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James Taylor; Like the James who came before him, the Dean of '70s Soft Rock turned emotional chaos into a new kind of cool. But hits like "Fire and Rain" only hinted at the torment behind Sweet Baby James' tragic chic.
By David Browne
12/07/2001 You find him where you would expect to find him. One moment you are motoring down a suburban block in the Massachusetts hamlet of Lenox; the next, you are turning onto private property. The driveway, a curving stretch of cracked pavement barely wide enough for one vehicle, has to be vigilantly navigated to avoid swerving into the maples that flank its sides. For five laborious minutes you climb, through unlocked wrought-iron gates and a wilderness that would spook a Blair witch, and it occurs to you that there is probably no better landscape for him to roam, brooding over the choices he has made in his life. His house--split-level and half sided in redwood clapboards--is modest. The glass dome on the porch light is cracked; a battered pair of work boots lies beneath it. The home is as unassuming as its owner, who comes to the door with a grin somewhere between bemused and waggish. You expect the wire-rimmed glasses, the bald pate, the gray-flecked rim of remaining hair--the look of an absentminded physics professor. You don't expect him to be so tall--6 foot 3--or to have a body that, even in loose gray slacks and denim shirt, seems as lean and rugged as a vintage oar. In other words, James Taylor in repose is not much different from James Taylor on the road, from which the laconic troubadour is taking a respite. His furlough is brief; in another week, he will be back on a bus. To Taylor, touring is "basically blue-collar work," the music he plays on those stages "a modest effort," but something he says has "served me well." As he sang nearly 30 years ago on his album One Man Dog, "Everybody knows that I'm just a Joe that likes to hang around/ Talking about my problems...." Such humble declarations befit Taylor's demeanor, his surroundings, and his lingering self-doubts, and they are also the key to his ongoing appeal. For nearly 35 years, he has endured hits and flops, marriages and divorces, newborns and burials, binges and recoveries and more binges, and he has documented it all in song for an audience that sees its own perseverance in his. Not only has this "professional autobiographer" (his words) survived, but he has done so with his plaintive, unadorned voice and droll humor intact. His recorded body of work, from James Taylor in 1968 to Hourglass in 1997, is of a piece in both mood and lyrics; as soon as you hear that crisp fingerpicking guitar and resonant timbre, you know it's him. At 53, Taylor has become part of the national landscape--never more apparent than on Oct. 20, when he sang "Fire and Rain" at the Concert for New York City and transfixed an audience of firefighters and police, for whom the line "I always thought that I'd see you again" couldn't have cut deeper. "The songs have this richness," says Taylor's friend and former guitarist Danny Kortchmar. "They're like Christmas carols. It sounds like they were written a hundred years ago." "He's becoming a classic part of America," says Peter Asher, his longtime and now former manager and producer. "Comparing him to Frank Sinatra is not silly. He's an icon of a certain era of American music." And no one is more surprised than James Taylor that he has arrived at such a place. He was the right screwup at the right time. Thirty-two years ago this month, Taylor began recording his second album. Its success was not a given. His debut, James Taylor , made for the Beatles' nascent Apple label when he was just 20, had not sold well. After its release, he cracked, landing briefly in a Stockbridge, Mass., mental hospital, where he completed a new batch of songs--including "Fire and Rain," inspired in part by the suicide of a friend. The new album was pulled together so quickly that the mock blues vamp "Steamroller" was recorded despite the fact that Taylor had a cold. There weren't even enough tracks for a full-length record, so three song fragments were combined into "Suite for 20G," so named for the $20,000 advance Warner Bros. Records (Taylor's new home) would pay him upon delivery. It was "just...another album," remembers Taylor between sips of coffee, seated at an umbrella-shaded table in his backyard, the Berkshire mountains spread before him. "I had no idea if it was any good or not." One person did. "I remember playing it for some friends," says his brother Livingston, two years James' junior. "And they thought it was nice. And I looked at them and said, 'No, you don't understand. This is a truly great record and it's going to be enormously popular.'" At least one Taylor's instincts were right. Reeling from Altamont and the demise of the Beatles, the rock audience was primed for inward and less ornate music. Released in 1970, the folkish rambles, pensive lyrics, and whimsical blues of Taylor's landmark Sweet Baby James couldn't have been better timed. "It's one of those things where somebody writes very personal songs about their own experience, and what they're feeling turns out to be shared by many people," says Asher. The album sold nearly 2 million copies and made him both the poster boy of the New Mellow and the archetype of a new breed of introspective, psychologically damaged antihero--a rebel truly without a cause. "I was babysitting when this friend of mine came over with a 45 of 'Fire and Rain,'" recalls Shawn Colvin, then a teenager and now a friend and occasional duet partner. "We were all in love with him. Forget it." As for his musical appeal, Colvin remembers that "he was dark--like an old soul." Not even starstruck fans like Colvin knew how dark. If America wanted a frail spirit to help guide it through the new decade, it picked the right man. By the end of the '60s, Taylor had already lived a troubled life. The second of five kids and son of an aloof father--Dr. Isaac Taylor, dean of the medical school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill--he felt like an outsider at a young age, having been born in Boston but raised in the woods of the South. Livingston remembers his older brother as "observant and fairly quiet--always held his cards close." His teen years were marked by folk-club hoots (many of them on Martha's Vineyard, where his family spent their summers and where Taylor still owns 140 acres) and what he calls "a typical late-adolescent breakdown"--albeit one that led to his first psychiatric hospital stay, at suburban Boston's McLean, where he was fed Thorazine. (Livingston and their sister Kate followed James there, a hint of what Taylor would later refer to in song as his "f---ed-up family.") After almost a year at McLean, Taylor fled to New York in 1966, where he and Kortchmar watched their first band, the Flying Machine, take off and crash. His big break in London, two years later, imploded when Apple began to rot. Not surprisingly, Taylor remembers the success of Sweet Baby James as being "very gratifying. It was what I was hoping for, that people would listen to my music and I could make a living doing it." But the demons of his youth never left. Taylor maintains he never thought in terms of an organized career: "The way I started being a songwriter is I pretended I could do it, and it turned out I could. And suddenly people were taking [me] seriously in spite of the fact that [I was] just playing at it." Suddenly, too, came the obligations and media scrutiny. "Way too much attention for him," says Kortchmar, who knew Taylor as a teen. "Painfully shy. Think Kurt Cobain unplugged." The Cobain analogy extended beyond social discomfort. Taylor had begun using heroin in New York, and Asher recalls his client "disappearing into the bathroom for long periods" during the Apple sessions. "I'm probably genetically predisposed to substance abuse, so I didn't stand a chance," Taylor says now. "It just felt like an amazing release. It felt like it solved all kinds of problems for me." It also created all kinds of obstacles. Grappling with the fame brought on by Sweet Baby James , Taylor withdrew further into various addictions. "Sometimes he'd be on methadone and then on some weird drinking binge," says Asher. "Sometimes I'd notice the shows would really be slowing down, and I'd say, 'Are you okay? There's obviously a problem here. What should we do?' Sometimes he'd say no, but other times he would say, 'Yes, we should stop for a bit and [I'll] go somewhere.'" Taylor became such a stolid and sedentary stage presence that a special chair, with a built-in guitar stand and one arm removed so as not to hinder his playing, was constructed. The albums from that time--1971's Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon and One Man Dog--were ambling, alternately melancholic and jocular, and brimming with effortlessly fluid folk-pop. But tellingly, the working title of One Man Dog was Farewell to Showbiz. "It's like anything else," Taylor says. "You arrive at a certain place in your life and you look around you and say, 'Well, this is it. What do I think of this?' Sort of like a mini-midlife crisis, but at the age of 23, 24." Salvation announced itself with his 1972 marriage to Carly Simon, an equally neurotic pop star. Like his career, the union, says Taylor, was "an unconsciously arrived-at decision. Seemed like a good idea at the time, and in many ways it was." Instantly, they were the royal couple of the nouveau-hippie rich. "I thought, Great, maybe it'll straighten him out," recalls Kortchmar. The signs were promising. In 1975, after several years of declining album sales, Taylor returned to commercial form with Gorilla, which signaled a new level of sophistication in his work. A year later, he left Warner Bros. for a then-remarkable $1 million-an-album deal with Columbia. Propelled by an impromptu remake of the Otis Blackwell oldie "Handy Man," 1977's JT became another benchmark. By then, he and Simon had two children, Sarah ("Sally"), now 27, and Ben, 24. But Taylor was a man divided. The preeminent symbol of pop sensitivity--in songs like "Shower the People" and his chart-topping cover of Carole King's "You've Got a Friend"--embodied that life. "My dad geared up one day to spank me," Sally recalls, "and got the hand raised and then just started weeping." Similarly, he was so upset about leaving Warner that he was found crying in a bar the night he was supposed to sign with Columbia. However, the other Taylor was, by his own admission, "a functional addict," a smacked-out metaphor for the high-life side of the '70s. "There were about five times in my life when I should have been out of here," he says, "and probably wiped out a good percentage of my brain." "He was Mr. Sensitive," Asher says, laughing, "while trying to f-- - your sister and steal your drugs." The most serious wake-up call came in 1981, on the eve of a Japanese tour. Prohibited from carrying methadone overseas, Taylor was forced to endure a hellish cold turkey. "That was brutal," he recalls. "It really let me know I was in chemical jail." Complicating matters, his marriage was unraveling. "When he and Carly were getting on, there was no finer couple," Asher says. "And when they weren't, it was a nightmare. Carly's a complicated woman, James was a junkie, and it didn't make for an easy time for anybody." Even the Taylor children took to trashing cigarettes they'd find around the house, knowing they were harmful to their father. Finally, in late 1981, Simon announced the couple's split. Simon (who was unavailable for comment) has maintained that drugs helped break up their marriage, something Taylor will not dispute. "But you have to examine what state I was in when I got married," he says. "It's easy to say the drugs were responsible; it's as easy to say sobering up was responsible for breaking up [my] marriage. That's what it couldn't stand." In effect, the relationship ended with the '70s, which felt doubly symbolic--the end of an era and, many thought, James Taylor . Only glimmers of those dark days are now evident at his concerts. With each tour since the late '70s, Taylor has become increasingly spirited on stage. At this summer's Pull Over shows, he sang the wistful ballads--"You Can Close Your Eyes," "Don't Let Me Be Lonely Tonight"--his huge, devoted following adores. But he also smiled, mugged, and jigged through uptempo crowd-pleasers like "Mexico" and his cover of "How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You)." He can't cite the number of times he has sung "Fire and Rain," but he maintains it does not bore him. "How does someone bake a loaf of bread for the thousandth time?" he replies. "It's like that. The doing of it is fascinating. And dammit, somewhere in the middle of it, I remember where I was when I wrote the second or third verse, and I'll make an emotional connection. It has that effect on the people who listen to it, and I'm one of them." Of course, there is one noticeable difference from the James of old. "I won't say I never worried about it," he says of the loss of his famous locks. "But I knew there was nothing I could do about it. Also, I am myself for a living. I don't animate a character. Fortunately, it doesn't seem to have made a lot of difference to my audience...that I'm as bald as a billiard ball!" With that, Taylor actually laughs. Although he remains a man of a few carefully chosen words--pausing before answering questions, smiling slightly and staring off into space when something amuses him- -he is a changed man. With the help of his second wife, actress Kathryn Walker, whom he wed in 1985, he sobered up for good. It was not without anxiety. "I worried, as people do, that if [I made] that change [I] wouldn't be able to write songs anymore," he says. "But I was willing to live with that if it meant putting an end to that part of my life." Luckily, it didn't: 1985's That's Why I'm Here and especially 1991's New Moon Shine found him settling into adult-contemporary grace while widening his subject matter to include politics and his own emotional awakening. "James was a guy who, if he started drinking too much, would turn into someone else," says Kortchmar. "Never has anyone been better off straight than James." Still, pop radio grew less interested, and record sales rarely moved past the million mark, so Taylor became a mainstay of the concert circuit. The reasons are partly financial: His album and song- publishing royalties, especially for his older work, are only a fraction of the going rate. Despite 18 albums (11 of them platinum or better) and the steady sales of his Greatest Hits disc, touring is what puts food on his table. "Of my main 10 sources of income," he says, "it's the first eight." But hearing applause fulfills something in him royalty statements never could. "Why is he sitting on a bus somewhere between Reno and Carson City?" asks Livingston, a fellow musician. "Because he has a deep personal need to reconnect with his audience, to tell them he loves them and to hear from them that they love him." Taylor's perpetual touring has not been easy for those around him. One casualty was his marriage to Walker, which ended in 1996. And early on, Sally understood she was "going to have to compete for my dad's attention. To realize he is adored and wanted by many people-- that's been a problem for me and my family at different times in my life." In recent years, Taylor himself has endured loss, including the death of his father (to old age), his brother Alex (to substance abuse), and two cherished and longtime collaborators, pianist Don Grolnick (to cancer) and drummer Carlos Vega (a suicide). "For a while there, they were dropping like flies," Taylor says in his understated way. "It was a rough stretch. We just had to sort of slap ourselves and move forward." Again, music equaled therapy: "Enough to Be on Your Way," the most moving song on the Grammy- winning Hourglass, dealt poignantly with his brother's death. Peter Asher remembers thinking "if he gets through all this without going back to drugs, he couldn't be cleaner. And he did." If there's been a consistent thread in Taylor's life beyond his music, it's that just when things appear to have settled, a new round of life changes shakes them up. The latest, and among the most positive, additions to this legacy have just awakened and are visiting Taylor in his backyard--Henry and Logan, his pink, chubby, and serious-faced 5-month-old twins. Propping them on his lap one at a time, Taylor breaks into baby sounds: "Ha-boo! Ha-boo!" "Tell him what happened the first time you played the guitar for Henry," says Taylor's third wife, Kim Smedvig, a pert woman of 46. "He threw up!" "It's the major-seventh chord he hates," Taylor deadpans. This latest phase of Taylor's unpredictable life began in 1996, when he started dating Smedvig, PR director for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. After pregnancy attempts proved unsuccessful, a friend volunteered to carry their child--or children, as it turned out. Taylor and Smedvig wed this past February, six weeks before Logan's and Henry's birth. "I had no reason to expect I would get another chance to get it right," Taylor says. "I finally have the possibility of being a decent husband and father. And I have every hope I'll do a better job." The news that Taylor would be a dad again, and at his age, sent a tremor through his family. "Surprised is one of the lesser of the emotions," says Sally, who, like Ben, is an upstart musician. "I was shocked and fearful and happy and freaked out. Fearful that it would take him away from us, my brother and I." More than a few friends express concern, including Asher and Kortchmar, who haven't heard from Taylor in years. But for once, Taylor seems comfortable both on stage and off. "Is James chased by demons? Can he be distant?" asks Livingston. "The answer is, absolutely." But, he adds, "he's in a good deal less pain in his 50s than he was in his 20s and 30s." How Taylor's tranquillity will affect his music (a new album is due this spring) remains to be seen, since angst has fueled so many of his best songs. But more than ever, he appears to be taking life in stride. He doesn't even reject ferocious attacks on his music, as epitomized by Lester Bangs' 1971 critical diatribe " James Taylor Marked for Death," in which the late wimp-rock-hating scribe (and Almost Famous curmudgeon) fantasized about disemboweling the musician with a broken bottle of Ripple. Taylor says he's never read that rant or any other dismissive reviews, but observes, "If you think [my music] is sentimental and self-absorbed, I agree with you. If you like that kind of thing, then listen to it. If you don't, you don't have to remove it from the face of the earth. It's not for everybody. But to me, there's still something compelling about doing it. Regardless of what the guy with the bottle of Ripple feels." Cradling Logan, Taylor drifts to the front door. The driveway needs a new layer of asphalt, and, like any Joe, he's waiting for the workers to arrive. Before you can say it, he does. "Handyman work," he cracks, flashing a puckish smile. |
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