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"James Taylor: Immense Singer, Considerable Cranium" MOJO September 1997 Timothy White James Taylor: smoothly crafty songsmithery his stock-in-trade. Or is it? Timothy White meets the troubled artist behind 1997's most quietly successful comeback. The Handyman's Tale
"So the sun shines on this funeral
It rolls across the western sky "A reading from the book of Revelation: The New Jerusalem," announces the rangy man at the foot of the altar, peering down at the open Scripture through wire-rimmed glasses as he towers over the bowed heads of the congregation. "And I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea," James Taylor gently recites, his sombre nasal sonority familiar but authoritative. "And I, John, saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband . . . " Several hundred people are assembled in the Church of the New Covenant in Boston's Back Bay on the morning of November 30, 1996 for a memorial service for Taylor's father, who died on November 3 at the age of 75.Dr Isaac 'Ike' Montrose Taylor II was a graduate of Harvard Medical School, lieutenant commander in the United States Navy, former chief resident at Massachusetts General Hospital, Dean of the Medical School of the University of North Carolina and sire of a famed generation of musical siblings. "The 'New Jerusalem' passage had a lot of layers of meaning for my father," James confides some months later when we meet to talk about his life and work. "The biblical aspect of a new beginning is there, and settlers coming to this country who were looking for the same sort of new start, but also my dad had a sailboat that he dearly n loved, and he named it New Jerusalem." The balding Taylor often seems spindly and careworn, but up close he is sinewy and boyishly patrician. Dressed in a brown turtleneck, caramel cords and rubber-soled leather brogues, his wiry frame is crisply muscled, and his clear eyed gaze blends intelligence with diffidence. Whenever our conversation veers off into the wildlife or topography of New England or the Tidewater South, Taylor is an astute amateur naturalist, and, as politics arise, his once-risky leftist, Civil Rights activist views now sound positively senatorial. What sets Taylor apart from most of his privileged lineage is a lacerating degree of self-knowledge, enforcing a humility that melds simple gratitude with a gripping survival instinct. The shadow that sometimes falls across James's intense stare when he forces himself to recount his family torments is perhaps the grim certainty that nothing guarantees anything, yet people are still worth depending on. This June, taylor released Hourglass, now well on its way to becoming the singer-songwriter 's biggest commercial success since 1970's three-million-selling Sweet Baby James landed him on the cover of Time magazine. Taylor hasn't been a substantial concern for UK album buyers in the period since Mud slide Slim And The Blue Horizon followed Sweet Baby James into the Top 10 in the summer of 1971, yet Taylor's sound has always drawn from the music of his English and Scottish ancestry as transplanted in the emergent culture of the New World. Taylor's recording career took shape in London, quite literally in the shadow of The Beatles. Apple Records A&R chief Pete Asher signed James and produced his debut album in 1968, in between the Fabs recording or mixing works-in-progress like Hey Jude, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, and Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except For Me And My Monkey. Taylor, who was living in Notting Hill, had a monkey of his own that was attracting unwanted attention. Before he could promote his self-titled Apple album; James would have to seek treatment at the Austin Riggs hospistal in Massacchussets for a nagging heroin habit he'd acquired two years previously in New York's Greenwich Village. That Taylor would ultimately conquer his addiction, survive his initial struggles with superstardom, and grow in artistic stature in the aftermath of his flamboyant but ill-fated 10-year marriage to Carly Simon are now part of his lengthening legend as a self-effacing kinsman of Jimmie Rodgers, Hoagy Carmichael, Ewan MacColl and other troubadour-stylists of Anglo-American song. In tribute, Garth Brooks named his daughter Taylor, and Sting cites him as the contemporary performer he most admires "because he's always been both a complete natural and a complete original. His singing and his sound are always contemporary and yet timeless, totally immune to mere fashion." Fans who've spent decades combing Taylor's lyrics for drugs allusions or clues to romantic attachments have allowed a few loose threads to distract them from the larger tapestry: his immigrant heritage and its thematic underpinnings of much of his music. Most of Taylor's songwriting concerns itself with restlessness, wanderlust, the lure of travel and the lives of the soldiers, troubadours, outlaws and hobos drawn to it. When James hasn't authored such picaresque ditties and musical narratives, he has borrowed from the time-hallowed song and air canon of Scottish-Irish tradition, interpreting folk ballads like One Morning In May, Wandering and The Water Is Wide. Peopled by those who traverse it seeking fortune, glory or forgetfulness in its farther shores, the bounding main and its briny depths are unceasingly evoked, whether to connote beauty and loneliness, signify redemption or renewal, recall a directionless time, represent a new beginning, announce the end of the line, or simply extend an occasion to splash about. Descended from Scottish seafarers who sailed to America in the late 1700s, James Taylor toiled as a 12-year-old on the decks on his Uncle Henry's trawlers - "knee-high in live flounder, tossing the trash fish overboard with a spiked pole" and now spends his 49th summer tacking with his own single-masted sloop off Nantucket Sound. The mariner novels by Patrick O'Brian like Master And Commander and The Wine-Dark Sea about the Royal Navy during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792-1815) are, he enthuses, "ripping yarns of the sea that illuminate the evolution of an era that encompassed the migrations of my ancestors." The Taylor ancestry actually features in this renowned 17-book series among the genuine ships, incidents and personages from the annals of maritime trade and naval adventure. In The Wine-Dark Sea, Captain Jack Aubrey's privateering crew on the HMS Surprise see a bobbing barrel in choppy waters off South America. They examine the cask, and deduce it's a "Bedford hog", as used by the whaling ships out of Massachusetts. "Then how come it has Isaac Taylor's mark?" asks one deck-hand, referring to an eminent Scottish merchant resettled on the North Carolina coast. That a forefather of the fellow who sang Shower The People should play a bit-part in these storm-tossed tales throws fresh light onto three decades of songwriting. The known Taylor pedigree stretches back to the Angus coast of Scotland. From Marykirk, Kincardineshire, the Taylors had shipping interests in the nearby coastal town of Montrose, in 1790 a crowded crossroads for naval vessels and privateers. The fourth son out of eight children, the original Isaac Taylor sought in America both his fortune and escape from the social and religious vicissitudes then besetting Scotland. Settling in a plantation outside New Bern, North Carolina, Isaac traded with the West Indies and prospered mightily— even despite his ship, the Rainbow, being temporarily seized off the coast of the Caicos Islands in April 1799 by two French privateers, but rescued by none other than the real-life HMS Surprise, only to be forfeited to the British Crown to recoup the cost of its recapture. When Isaac Taylor died in 1846, he left most of his extensive holdings (which included 7 5 slaves ranging from 11 -month-old Betty to 64-year-old Bill Foy) to his wife and six daughters. His son Alexander was cut out of the will because his drinking habits were considered "excessive". "All these matters run pretty deep," says James Taylor, "and the Civil War was about to change all of them forever." In 1863 Union soldiers commandeered the Taylor house for the headquarters of the 45th Massachusetts Regiment. (Two old-maid Taylor sisters, who continued to live on the third floor of the mansion, refused to co-operate with the Yankees, and had their provisions raised to their window by pulley. Mrs Alexander Taylor, known locally as the 'Prison Mother' for her work nursing Confederate inmates, also spied for the rebels and ran an underground mail service.) At the end of the Civil War the Taylors abandoned plantation life for the professions of medicine and law, moving to Morganton, 200 miles north-west of New Bern. Isaac Montrose Taylor 1, one of Alexander Taylor's two sons, begat another physician son, Alexander Taylor II— James's grandfather. "My grandmother, Theodosia Haynes, fell in love with my grandfather, and her sudden marriage came as a shock to the Haynes family. There was a tradition in my family that wives would deliver the children at home, and so my great-grandfather Isaac was the doctor in charge. Theodosia died two weeks after giving birth to my father, having contracted 'childbirth fever ' - basically a uterine infection after my great-grandfather went in after the placenta. Naturally, the Haynes wanted to know how she died, and were told it had been tuberculosis. But then the truth came out and there was a major rift and a scandal. My great-grandfather became suicidal and died about two months later from drink. " This Gothic tragedy next claimed the inconsolable Alexander Taylor II, who was so overcome by whiskey-aggravated grief that he couldn't bear the responsibility of bringing up his new son, James's father Ike. "My father was raised by his aunt and uncle. My father's father was pretty much an abandoned alcoholic - there was nothing they could do for you before 19 3 5. The shame propelled my dad to succeed from an early age; he felt he had something to prove." Dr Taylor was doing his residency at Massachusetts General when he met James's mom, Trudy, daughter of a musical family in the commercial fishing and boat-building business. They were married in 1946, settling in suburban Weston, Massachusetts. Offspring Alex, James, Katherine (aka Kate), and Livingston were all born in Boston, but Ike wanted to return home to North Carolina, where last child Hugh was delivered. "He was a very principled person always," says James Taylor of the father about whom he penned assorted sombre songs over the years, including Walking Man, Only For Me and Jump Up Behind Me, the last a wistful anthem of rescue from Hourglass. "And he was very liberal-going-toward-socialist in his political leanings, so we shared an adamant outrage at the political system throughout our lives. I'd also describe him as an alcoholic, but in a very controlled way. "He was a very sexy, earthy guy, not a dry person at all. But he was a very lonely fellow, very driven and submerged." James shakes his head ruefully at the memory of Ike Taylor's decision to resume life in the South. "My father, in moving back to North Carolina, basically reengaged his family drama." The transplanted Taylors holed up in a restored farmhouse in a wheat and barley field in Carrboro near Chapel Hill, Trudy stocking the Victrola with Woody Guthrie, light opera and Leadbelly. A woman named Effie Hairston showed up one morning, looking for work, and got a job for the next 20 years as the family cook, wetnurse and helpmate. The Taylors were like that: spontaneous and trusting in an otherwise cautious and conservative province. "Chapel Hill, the Piedmont, the outlying hills, were rural, beautiful but quiet says James. "The soil, the seasons, the way things smelled down there, I feel as though my coming of age was more a matter of landscape and climate than people. There was nobody around! I think it was hard on my mother, 'cos she was very isolated down there, out of her element; Carolina in the early '50s was culture shock for somebody used to Boston, so she focused on us kids." James's first instrument, brought home from elementary school, was the cello. A more rustic musical influence soon invaded the household via the accordion, harmonica and banjo; and a friend showed the children how to yodel by spinning a silver dollar in a creamery bowl, its ceramic bell shaping a tone against which their wobbly warbling could be gauged. "We sang African songs, union songs, folk hymns and radio jingles for snuff, " recalls James . "And for Christmas when I was 12 I got a nylon-stringed mail order guitar from Schirmer & Company in New York, which my brother Alex promptly repainted solid blue - the strings too. I think he was looking for the expression on my face." James remembers helping his dad clear land one June, painting a skiff with him another July, or fixing up a shack in the woods one autumn that the kids used. But mostly Ike was missing in action, teaching, doctoring, doing medical research. In 1953 the family took the first of their annual summer vacations in Martha's Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts, the New England summer ritual "a lifeline for my lonely mother". But by 1955 Ike Taylor was called to fulfill the two years' military service he'd deferred | for medical school. Ike was offered an assignment at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland, a posting that would have permitted him to return home regularly. But instead he volunteered for Phase I of the pioneering and perilous Operation Deep freeze, joining l ,800 Seabees and Navy specialists on a fleet of seven ships sent to establish bases at Kainan Bay and McMurdo Sound, at the edge of Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf. Lieutenant Commander Ike Taylor would be a base physician at McMurdo, whose encampment on the glacial 'ice piedmont' hugged the base of Mt Erebus, the South Pole's only active volcano. "I think it was an escape from the harness of his shamed existence in Carolina," says James. "Ships and planes can't reach the Antarctic most of the year, and there were no phones, so we could only communicate by a periodic mail packet. At one point in 1956, my mom took a photo of us kids on the porch of our house, saluting dad, just so he knew what we all looked like. It was tough for us who missed him a lot, and very rough on my mom the he had even decided to do this. And for him, there was nothing to do up there but work, avoid fatal frostbite, and drink. "His re-entry after a couple of years was difficult. There were some difficulties for him just living in his own skin, and then he came back from a world of men in authority to a world of women in authority, because by that time it was my mother 's house. On some level he never really got back into the house, or our lives, or his marriage. My little brother Hughie was justs cared of him; he said, 'Who is this wild man?' That absence and return became a major feature of my family, which sorta broke up when my parents divorced in 1972." For his part, James, 13, went looking for surrogate families, most of them musical. Enduringly, he found 15-year-old Danny 'Kootch' Kortchmar, whose folks summered in the Vineyard hamlet of Chilmark. Kortchmar was one of a loose aggregation of eager young musicians who haunted the Vineyard's coffee houses and folk parlours. He and James initially met behind the post office where the moody Taylor, known on the island as 'Stringbean', found the broody Kootch, perpetually dressed in black and nicknamed 'Happy', as he was fooling with a new throwing knife . "James was into my knife and eventually we each bought four or five knives apiece, throwing them at anything that didn't move, " Kortchmar laughs. When James pulled out his harmonica, Kootch proposed they hitchhike to his folks' cottage to get his acoustic guitar. Inspired, James went back to Chapel Hill that autumn and honed his own guitar chops, writing his first song, Roll River Roll. A year afterwards, James joined his brother Alex's band, The Fabulous Corsairs. Now armed with a Fender Mustang, James learned enough as he played gigs at high school hops and frat parties so that "he was a pretty good player the following summers," as Kootch recollects. "I'd put on Lightnin' Hopkins albums like Last Night Blues on Prestige, and we'd sit and learn to play Rocky Mountain and Custard Pie together. We won a folk singing contest that was supposed to get us $50 and a chance to play the Unicorn coffee house in Boston. But we doubted we'd get our prize after we heard that Jesse Fuller had to pull a piece on someone at the local branch of the Unicorn in Oak Bluffs in order to get paid..." Meanwhile, Taylor began to undergo some personal reversals- mainly escalating bouts of depression - dropping out of the Milton Academy boarding school in Massachusetts. "Probably typical adolescent stuff," says James, "but people around me put me into a mental hospital for about nine months. " (Sister Kate and brother Livingston would also spend short intervals at McLean Hospital, where Ray Charles had once gone to detox.) Sprung by a pal named Dave Barry, Taylor fled with his record collection - Joseph Spence, Vaughan Williams, Frederick Delius, Miles Davis, Irma Thomas, the Stones, The Beatles, and Music Of The Ituri Rain Forest and found a job at the Bort Carlton Handbags leather bindery in South Boston. Hating it, James high-tailed it to Manhattan, where Kortchmar had just dissolved a blues-rock combo called The King Bees. Kootch offered to form a new band around Stringbean, titled The James Taylor Group "after The Spencer Davis Group, but James backed off that idea, so somebody suggested we call ourselves The Flying Machine" - which soon included mutual Vineyard associates Zack Wiesner on bass and Joel O'Brien on drums. "Zack and I lived in the Albert Hotel in Greenwich Village on a floor that was burned out except for this one room," recalls Taylor. "Getting to the room was a little smoky, a charred experience, but the room itself. . .wasn't great either, haha. Yet the rodent and cockroach population had at least been discouraged by the fire. We rehearsed in the basement of the Albert, and shortly thereafter we became the house band at the Night Owl Cafe on West Third Street off MacDougal, doing three, four sets a night in between stands by Turtles and Lothar And The Hand People. This were going OK until we made the mistake of trying to cut a record in 1966..." This debut single was James's Night Owl backed by his Brighten Your Night With My Dad. "The people involved wouldn't spring for the money for a whole album of James's songs, which he had a considerable number of, like Knocking Round The Zoo, Rainy Day Man, after getting out of McLean, " complains Kortchmar. Demoralised, Taylor slid into heroin addiction. . . "IT WAS AS EASY TO GET HIGH IN THE VILLAGE AS GET A drink," says James. We've spent most of a rainy April afternoon in the back dining room of the fabled Minetta Tavern Restaurant, an ancient leftie/showbiz hangout at the corner of Minetta Lane and MacDougal. This is where he and Kootch often ate, and swapped set-lists before ambling one block over to their nightly Night Owl regimen. Taylor hasn't been back to this historic watering hole since the mid'60s, and its ghosts have prompted expansive reflection. "I had fallen in with some people who could have done me some harm if I'd stuck with them," says Taylor as he pokes at his pasta, the smooth, angular planes of his narrow face tautening. "There were warrants out for these two guys staying at my place. I knew them by no other names than Smack and Bobby, and they were robbing people for a living. I was addicted. I was beginning to get desperate. "I called up my dad in Chapel Hill. We weren't terribly close, especially in those days. But he had a sense I was in trouble. And he said, 'Stay put. What's your address? I'll be right there.' To focus on that cavalry charge of my father's, now that he's gone, is a great thing for me," Taylor considers. "If he had just sent me a plane ticket, I definitely would have just sold it." But because James finally realised, 30 years later, that his dad was not just retrieving his son but trying to take him home to the safest place he knew, James decided to show both Ike and his own boy he understood the meaning of that gesture. "The idea of the lyric of Jump Up Behind Me on Hourglass was of someone swinging a person up onto a horse behind him, and taking the person home," Taylor recounts "I had this very strong image of being on the side of the road, collapsed, and my father finding me. And then I also made it about finding my true love, and wanting to take her back across the water, to the Orkneys or some mythical place that you leave when you're young but return to when you're old. " Taylor decides to drink his coffee by a window looking out on the Cafe Wha? where, he fondly recalls, Jimi Hendrix had performed in the era of The Flying Machine. Taylor angles his elongated carriage into the cramped booth nearest the street, and sips his decaf "For most of my life," he mulls, "my father basically was inaccessible to me. There was another song like Jump Up that I recorded in 1980, called Only For Me on the Dad Loves His Work album, and it was about finding my father in a bar: 'Out of sight of the light in the window/His mind in his whiskey/And his body in a folding chair/Far beyond repair ' . " The Lyrics go on to recount how his son walks into the tavern and enters his parent's line of "vision", Ike makes "his decision" and he stands proudly to his feet to greet him - although sitting back again proves "a long way down". James sizes up his dad's dissolution, knowing he's been there too, and says he's come to his aid. "Young man," Ike answers, "you're looking pretty green/Like a stranger to this kind of place." Ike insists his son sit beside him, peer into his face, and hear a story he'd never before dared to tell: "There was a father and a son/But that was long ago/And when the time came to run/I just couldn't say no/So I left them behind." The verses of Only For Me finish with: "We have seen it before/ In times of great sorrow/The human compassion will flow from a well that has long run dry.../It happened to me.../Only for you.../From one who was lost and found." "He finally came across, acting even slightly apologetic for his own failings," recalls James Taylor, eyes shining. "On that night, and then with that song, after so much time, my dad and I made a connection. " Over the course of the next five years, during which he wound up a decade of wedlock to singer Carly Simon (the mother of his two children, Ben and Sally) and was married to actress Kathryn Walker (a tie which formally ended in 1996), Taylor also weaned himself from his remaining addictions to methadone and alcohol. "In 1985 I bottomed out and went into recovery, and I was managing to feel I could stand to be in my own skin again. I played at this Rock In Rio Festival in South America, and seeing that 300,000 people in a cultured country knew my stuff, with these great Brazilian players like Airto Moreira giving me validation, really resurrected me. " Resuming touring with renewed vigour, Taylor quickly became one of the foremost concert attractions in the United States, with a box-office consistency rivalled only by The Grateful Dead and Jimmy Buffett. His post-Brazil album, 1985's That's Why I'm Here, restored his status as a platinum-selling artist, with all ensuing records following commercial suit. His Greatest Hits collection of 1976 is currently a fixture in the higher reaches of Billboard's Top Pop Catalogue Albums chart, with 11 million units purchased and no let-up in sight. "I JOKE THAT I KNEW JAMES BEFORE HE WAS SENSITIVE," Danny Kortchmar chuckles affectionately, "but the truth is that James is the archetypal singer-songwriter. He's the mould, as a solo artist backed by a consistent touring band, writing confessional songs before almost anybody - songs that remained personal even as they became universal. Dylan achieved the universal aspect, but not the personal vulnerability. "Working and touring with James for decades, I used to want him to rock out more, until I realised that what he wanted to do was actually calm people in a unique, quirky way. He's a guitar virtuoso who subverted folk forms with a lot of major 7ths and higher inversion chords, and he mixed influences like Stephen Foster, Pete Seeger, Aaron Copland, Lightnin' Hopkins and The Beatles so they disappeared into the James Taylor stew. His songs sound like blues, like Christmas carols, and like a church choir too, yet it all essentially comes only from him. " "Fundamentally," Ike Taylor told this writer in 1981, "James is a retiring person who wants and is able to be in meaningful contact with other people. At the one-on-one level his shyness interferes. Paradoxically that shyness disappears on-stage. I see family allusions in much of his work, and a core confidence in the rightness of exposing his inner self Fire And Rain, for instance, was a great expression of his sensitivity but also of his will. " "My son ministers through his music," says Trudy Taylor. "He picks up the themes of what's good in the past, and he gives them a unified clarity in the present. " Hourglass was built up informally but deliberately in sight of the sea, in a bungalow near Taylor's own house on Martha's Vineyard. "Hourglass felt like a good title," he says. "It reminded me of the hourglass on a ship during the 18th and 19th centuries. A CD disc is also a kind of glass that you can start again and again, most of them lasting about an hour. In the old days of British maritime history, the sandglass was used to mark time, to measure how long a sailor has to stand watch while at sea, and to judge how fast the ship was going." The songs highlight all his various strengths, from topical narratives (Line 'Em Up), to power ballads (Little More Time With You), to jazz waltzes (Up From Your Life), witty romps (hidden track Hangnail), and secular hymns, particularly Up Er Mei, about a 1993 hiking trip James took with his children to Sichuan. And then there's Enough To Be On Your Way, which encompasses Taylor's reactions to the deaths in the 1990s of Ike Taylor; brother Alex (who expired due to an alcohol-related heart attack on March 12, 1993, James's birthday); Ike's second wife, Suzanne, who succumbed to cancer; and, most recently, of the passing of James's best friend, keyboardist-arranger Don Grolnick, a lynphoma victim who had produced Taylor's three previous albums. "A lot of the initial focus of Enough To Be came from Alex's dying, and the mention in the Lyric of smoke and a storm refers to an actual event after his cremation, when the ashes that went up a smokestack in Florida s eemed to turn into an amazing storm that followed us home from that ceremony, tearing up the East Coast from Carolina to Massachusetts, " says James . "The idea is of somebody who can't get home, who can't find home late in their lives. As you get older- and I'm pushing 50—you grasp that the loneliness of the human condition stems from a wholeness from which we seem separated. Consensus, just the sense of connection with other people, feels so great, and it motivates an awful lot of what we do . The more successful or thwarted you are as an isolated individual, the more you need reconnection. "The Hourglass record, my first all-new work in five years, was postponed by the dying of Don. And then it was interrupted by the loss of my father, his second wife, and then the family duties that came with that, including looking after the three young children they left parentless." He shrugs haplessly. "These things brought me full circle in my sense of everything I've inherited from my past. "After a while you want to be a little bit fonder of your burdens, because they're what make life interesting, and they're basically what your work is in this life. I think I'm getting better at being a friend, and a parent, and a sibling, and a child. l don't know how good I am as a companion but a woman I've been seeing for a while named Kim [Smedvig] has helped me there, and I'm starting to feel good about that too. " As the rainy day man finishes his coffee, the sun breaks through outside, and he suggests we take a stroll through the area's residential back streets. "The other song on the new album that means a lot to me is Another Day, " he says as we hit the sidewalk, turning west past the Cafe Wha? and retracing the path of the Minetta Brook as it meandered to the Hudson and from thence out to sea. "It took me 13 years to finish Another Day, which is about experiencing withdrawal and making it to morning, when the sun comes out and you believe in the fact of yet another day. I'm stronger than I was in '66, no question, and stronger than I was in '96. I'm very curious to see where I'll be in three years. I think I'll be in a pretty good position. "But right now," he smiles, "I feel like I can walk down Minetta Lane as a different man." |
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