14
Music is my living,” James Taylor told British journalist Keith Altham in 1971. “I don’t enjoy selling myself. Photographers and reporters are mostly after me. They want to know what I read and what I’m like and I don’t really know myself, so how can I tell them?”
He would, he insisted, have been happy to see “a lot of this confusing rubbish go away and get back to [the] old times. If I could go back I would. I’m looking forward to being able to retire from being a public figure and being able to afford to be myself!” Even the media’s growing penchant for labeling him the first in a new wave of players called the singer-songwriters dismayed him.
Where, he asked, was the dividing line between what he did and what Bob Dylan had been doing for eight years? He sang and he wrote songs. “We were just following on from…all those [other] players who wrote their own stuff,” he reflected forty years later.
Taylor retreated from view. Even with Sweet Baby James still reasonably fresh on the racks, he eschewed a lot of the live work and touring with which he could have filled his time, opting instead to return to the studio and repay Carole King’s friendship and support by guesting on Writer, her first solo album.
He ducked out of public appearances, and he ducked out of the media whirl as well. Requests for interviews with Taylor were invariably greeted with a polite “no, thank you,” the apparent media blackout first bemusing and then bewildering the growing line of journalists who were hanging on his telephone. Because suddenly, without any more promotion than a gentle word of mouth, and a few obliging FM disc jockeys who swung Sweet Baby James into radio rotation, things were picking up.
“We really are not trying to be nasty to the press,” Peter Asher pledged. “We are not saying, ‘Fuck off, you nasty snotty plebby press,’ because we really are grateful for the nice things that have been written here, but James just doesn’t like interviews. It’s not what he does [that matters], it’s what he sings!”
So Taylor stepped as far from the limelight as he could, heading into the studio with Kootch and Carole King to craft the album that, perhaps more than any other, epitomizes what the media required of this new musical breed: “a hunger for the intimacy,” said King. “The authenticity of someone telling their own story,” agreed Jackson Browne.
Writer, said Kootch, “is phenomenal. I thought, ‘Man, this is it. This is so fucking great. It’s got to be the breakthrough. Lou [Adler] produced it; he knew exactly how to record her. It was like going to Harvard, man. Those sessions…anyone who had been on Writer learned how to play on records. Being on those sessions was such an education.”
Writer remains superlative, from the opening blast of “Spaceship Races,” the sound of Jo Mama in full-tilt boogie, through the plaintive “Child of Mine,” the psych-flavored “Can’t You Be Real,” the countryish “To Love,” and on to that rendition of “Up On the Roof” that Taylor had been previewing in concert, oozing with strings and piano.
The album’s highlight, however, was “Goin’ Back,” a return to childish pleasures and innocence that King and Gerry Goffin wrote for Dusty Springfield back in 1966 and that had since been recorded by the Byrds, but which might easily have been written to order around Taylor’s own growing nervousness as the outside world continued beating a path to his door. “Things started to get out of control when I began reading that I was a superstar,” Taylor admonished writer Altham. “I’m not what a superstar should be—it’s a box with a label on it.”
And so Taylor was off again. The Writer sessions had barely wrapped when he found himself busy preparing for, and then filming, his first (and, as it transpired, only) motion picture role, in Two-Lane Blacktop.
“I’m not sure how he was convinced to go off and do that movie,” Kootch reflected on the fortieth anniversary of its release. “It probably seemed a good idea at the time. [But] when I saw it, I thought it was the most boring thing…deadly boring.”
Two-Lane Blacktop saw Taylor linking with director Monte Hellman, a former Roger Corman protégé, and Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, in what was never envisioned as anything more than a bog-standard rods- and bodsploitation flick, the kind of film that went straight to the drive-ins sandwiched between a couple of other movies with much the same plot and direction. Indeed, the story of two men (Taylor and Wilson) drag-racing their way down the Route 66 in a primer-gray 1955 Chevrolet, paying their way by staging races with every other racer they meet, was scarcely one that could hope to do battle in any arena other than that, and without the cachet of its leading men’s names, it might well have been forgotten before the ink was even dry on the theater tickets.
Instead it became a cult classic.
The movie opens with the pair preparing to set out, but really only gets going once they arrive in New Mexico and encounter Warren Oates, the motormouth at the wheel of a 1970 Pontiac GTO. The inevitable flash point, whose car is better, arises, and while the cynical viewer will already have determined that it would probably have been easier for the pair just to beat the crap out of the obnoxious little show-off and wrap the movie there, they instead agree to race him to Washington D.C., winner take all.
Oates promptly gets the better of them when he drives off with the female hitchhiker that Taylor and Wilson have been sharing since they picked her up in Flagstaff, Arizona; winning back the girl soon becomes as much a motive for the pair as winning the GTO’s pink slip, but with a fatal charm that surely borrowed some ideas from that other cross-country freakoid film, Easy Rider, we never discover who won the race. As the two cars battle down a deserted airstrip somewhere in eastern Tennessee, first the soundtrack drops away, then the film begins to judder, and as the cars pick up speed, the cellulose catches, discolors, and burns. The credits roll over the viewer’s interpretation of precisely what happened next.
The movie’s casting was as haphazard as its action. Hellman cast Taylor after seeing his face on a Sunset Strip billboard, advertising Sweet Baby James, and recruited Wilson just four days before principal photography got under way, in August 1970. Neither did he intend allowing such inexperienced actors any opportunity to feel their way into their roles. Not only did the director refuse to allow them to read the script ahead of filming, he also refused to allow them any other clue toward their characters’ personalities. He even refused to give them names. In script and movie credits alike, Taylor, as the driver, was simply called The Driver; Wilson, the mechanic, became The Mechanic. Oates, the rival driver, became GTO, and the girl was just The Girl.
So far, so grinding, and even fans of the film must be grateful that Hellman’s original three-hour cut was ultimately slashed down to 105 minutes for release. Yet when Two-Lane Blacktop was released in April 1971, reviews were more than generous.
“What I liked about Two-Lane Blacktop was the sense of life that occasionally sneaked through,” said Roger Ebert, as he lavished three out of four stars on the film.
Vincent Canby in the New York Times admitted it was a “far from perfect film (those metaphors keep blocking the road), but it has been directed, acted, photographed and scored (underscored, happily) with the restraint and control of an aware, mature filmmaker.”
The Village Voice declared, “Two-Lane Blacktop is a movie of achingly eloquent landscapes and absurdly inert characters”; and Esquire went positively apeshit for it, reprinting the original script (including much, therefore, that was cut from the film) and declaring with a total absence of either irony or self-consciousness that Two-Lane Blacktop was “our nomination for movie of the year.” There were eight months of the year still to come.
Six weeks of filming kept Taylor out of the limelight; he returned to Los Angeles, however, to discover the spotlight was now going supernova. First “Fire and Rain” slipped out as a single and, in a world that had been at least partially reshaped by the magnificent melancholia of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge over Troubled Water” single, followed that song’s tone of maudlin tenderness toward the uppermost reaches of the Hot 100. Entering the chart at the beginning of September, “Fire and Rain” would ultimately rise to #3.
Sweet Baby James followed, and would soon eclipse every one of the single’s achievements. It too peaked at #3, trapped behind such immovable logjams as Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Cosmo’s Factory; Led Zeppelin’s third LP, Led Zeppelin III; and the soundtrack to the festival that Taylor never played, Woodstock. But it remained on the chart for close to two years, and U.S. sales were swift to march past a million, while the industry simply sat back in amazement. The new decade had its first superstar. And if Taylor thought the last six months had been crazy, he had no idea what the next six would bring.
In October 1970, Taylor and Joni Mitchell coheadlined a benefit concert for the protest group Greenpeace in Vancouver, at the event that history declares marked the very birth of the organization.
It was Mitchell who landed him the gig, although even she had not been organizer Irving Stowe’s first choice. That was Joan Baez, but her schedule was already too crammed for her to fit the festival in. She sent her apologies, a $10,000 check, and a suggestion that Stowe contact Mitchell.
Stowe’s daughter, Barbara, recalled, “Joni came on 100 percent.… [Then] she called us up one night at dinner and Dad put his hand over the mouthpiece and said, ‘It’s Joni! She wants to know if she can bring James Taylor, is that okay?’ [And] we didn’t know who James Taylor was. I actually thought he was a black blues singer, I had him confused with James Brown. My family was so out to lunch.
“But my dad said to Joni, ‘Okay.’ And then he hung up and said to us, ‘Don’t tell anyone. We don’t know who this James Taylor is. If he’s no good, it could ruin the concert.’ Then my brother said, ‘Hey, let’s go down to Rohan’s and find out [who he is].’ And there it was, [the album] Sweet Baby James [laughs], which was on its way to platinum.”
Greenpeace was unknown at the time. Indeed, it only became Greenpeace in the days before the concert. Prior to that, Stowe and his wife, Dorothy, had intended calling their Vancouver, B.C.-based group the Don’t Make a Wave committee, and had just one aim, to protest and, if possible, prevent: the latest round of American hydrogen bomb tests on Amchitka, a small but, in terms of wildlife, densely populated island off the Alaskan coast. Staging a festival to raise funds and awareness was the most direct form of promotion they could think of. The ultimate goal, setting the stage for future decades of Greenpeace activism, was to send a ship to the luckless plot of land.
So Baez suggested Mitchell, Mitchell suggested Taylor. Greenwich Village stalwart Phil Ochs was there, and so were Chilliwack, a Canadian rock band that went onto enjoy some U.S. success much later in the decade, and whose invlovement might better be remembered today had they not been the only participants that evening who refused to allow their performance to be recorded. But sound engineer Dave Zeffertt of Kelly-Deyong Sound taped the remainder of the show and, forty years later, the Stowe family opened a fascinating window to the past with the release of Amchitka: The Concert That Launched Greenpeace.
The performers were not simply turning out to offer token support. “Greenpeace is beautiful, and you are beautiful because you are here tonight,” Irving Stowe told the crowd as he gazed out a packed Pacific Coliseum. Though Taylor later admitted that he was distracted because his guitar was out of tune, he fully understood the importance of the event.
“People were very excited and very fired up. It was exciting, it was very contagious. [And] since then people have…become more aware of the urgency of the environmental issue. When I encountered the people at Greenpeace and saw the work they were doing, and the way they had engaged the problem, I felt a big sense of relief that people were working on it.”
By modern standards, Barbara Stowe continued, the concert itself “was anarchy.” Greenpeace itself provided the venue’s security, volunteers drawn from its fledgling membership whose job, essentially, was to watch as the vast venue filled up, and hope there was no trouble. So the crowd spilled in and sat where it wanted; there were no aisles, no seating blocks, no brightly jacketed rent-a-thugs to quash the slightest sense of occasion. Placards waved, banners were unfurled, chants and war cries arose from the masses, and they were not only targeted at the United States’ activities.
That very morning had seen the passage of Canada’s War Measures Act, effectively outlawing any actions or behavior that could be seen as supporting the anti-Vietnam protests that were burning up Canada’s next-door neighbor. Indeed, there were very real fears that the concert itself might fall afoul of the new regulations. It didn’t, but Phil Ochs remained in a state of shock. So far as the majority of Americans were concerned, Canada was a peace-loving country miles removed from the political and militaristic belligerence then shaping the United States. Ochs had crossed the border to discover a land under what amounted to martial law.
He remained furious onstage. “Phil Ochs was so angry his whole set,” Barbara Stowe said. “It permeated that, his anger, and that gave it a certain electricity and power. Then when Chilliwack came on, they had to sort of chill out the crowd. They were amazing. James Taylor chilled it out further, and then Joni came on and just let her lyrics speak: ‘Bombs turning into butterflies,’ you know?”
The festival raised a staggering $17,000, and maybe that was the night when Taylor realized precisely how astronomically high his profile had risen. “Fire and Rain” was marching up the chart, and when he introduced the song toward the end of the show, the audience began applauding after just two lines. It was a moment of recognition that, more than any other, confirmed Taylor’s ascendancy and nothing else that happened that evening, not even the encore he shared with Joni Mitchell, performing Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” and the Mitchell-penned title track to Tom Rush’s The Circle Game, could compare.
Days later, on October 28, Taylor and Mitchell were sharing a stage again, this time at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Broadcast live on BBC radio, the performance caught the pair giggling and laughing through their between-song patter like high schoolers enjoying their prom.
Mitchell opened the show, peforming two of her own songs—“That Song About Midway” and “The Gallery”—solo before she turned the spotlight onto Taylor for a resonant “Rainy Day Man,” and a jocular “Steamroller” (“the heaviest blues tune I know, ladies and gentlemen”). Mitchell followed through with “The Priest” (from that year’s Ladies of the Canyon) and “Carey,” a song destined for her next album, Blue. Taylor came back for “Carolina in My Mind,” and then the pair joined forces for Mitchell’s “California,” laughing through its travelogue introduction.
They swung into “For Free,” that staple of Taylor’s own early live show. “The first time I ever heard this tune,” Taylor told the crowd, “I was at Newport. Joni and I were both doing some workshop out in the middle of a field; it was raining, and the mike system was shorting on and off. It was kind of a weird day. But I’d never heard this tune before, and I’ve never played it with her either.…”
They duetted through an achingly sparse “The Circle Game” and closed with a beautiful “You Can Close Your Eyes.” The recording of this song is perhaps the finest existing recording of the two lovers to have come to light in forty years. And every word they uttered, here and anyplace else they stepped out that year, seemed to be recorded for posterity by somebody or other.
He portrayed the grand sad loner, then, but James Taylor was decidedly not alone as he reeled from the sudden lightning strike. Suddenly it was as though his very family name had become a license to print (or at least hope to print) money. Seemingly sidestepping any kind of broad musical apprenticeship, brother Livingston already had an album out through Phil Walden’s Capricorn label. Siblings Alec and Kate were both awaiting the release of their debut LPs, with Kate about to head out on tour with Cat Stevens. And though very few people ever expected all three to hit it as big as their famous brother had (Livingston’s LP was sweetly melodic but hardly anything to write home about; Kate’s was better, but scarcely more formed), still, Rolling Stone headlined Taylor’s March 1971 cover story “The First Family of the New Rock,” and there were few people who doubted that was true.
In the handful of interviews he did give, now and over the months to come, Taylor seized gratefully on the opportunity to speak about anything apart from himself. Carole King’s emergence from the shadows of stage fright, for example, was a favorite topic.
In the run-up to Thanksgiving 1970, Taylor played a sold-out six day season at the Troubadour and convinced Carole King to be his opening act. She pulled it off, too, not even flapping when there was a bomb scare during her opening night set, phoned in by who knew which radical, entertaining who knew what grudge. And Taylor, too, remained unperturbed, sitting with Joni Mitchell and flicking instead through the good-luck telegrams that had flooded in.
“Best of luck on opening night to one hell of a swell guy,” from his publisher; “I wish I was there, but you sold out,” from musician John Stewart. “I knew someday you’d sell out.”
“Carole was waiting to happen,” he told writer Kerry O’Brien. “The singer-songwriter thing had sort of happened with Dylan, really with Woody Guthrie, from my point of view. But it was time for Carol to sort of step up to the plate and knock it out of the park.” The first time King ventured out onto a public stage, “in the context of my set,” was when he played a show on the roof of Queens College. Now, however, she had taken the Troubadour stage at last, billed as Taylor’s support, and he proudly recalled, “It was—she was very tentative and—but, you know, the music takes over and those songs that she wrote are such vehicles, you just can’t lose. Once you hook into it, it’s sort of ‘away we go.’”
King’s Writer album did little. But her next record, Tapestry, cut in two weeks with everybody wondering how it could possibly succeed after Writer had failed, was destined to soar. By June 1971, the woman who once canceled a gig at the Troubadour because she was too nervous to go on stage was headlining two nights at Carnegie Hall.
Taylor, meanwhile, continued to feel vulnerable.
“It is very strange making a living out of being yourself,” Taylor mused, and his bandmates sympathized with his dilemma. Kootch: “It was absolutely great. For me it wasn’t just James breaking through, it was all of us, Peter, Russ, myself, all of us, we were all a part of the picture.
“It was a big deal. Here we were suddenly getting all this attention, and I loved it, I was having a ball. It was great, we made it, we can go on a big tour, we can go all over the country.
“But James was miserable, he was struggling, he was still on dope. He’d get through the gigs and everyone was having a great time but James.”
Sweet Baby James was still selling like diapers. Reactivated, the Apple album was now marching up the chart and dragging “Carolina in My Mind” in its 45-rpm wake. Chip Taylor had even reached back into the vault and, at last, pulled together the afternoon’s worth of Flying Machine material he had taped, and that was likewise gnawing at the Hot 100—much to its makers’ disgust.
Kootch spoke for the entire band when he condemned, “When James hit, which had nothing to do with Al or Chip, along they come sticking this album out on the tails of James’s success. [Chip] didn’t ask us our permission, he didn’t tell us it was happening, and he certainly didn’t pay us, and we were furious. The guy blew more money at the gambling tables in five minutes than he spent on the goddamned album. It was a lowball, classless, jive-ass move.”
But Chip was, and remains, unrepentant. A contract had been signed, and it needed to be honored. Allen Klein had refused to negotiate, and Apple was in any case in no fit state to fight. The only other option would have been to sue James Taylor himself, and Chip Taylor was adamant: “We didn’t want to do that.”
***
In March 1971, James Taylor became the first self-professed heroin addict ever to appear on the cover of Time magazine, and one of a select band of pop performers, too. The Beatles and the Band were about as far out as the venerable weekly journal had journeyed, which meant that even Bob Dylan had still to appear. But Time was unequivocal in its support for Taylor.
“The man who best sums up the new sound of rock, as well as being its most radiantly successful practitioner, is a brooding, sensitive twenty-two-year-old rich man’s son who sings, he says, ‘because I don’t know how to talk.’”
The article reflected how Taylor’s first album, James Taylor, sold just 30,000 copies in its first year; while his second, Sweet Baby James, had topped a million and a half in the same amount of time. He was a favorite for five awards at the upcoming Grammys, and just a month earlier, he was a star turn at the predominantly classical Great Performers series at New York City’s Lincoln Center. He was, quite simply, the first American superstar of the seventies, and he hated it. Years later, he would admit to Stereo Review, “I think that the early success and recognition really froze me up. The Time magazine thing was a big deal. Back then it was a big thing. I can’t remember it that well.”
He did not resent his success. “It was very gratifying to have a hit.” But, he continued, “there were some things about it that I wasn’t really ready for; perhaps there are some aspects of being a star that I’m not very strong in. Some people can really handle an awful lot of it. And other people just continue to do their work and continue to do it well and have a good attitude toward what they’re doing and know how to enjoy themselves and disregard things that are gonna mess with their heads.”
He was not one of them, and the Time magazine article dwelled upon that with what might have been seen as almost intrusive detail. “The press want something that’ll sell copy,” Taylor acknowledged to Rolling Stone in 1979. It was their job, or at least their duty, to pick up on subjects that their readership would be interested in, regardless of how prurient that interest might be.
So “they pick up on the mental hospital, family stuff, try to invent some category of rock that I belong to, or perhaps they pick up on my drug problem. [And] it gets to the point sooner or later when you start to think about your kids: ‘What does your daddy do for a living?’ ‘He plays the guitar and he talks about his drug problems.’ It’s embarrassing to read the drivel that comes out of your mouth sometimes.…”
Embarrassing, too, to read some of the drivel that Taylor’s detractors could come up with, as the long-established countercultural imagery of smack as a somehow acceptable artistic statement ran headlong into his own decidedly uncool public persona.
Images of course abound. Ray Charles standing on a South of France seafront, shivering in his overcoat on the warmest day of the year. Johnny Thunders pinprick-eyeballing an audience that has just spent three hours waiting in a run-down club while he sent back to New York for some merchandise.
Keith Richards not having his blood changed at a Swiss clinic every year, but rarely saying anything to send the rumor packing. Lou Reed writing two of the greatest love songs of his life about the drug, one about scoring it (“I’m Waiting for the Man”), one about using it (“Heroin”). Iggy Pop on stage in 1977, screaming to the bleachers, “Mama, I shot myself up!” And Sid Vicious’s mama shooting him up herself, with enough high-grade smack to pack her Sex Pistol son off to the graveyard.
And what do they all have in common?
They’re cool.
Which isn’t to say heroin itself is cool. Its imagery, though, and its acolytes, flow through some of the most archetypal notions in rock ’n’ roll—none of which have anything to do with a singer-songwriter strumming his guitar: “the only junkie,” more than a handful of commentators have quipped, “whose audience nods out before he does.”
Taylor was working now on his third LP, but he was doing so from beneath shadows that could never have imagined before: the weight of expectation from an apparent universe full of followers; the sibling rivalry induced by his familial contemporaries (sister Kate’s Sister Kate, another Peter Asher production, was now bubbling under the chart); and, suddenly, the race among the other record labels to launch their own New James Taylor.
Taylor was dropped into the thick of this hubbub, in spring 1971, on a twenty-seven-date American tour packaging him, Carole King, and Kootch’s Jo Mama onto one bill, the musicians slipping and sliding between their own spots and one another’s in an outing that would later offer Bob Dylan a template for his Rolling Thunder Revue. It also left Taylor facing the most grueling schedule he had ever confronted.
From the outset, it was an ill-starred outing. Later, Rolling Stone would reflect on Taylor’s live appearances and muse, “[His] last tour had not been an artistic success. He had become sluggish and more distant from his audience.” But even before they hit the road, neither Taylor nor King was comfortable with the mind-numbing repetition of a full tour. But ticket demand was so vast that, had they stuck to the size of venues they preferred to play, the tour would have lasted twenty-seven weeks, not twenty-seven days.
There was further discontent when the ticket prices were announced—admission to the closing performance, at Madison Square Garden, topped out at a staggering $7.50, and Asher admitted that he was horrified at the cost.
They did their utmost to compensate audiences for the lack of intimacy. Video screens were brought in to project the onstage action as far as possible, and Asher at least took solace in the knowledge that a Taylor ticket at the Garden still cost 25 percent less than Tom Jones’s fans had to fork out when their idol performed there. And, as Asher must have grown tired of reminding people, $7.50 was the maximum cost of attending the spectacle. There were a lot of cheaper seats as well, and all of them had an excellent view of the stage.
So the audience could see, but what were they watching? Even his supporters could tell there was something amiss, that Taylor was growing increasingly distant from the audience who came to worship at his feet. And watching from across the ocean, Cat Stevens made no secret of his opinions. “If you play Madison Square Garden as a soloist then you’ve had it,” he told Hit Parader. “I suppose the trouble with America is that you’re either a superstar or you’re nothing and you’re expected to play the large auditoriums. But it can easily get out of hand and become quite frightening.”
“I don’t go in for all that,” he told writer Roy Carr. “They’re only in it for the bread, it’s definitely a bread thing. The only thing is that you do get heard by a lot more people, but then you don’t, really, because you sacrifice the quality of your performance. They only see the event, that’s all. Now that’s what I call a drag. That’s not what it’s about.”
Taylor, it seemed, agreed with every word.
It would be childish to blame stress for whatever happened next; childish, but also childlike. Accustomed to living his own life, but all too willing to turn to other crutches rather than try and fight through his problems alone, Taylor was getting high again.
He wasn’t, he insisted, stoned throughout the entire tour. Occasionally he would pop an upper or two if he was feeling especially tired, or too weak to take the stage. But when the tour hit Chicago, Taylor hit rock bottom. He had a jones like none he had experienced in a long time.
“I got in touch with a doctor who was a friend of mine and he got me methadone somewhat illegally. He figured it was either he’d break a law or else I’d go down, so he straightened me out. I stayed on that methadone he gave me for almost a month.”
The problem with addiction, however, “is that it’s consistent. What the junkie is looking for when he picks up his syringe or goes out to cop is something that will be the same every time, and that will completely supersede all other goings-on. And smack does that. It’s the circumstances around it that kill you. Heroin maintenance has worked well in England. But it’s like being dead. It knocks out your sensitivities at the same time that it gets rid of the suppressed emotion that you can’t stand anymore.”
He found it very difficult to write when he was strung out.
If his personal capacity for self-indulgence had run dry, however, his mailbag bulged with fresh inspiration for song. Having established himself, as Al Aronowitz put it, as the voice of his generation, he had also maneuvered himself into place as its mouthpiece, and it seemed as though every sad-sack romantic who felt that life was beating him with the sharp end of the stick was putting pen to paper to tell Taylor all about it.
He could, his friends joked, have readily given the music business up, and set himself up instead as an agony aunt, catering to the miseries of American adolescence and answering his many fans’ problems with a few lines of verse.
That the material he wrote for what became Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon was, for the most part, as lasting as that which comprised its predecessor was no surprise. Even as Taylor looked for a possible escape from his life as a tortured soul (ironically by giving himself fresh fodder for the role), he also knew what his audience required and, by that token, what his paymasters demanded.
Onstage, he continued to play the down-home humble boy, even affecting the ghost of a Southern accent for the benefit of audiences who would see that as a mark of authenticity. Other people noticed how his revelations about drug abuse and mental illness offered him an almost tangible sense of vulnerability, one that kept his friends close and his enemies closer. To savage James Taylor in print, one writer of the time recalled, was to bring down a mailbox of merciless opprobrium, seething with that brand of self-righteous fury that only the truly liberated mind can bring to bear on a subject, accusing the author of hate crimes against addicts and lunatics, and any other disadvantaged group that could be shoehorned into the diatribe.
The intriguing aspect of such a firestorm was that Taylor himself did not need to be defended with such ire; was, in fact, as tired of his apparent sainthood as the critics who bemoaned its conferral in the first place.
There would be flashes, across the course of the album, of a new sense of personal distance from the problems he sang of, but there would also be a tired lament for the life that he was no longer allowed to live—his own.
“Hey Mister, That’s Me Up On the Jukebox” was, and would remain, one of Taylor’s greatest creations; Kootch told Taylor biographer Timothy White that “it was exactly how he felt. He knew he was spread thin, and needed some time alone to get better again.” But more than that, the song was a plea for moderation, an acknowledgment of the fortune that had come his way, but also a request that the spotlight be turned off occasionally.
Taylor: “That song was actually as much as anything else to Peter Asher, who bore the brunt of my discomfort about the deadline aspect of Mudslide Slim. I wrote that song in the studio. The bridge, which was ‘Do you believe I’ll go back home / Hey, mister, can’t you see that I’m dry as a bone?’ is about having to write a song. It’s an album cut about having to make an album cut. It’s kind of a rip-off, except that it’s a really nice tune.”
He scrambled for material. No fewer than three of the songs he took into the studio with him dated back to that frenetic burst of songwriting energy that consumed Taylor the previous year. One was the slight “Long Ago and Far Away,” but the other two rank among the best songs he had yet written—the ode to Joni, “You Can Close Your Eyes,” and “Riding on a Railroad,” voicing his frustrations over the moviemaking experience. He had expected a lot of things from his big-screen debut, and worried about a lot as well. But the total lack of creative control was one that he had never anticipated.
How telling, then, that neither song was to be presented in anything approaching its most flattering light here. Two years later, Peter Asher would utterly reinvent “You Can Close Your Eyes” for Linda Ronstadt, as a highlight of her breakthrough album, Heart Like a Wheel; while “Riding on a Railroad” had already been presented in definitive form, after Taylor sent Tom Rush a demo of it as he worked toward his next album, Wrong End of the Rainbow.
Not that Taylor necessarily agreed with Rush’s treatment of it.
Rush: “James sent me the song on a tape, a piece of tape, wrapped around a stick, and at the start of the tape, after I’d wound it onto a reel, he’s saying, ‘Sorry, I didn’t have a take-up reel, Tom,’ and there was the sound of carpenters hammering in the background. So I did ‘Riding on a Railroad’ on the album and the next time I saw James, which was about a year later, he said, ‘You know, next time you do one of my songs let me show you the chords.’”
Significant, too, was Taylor’s own choice for the album’s stand-out track—a song that spilled not from his pen but from Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend.”
It was King’s idea for him to record it, and she remained adamant even after Taylor teased that her old Brill Building training was kicking in again, the notion that she had written a great song and now needed to find someone to record it. No, she assured him, she had already taped her own version and it was going to be on her own next record. She simply wanted to hear Taylor perform it as well.
King’s version of the song would, in fact, greet the public first: Tapestry saw daylight in November 1970, almost half a year ahead of Mud Slide Slim, and it had long since commenced its skyward rise. But there is no doubting that Taylor’s version played a major role in further popularizing King’s, all the more so after it was released as the follow-up single to the distinctly underperforming “Country Road” single, which had come out earlier in the year. While the album rose to #2, “You’ve Got a Friend” was destined to climb all the way to the top, and the demand for Taylor to keep on doing what he did grew even louder.
“You’ve Got a Friend” is the single that established Taylor at the peak of his profession, though his supporters had been claiming for a year that he was already there. Even more impressively, however, it beat off competition not only from Tommy James, the Bee Gees, and Jean Knight, but also from itself. A cover of the song by Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway had been released almost simultaneously by one of Warner Brothers’ sister labels, Atlantic, and the ensuing battle was considered worthy enough to make the front page of Billboard magazine’s May 29, 1971, issue.
“Several things are at stake,” Atlantic’s Jerry Wexler told the paper. “In addition to the natural desire to win, there is also the matter of responsibility to your artist.” Atlantic would go “all out” to promote the cover version, although even there, there could have been little doubt that it would be Taylor who won out. And so it was; Taylor was #1, Flack and Hathaway got no higher than #29.
Taylor should have been celebrating. He just wasn’t sure what, exactly, it was that he needed to be so happy about. Performing, he once said, “is terrifying. And it has to stay that way. Your really need that energy and that urgency, or else you’d get complacent.… You’d just lay back and nothing would happen.”
That was what he wanted now, to lie back and allow nothing to happen. But he couldn’t do that. All he could do was look forward to the little breaks that had been dropped into the itinerary, to give the players a little downtime. Like the one that allowed him to return to Los Angeles for a few days at the beginning of April 1971. He grabbed it, and grasped, too, the opportunity to check out the latest in the long line of singer-songwriters who were apparently coveting his crown.
Still warming up for that six-week American tour, Cat Stevens was back in Los Angeles…back at the Troubadour.