Fire and Rain (18 page)

Before the brownstone explosion, the Weathermen were something of underground culture heroes; they weren't succeeding at much, but they knew how to get publicity. The accidental bombing—along with their intended targets—cast a pall over the group that never dissipated. No one expected Richard Nixon to be supportive, and he wasn't. On March 12, a report called “Subject: Revolutionary Violence” was dropped onto his desk; when asked to reach out to the disgruntled younger generation, he shot back, “Forget them.” But Abbie Hoffman, who had once championed the Weathermen, even helping some members escape the clutches of the law, was having his doubts. Realizing that killing innocent civilians wouldn't help the cause, he later wrote that the 11th Street incident was “the great tragedy of the underground's development,” although he admitted it was “a blessing in disguise” in the way it obliterated dangerous tendencies in the group. Reading about the explosion in a Washington newspaper the next day, Moratorium co-organizer David Hawk was disgusted and thanked God no innocent bystanders had been killed.

After seeing photos of the destroyed building on the front page of the
Times
the following day, Susan Braudy, a young writer and Bryn Mawr and Yale graduate who'd attended school with Boudin and Oughton, went to see the site for herself. The block was engulfed in smoke, water, and plainclothes cops. “I just thought, ‘This isn't going to work,'” she remembered. Maybe her generation wasn't going to bring about the change they hoped. Maybe all the political sloganeering amounted to nothing. Confused and upset, she began rethinking everything positive she'd presumed about the group and other radical organizations.

A month later, Braudy saw Boudin running down a street, bare-legged and wearing a winter coat. The sight seemed to make as much sense as anything else at that moment.

Early in the afternoon of March 7, the day after the brownstone explosion, a line began forming outside 116 MacDougal Street, eight blocks south of 11th Street and on the other side of Washington Square Park. The crowd was preparing for the first of James Taylor's three nights at the Village Gaslight, a tiny space crammed in the midst of the Village's club strip.

The Greenwich Village folk music scene wasn't as bustling as it had been in the early to mid '60s, when Simon and Garfunkel and Stephen Stills—not to mention Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary, Judy Collins, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, and so many others—had worked on their craft on cramped coffeehouse stages. Dylan had just relocated back to the Village after several years in Woodstock, but he and his peers had long since moved on to bigger, more prestigious venues, and folk music itself, especially the political type, no longer had the cultural impact it once had. Of the coffeehouses and clubs that had survived, the Village Gaslight held all of 130 people wedged behind its angled wooden tables; the stage
was next to the kitchen. To compensate for the lack of a liquor license, the bartenders would add a bit of rum flavoring to the soda.

Taylor's first tour to promote
Sweet Baby James
had nothing approaching a budget. From town to town, Taylor traveled with just his guitar and his mother's small canvas suitcase for whatever clothes he wanted to bring along. Asher sensed Taylor would be able to attract more than one hundred people to a New York show; surely some must have remembered the Flying Machine, who'd played at the nearby Night Owl just a few years before. But Asher was savvy enough to realize that an overpacked house was far better for buzz than a half-filled one, so he'd booked Taylor into the Gaslight for three nights. On opening night, hundreds began lining up in the frigid temperatures, even for the late show, which started at 2 A.M. Someone glimpsed Dylan in the crowd.

Asher knew good publicity when he saw it. Grabbing a few dimes, he ran to a pay phone up the street and called local newspaper and TV outlets to tell them about the long line extending from 116 MacDougal all the way down to Bleecker. Afterward the
New York Post
reported that the Gaslight had turned away two thousand people. The club's owners had no idea where that figure came from, but it sounded impressive.

Ambling onto the compact Gaslight stage and taking a seat on a wooden chair, Taylor could have been mistaken for a roadie rather than the headlining act. He began singing, his gaze downward, eyes sometimes closed, his long, slightly greasy brown hair occasionally obscuring what few expressions he had. He seemed pained and didn't work hard to hide it. “Lord knows you got to take enough time to think these days,” he told the crowd. Then he added, “If you feel like singing along . . . don't.”

Yet Taylor also knew how to charm the Gaslight crowd. At moments, he made mild fun of rock star convention. Toward the end of the set he would do “Steamroller,” picking out a few rough-hewn notes on the guitar and deadpanning, “Pick it, Big Jim.” (Asher had suggested Taylor actually stand up while performing that song, for an added bit of
showmanship, but Taylor declined.) When water from a steam pipe on the ceiling began to drip on him, he joked, “My guitar is gently weeping.” “He was painfully shy onstage, but he knew how to make his painful shyness work for him,” recalled Danny Kortchmar. “Every woman in the audience was in love with him. It wasn't a premeditated thing. Even when he was sitting in a chair, people would lean forward to hear what he had to say. It worked like a champ.”

“I can feel it happening,” Taylor told
New York Post
writer Al Aronowitz before the show. “I'm starting to feel good about it.” Taylor's feeling was borne out in the post-show press. “Is James Taylor going to be the next public phenomenon?” wrote the widely read Aronowitz.
Cashbox
, the music trade magazine, noted, “They can smell a legend going to happen—the crowd, the ‘knowing' crowd, had really gotten James Taylor's scent.” Coming only a few days after the brownstone explosion, Taylor's stint at the club, his nonthreatening songs rolling out effortlessly, must have felt especially consoling.

Murmurs in Greenwich Village weren't yet translating to record sales. As the spring deepened,
Sweet Baby James
remained under the radar. In the April 25 issue of
Billboard,
it zipped up to number 25, then dropped and kept falling, until it remained stuck in the lower echelons of the top 100. At one humiliating point, it was one notch below the soundtrack to
Paint Your Wagon,
a hokey film adaptation of a '50s Broadway musical—everything Taylor's music, much less rock and roll, was supposed to have abolished. Right then, the radio was teeming with music that whooped and soared, like the Jackson Five's “The Love You Save” or Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's “Woodstock,” or ripped and roared, like Creedence Clearwater Revival's “Up Around the Bend” and John Lennon's “Instant Karma.” Next to them, “Sweet Baby James,” a modest shrug, failed to chart.

The campus circuit was another, more welcoming matter. By the spring of 1970, more kids in their late teens and early twenties were attending colleges and universities than ever—over seven million, a 30 percent increase from 1965. Young, confused, and disillusioned, they began responding, albeit slowly, to
Sweet Baby James
. At a record store at the Madison branch of the University of Wisconsin, the album went top 10, just behind juggernauts like
Bridge Over Troubled Water
and
Déjà vu
. Realizing the importance of this market, Asher began booking Taylor into a string of college dates, including Harvard on April 21 and Cornell on May 2.

The turnouts varied: After the Cornell show, sponsored by Volkswagen, one of the students who organized it cracked, “It's probably the only thing Volkswagen ever lost money on.” The accommodations varied as well. To save money, Taylor would often crash in student dorms. But his May 29 performance at a high-school theater—the Berkeley Community Theatre, part of Berkeley High School just north of San Francisco—demonstrated how he was beginning to connect with an audience of his own. Judging from their warm response, the hundreds gathered were clearly already familiar with “Fire and Rain” and “Country Road” from the new album, and “Carolina in My Mind” from the first. They chortled, as they always did, when he rolled out the self-deprecating “Big Jim” line in “Steamroller.” “My my my,” he ad-libbed that night during that song, “I don't know nothin' but the blues.” The line was half joke and half branding act.

Even the outside material Taylor picked for his set built on his apolitical, lonely-guy persona. In Berkeley, he sang a muted version of Joni Mitchell's “For Free,” about a pop star who sees a street musician and pines for those early, pre-pressure days. His younger brother Livingston's plainspoken, lilting “In My Reply” was a parable of people corrupted by their lust for power and money. In the hands of the Drifters eight years before, Carole King and Gerry Goffin's “Up on the Roof”
was a wondrous and jubilant exaltation of city life; Taylor transformed it into a doleful lament. Later in the show, with a modest, “Hello, Carole,” he even introduced King, who was joining him at select shows as his piano player. (Just before hitting the road, Taylor played guitar and harmonized on King's first album as a solo artist,
Writer,
cut that spring.) Whether he sang his songs or others', Taylor was becoming an entry point for a new generation of songwriters eager to analyze their mental states in song; community and politics were far from the agenda.

During interviews he began doing to promote the album, Taylor seemed uncomfortable discussing his stays at McLean and Austin Riggs. But neither did he completely run from that part of his past. In a press release that accompanied
Sweet Baby James
, he wrote, “In the fall of 1965 I entered a state of what must have been intense adolescence . . . and spent nine months of voluntary commitment at McLean Psychiatric Hospital in Massachusetts.” At early club shows, he would turn his stay there into a quizzical in-joke: “McLean, that's a mental hospital,” he told one audience. “Okay, anybody here from McLean? Let's hear it for McLean.” Eager to discuss money matters, Taylor called Warners head Joe Smith one day. Taylor was distraught, and Smith said he should go to Smith's house and wait for him. There, Taylor and Smith's wife sat waiting for Smith to come home, Taylor barely saying a word for nearly a half hour. “My wife can make a conversation with a wall, but he sat there and said nothing,” Smith recalled. “She finally called me and said, ‘Get home!'”

The sense that Taylor had been damaged by drugs or mental instability only added to his mystique. When a reporter interviewed college students about Taylor's appeal, one answered, astutely, “The fact that he was in a mental hospital colors people emotionally before they even hear the songs. They all feel sorry for him. The girls, especially.” By then, even Taylor understood that playing up his flaws wasn't such a bad idea. “I feel fine just to know you're around,” he began plucking and crooning at Berkeley. At first it sounded like a love song, but soon the crowd
started realizing what was happening.
Wait, what
is
this song?
Then Taylor hit the chorus: “Things go better with Coke,” he sang, and the audience whooped at both the not-very-veiled drug reference and Taylor semi-mocking a corporate ad jingle.

“
Yeah!”
yelled a man in the crowd, with evident approval.