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BOOK REVIEW Novel approach to James Taylor story By Scott Alarik, Globe Correspondent, 12/4/2001 Timothy White, editor in chief of Billboard, took a magnificent gamble
in his approach to what will surely become the definitive biography of the
man who defined the singer-songwriter genre. Taylor has a genius for
writing songs that seem intimate without revealing much about himself.
Even to those closest to him, he is an aloof and inscrutable figure.
White dealt with this by telling a story that feels more like a
sweeping 19th-century novel than a pop-star bio. After a glimpse of Taylor
at the 1996 memorial service for his father, the tale begins with the
Taylor family's rise to affluence in 17th-century Scotland.
Slowly, pausing often for colorful description of the growth of the
folk music that will spark James Taylor's muse, White tells the saga of
what he calls ''a bedeviled family tree.'' Each generation of Taylors
strangely haunts the next, as fathers fail to connect with sons, leaving
them in turn unable to be close to their children.
All this background has its payoff: Taylor appears, quietly tormented
by the emotional remoteness of his brilliant, formidable, and alcoholic
father, Ike, whose own father was the most tragically blighted of the
clan. By the time James writes his first song, at age 14, we know the
ancient shadow beneath which his brooding persona is cast, and we care
deeply about whether his anguished struggles will succeed.
It was Ike Taylor who broke the chain. When it happens, White's
meticulous storytelling captures the drama and danger as a
heroin-addicted, 18-year-old James calls his father for help, and he, at
this crucial moment, responds with love bordering on heroic. It is a
thrilling moment.
Thanks to James's mother, Trudy, music was always a sanctuary, a way to
feel the bond of family, and to explore deep, private feelings. Lively
kitchen hootenannies gave all the children a lifelong love of folk music,
and four of them - James, Alex, Kate, and Livingston - went on to music
careers.
James Taylor's 1968 rise happened with an almost fairy-tale simplicity.
Scuffling around London, he simply auditioned at the Beatles-owned Apple
Records and, after a nod from Paul McCartney, was given a recording
contract that propelled the obscure songwriter to stardom.
It is difficult to like Taylor very much at this point, in that he
reacted to success in the way he had to failure, and returned to using
heroin.
Taylor remains a curiously distant character, glimpsed mainly through
the eyes of others. His former wife, Carly Simon, whose emotionally
abusive parents make the Taylors look like June and Ward Cleaver, began
writing troubled songs about one-sided romance soon after their marriage,
and remarked to friends that Taylor ''goes away forever every day.''
By 1974, Taylor was approaching his music as a workaday job, churning
out commercially successful records with his canny blend of personal
ballads and winsome covers of old R&B and pop chestnuts, which got
airplay even when his own songs could not, and kept his career afloat.
To enliven these stretches, White offers provocative peeks at the
glitterati of Martha's Vineyard, where Taylor lives when business does not
take him elsewhere, and at the seamy underside of the pop industry.
Taylor remains an elusive figure as the book leaves him at midlife,
starting another family with his new wife, Kim Smedvig, determined not to
pass the old Taylor curses on to his children, and apparently succeeding.
But he still seems wedged into that deep gray place that keeps him apart
from his world, from those he loves best, and perhaps even from himself -
and from which he draws his best songs.
''After a while you want to be a little bit fonder of your burdens,''
he tells the author at book's end, ''because they're what makes life
interesting, and they're basically what your work is in this life.'' Even
in the hands of as thoughtful and kind a biographer as White, that's as
close as we get.
This story ran on page D2 of the Boston Globe on
12/4/2001. |
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