This Day in Pop Rock Music History (JT, Simon, Mitchell, Ronstadt Go Caroling)

December 24, 1974—In one of the most entertaining evenings in any Southern California holiday season, three couples—James Taylor and songstress wife Carly Simon (in the accompanying post), Linda Ronstadt and comedian Albert Brooks, Joni Mitchell and session drummer John Guerin—went house to house in the Hollywood Hills, serenading the inhabitants, then made their way to the West Hollywood Club known as The Troubadour, where the sextet continued their spontaneous caroling for lucky attendees at an opening-night performance of Flo and Eddie.

What a treat it must have been to listen to this group warble! Yet as far as I know, none of the proceedings were ever recorded. I mean, does a bootleg even exist of the Troubadour tunes?

Here’s what also gets me: major biographies of the participants that amazing night give scant, if any, attention to it. The one crooner who has described it, Simon, did so, in desultory fashion, in a 2002 “Ask Carly” Q&A from her Web site:

“Basically it was a gathering at James' and my house in L.A. James, Joni, Linda and myself started singing carols with others who were there (and you would be more able to fill me in on who they were than I) and we decided to go on over to the Troubadour and sing them there. It was impulsive and the kind of thing that should be done more. It was lots of fun and exuberant and if there is any more legend to it than that, I would love to know. It could be that there was and I’m not remembering it.”

Carly, Carly, Carly! I think this is one of those moments that, fleshed out just a bit more, would make a wonderful vignette in a memoir—the one for which you wrioe 50 pages, at the behest of your editor, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, before getting cold feet about revelations concerning other people.

But this incident has color and verve, and would tell a lot about its participants. And don’t let any possible haziness stop you—here’s how you can recreate it:

1) Invite anyone at the Troubadour that night—heck, any of your lucky Hollywood Hills neighbors—to e-mail you their memories of the event, the way Mitchell has done with various appearances from her legendary career on her Web site;

2) Dig out past photo albums and begin free-associating—it’s bound to trigger a memory, a la the way a single madeleine set off Proust’s epic Remembrance of Things Past;

3) Pick up any LP that you and the other singers made at this time and ponder what songs were special for them; or simply

4) Read through my account and simply react to it.

Nope, I wasn’t there that night (I was on the East Coast, though it was very possible that I had on the turntable a record by you, JT or Mitchell). But this account starts with facts, and from there you can supply what’s correct, what’s not, and, most of all, what’s missing—a place, an influence, a motive, an emotion.

Let’s start with place. Or, rather, two places: The Taylor-Simon house and the Troubadour.

The house, according to Timothy White’s fine 2002 biography of Taylor, was one James and Simon had rented for a two-month stay that turned into four, on Hazen Drive off Coldwater Canyon Drive, “in the brambled slopes where the coyotes come out at night to prey on household pets.” Given that environment, human company, like the ones Simon, JT, and one-year-old daughter Sarah had that night, would have been most welcome.

The Troubadour held double significance for Taylor. Not only had he played at the then-two-year-old club in 1970 with Carole King (the beginning of a mutual admiration society that would see him make hits of two of her songs, “You’ve Got a Friend” and “Up on the Roof”), but also where he first caught his future wife, as the opening act for Cat Stevens, a year later.

Okay: People.

At this point, Taylor and Simon were, of course, the (Elizabeth) Taylor and (Richard) Burton of rock—hugely successful and impossibly glamorous. Even their rented house underscored that connection—Taylor the movie star had been a prior resident, along with Mick and Bianca Jagger.

JT had hit an unexpected sales trough with the Walking Man LP, but was now in the L.A. area working on a follow-up, Gorilla, that would return him quickly to success. Simon didn’t know it, but a slow commercial decline was about to ensue with her next album, Playing Possum.

After several years of trying, Ronstadt had finally scored a pop solo success with the LP Heart Like a Wheel. Unlike Taylor, Simon and Mitchell, her forays into songwriting would be minimal. But her voice was an amazing instrument that, over the decades, would see her extend over a far greater range of styles than they could ever anticipate.

After several years of heartbreak, the singer thought she had found a truly nice guy in funnyman Brooks. She was moving into his house this Christmas, but several months later, according to a Rolling Stone article, her cartons were still in one room, unopened—because if they split, she’d rather not go through another packing job. It was almost as if she were donning protective gear in case of heartbreak.

Mitchell and Guerin (who had just served as a studio musician on the Canadian-born singer’s most successful album to date, Court and Spark) had also recently become an item, moving into a home in Bel Air. Already, however, issues of ownership, intimacy and freedom that had become the overwhelming themes of her songs were informing this relationship, too. According to a Time Magazine story about Mitchell at year’s end, she had accepted a caller’s invitation that she and Guerin come to a party, then told her listener: “But why don’t you ask John. If I suggest it, he’ll think I want to see my old boyfriends.” (Like, as it happened, Taylor.)

Finally, what might the group have sung this night?

Of the four singers, only Mitchell has never recorded a full Christmas album (she cut four songs in the late Seventies, only to shelve the project for the Mingus LP). But it seems a safe bet, based on what the other three singers put on their subsequent holiday albums, that “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” would have been on their spontaneous playlist. Another WWII era song, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” was a favorite of Simon and Ronstadt.

And who knows—maybe the group might have gotten around to singing Mitchell’s infinitely sad “River.” Taylor and Ronstadt are among the more than 100 musicians who have recorded the tune for commercial release, making Mitchell the only one of the group to record a song that, without intending it, has become a holiday standard.

In one way, perhaps it’s appropriate if nobody did record the merry carolers on this night. After all, a spontaneous performance of this kind is, by its nature, evanescent—like youth, even like Christmas at certain points in one’s life—making it all the more precious for those who’ve experienced it.