seem to have the strength to manipulate them. I know that most serious acoustic guitar players eventually move up to those, but I haven’t been able to manage yet. Were you playing fingerstyle right from the beginning? Pretty much. The very first couple of months I had a guitar, I was flailing away at it, you know. Then someone showed me what used to be called a Travis pick. But that’s two fingers and a thumb, and pretty soon I started to play with three and a thumb. I never had any formal guitar training or anything. A lot of my chords are kind of backwards, because if someone would show me a chord, I would just construct it some way that was appropriate on the guitar, and so my A chord is a little bit backwards, ad my B is backwards. A couple of my chords are strange sort of hybrids. Are they just fingered differently, of do they actually include different notes? They’re fingered differently, but they’re basically the same notes. How seriously did you view guitar when you were starting out? Did you practice several hours a day during any period? I never really thought of it as practice; it was a real obsession with me. I loved it. It was portable and it was private. I never considered at any time up until I was about 15 or so that I would try to perform or use it in any way publicly. It was always kind of a private delight for me. I spent a lot of time by myself, just always picking it up. My experience has been that that’s pretty much the way everybody gets into it who really gets into it. It’s not a matter oaf having to discipline yourself and apply it. You just can’t put the damn thing down. And I think that’s tapered off in recent years. I had a injury to my left hand. I cut the nerve to the outside of my left index finger - my barring finger, as it were. How did you do that? I was taking the meat out of a coconut, and I looked up to see a pelican dive into the water and just slipped and cut my hand right where the callus is at the base of the left index finger. It really wasn’t a very serious cut at all, but it left the outside of that finger dead. I don’t play as well as I did five years ago. I’ve been waiting for it to come back. I had reconstructive surgery on it; that’s sort of a hit or miss kind of thing, and it doesn’t seem to have done it any good. I’ve been trying to relearn a little bit since then. I can’t really tell if I’m making contact with the barre chord very often. Chord changes that I wrote five years ago are sometimes a little difficult for me now. So it’s unfortunate. It’s not a major disability or anything, but it’s frustrating. Did you have any mentors or friends who would show you chords of different things? Sort of catch as catch can. Aside from Danny Kortchmar, it was just listening and playing a lot. Kootch was one of the first people who interested me in blues. I used to spend summers with my family in Massachusetts, and he was up there, too. He played a lot of music for me and kind of opened my eyes a little bit. My older brother Alex is also a blues singer, and he turned my on to a lot of black music. Later on I got a heavy dose of Stax-Volt soul music consciousness from Joel O’Brien, who was the drummer with the Flying Machine. That’s always been my favorite kind of music. How far back does your relationship with Danny Kortchmar go? I guess I was 13 when I met him. But he and I played our first professional gig together as James & Kootch when I was 15 and he was 17. We worked coffeehouses, mostly in Massachusetts. At that point, was he more advanced on guitar than you? I think he was and still is. I learned an awful lot from him. I actually played relatively little guitar at that time. I mean, I had been doing it for years, but in the act I played harmonica and sang mostly. A difficult thing to do at the same time, but…..[laughs]. And then Kootch kind of tempted me away from high school and down to New York to start the Flying Machine. He had been working with a band called the King Bees down there, and they had broken up. We ran into each other over the summer and talked about starting a band. I went down to New York, and we got a gig for about eight months at a place called the Night Owl Café on Third and MacDougal. We did a few other gigs, and then finally, the group broke up in the summer of ’67, if I remember. By the time you got to New York, had the thriving folk scene in Greenwich village already died off? I guess Dylan had already recorded with the Band. The Lovin’ Spoonful had just been through this place where we played, and that was going on. I can’t really remember too many of the names of the other groups that were around at that point. Not too many of them got to be real well-known, but they were real influential. Did those people influence you much as a songwriter or performer? Yeah, a little bit - you know, the Jim Kweskin Jug Band and the Charles River Valley Boys. I used to listen to a lot of bluegrass, too, and Buddy Holly and Hank Williams - they’re singer/songwriters too, you know. I used to hear an awful lot of them down in North Carolina. There were a lot of country performers who wrote and sang. Dylan, of course, was a massive influence on me. Sam Cooke was another. There wasn’t as much of that as there is now. It’s almost required that you write your own stuff now - in at least a certain segment of popular music. You mentioned Dylan as a big influence, but there’s not much similarity between your music and his. He really took things another step. In ways he wasn’t that much different from people like Hank Williams and Buddy Holly, it he really expanded the kinds of things that people were writing songs about, and it was basically a man and a guitar who sang and wrote his own songs. It was extremely exciting to think that artists could do that and reach that amount of people. There were others, too, but he made it very attractive. How do you select what musicians to use on a specific project? It’s not so much a selection process, or studied, or a conscious sort of thing; it has to do with kind of a musical community. It’s always been surprising to me that that community is in Los Angeles. Although I’ve made a lot of albums out there, I’ve never lived out there. It’s sort of strange that that should be where most of my colleagues are. I’ve worked with Lee Sklar since 1971, and I still only work with Lee on bass - mostly because he makes himself available. He’s very busy and very in-demand, but he likes to play my stuff, and I love to work with him. I’ve been working on this album and for a couple of years on the road with [keyboardist] Billy Payne, and I admire him immensely. I think he’s profoundly talented. I worked with Kootch until we parted company. He had a couple of albums on his own and was working with Jackson Browne on an album that extended, and I found myself relying more and more on [guitarist] Dan Dugmore, who had initially worked with me just from time to time. It’s just sort of a community of players, and loyalties and preferences tend to stay the same. I like to work with the same people if I can. Having worked with Danny Kortchmar for so long, was it difficult playing with Dan Dugmore at first? Well, Dan is an amazing guitar player. I think pedal steel is the most demanding stringed instrument; it just requires incredible control and concentration. But his banjo, his acoustic guitar, and most recently his lead playing are fantastic, too. He’s really been stepping out a lot. I’ve often had trouble onstage with too much electric volume. I find I don’t have enough power in my voice to really rise above extreme dynamics. Electric guitar players tend to crank it, because that’s the dynamic of the instrument. You have to play loud to fulfill the potential of it. Dan is extremely sensitive to the overall sound. I have great admiration for him. Being self-taught, how did you arrive at the various chords and progressions that you would build songs around? It’s pretty much just trial and error. I don’t read music, and I can’t write it, and I never really followed chord changes or chord charts. I can read sort of Bible Belt chord symbols, you know. I can get away with that, and when I do sessions - on my own records or with other people - I apologize for my inability to read. But I can usually get over okay with it. Does the lack of formal training create any obstacles when you’re in the studio showing a song to trained musicians who "speak theory"? I’ve always been lucky to work with incredible people who could easily grasp what I was trying to do. I have a good grasp of theory, but I don’t know counterpoint really, and I don’t fully understand arrangements and what’s appropriate for what. Most of the arrangements that we do are head arrangements, usually with a little bit of help from the keyboard player. Carole King and later Clarence McDonald, Don Grolnick, Craig Doerge, and most recently Billy Payne - these are keyboard players I’ve worked with, and they have always helped me work things out and communicate. I can write out just the letters to a bass line and then the letters and symbols to chords - plus 2, augmented, diminished, major, major 7th, and minor 7th. Generally, speaking, anything I can play, I can find a way to communicate. I don’t notice it as an obstacle. I’m sure that if I had a solid formal education in music, I could be doing a lot more. But since playing and composing are so much the same things for me - it’s sort of a serendipitous kind of process - I never really notice what I can’t see. It’s an I-don’t-miss-what-I-never-knew kind of thing. I have no double that some education would be a good thing; I’m just too damn lazy to do it. Was your version of "Up On The Roof" [Flag] a head arrangement? Yeah, that all comes down to my acoustic guitar arrangement. My style, I suppose you would call sort of pseudo-classical, in that I don’t play block chords. I fingerpick everything, so that there’s usually a pretty complete bass line and a couple of internal lines to the thing. It sort of comes out like a simple piano arrangement. Do you ever record by starting out with just the guitar and vocal and then adding a band? Or do you begin with a partial or full band? It depends, but usually it starts off the way it is written. I communicate first with the keyboards, to really put an harmonic chord to it, and then Lee can read my mind by now and knows what do to on bass. I’ve been working on this record with Rick Schlosser, who’s a great drummer. Do you play the guitar acoustically in the studio and just use amplification for stage? No, we take it both ways. We often mike it with a small personal mike equipped into the soundhole - a Sony PCM 50 or something. And I use the Takamine pickup as well. We can get a pretty good balance with those two things. But I’ve also used an AKG occasionally, sometimes a Beyer, and sometimes the extremely directional shotgun mikes are interesting to use. But basically, a good quality personal microphone in the soundhole as well as the Takamine pickup seem to do the job. What is that V-shaped acoustic guitar that you use onstage to play "Steamroller Blues" [Sweet Baby James]? That’s a Takamine too. I think it was an experiment making an acoustic flying wedge. Their pickups are good, those people. The actual construction of the guitar is not that fine, but it’s damn rugged. And for an off-the-peg guitar that amplifies well, I’ve found nothing better than Takamines. I think that they’ve hit on a pretty good thing. As I say, I like the old preamps better, because they are hotter and crisper-sounding. I’m interested in the Ovation company’s pickup, too; those are piezoelectric pickups, like the Takamine, or FRAP, or Barcus-Berry, but they’re very specifically isolated as to each string, and they’re incorporated into the bridge. If you can get into the works of those, you can really fine-tune your sound with them. But I’ve never tried to take it out of the context of their plastic guitar, which is good - it’s okay - but I don’t like it as much as playing a wooden one. When you sing "Shower the People" [In the Pocket] onstage, you’re accompanied only by your guitar and a reel-to-reel tape recorder with your own prerecorded vocal harmony. How do you get it to come in on cue, shut off, and then start up again? The secret is that it’s stereo and it’s a Revox. Different tape machines have different ways of shutting off when the tape runs out. On most, when the tape runs out these arms snap back and shut off - like a Teac and most studio machines. A Revox has a photosensitive cell and a light just opposite it, and the tape runs between the cell and the light. As soon as it runs out, the light hits the cell and turns the machine off. So I spliced in some clear leader, so that the machine stops itself at the end of every cue. We just played around with the interval to the point where at 15ips it would shut itself off, and we recue exactly on the upbeat. Then the program that the audience is going to hear is on one side of it, and we run that program and a click track through the monitor system onstage. So onstage I’m getting time to stay with, although I have to know the right speed to count things off. So it stops by a photo-electric automatic shut-off being triggered by the clear leader passing through, and then I turn the machine back on with a footswitch on the fourth beat of the measure before I want it to come in. Also the footswitch has a stop button, because occasionally it runs through the leader. There have been a couple of performances where there was so little ambient light onstage that the photoelectric cell didn’t activate, and it just steamed on through, so you’d find yourself singing the second verse with the third chorus about to come in [laughs]. So that’s how that works, and it works well. I’m surprised more people haven’t done that. When you compose, do you use a tape recorder, or do you write things out, or make mental notes? All of those. Usually, I carry around a small tape recorder - one of those micro-cassettes - to remember melodies and harmonic lines and stuff like that. Have you investigated any of the home 4-track units? Yeah, I did get one of those Teac Porta-studios, the 4-track cassettte, but I didn’t use it that much. I bought an Otari half-inch 8-track, and I’ve used that on the road a few times to try to record shows. But to record live with a band, I think you need 16 tracks to get the separation you need. I hear that there are a couple of digital programs coming out that can be used with an IBM Personal Computer, so it should be an exciting time coming up for recording live and in small home studios. I’m really looking forward to that. And I’m really excited about the technology of trying to interface guitar with synthesizers. Do you have any feedback problems playing the acoustic with a pickup? Yeah, we cover the soundhole. We used to use a piece of foam glued onto the back of a lighting gel, taped down with regular masking tape or whatever was available. We started with just a piece of cardboard. That’s less and less a problem for some reason; we don’t seem to be getting that bad feedback now. We cover it up anyway, because it’s not necessary to have the hole open - the sound is all coming from the top. Do you use capos very often? Yeah, a lot. It’s really the thing that shows how rudimentary a player I am. I can’t seem to get away from using a capo, because I’m very stuck on open positions. Are there certain songs that couldn’t be fingered in standard tuning without a capo? Yeah, like "Fire and Rain" [Sweet Baby James], which is capoed on the 3rd fret. For the past five years or so when Warner Bros. puts out sheet music to my songs, we always put a note for the capo position if one was used. I was told that some of the early sheet music was kind of confusing for people trying to play it, because they couldn’t hear the same intervals in the chord positions. But I us the capo shamelessly, all the time. Do you have a specific model that you prefer? I just used one of the stretchy elastic ones all along, but now I’ve changed to a Shubb, which is a sort of clamp thing. It has a little cam with a lever on it that mashes on a tine that goes underneath the neck. It has the same kind of action as your thumb and forefinger when you barre a chord. That’s good, because it changes fast, and you don’t end up throwing your bass string flat by shoving the capo around when you change it. It’s not unusual for me, either, to write a song with three separate capo positions - just out of stone laziness and inability. We do a tune called "Your Smiling Face" live onstage, and that has three capo positions in it. So in the course of the song you actually move the capo while performing? Yeah, I sure do. It ends up ludicrously high. It starts on the 2nd fret, moves to the 4th, and then to the 6th. You call your use of the capo and open chord positions rudimentary, but your use of passing chords and moving bass lines exhibits a considerable knowledge of theory. Did you ever study theory? I studied it in high school for a year, and when I was a kid my parents bought me cello lessons. I was a poor student, and I didn’t enjoy it. It was one of those things when your mother and father are trying to better you, and you just don’t have any appreciation for it at all. So I picked up the guitar when I was 12, instead of the cello, but I think I got a lot from it. I’ve never had any other formal musical training, and I was a hopeless student. But I got a real sense of bass lines from that. What sort of music do you enjoy listening to these days? The guitarist I really admire is Ry Cooder. I think he is really a beautiful player. I always loved the Beatles. When I made my first album, I was using leftover Beatles studio time. We were working in the same studio, at Trident. They were making the "White Album," and that took them about six to nine months. I would just go in pretty much in between their scheduled dates, and I was around for a lot of their sessions. The Beatles were a major influence to me. I still thin that their music is phenomenal - things like McCartney’s bass lines. In terms of rock and roll or popular music, he made it a much more melodic axe. I also like people like [jazz bassist] Ron Carter. My favorite pianist has always been Bill Evans. I think that I have pretty standard tastes in music - Latin music, Cuban music, Brazilian music, too. How did you connect with the Beatles and Apple Records? Peter Asher was working in A&R at Apple. It was a fledgling company at that point. He listened to everything that came his way, and he liked my demo tape. Had you already sent that around to other companies? I sent it to everyone, first in the United States and then in England. Couldn’t get arrested. Then Peter liked the stuff and played it, I believe, for Paul McCartney. And McCartney more than anyone else took a personal interest in my project, although George Harrison was also very helpful, and they both played on my first album. As a 21-year-old debut artist working with the Beatles, didn’t that just blow you away? Totally, yeah. It was entirely amazing, a very exciting period. I was just a kid looking to have fun and knock around, you know. I took my music seriously, but never thought of it as a career - people weren’t really doing that back then. When the Beatles and Peter Asher acknowledged that they thought my stuff was good, the top came right off.