17
Journalist Lester Bangs was writing about punk rock years before the rest of the world even knew what it might be, and long after it had all but forgotten. His first published article was a review of the MC5, one of the hottest of the rhetoric-heavy rockers that emerged from Detroit in the late 1960s, and his last, prior to his death in April 1982, lauded Oi!, an antisocial skinhead noise that rose from the streets of working-class England in the early years of the 1980s.
In between times, he praised the Sex Pistols, canonized Iggy Pop, and worshipped the Velvet Underground and several million other words, all hell-bent in the pursuit of rock ’n’ roll excellence.
He believed in rock ’n’ roll music as the ultimate cultural artifact, our one shot at scoring everlasting youth. We listen, he suggested, not to stay young, but to stay feeling young. Pete Townshend once said all anybody really needs is a record that does for them what their first few records did. They want that first fuck, and that was what kept Bangs going for as long as he did. He knew he would never get it again, but he kept on looking all the same.
Fellow writer Greil Marcus reckons it was Bangs who christened punk “punk” in the first place, and Bangs claimed his hermit crab Spud used to dance to old Lou Reed LPs. So, ten years after Bangs’s final, fatal drug overdose, the world of rock ’n’ roll journalism held a memorial read-in.
“It was disappointing,” mourned Richard Hell, one of the evening’s performers, and a man whose ass Bangs once publicly threatened to kick. “I thought it was going to be people talking about Lester. Instead, they just got up and read passages from his book.”
What did you do?
“I read the index.”
Hell brandished a two-inch-thick hardback. It was called Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung and, inasmuch as it was a collection of Bangs’s best (and best-remembered) essays and reviews, it is probably the most acerbic and dedicated rock book anyone has ever published. It has the hippest index, too. The Clash receive more mentions than the Beatles, the Fugs appear more often than John Fogerty, and the only time you hear of James Taylor is when Bangs is plotting to kill him. “I hate to come on like a Nazi, but…”
The occasion, if such sentiments actually demanded an occasion, was the random happenstance of Bangs waking up one morning in late 1971 and wanting to write about the Troggs, the band from Andover, UK, who might have ground their way around the pubs of sixties England forever had they not had a remarkable piece of luck: the chance to be the first band in the world to record Chip Taylor’s “Wild Thing.” The same Chip Taylor who would then discover James Taylor.
Strangely, Bangs did not make that connection. He did delve into his personal and musical biography; he did deviate around a dozen different other topics; and, in tandem with fellow scribe Richard Meltzer (the same Richard Meltzer who had already discovered Jackson Browne), he transformed the December 1971 issue of Who Put the Bomp magazine into a two-man eulogy to the Troggs. Meltzer’s article was called, simply, “Richard Meltzer on the Troggs.” Bangs, with an eloquence and passion that even his most dedicated acolytes admit is a sometimes-acquired taste, called his “James Taylor Marked for Death.”
Who Put the Bomp was not a major magazine. Indeed, in the scheme of the American music media, it was scarcely even a small one; a few dozen rudely typed and illustrated pages Xeroxed and then stapled together in the spirit of fanzines all over the world. It certainly wasn’t available in the same way as the Esquire article that first served notice, six long years before, that rock ’n’ roll could be taken in so many fresh directions that poetic vocabularies and a studied lack of volume were no longer cardinal sins; and it certainly didn’t reach as many homes as the genuine giants of the printed music scene.
What marked it out was the quality of the writers that editor/publisher Greg Shaw attracted (Bangs, Meltzer, and another contributor to that issue, Lenny Kaye, were all regular Rolling Stone correspondents), and the passion for music that Shaw demanded they evince. With a print run that rarely exceeded a couple of hundred, not many people could have read each issue. But those who did paid attention, both to the words and writers that filled each issue, and to the pronouncements therein—even when those fantasies entailed disemboweling the crown prince of I-Rock (a phrase Bangs had just invented, he said, for any music that was “so involutedly egocentric that you…just want to take the poor bastard out and get him a drink, and then kick his ass, preferably off a high cliff…”).
“It amused me because James Taylor would make mincemeat out of Lester Bangs in about three seconds,” Kootch reflected in 2010. “People decide who’s successful. Not Lester Bangs and not any other critic. At that time, critics had a lot more clout than they have now. Nobody remembers Lester Bangs, but they all remember James Taylor.”
Yet (and only in hindsight is it possible to make this observation; it was not remarked upon at the time, nor would it become apparent for a year or so more) something did change at the end of 1971, as James Taylor retreated to Martha’s Vineyard, to dread the demands of his next LP; as Cat Stevens basked in the success of Teaser and the Firecat, and wondered what he, too, could possibly do next; and as Jackson Browne nervously contemplated his promised role within the music industry following the imminent musical sea change his manager was predicting.
Something happened and something changed. Because the records that all three would produce during the next twelve months (and across the years and decades that have passed since then) would be those of artists who had each outgrown the expectations of their early-1970s followings, and were now truly reaching out to touch a destiny of their own.
Browne started slowly. Almost unwillingly following in the footsteps of the hit single, Jackson Browne choked at #58 on the Billboard chart, an uncertain performance that only appeared more diffident when matched against the promotion that the record received. The slavering devotion of the media was only the start; at Seattle’s Paramount Theater on February 16, 1972, Browne took his bow as the opening act for Joni Mitchell’s latest tour: a month of shows across the U.S. and Canada in February/March, followed by a return to the Europe in May for half a dozen shows around the UK, West Germany, the Netherlands, and France.
He appeared on the UK’s top rock show, Old Grey Whistle Test, and recorded a spectacular solo concert performance for BBC TV’s In Concert. But the London concert was a disaster. In the thirty or so minutes that he spent onstage, a malfunctioning microphone ensured he battled his way through no more than four heavily interrupted songs before finally conceding defeat; yet Mitchell, by all accounts, played one of the greatest shows of her career, circumventing the stage setup to play through the house system.
In June, Browne and Mitchell were in Hawaii; in July, they hit the Mariposa Folk Festival in Toronto, Ontario, behind homecoming king Neil Young, another artist who, as Browne thoughtfully mused, employed the events that shaped his own life as a means of communicating with others, but who did so—and this was the key to the entire debate and divide that was shaping the singer-songwriter “movement”—without paying lip service to the “overwhelming universality” that the less imaginative record labels seemed to think was the key to success.
It was originality that marked out an artist, Browne (like Taylor and Stevens, Mitchell and Young) believed, the need to keep pushing forward, regardless of the barriers that their audience’s expectations erected. It didn’t matter whether or not commercial success came knocking immediately; better for an artist to act out his own feelings and beliefs than to simply play blind, bland follow-the-leader.
Browne and Mitchell were lovers by now. Their tempestuous affair lasted little longer than the time they spent together on the road and, according to David Geffen biographer Tom King, “had an ugly ending”—from Mitchell’s point of view, anyway.
It was Browne who ended the affair. He had met a new lover, Phyllis Major, falling for her one night at the Troubadour when quite by chance he tried to break up a fight between a woman and an unemployed actor. In fact, he failed, as he was felled by the actor, but Major thanked Browne for at least trying to stand up for her and, slowly, they grew to know one another.
She was born in California but grew up in Europe—following her parents’ divorce, Phyllis and her mother lived on the Greek island of Hydra; she worked as a governess in Switzerland and a model in Paris. She had dated Keith Richards in France and Bobby Neuwirth in New York, and she cowrote a couple of songs with Al Kooper for the ex-Dylan organist’s New York City (You’re a Woman) LP. Now she was in Los Angeles and was an immediate muse to Browne. “Ready or Not,” a song that would be gracing his gestating second album, was written for Major, around the same time as his career took another upward turn: He headed out on his next tour, this time with that newly formed Los Angeles aggregation, Eagles.
Swiftly graduating from being, simply, Linda Ronstadt’s band (the core quartet of Frey, Leadon, Henley, and Meisner had accompanied her through the recording of her third, eponymous, solo album), Eagles were quick to cut their own first LP. Eagles was now out, earning reviews at least as ravenous as those that awaited Browne’s, and aiding Browne’s own star with the inclusion of “Take It Easy,” a song he’d been tinkering with during his own first album sessions, and had even previewed on the Gene Shay WFFM radio broadcast back in November 1971.
Eagle Frey had been at the studio one day and could never understand why Browne so cavalierly placed the unfinished number to one side. So he called him up and asked if he could have a go at finishing the song. Browne gave his blessings and Frey completed the song in time for his own album sessions and Eagles’ first hit single.
On the road, Browne was joined by fiddler David Lindley, that passing acquaintance from his Troubadour debut, but the nightly highs of the live show were counterbalanced by the darker shadows that were looming around Browne’s much-anticipated second album—namely, the fact that he didn’t have one.
Loath to dig back into his past for another round of songs, Browne set himself the task of creating a whole new LP’s worth of music. Unfortunately, the speed with which his life was whirling around the release of Jackson Browne, the suggestions that he ought to write another radio-friendly “Doctor My Eyes”–type song, and the ups and downs of his personal life were all distractions he could never have imagined as he’d stockpiled songs in the past.
The record that finally emerged in October 1973 as For Everyman took him nine months to complete, as he fought with each song, intent upon perfecting it and then, once he had done so, perfecting it again. Songs deemed complete one day were adjudged in need of a new verse or a new guitar part the next. It wasn’t quite a never-ending process because, at some point, the record needed to be complete. But while he had the freedom to tinker and toy, Browne took full advantage of it.
The result was a record that sounded exquisite, and readily confirmed all the promise of its predecessor. Yet life was not all strife and struggle. Phyllis became pregnant and they moved into Browne’s grandfather’s Abbey San Encino home to raise son Evan Browne. “I’ve always known I would live there someday,” Browne reflected. “I have a real appreciation for the bare walls and plants…and now I’m going to be a father there, in the house where I was a child.”
He cowrote a couple of songs for the next Eagles album, the western epic “Doolin’ Dalton” and the fifties throwback “James Dean” (ultimately held over for the band’s third LP), and that summer, he went out on tour with “Horse with No Name” hitmakers America—an August-long outing that was originally booked when he thought he’d have the new record completed in time for an early-fall release.
That date had long since been pushed back when the first show came around, one more consequence of the inordinate amount of time (by contemporary standards) he had taken on the album. But again, he knew he had been right to prevaricate—if that’s what he was doing.
His principal problem was one that both James Taylor and Cat Stevens would recognize, and which both would swiftly be attempting to resolve in their own fashion: the perceived need to continue writing songs that were, in the parlance of the time, “heavy.” No matter that Browne himself had long ceased to consider his songs in that light; his audience did, and they responded accordingly. And now he found himself trying to force out more of the same. “That’s a bad connection,” he admitted to Cameron Crowe. “I’m taking someone else’s word for them. That’s what fame does. It’s a crusher.”
Slowly, however, For Everyman came together. He included “Take It Easy,” following Eagles’ own blueprint for a song that was effectively his; and he finally tackled “These Days” too, but only after hearing what his old friend Gregg Allman did to it, when he included a version on his debut album, Laid Back. For five years, Browne had heard the song in the manner that he wrote it and the style that Nico (among so many others) had preserved it. Allman turned it around, abandoning the wistful, folky strum for a slow stroll and an impassioned vocal, reimagining a song that had once seemed set in stone. Gratefully, Browne reclaimed the greatest song of his youth and pointed it forward into his future.
He didn’t disagree, either, when people assumed another song on the album, “Redneck Friend,” was about his friendship with Allman. In fact, the song was about his penis, a theme that slotted nicely into “The Times You’ve Come,” an almost juvenile ode to orgasm.
“Ready or Not” was his love song for Phyllis; “For Everyman” was originally written for David Crosby, who didn’t record it himself but added harmonies to Browne’s recording and then told Rolling Stone, “[Browne] stopped me cold in my tracks. He nailed a certain thing in me, that escapist thing, and he called on something…that I really believe in.… Human possibility.”
A quarter century later, Rolling Stone’s Anthony DeCurtis took another look at the song. “The title track of Jackson Browne’s second album, For Everyman, was a response to the escapist vision of Crosby, Stills and Nash’s ‘Wooden Ships.’ As violence, fear, and paranoia overtook sixties utopianism, ‘Wooden Ships’(written by Crosby and Stills, along with Paul Kantner of the Jefferson Airplane) imagined a kind of hipster exodus by sea from a straight world teetering on the edge of apocalypse.
“‘We are leaving. / You don’t need us,’ the song declared.
“Browne wasn’t giving up so easily.”
***
As Jackson Browne carved that new face into the consciousness of the early 1970s, Cat Stevens seemed to have forgotten the very existence of his former self. Leaving his reputation in the confident hands of Teaser and the Firecat, he returned to the Fillmore at the end of June 1972; then toured Australia and New Zealand through August and early September. Back to the U.S. at the end of that outing, it was no surprise when he admitted, that his upcoming new album, Catch Bull at Four, was already six months old by the time it was released. Yet still he was shocked to discover the American media regarding his return to their shores as something akin to the second coming. Australia? What’s that?
“Twelve-month silence,” insisted Circus magazine. “Cat Stevens may be acting like an embryonic Beethoven in private, but in public he has seemed much more like the Invisible Man. For the better part of a year, the Cat remained fastidiously out of the public eye, safely away from the press and fans alike. No performances, no records, no interviews, no nothing.”
Ah, so that was what had changed. Taking a leaf from a new book of management techniques that his old Deram label mate David Bowie’s manager, Tony Defries, had just opened, that of withdrawing the star from circulation to allow a little mystique to build up, Stevens’s manager Barry Krost insisted that they had always intended to duck out of the spotlight for a time. But what he really meant was, Stevens had asked for time in which to shift his musical priorities, because Catch Bull at Four was to emerge as almost brutal in comparison to its predecessors.
It was harder, it was more produced, it was more experimental. Guitars faded beneath the weight of keyboards. Songs became less about “me” and more about “us,” the universal “us” that had been addressed in “Peace Train,” but while Sounds writer Penny Valentine, one of Stevens’s most vociferous UK press supporters, was swift to comment on the album’s more up-tempo approach, Stevens insisted that he saw it simply as the end of “a four-album period.” It’s probably more noticeable, she responded, that he was really trying to break away from a format that he’d found himself trapped in on the previous three. A puppet of his own design.
Stevens conceded the point and even pinpointed its genesis, a review of Teaser and the Firecat that suggested that, just maybe, all of his songs were beginning to sound alike. That only three of the album’s ten songs really stood out.
Stevens was incensed. At first. But then he began to think about it. He still disagreed, still believed that the other seven songs had been sorely mistreated by the reviewer’s opinion. (Because that’s all it was, an opinion.) But he could also see how people might think that way; people who listened to the radio or records with only half an ear, who didn’t have the time or the inclination to become as emotionally involved in a song as its writer. The people, in other words, whose disposable income made the difference between an artist having a minor hit and a major smash.
Had he grown predictable? Had his pen become set on autopilot? Was he becoming indistinguishable from every other literally or figuratively bearded bard who sat on a stool and strummed his guitar? And had his vibe become so relaxed that he was in very real danger of actually sliding off that chair?
It was time to tighten up. He looked around at the musicians who would be working with him on this latest project—guitarist Alun Davies, who had worked alongside him since Mona Bone Jakon; drummer Gerry Conway, who came in for Teaser and the Firecat; pianist Jean Roussel and bassist Alan James—then called in photographer Homer Sykes to take their pictures. It would be the first time any face other than Cat’s had appeared on one of his record sleeves, because it was the first time he had ever gone into the studio with a group. In the past, they had just been his musicians.
It was crucial to bond, both with the songs and with one another. Other artists would have booked a rehearsal room in a disused cinema somewhere and spent a couple of weeks getting drunk between songs. Adding producer Samwell-Smith to the ticket, Stevens flew the entire party out to Portugal for two weeks, not to learn the songs so much as to learn what one another could bring to them. The benign dictatorship with which Stevens had once overseen the treatment of his songs was gone. The band had to play the songs; the band should have some say in what they played.
Four months of sessions continued the party atmosphere, as the team bounced from Morgan Studios in the center of London, to the Manor in rural Oxfordshire, and then the Château d’Hérouville in the Parisian countryside, the honky hangout of Elton John fame. And everywhere, Stevens kept on reinforcing the mantra that would, ultimately, make his most magnificent LP yet. They were all in this thing together.
And once it was all complete, he panicked. Listening back to the ten songs they’d competed, hearing the synthesized tribalism of “Angelsea,” the hard-nosed electric rock of “Can’t Keep It In,” the burbling baby boogie of “Freezing Steel,” the Iberian drama of “Ocaritas,” he wondered for the first time what he had done, what he’d been thinking. “Catch Bull was very paranoid,” he told Sounds the following year. “I mean ‘Ruins,’ that last track? It said it all.”
In the past, recording his songs, he had always seen them as sketches and possibilities, upgraded versions of the demos that he had so much fun producing. Not since the bad old days of Matthew and Son and New Masters had he subjected his music to anything more than the fringes and embellishments that a simple acoustic guitar and voice could not manifest. Catch Bull at Four reversed that policy completely, painted the songs into musical corners from which he knew they would never be allowed to escape. “Can’t Keep It In” would always be a rocker now; “Sweet Scarlet” would always be a piano ballad; “18th Avenue” would always be a dramatic urban epic.
But was that a bad thing? Catch Bull at Four was a child of spontaneity, the meetings of half a dozen minds in the studio, and a witheringly honest reflection of that collision. Who was he to deny those things? Who was he to try and hide them? If Stevens’s core audience recoiled from it, then let them. Besides, the old cat was still there, curled up within his lyrics; the first verse of the album’s first song, “Sitting,” admitted that, with its defiant declaration of “sitting on my own, not by myself.” He may have been surrounded by bandmates and buddies, but the writing was still a solitary pursuit.
He had no cause to worry. Catch Bull at Four became the first Cat Stevens album to top the America chart, bumping Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly soundtrack out of the way in the process; but, perhaps, even more rewardingly, it came close to repeating the feat in Britain. Catch Bull at Four peaked at #2 in his homeland, “Can’t Keep It In” rocked to #13, and when Stevens announced a full-scale world tour, the self-styled “most unquotable person” in the world told journalist Michelle O’Driscoll, “I’m really looking forward to the whole world tour. For a while now, I’ve been taking it easy. I’ve been recording my new album and helping Alun [Davies] with his; so it will be stimulating to get back on stage, performing.”
The Alun Davies album was, in fact, especially dear to his heart. Recorded with both Gerry Conway from Stevens’s current band, and Harvey Burns, drummer on the three albums that preceded it, Daydo comprised seven of Davies’s own compositions, a couple of covers (Buddy Holly and the Mad Hatter—“I’m Late,” from Disney’s Alice in Wonderland), plus a Cat Stevens oldie that Davies had loved ever since the night in Los Angeles when Stevens strummed it loosely out at the audience without either warning or rehearsal, “Portobello Road.” “I really liked the scuffling guitar accompaniment,” Davies told Sounds. “I always liked the European rhythms he used right from the early days.” The album’s overall title, meanwhile, immortalized the nickname Davies had borne since his schooldays.
The Australian and Japanese dates in August were the shows that launched the world tour; the United States and the UK followed in the weeks leading up to Christmas. But Stevens was already looking ahead. Making Catch Bull at Four, he said, felt like a new beginning; the birth of a whole new phase in his career, and in the same way that Mona Bone Jakon exorcised the memory of the two discs that had preceded it, so this latest album placed a period at the end of the pair that followed that.
Writing the latest album had been a chore, he admitted, because it required him to completely reevaluate the way in which he had always made music (or always wanted to, at least). Now that the reevaluation was over, it was time for him to determine what he wanted to do with his discoveries, and although the road was probably not the best environment in which to indulge in too much meaningful thought, still a notion was germinating that he could never even have given credence to a year or so before.
“I’d like to come out with something now that’s freer and more natural and I think I will,” Stevens told writer Penny Valentine, and if he had telegraphed that intent across the ocean to James Taylor, he would have found a compatriot whose own thoughts had spent the past twelve months pursuing exactly those same liberated notions.
Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon was still fresh on the record racks when Taylor retreated to Martha’s Vineyard, abandoning the semi-nomadic life he had led in Los Angeles in order to build his own home just off Lambert’s Cove Road. It was there, he decreed, that he would begin work on his next album, echoing former mentor Paul McCartney’s homespun philosophy as he and Asher demoed material on a portable tape recorder, branching out into different environments—A&R Studios in New York with producer Phil Ramone, and Clover in Los Angeles with Robert Appere—as material came together.
The result would be a sparse, stark collection that Taylor, again surely in a fit of post-McCartneyism, titled One Man Dog in honor of his sheepdog David; McCartney, famously, recorded “Martha My Dear” in tribute to his own representative of that noble, hairy breed.
The gestating album and the gestating house were exquisite echoes of one another. Cardboard boxes stood in for tables, but they also doubled as drums. Rocking chairs dotted the attic, but they were great for rhythmic creaking as well. Taylor himself was running on sheer inspiration. One song, “Little David,” saw him augment the conventional instrumentation of an acoustic guitar with a chain saw and various workshop tools left lying around by the builders. One of the workmen, Mike Paletier, even “played” the crosscut saw.
It sounds idyllic, but it was not. “Unfortunately,” Kootch recalled, “there was still dope involved, and James at that point was always either on dope or trying to get off it, using methadone or some other inferior technique.” The result, he said, was that One Man Dog “is scattered all over the place.”
Ideally, Taylor would have been left to his own devices, given time to clean up or at least find some level of equilibrium. Instead, Kootch explained, “he needed another album. There was a lot of pressure, and he was in no position to do it. He couldn’t take two years off. You had to keep going, so here’s another album, and we decided for James’s comfort zone that we would start it on Martha’s Vineyard at his barn. We moved a twenty-four-track machine in there and moved upstairs and recorded in this barn.
“But he wasn’t in great shape. I thought the album, although it had some really great stuff on it, was a little disjointed and not really focused.”
Ironically, however, it is that lack of focus that gives One Man Dog its flavor and ensured that, like Stevens’s Catch Bull at Four (whose release preceded it by a month, and with which it was destined to joust at the top of the chart), its maker was able to slip the generic shackles of singer-songwriterdom a lot more effectively than either his audience or his contemporaries.
Whether out of necessity or not, the fact is, One Man Dog is an inherently funky album, a mood that is overtly conjured by “Fool for You” and “Woh, Don’t You Know,” but is percolating forever under the surface elsewhere.
Songs are fragmentary. Just two top three minutes in length; seven more stretch above two. On an album laden down with a mind-boggling eighteen tracks, many are more or less a minute long, vignettes and shreds that seem complete but are over before you realize it. The shortest, the gentle chant of “Mescalito,” clocks in at just twenty-nine seconds.
Small wonder, then, that Taylor described the record as being comprised of “cooperative pieces.” Nor is it surprising that the band—a core quartet of Kootch, Russ Kunkel, the magnificently bearded bassist Leland Sklar, and the schoolmasterly keyboard player Craig Doerge (henceforth to be known collectively as the Section)—that dictates the course of the music would become synonymous with the sound of Los Angeles rock for the next two or three years.
If only to keep its creator on an even keel, then, One Man Dog was a relaxed affair, with the literal open-door nature of the barn accentuated by a similar policy when the recording light was on. Dash Crofts (of Seal and Crofts) contributed mandolin; Randy and Michael Brecker added urban horns. Linda Ronstadt turned in a shimmering performance on “One Morning in May,” a traditional English folk song that had moved into the American kit bag courtesy of two other Vineyard folkies, Bill Keith and Jim Rooney.
Carole King dropped by to add some characteristically sweet backing vocals, and so did Taylor’s brother Alex and sister Kate. Carly Simon (whom Taylor would wed on November 3, 1972) was constantly around; so was Kootch’s wife, Abigail Haness.
Perhaps the most fascinating guest, however, was John McLaughlin, the thirty-year-old Englishman whose Mahavishnu Orchestra union with jazz rockers Jan Hammer and Billy Cobham would effectively rewrite the laws of jazz rock for the next decade. That, however, was still to transpire when Nat Weiss, Peter Asher’s partner in Marylebone Productions, called Kootch and Russ Kunkel over one evening to hear an acetate of the Orchestra’s then pending debut album, The Inner Mounting Flame.
Kootch: “John was being managed by Nat Weiss and he was James’s attorney, he represented the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and he played Russ and [me] the acetate of the first Mahavishnu Orchestra album. We couldn’t believe our ears—nobody had ever heard anything like that before. It was way ahead of its time. So that’s how John came into the picture, and before you knew it, he and James had written a song together, ‘Someone’; John had created some music—he might have written those lyrics, too—and there we are in the studio, James and me and John McLaughlin, sitting in a circle. I could not believe it.
“So there were some great things about the album. We started playing with some jazz guys, and I got to play with my all-time idol John McLaughlin.”
Still, Taylor was in no doubt as to what One Man Dog could do to his career, one reason why he joked with the title Farewell to Showbiz. Carly Simon and Peter Asher put the mockers on that because, listened to completely dispassionately, there were moments when that is precisely what the finished tapes sounded like.
Taylor tried again. Throw Yourself Away. No, that one didn’t fly either, and for much the same reason. Finally he hit on One Man Dog, and his exhausted advisors breathed a sigh of relief. It was still a loaded title if anybody cared to look for clues in its name, but the album’s artwork—Carly Simon’s brother Peter’s snap of Taylor and doggy David boating on a pond outside Brattleboro, Vermont—at least justified it. Now to see what the rest of the world thought about it.
Early portents were good. There was no indication that Taylor would tour; indeed, he had barely been sighted in public for a year now, aside from a handful of campaign appearances for presidential candidate George McGovern. But Rolling Stone found much to love in an album that “will hit you from behind because on the surface it all sounds so simple, and yet underneath the horns—so dazzlingly arranged—and the beautiful rhythm, the voice and the thoughts resonate long after the record is over.…”
Warner Brothers, too, made the best of it. Passing over what many people saw as the most obvious single on the record, the son of “Steamroller” that emerged as the rocking recipe “Chili Dog,” and closing their eyes to the knowledge that absolutely nothing on the record leaped out with the same emergency as the previous three album’s standouts, the label chose “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight” as the first 45, and it slowly made its ascent to #14.
It was a disappointment, even if the Taylor household did have cause to celebrate as Carly’s “You’re So Vain,” a song she wrote about David Geffen, was destined to hit the #1 slot. There would be a round of triumphs at the Grammys, too, as Simon scooped Best New Artist, Taylor won Best Pop Vocal Performance for “You’ve Got a Friend,” and King rushed off with Song of the Year (“Friend” again), album of the year (Tapestry), Record of the Year (“It’s Too Late”), and Best Female Vocal (“Tapestry”).
But One Man Dog, too, was destined to move with the kind of creaking uncertainty that is always perceived to haunt an artist in decline—because it is only with the benefit of hindsight that he can instead be revealed to have been in transition.
Cat Stevens’s latest, Catch Bull at Four, entered the Billboard chart on October 14, 1972, at a surprisingly lowly #135, then leaped to #42 and #21 before zeroing in on the top spot. One Man Dog jumped in at an equally disappointing #128 on November 25, and had only just breached the Top 10 at Christmas. The dog would ultimately come to rest at #4, with the Cat still breathing down its neck, the wife gazing down from the top of the chart (Simon’s No Secrets LP topped the chart on January 13), and Carole King’s latest, Rhymes and Reasons, one spot better off.
One Man Dog became the first James Taylor LP since his debut to not even sniff platinum status. And Taylor didn’t care. It would be 1974 before he returned to the record racks, hiding behind the autopilot controls of the dismal Walking Man album, and another year before Gorilla even hinted at a musical life away from the solitude of his greatest years.
Things had changed; the mood had shifted. Lonely bards were no longer the flavor of the month, probably because there were simply too damned many of them, and few of them were any good. A new mood had emerged from the same milieu, though, one that was superficially indistinguishable from what went before, but vastly different regardless.
The mood of loosey-goosey funky fun was in, the sound of the Doobie Brothers, Eagles and Little Feat, Jackson Browne and Linda Ronstadt, Andrew Gold and Warren Zevon, all the West Coast sounds that would not have been possible without the sounds that went before, but could never have existed in tandem with them.
The mood in fact was one that One Man Dog both prophesied and personified, as Lester Bangs predicted when he reviewed One Man Dog for Creem in February 1973.
Gone was the vitriol of James Taylor Marked for Death—which was, in any case, merely a throwaway paragraph or so within a far longer dissertation on the meaning of rock ’n’ roll. In its stead was an acknowledgment that “when ya get right down to it…James Taylor’s a real punk. He just sits around and gets fucked up…just like most of us.”
And, if he’d only “come on outta the closet…stop trying to be the J. D. Salinger of the count-out culture…[and] slouch on down…with the rest of the wetbacks,” he would become an even greater inspiration than he was already.
Taylor, like Stevens, was not marked for death. Instead, he was being nudged toward a rebirth, one that would see him—again like Stevens—carve a whole new musical direction from the introspection and insularity with which he had first introduced himself to the world.
That it was a direction that Jackson Browne had already signposted should not detract from the accomplishment; nor should the rocky roads down which all three artists would occasionally bump over the decades that followed. Each had opened his soul and bared a heart filled with darkness to a watching, fascinated, world. And each, through careers that intersected as much as they spiraled alone, had ultimately set himself to resolve that darkness.