Flashback, February 1970: James Taylor Breaks Through With Cathartic ‘Fire and Rain’

Fifty years ago this month, as Vietnam-weary Americans searched for serenity within the national chaos, a 22-year-old singer-songwriter, James Taylor, sought his own separate peace: a place in the musical mainstream based on his own tenuous quest for mental health. 

The 11-song Sweet Baby James might have taken its name from the “country lullaby” that became its first single, but it became a commercial smash through the unlikely success of “Fire and Rain,” whose understated chords contrasted with three verses of shattering emotional power.

There really isn’t a bad cut on Sweet Baby James, and devotees of “deep cuts” from the album (heard on what was known, in those days, as “free-form radio”) will still have echoing in their heads the likes of “Sunny Skies,” “Country Road” and “Anywhere Like Heaven.” 

(I also confess that, on my occasional trips to Western Massachusetts over the years, even during sweltering summer days, I can’t get out of my mind these lyrics from the title cut: “Now the first of December was covered with snow/So was the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston/The Berkshires seemed dream-like on account of that frosting.” Indeed, Taylor said, in a recent interview with Parade Magazine’s Jim Farber, that it was his favorite song: “‘Sweet Baby James’ has a rhyming scheme that’s positively Byzantine. For every line, there are three internal rhymes. Every verse is like a Chinese puzzle.")

But above all, “Fire and Rain” continues to weave its mournful magic all this time later, with an oblique recitation of a private tragedy that resonated with a wide public. 

As David Shumway noted in Rock Star: The Making of Musical Icons from Elvis to Springsteen, Taylor—and, shortly, his good friend Joni Mitchell—brought to popular music the “confessional” mode popularized by the midcentury American poets Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton: “While the modernists [led by T.S. Eliot] were read as tackling the largest philosophical, religious, or formal issues, the confessional poets reported on their private psychological struggles.”  

It took me a number of years—and some intensive research into Taylor’s background—to understand what lies between the lines of the musician’s unique form of poetry, what Robert Frost, in his apt description of the form, called “a stay against confusion”:

* “Just yesterday morning they let me know you were gone/Suzanne, the plans they made put an end to you.” Suzanne Schnerr was a friend Taylor had gotten to know in New York in 1966 and 1967. While he was recording his first LP, James Taylor, for Apple Records in London, she had committed suicide. A group of friends, knowing his emotional fragility, had kept the news from him for several months. But in a booze-filled night out, they finally revealed the news. The “they” in “the plans” were not her parents, he later told Timothy White for the 2002 biography Long Ago and Far Away, but instead “the fates.”

* “My body’s aching and my time is at hand”: As if a teenage depression so severe that it landed him in McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., wasn’t bad enough, Taylor became addicted to heroin while trying to build his musical career in London. (He admitted, in an interview with The Guardian’s Jenny Stevens, to having given opiates to John Lennon during this time.)

* “Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground”: In the United States, a band Taylor had put together, The Flying Machine, disintegrated after a series of disastrous, ill-paying  concerts. Its failure was a bitter blow to his ambitions.

Matters might have taken an utterly dismal turn if Taylor had not managed to churn out enough highly creative material to make people like producer Peter Asher bear with his difficulties; if his new American record label, Warner Brothers, had given up on him after the first single from his American LP, “Sweet Baby James,” had lost momentum; and if early studio work on “Fire and Rain” hadn’t convinced Asher to scale back the instrumentation so that its quiet power would emerge more firmly.

What “Fire and Rain,” the second, far more successful single from Sweet Baby James, meant to Taylor can’t be measured simply by units sold (nearly 100 million streams on Spotify), nor in how it finally enabled him to establish a foothold in the music industry, nor even in the vogue for singer-songwriters that would see the likes of Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, Carole King, and Jackson Browne (all associated—a couple intimately—with Taylor) follow him into superstardom. Commercial success is, after all, when it is not downright elusive, likely to be transitory because of passing musical fads, ego, ill health, or the sapping of creative energy that befalls artists in all fields. 

But creating the song—not producing a hit record—functioned as a kind of personal purgative for Taylor. “There's a cumulative emotional quality to it, a message that's useful to hear,” he told WSJ.com earlier this month. “Why do people sing the blues? It's because it helps to share it with other people and to expiate it—to have it out in front of you.”

A troubadour of inner turmoil, Taylor may have also taken solace in the comfort countless people wanted to extend to him. One, Carole King, saddened by the line, “lonely times when I could not find a friend,” was inspired by his plight to write “You’ve Got a Friend”—a song that JT then turned into another hit.

Quote of the Day (James Taylor, on How Addiction ‘Freezes You’)

“A big part of my story is recovery from addiction…One thing that addiction does is, it freezes you. You don’t develop, you don’t learn the skills by trial and error of having experiences and learning from them, and finding out what it is you want, and how to go about getting it, by relating with other people. You short-circuit all of that stuff and just go for the button that says this feels good over and over again. So you can wake up, as I did, at the age of 36, feeling like you’re still 17. One of the things you learn as you get older is that you’re just the same.”—Singer-songwriter James Taylor quoted in Paul Sexton, “James Taylor: ‘A Big Part of My Story is Recovery From Addiction',’” The Telegraph (U.K.), June 20, 2015

I have thought of Taylor’s quote a great deal in thinking of the current opiod crisis and its origins. The first indication of massive U.S. drug addiction came early in the late 19th and early 20^th century, when Civil War veterans turned to a variety of “medicines” for pain management. James Taylor’s form of “pain management,” however, was of a different sort: to ward off the depression that continually afflicted him in his youth (a trauma recorded in his harrowing "Fire and Rain").

The recent manifestation of the opiod crisis really came out of left field, as far as I am concerned, but I doubt if it would have surprised Taylor in the slightest. He has spoken for a whole generation in enduring and getting through all manner of pain. I hope that many others in the U.S. now find the kind of help he was eventually able to do.

Valentine Day’s Video: Carly Simon Live, ‘The Right Thing To Do’

This YouTube video, which I discovered this past weekend, comes from the 1987 HBO special "Carly Simon—Coming Around Again." "The Right Thing To Do" was, in a real sense, my introduction to the wondrous singer-songwriter Carly Simon, as it was the opening cut of the first LP of hers that I ever owned, No Secrets.

Unlike the monster single from that collection, “You’re So Vain,” the song is not interested in slapping down a caddish former lover. However, we don’t learn why the lover in this song merits such tenderness, and the one hint we receive about what he’s like is not reassuring. (“I know you’ve had some bad luck with ladies before/They drove you or they drove you crazy”). 

While Simon has not always pinpointed the subjects of her confessional songs, she readily admits that this one was about the early stages of her relationship with James Taylor--making all the more poignant the heartfelt yearning she still displays here, several years after the collapse of their marriage.

But Simon was in a good place when she sang this live: She was at the beginning of her second marriage, in the midst of a career resurgence following the album Coming Around Again, and about to start work on her Oscar-winning song from the film Working Girl, “Let the River Run.” That self-confidence may accounts for the fact that, after a long time, she was able to surmount her well-known crippling stage fright.

We have this video to remind us that she had nothing whatsoever to fear, either because of her voice or her audience.

Song Lyric of the Day (Carole King, on Friends, ‘Winter Spring Summer or Fall’)

“Winter spring summer or fall,
Hey now, all you've got to do is call.
Lord, I'll be there, yes I will.
You've got a friend.”—Carole King, “You’ve Got a Friend,” from her Tapestry LP (1971)

Throughout the 1970s, when I was either learning to drive or just before, it seemed that the best music in the world came through a car radio. Especially in the summer of 1971, one song insinuated its way into my tween consciousness—first slowly, softly, then achingly trying to balance a young love versus one that had died. The lyrics of “It’s Too Late” seemed so sophisticated, so adult, so like that cool Tom Scott sax solo in the instrumental break, but they couldn’t overcome the piano chords as persistent as the hurt in the voice of the song’s composer.

Like a good friend, the music of Carole King—who, hard to believe, turns 70 today—helps one endure the seasons of hurt and love, harsh as well as gentle. If you can imagine a granola earth mother, the one authentic link between the Brill Building group of songwriters (King, onetime hubby and lyricist Gerry Goffin, Neil Sedaka, Burt Bacharach, and Neil Diamond) and the singer-songwriter movement of the 1970s, that person is unquestionably King.

“You’ve Got a Friend,” from the same Tapestry album that spawned “It’s Too Late,” was “as close to pure inspiration as I’ve experienced,” King later told Paul Zollo, in an interview collected in his Songwriters On Songwriting. “The song wrote itself. It was written by something outside of myself through me.”

The song became a hit for King’s great good friend, James Taylor. If you ask me to pick between King’s and JT’s versions, King’s would win, but just barely. But as for “Up on the Roof,” his cover of her earlier hit—well, I guess it evens out. I couldn’t have asked for a better birthday gift than seeing Taylor perform this at the then-Garden State Arts Center in Holmdel, N.J., in the mid-1980s.

Before she wrote songs for herself, King (and Goffin) created them for others in the 1960s. I could go on and on about who performed which King song, but I’ll just pick out a couple more favorites here: Dave Mason’s 1978 cover of the Shirelle’s “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” (another I saw in concert, this time in Central Park) and one which I wish I’d seen, but which I fell rapturously in love with every which way the second I first heard it: “Up on the Roof,” performed by Bruce Springsteen in the mid-70s with all the rawness and hunger that made so many of us worship him for life (which you can hear—unfortunately, not seen—in this YouTube version.) It added a whole new level of magic to the song that first became a hit for the Drifters in late 1962.

Song Lyric of the Day (James Taylor, Invoking “Blossom” As Muse)

“Blossom, it's been much too long a day
Seems my dreams have frozen
Melt my cares away.”—“Blossom,” written and performed by James Taylor, from his Sweet Baby James LP (1970)

Funny how the songs of youth have a way of rooting themselves in you, played so often at the time that they’re taken for granted, then appearing in your consciousness fully formed, years later, like a glistening, watery landscape revealed after an iceberg has melted.

So it is now with James Taylor, the first performer I ever saw in concert, in 1975, at the then-Garden State Arts Center in Holmdel, N.J. This particular song was not the Top 40 hit that the shattering “Fire and Rain” was from the same Sweet Baby James album. But that soothing voice, calling for an antidote to deep world-weariness, seems fresh and meaningful to a now-middle-aged listener, four decades later.

In some ways, I would have liked sunlit blossoms for this shot. But this image, taken outside a senior-citizen project in my hometown of Englewood, N.J., at twilight, seems appropriate for this set of lyrics, so here it is...

Video Classic of the Day: Souther’s “You’re Only Lonely”

Valentine’s Day brings all kind of reflections about love, but let’s not forget the unrequited kind. I don’t think that the agony of love’s absence has ever been evoked so movingly as in the 1979 hit “You’re Only Lonely” by J.D. Souther.

The singer-songwriter might be better known as one of the architects of the ‘70s Southern California sound with tunes covered by The Eagles, James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt (“Best of My Love,” “Heartache Tonight,” “Her Town Too,” and “Faithless Love”). But he may have reached the zenith of his career with this plaintive cry of the heart, which he sings in Japan in 1990 on this YouTube clip.

I’ve sometimes wondered why this song, unlike the others named above, hasn’t been covered by more artists. But then again, it’s impossible for me to conceive of anyone else performing this better.

Song Lyric of the Day (James Taylor, on Aging)

“September grass is the sweetest kind
Goes down easy like apple wine
I hope you don't mind if I pour you some
It’s made that much sweeter by the winter to come.”—“September Grass,” lyrics by John Sheldon, performed by James Taylor, from his October Road CD (2002)

Thanks to my friends for the birthday greeting, and for being there for me through the years.

Quote of the Day (Chevy Chase, on “Caddyshack” Co-Creator Doug Kenney)

“Someone suggested that maybe I could help clean Doug up. I was the last guy to ask! We went to Hawaii. The point was to dry out. But why would that happen? Look at us at that age and the time. I had to go back to California, and within a couple of days Doug's body was found at the bottom of a ravine.”—Caddyshack star Chevy Chase, on the death of that film’s co-screenwriter, Doug Kenney, quoted in Chris Nashawaty, “Caddyshack,” Sports Illustrated, August 2, 2010

Thirty years ago today, one month after the opening of his hit Caddyshack, Doug Kenney—who had brought his irreverent, authority-defying brand of comedy from National Lampoon (where he was a founding editor) to Animal House—plunged to his death from a cliff in Hawaii. When his body was discovered a few days later, the news shook Young Hollywood—though, in a way, it shouldn’t have.

The Sports Illustrated oral history on the making of his last hit—from which Chase’s rueful quote comes--gives some hints on what brought Kenney to his sad end. Nearly everyone involved in that film (with Ted Knight being a notable exception) sampled the drugs being passed around like candy cars on the set.

Kenney’s influence can be seen through the types of entertainment that came in the wake of National Lampoon—not merely his own films, but also Saturday Night Live, SCTV, good friend Harold Ramis' filmography, Christopher Guest’s parodies, and P.J. O’Rourke’s work.

Robert Sam Anson’s Esquire October 1981 cover story on the life and death of the hugely talented and troubled Kenney nettled the screenwriter's many close friends. They preferred to focus on the good Doug, the warm, generous guy who made sure actress Cindy Morgan received two complimentary tickets to the premiere of Caddyshack when she’d been left off for no good reason—not the quarrelsome man who got into shoving matches with colleagues in post-production on the film.

His death—and the drug use that led to it (it’s still uncertain if he jumped or stumbled from the cliff)—hit far too close to home. After that, for far too long a time, his friends didn’t want to cooperate with other reporters or biographers.

Too bad—within two years of Kenney’s demise, they were doomed to repeat the cycle, as another one of their own, John Belushi, also fell victim, far too young, to drugs at the height of his fame.

The 33-year-old Kenney was especially mourned by fiancée Kathryn Walker, an accomplished actress who would later find happiness (for a time) as the second wife of musician James Taylor.

This Day in Rock History (JT’s “Fire and Rain” Enters Charts, and Legend)

August 12, 1970—James Taylor’s quiet but pitch-black meditation on friendship, failed dreams, life and death, “Fire and Rain,” appeared for the first time on Billboard’s “Hot 100” list, driving sales of his Sweet Baby James LP—and propelling the emotionally fragile musician to the forefront of the confessional “singer-songwriter” movement of the early Seventies.

JT didn’t invent the genre, of course. Joni Mitchell, a future lover, had already come out with three confessional LPs (including Ladies of the Canyon earlier in the year), and songs from Carole King’s first solo album, Writer (recorded earlier in the year while JT was fine-tuning SBJ), were already familiar to many listeners who had been hearing her hit tunes for the past decade co-written with former husband Gerry Goffin.

Taylor himself forthrightly—and accurately—has pointed to other great musician-composers who preceded him, including Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Cisco Houston, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Huddie Ledbetter and Harry Belafonte.

But Taylor’s success (triple-platinum sales for the album, a top-10 hit for the song) made record-company execs not only support projects and artists waiting in the pipeline for their chance, but led these execs to hunt down others in the hinterlands. The next two generations of musician-heroes looked to Taylor for a model on how to craft such songs, including the likes of Jackson Browne, John Mayer, David Gray, and Taylor’s future wife, Carly Simon.

I wonder if Taylor has ever chuckled at the assumptions of omniscience by so many of these major-label execs? Even those supposedly gifted with the Midas touch are not necessarily all they’re cracked up to be (see my post on how Clive Davis nearly deep-sixed a career-changing album, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison).

In Taylor’s case, the powers-that-be at Warner Brothers decided that the sophomore effort by this newcomer (he had already released an LP for the Beatles’ Apple label) could be most effectively promoted with another song they believed would make a more congenial single, the lilting lullaby “Sweet Baby James.”

A nice strategy, except that it didn’t work: “Sweet Baby James” didn’t get close to cracking the “Hot 100.” Perhaps it was because in that year of Kent State and other shocks to the national psyche, young audiences wanted something that addressed their fears. “Fire and Rain,” the follow-up single, did so.

At the two concerts when I saw Taylor perform, in the summer of 1975 and September 1986, audiences greeted the opening chords of “Fire and Rain” with giddy applause. Seldom in the history of popular music has such a downbeat song given so many people so much happiness.

In a music genre that celebrates youth, “Fire and Rain” is unusual in that it squarely confronts mortality, in the form of suicide. It was triggered by how Taylor heard of the death of a female friend from Long Island, Suzanne Schnerr, who had come to know the singer when he was living briefly in New York.

For a time, Taylor’s friends—concerned that having already been confined to the mental-health facility McLean Hospital, outside Boston, he might react catastrophically to bad news—had concealed from him the facts about Schnerr. Informed at last while he was recording in London, Taylor attempted to make sense of the shattering event in this haunting song.

Unlike the kind of socially conscious tunes that, for instance, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young were releasing at the time, “Fire and Rain” didn’t deal with major social issues. But the manic depression strongly implied in the song’s lyrics made this neglect understandable: How could you think of others’ plight when your own situation was so grim?

Taylor’s warm baritone and smooth guitar licks offered a musical reassurance that was at odds with the song’s foreboding lyrics (“My body’s aching and my time is at hand,” a reference to this addict’s continuing struggle with heroin).

Or maybe there’s another way of viewing the song’s success that makes better sense, one offered years later by JT himself, in a 2006 interview with the Boston Globe: “A song like 'Fire and Rain' takes something internal that you're struggling with and lays it out in front of you in such a way that you can at least see it. It's a way of working through it and coming to rest with it. Yes, most of my work is, for better or worse, self-referred and autobiographical. I think everybody's writing music about themselves, essentially. But mine is admittedly so, and if it has value, it's that it's emotionally useful to people.”

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.