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.

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...

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.”