James Taylor: One Man's Family of Rock

THE 1960s reverberated to rock. The walloping folk rock of Bob Dylan sang a striking counterpoint to the sweet-sour, sometimes thunderous eloquence of the Beatles at their best; the psychedelic star shells launched by the Jefferson Airplane soared over the Beelzebub beat and leer of the Rolling Stones. And now, suddenly, the '70s have brought a startling change. Over the last year a far gentler variety of rock sound has begun to soothe the land.

Why? Theories abound, few of them satisfactory. The fading out of ear-numbing, mind-blowing acid rock, some say, is related to the softening of the youth revolution. Its decline is variously viewed as a symptom of either progress toward harmony and thoughtfulness or a tragic slide from activist rage into a mood of "enlightened apathy." There is also the desire for individual expression on the part of talented rock musicians too long cooped up in their communal palaces of sound. Many of them came to realize that the higher the decibel rate, the less creative subtlety possible for composers and performers alike. In any case, rock could hardly have gotten more frenzied. "After you set your guitar on fire," says Rock Musician Danny Kootch, "what do you have left? Set fire to yourself? It had to go the other way."

Whatever the cause, the result is clear. The old groups are fast fragmenting. In their place, a diverse, wonderfully evocative collection of individual balladeers and rock composer-performers is quickly moving in as the major pop innovators of 1971. Many of them have dropped such devices as the electrified guitar and wall-to-wall loudspeaker banks; they are returning instead to the piano, or to the more intimate acoustic guitar. Offering a kind of Americana rock, they are likely to celebrate such things as country comfort, Carolina sunshine, morning frost in the Berkshires. What all of them seem to want most is an intimate mixture of lyricism and personal expression--the often exquisitely melodic reflections of a private "I."

A Peculiar Hold on American Youth

As TIME'S informal family tree of rock shows, many of the new troubadours are not new at all. The decompression of rock can be traced back to 1968 and Bob Dylan's search for a simple way of saying simple things in John Wesley Harding. Among the groups, the gentling process was carried to mellow new highs and lows by The Band. The rise of rock's new solo poets is a natural extension. Often they are talented offshoots from famous groups, the most notable examples being all four Beatles. Characteristically, they make the new sound but leave explanations to musicologists and sociologists. Occasionally, however, one will fall prey to the seductions of historic hindsight. "The dream is over," John Lennon has lately observed. "I'm not just talking about the Beatles, I'm talking about the generation thing. It's over, and we gotta--I have personally gotta--get down to so-called reality."

Whether or not the dream is over for good, the man who best sums up the new sound of rock--as well as being its most radiantly successful practitioner--is a brooding, sensitive 22-year-old rich man's son who sings, he says, "because I don't know how to talk." James Taylor's first album came out only two years ago on the prestigious Apple label. It sold only 30,000 copies its first year. Today Taylor is one of the best and steadiest national record sellers since the loudest days of Beatlemania. Sweet Baby James, his second album, has already sold 1,600,000 copies and, along with his hit single Fire and Rain, has been nominated for five Grammy Awards. A third album, Mud Slide Slim, will be released next month. Last month, Taylor was included in the predominantly classical Great Performers series at New York City's Lincoln Center. He has just finished a movie, Two-Lane Blacktop, for late spring release, and last week he began a sell-out national concert tour of 27 cities.

These and other abundant signs of commercial achievement measure, but do not begin to explain, James Taylor's peculiar hold on the ear and imagination of youthful Americans. A good deal of his success is based on the kind of personal magnetism that has been making baritones and matinee idols rich and famous for generations, a particular masculine presence. Lean and hard (6 ft. 3 in., 155 Ibs.), often mustachioed, always with hair breaking at his shoulders, Taylor physically projects a blend of Heathcliffian inner fire with a melancholy sorrows-of-young-Werther look that can strike to the female heart--at any age. Half explaining, half apologizing for her delight in Fire and Rain, a University of Michigan coed who is also a trained musician admits: "I don't know why I love it. I know I shouldn't, because he doesn't really sing. He just sort of intones."

What Taylor intones is far more artful than it seems at first. For if his voice is spare and strangely uninflected, his guitar fingering lends sudden lights and shadows to the barest melody. Musically, Taylor is a fusion of the three black and white mainstreams of pop: the lonely twang of country, the pithy narrative of folk and the rhythmic melancholy of blues. Beyond that, Taylor's use of elemental imagery--darkness and sunlight, references to roads traveled and untraveled. to fears spoken and left unsaid--reaches a level both of intimacy and controlled emotion rarely achieved in purely pop music. He can, says one of his campus admirers, "turn an arena into a living room."

Listeners do not need to know anything about him to enjoy his music. Taylor is a master of many styles and subjects. The song Sweet Baby James is simply one of the best lullabies ever composed. In Suite for 20 G, he can ease into a cool, rock-'n'-roll-flavored parody of the 1950s, or do wailing variations on old-fashioned blues (Oh Baby Don't You Loose Your Lip on Me).

Yet much of the time Taylor sings about himself, and most of his fans feel instinctively that the anguished outlines of his private life--as well as those of his two brothers, Livingston, 20, and Alex, 23, and his sister Kate, 21, all now launched on singing careers--could be their own. The four singing Taylors, in fact, run some risk of becoming a sort of One Man's Family of rock.

Like so many other troubled, dislocated young Americans, Taylor may at first seem self-indulgent in his woe. What he has endured and sings about, with much restraint and dignity, are mainly "head" problems, those pains that a lavish quota of middle-class advantages--plenty of money, a loving family, good schools, health, charm and talent--do not seem to prevent, and may in fact exacerbate. Drugs, underachievement, the failure of will, alienation, the doorway to suicide, the struggle back to life--James Taylor has been there himself.

It seems to add something to the impact of a song like Fire and Rain to know that the lyric is really a mini-trilogy dealing with three bad times in the singer's life. Part I goes back to a moment of sadness--and a sense of failure--when he was making his first record in London in 1968. A girl he knew died at the time, but his friends did not tell him until the record was finished because they thought he was "too strung out" to handle the news:

I've seen lonely times when

I could not find a friend,

But I always thought I'd

see you again.

Part II finds Taylor bottoming out in the New York drug-scene abyss:

Won't you look down upon

me Jesus?

You've got to help me make a stand,

You've just got to see me

through another day.

The song's final stanza is a footnote to 1968, when James left New York trying to escape heroin and personal squalor, and thus brought to an end The Flying Machine, a struggling group started by his friend Danny Kootch:

There's hours of time on the

telephone line

To talk about things to come,

Sweet dreams and flying machines

in pieces on the ground.

Taylor's voice is mercifully free of the whiny self-pity that haunts most singers of lovelorn pop lyrics. Even his most self-revealing effort. Knocking 'Round the Zoo, which tells what it was like in a mental hospital, where James spent nine months, comes out heavily armed with witty, riffy musical irony--at least until the end, when Taylor tacks a chilling descant of bedlamite sounds onto the following stanza:

Now my friends all come to see me,

they point at me and stare,

Said he's just like the rest of us

so what's he doing in there?

They hide in their movie theaters

drinking juice--keeping tight

'Cause they're certain about one

thing, that zoo's no place to

spend the night.

Today Taylor's experiences seem frighteningly in tune with the troubles of his age. "Right now," remarks Danny Kootch, who first met James in the late 1950s and now not only plays guitar with Taylor but leads his own group Jo Mama, "if you're not alienated, you're weird. All you have to do is grow your hair long and everybody talks to you. But in those days you felt, 'What's the matter with me that I can't exist in this world?' Either you ended up very neurotic and screwed up, or you got strength from it." James eventually ended up doing a little of both.

James Taylor managed to grow up in two of the most beautiful places in America. Boyhood winters were spent in a specially designed eleven-room house on 28 acres of North Carolina woodland and pasture near Chapel Hill. His hard-working doctor father, Isaac ("Ike") Taylor, independently wealthy and from an old Scottish-Southern family, was busily working his way up to the deanship of the University of North Carolina Medical School. "We quite consciously set out to raise our children free of the hang-ups we see in ourselves and our generation," Dr. Taylor explained recently. "We weren't going to use that cop-out of 'because the Bible tells you so.' " James' mother, Trudy Taylor, is the daughter of a Massachusetts fisherman and boat builder who before her marriage trained seriously as a lyric soprano. She had seen fondness for music so tormented by formal training that, though James, Livingston, Alex and Kate all took up various instruments (violin, cello, piano), they seldom took lessons for long. Mrs. Taylor did not go to church. Instead, she taught her children "to believe in people," and long before ecology became a household word, she encouraged them to nourish a pantheistic sense that the earth is a "beautiful, fragile place." As a very little boy James was greatly affected by the Bible Belt religion he heard at school. Mrs. Taylor remembers how he needed reassurance that he would not burn in hell for his sins.

Faith in Day-to-Day Goodness

Any wintry doubts the young Taylors might have entertained on the subject of natural beauty were dispelled during summers on Martha's Vineyard at the family's big house in Chilmark, hard by the long breakers and sandy wastes of South Beach. In those days there was plenty of everything, including time and money. John Sheldon, a friend of Livingston Taylor, remembers that many days were passed taking apart motorboat engines and trying to soup them up. "We dropped a few overboard," he says, "but ruining expensive stuff was the usual. Ike always provided replacements." In those days, too, Dr. Taylor led in singing sea chanteys and folk songs at cookouts on the beach. At 15, James, along with Danny Kootch, won a hootenanny contest, singing and accompanying themselves with harmonica and guitar. In their early teens, Livingston and James used to turn up at the Chilmark Community Center square dances. Friends recall that the Taylors as a family seemed touched by a special energy and grace--particularly the boys.

Last week in Chapel Hill, Isaac and Trudy Taylor, who were recently separated, reminisced about the children and their musical success. "I always had paternal fantasies about my children doing something collectively for society," Dr. Taylor admitted, "though I guess I had something like the Mayo brothers in mind." Their musical mother is also proud. But she, too, recollects that in those days "I always assumed they'd be doctors." Like so many parents in an age of affluence, the elder Taylors provided their family with a free and loving childhood, apparently dedicated to scrupulousness in behavior, delight in the natural world, self-expression and faith in the day-to-day goodness of human nature. At the same time, they assumed that their children would automatically develop the driving will to endure the tough, pragmatic grind usually required for worldly success. The contradiction, as a great many parents and children learn, can cause great strain. "The basic orientation in my family," Livingston Taylor remembers, "was that simply because you were a Taylor, you could and should be able to accomplish anything."

For James, trouble began after he was sent off to strait-laced and demanding Milton Academy, outside Boston. Says he: "There were things going on in my head other than what the Milton people thought was right and proper." Milton's dean, John Torney, recalls James with a sigh. "We just weren't ready for him," Torney explains. "James was more sensitive and less goal oriented than most students of his day. I'm sure James knew about drugs long before anyone else here."

Soon thoroughly miserable, James nevertheless struggled on for the better part of 3 1/2 years, well liked but withdrawn, notable mainly for his height (he was known as "Moose") and for a certain mastery of poetic metaphors in English class. He dropped out for part of a term, and with Alex, he joined a North Carolina band called the Fabulous Corsayers that played straight rock 'n' roll. Back at Milton, he grew suicidal, and at 17, he signed himself into the McLean Hospital, a mental home in Belmont, Mass.

There were screens on the windows. Hospital personnel counted up the silverware after meals to be sure no patient had concealed a potential weapon. But to James, compared to Milton it seemed paradise regained. Besides doctors and nurses, there were plenty of hi-fi sets. "Above all," James says, "the day was planned for me there, and I began to have a sense of line and structure, like canals and railroad tracks." The hospital even had a high school, from which James duly graduated. He still has high praise for it because it genuinely interested students in learning. "We didn't have that jive nothingness that pushes most kids through high school," he says. "You can't tell a whole bunch of potential suicides that they must have a high school diploma." Indeed, for the Taylors, the McLean experience would soon become what Harvard is for the Saltonstalls--something of a family tradition. Hardly had James graduated when Brother Livingston turned up after withdrawing from a Quaker school in Westtown, Pa. By the time Kate arrived in 1967--on a transfer from the Cambridge School of Weston, Mass.--McLean had even instituted musical therapy. Kate played and sang with an inmate group called Sister Kate's Soul Stew Kitchen, gaining psychological confidence and laying the groundwork for a pop-music career at the same time.

Christianity as a Buffer

Milton cost $2,700 a year. McLean customarily runs around $36,000. But besides structure and schooling, it provided James with an opportunity to think. He began to reflect upon what it takes to survive--beyond sensitivity and naked faith in human nature. Says he: "In a euphoric society existentialism would be fine. The way things are now, though, it certainly is necessary to have buffers like Christianity. To me Jesus is a metaphor, but also a manifestation of needs and feelings people have deep within themselves." After nine months of thinking things out at McLean, James also came to realize that the only other buffer he had against the world was music. Without waiting the three days normally required for discharge, he piled his stuff into a friend's station wagon and escaped to New York.

Kootch had been playing in a rock band called the King Bees. Now he was forming a new band, the Flying Machine. With James on guitar and doubling as composer-vocalist, Kootch also on guitar and Zachary Wiesner, son of M.I.T. Provost Jerome Wiesner, on bass, the group was soon able to earn something like $12 a night. Despite its low income, it was quite a good band. What it proved while it lasted was that Taylor had somehow evolved into an accomplished musician. Most of his songs--including Knocking 'Round the Zoo, Night Owl and Rainy Day Man, which were later recorded for Apple in the James Taylor album--were first written for the Flying Machine.

However promising professionally, the ragged edge of the New York rock scene was a personal disaster for James. He was 18, but as Kootch points out, he had never had any exposure to real life. "New York isn't like Martha's Vineyard." James had a little money from his parents, and he lived all alone in an uptown pad furnished with a mattress and a radio. "He got hung up on taking in weird people--runaway teen-agers and people like that." Taylor was also getting heavily into drugs, especially heroin. Zach Wiesner had quit the Flying Machine after three months. Partly from inertia and partly out of loyalty to Kootch, James hung on for a year and a half. Then he escaped--not to the structure of McLean or the tranquillity of Martha's Vineyard but to swinging London.

Living With Success

James Taylor likes to say: "I find comfort in things like earthquakes and eclipses of the moon because I have no hand in them. They relieve me of responsibility. I find comfort in writing about and projecting and thinking about the seasons and the sea, things like that, because I have no control. I find comfort in fatalism and inevitability." Well he might. For if some kind fate is guiding Taylor's professional destiny, it was at work when it sent him to London.

It was not merely that in London, as a nearly unknown singer-composer of uncertain stability, he miraculously won a record contract with Apple. What really mattered was that there he met 24-year-old Peter Asher. At the time, Asher, an Englishman and a former rock performer (Peter and Gordon), had just been installed as Apple's chief talent director. He recognized Taylor's talent, signed him, then helped push the first Taylor album to completion despite the fact that Apple was beginning to come apart at the core. Asher was responsible for the fact that a year later Taylor was able to sign up with Warner Bros, and launch Sweet Baby James. Since James' return to the U.S. in December 1968, for another sojourn in a mental hospital (this time Austen Riggs in Stockbridge, Mass.), Asher, as friend and manager, has proved himself to be a sound guide, with shrewd bargaining abilities and an instinctive feel for the fast-shifting tastes of the pop-music world.

Thanks largely to Asher, Taylor's problem from now on will not be how to secure the success he has lately won but how to live with it personally. The concept of a shy artist suddenly overwhelmed by commerce is one of the phoniest wheezes in show business. Yet given James' predilection for privacy and peace, as well as his slender hold on personal stability, it may prove genuine enough in his case.

Offstage, James seems in many ways to be the average rock-'n'-roll musician. He wears regulation T shirts, regulation Levi's, regulation cowboy boots. He crosses living rooms or recording studios with the same ten-league strides he would use heading up a country road. He eats--and drinks--anything and everything that is put before him. Like his songs, he can easily be witty. But like his songs, he is also much turned in upon himself, rarely talkative, sometimes edgy, always haunted by the precariousness of human joy.

Easing the Guilt

He is fully aware that a pop star can be destroyed by his fond public. Interviews seem to threaten him tremendously. "With all that feedback of ideas and memories and resonances from the past," he says, "an interview can be like an epileptic fit. People come at me as though they had a coloring book and ask me to fill in the colors." The false rumors that accrue to fame are exasperating. "One day," he told a reporter, "my brother Alex got ten calls consoling him about my suicide, my reinstitutionalization, and my split with Joni Mitchell." Chatter about Taylor's very real romance with Joni is currently the gossip rage of the teeny-bopper set. Now that his face and name are nationally known, Taylor ponders the effects of his record as a junkie. "I don't want some kid out in Nebraska to read about me and say, 'Well, I'm gonna pick up some smack just like James did.' "

Though he arrived at his present feelings and scruples before they became fashionable, he is driven by many contemporary idealistic concerns--about nature and its misuse, about wealth, about manipulation of people. "Nothing is wrong in making as much bread as you need," he says, "but there are things wrong in making more bread than you need." To help ease that guilt, he has lately taken to giving away some of the proceeds from his public concerts--to, among others, the Hopi Indians. "I wish I were really part of the environment, part of the land," he says, "instead of a successful Caucasian." He is proud of his accomplishments, though, and will admit that "I like success almost as much as I dislike it." Aware of these mixed feelings, he is concerned about the very real problem of maintaining a proper perspective between the private James Taylor he and his friends know and the public James Taylor who sometimes seems to be coming in the windows. One of the newest songs on his forthcoming album--in the same vein as Sweet Baby James, but looser, more free and easy--describes the odd schizoid feeling of hearing his own voice on the jukebox:

Hey Mister, that's me up on the

jukebox,

I'm the one that's singing this sad

song,

And I cry every time you slip in

one more dime.

Taylor may perhaps derive some comfort from the division of public attention, which is certain to grow more pronounced as the individual reputations of his fellow rock troubadours grow. There are, for example, such famous ex-group soloists as the individual Beatles, Neil Young and Stephen Stills (of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young). Elton John is an English one-man music industry whose songs range panoramically from country rock to blues. Leon Russell, the presiding master of gospel rock, invokes the Lord Jesus with piano playing that has a touch of Fatha Hines and a voice that has a touch of bayou frog. Nashville's Kris Kristofferson, an ex-Rhodes scholar, sings bluntly sensual protest songs that have made him the most controversial country songwriter-singer of the day. Van Morrison, an Irishman late of Them, flavors his blues-gospel-folk broth with a salty pinch of jazz. In the wings are two virescent newcomers. One is Carole King, a soul blues singer who plays piano on James' records and has written a song for his new album. The other is English Folk Minstrel Cat Stevens, who sounds like an off-the-moors Harry Belafonte.

James' rivals may also soon include a few more individual Taylors. Thus far Livingston, Alex and Kate have openly--though in Livingston's case not always willingly--ridden on James' coattails. Yet the tendency to see Livingston merely as an "up" imitation of James' "down" is unfair and misleading, as anyone will know who listens to the deft melodic twists and musical good humor of Livingston's first LP, especially the songs Carolina Day and Sit on Back. Alex's LP, released last week, divulges a freewheeling, lowdown style of music that lies somewhere between Hee Haw and New Orleans' Jazz Preservation Hall. Kate's album debut, Sister Kate, produced by Peter Asher and due for release next month, would be an accomplishment for a blues singer with years of experience. As it is, her weary lag and sag in Sweet Honesty and her joyful hymning of Home Again (by Carole King) are nothing short of astonishing in a singer just setting out on a career.

A Special Kind of Salvation

In pop music no fashion lasts for long. Though now is predominantly the moment of the solo trip and the modulated musical message, group think could easily come back strong. For that matter, it is still around with varying degrees of excellence in the work of Chicago and Led Zeppelin. Yet just as individuals like Ray Charles and Chuck Berry influenced the major groups of the 1960s, so today's soloists are bound to affect the future. If so, tomorrow's rock could well be more religious and pastoral in tone, more intricate and ambitious in style. Because of the increasing influence of Miles Davis, jazz is bound to be an added ingredient. Intriguingly complex forms, exemplified by the rock passion Jesus Christ, Superstar, have yet to be explored adequately and may one day engage collective talent, perhaps even the Taylors.

Whatever the other Taylors do, James, at least, has made his own special music--which is also his own special kind of salvation. He probably always will, if only to throw a sound back to the sea at Martha's Vineyard, where he has just built a house. Between road trips and recording sessions, Alex lives on the island too. So does Kate. So does the youngest Taylor, Hugh, 18, who reportedly has the best male voice in the family but so far prefers to work as a carpenter. "It just may be," says James, pondering the enduring pull of the Vineyard upon them all, "that we can't find anything more comfortable than the time we had as a family." And he adds: "Or maybe it's something that was never there that we miss and are still trying to put together."

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