Fire and Rain (47 page)

“It was very gratifying,” Taylor recalled of the way
Sweet Baby James
was embraced by the public. “No question. It was what I was hoping for, that people would listen to my music and I could make a living doing it. There's no doubt it was a great thing.” It was an equally great thing to his former label. To cash in on the newfound success of its former act, Apple re-released “Carolina in My Mind” from his first album. (It reached number 67 on the charts, a respectable showing for a two-year-old song from a flop album.) By year's end, Allen Klein was bragging that Taylor's Apple album had sold 400,071 copies in the U.S., along with 71,647 eight-track tapes.

The money that began streaming in sped up the growth of the James Taylor industry. Asher's management company, Marylebone Productions, was still based out of his house, but Asher was now able to afford an assistant, former Apple employee Chris O'Dell. In search of a new camper for an upcoming tour, O'Dell drove Taylor around to car dealerships. She'd met him before, in London during the Apple days when he'd crashed at her apartment, but was struck by how much more depressed he now seemed. “He hardly talked,” she recalled. “It was hell trying to talk to him all the way out to somewhere south of L.A. He didn't seem like a guy who had all this great stuff going on. Either he was still on drugs or maybe
off
drugs, which maybe was the problem.”

Taylor could now afford a larger band and hired Kortchmar back into the fold. Kortchmar, who'd spent much of the year recording and touring with the Laurel Canyon funk-pop band Jo Mama, made his impact felt immediately. As soon as they began rehearsing, Kortchmar started needling Taylor: “Get your ass out of that chair!” he'd bark. “Come on—you look like an old man! You gotta rock!” Honoring his
friend's request—Kortchmar was a wiry stage presence himself—Taylor began standing up, but only during the last song of the set.

Being an animated showman didn't come naturally to Taylor. He'd emerged from the folksinger tradition, where perching on a chair was as standard as learning to play Weavers songs. Taylor sat onstage so frequently that by fall he'd hired a carpenter from Martha's Vineyard to build him a custom-made wooden seat: No right arm, so Taylor's guitar wouldn't bang into it, and a stand on the left arm to hold his guitar picks and glass of water. The chair was also slightly elevated to accommodate his long legs and arms. It was, Asher recalled with a laugh, “the James Taylor Chair.”

The second reason for staying put onstage was the drugs. “He was still pretty strung out on serious drugs at that point,” recalled Kunkel. “So sitting down was probably a better thing.” Sklar, who avoided illicit anything, would often be the one to lead Taylor or one his bandmates back to the tour bus when they could barely stand. It wasn't a chore he relished, but someone had to be straight. “James didn't really talk about how he was dealing with it much,” said Asher. “Perhaps I should have said, ‘Are you all right?' But I didn't. Neither of us discussed our personal and emotional lives that much. He's shy; I'm English.”

Since everyone else seemed to be high—one reporter spied coke and pot backstage at the Troubadour shows—Taylor's problems didn't raise any alarm bells, for those around him or Taylor himself. “I was a very functional addict,” Taylor recalled. “I'm not saying it didn't get in the way of my work and my creative stuff. But I could also say in a strange way that it contributed. It was definitely something I had to go through.” The drugs were just there, and as far as anyone knew, they didn't seem to be harming Taylor or anyone else.

Sensing a cultural phenomenon in the making—the rise of the new, inward
pop, the anti-hard rock—
Time
magazine decided to pursue what would have been unthinkable months before: a cover story on James Taylor. In keeping with the magazine's reporting tradition, editors dispatched writers to campuses around the country to gauge Taylor's impact. Colleges were still a reliable barometer of his connection with those under twenty-five: At the student store at one of the University of Michigan campuses,
Sweet Baby James
sold out every three days.

At that and other schools, the
Time
reporters, in files not included in the final article, described Taylor's fans as “former freaks who have become more serious and mellow,” people who saw Taylor as “a pleasant relief from acid music.” They were “quiet, sometimes inarticulate; they certainly will not undertake the sort of diatribes that accompany much of ‘heavy' rock.”

“Many of them feel he is simple and sincere,” filed a stringer from the Duke University campus, quoting students who deemed Taylor, in a positive way, “not an act, but a performer” who was “really good to hear when you're down.” (One student added, approvingly, “I like his songs because they're all about heroin.”) To another student, Taylor was proof “the Love Generation doesn't work.” The Wisconsin stringer noted that Taylor's record sales on campus had eclipsed those of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, the previous year's top sellers. “It's nice, relaxing stuff,” a female student at that school observed. “It's pleasant. You don't get too excited about it.” When the story finally hit newsstands the week of March 1, 1971, its cover line read, “The New Rock: Bittersweet and Low.”

Not everyone was enthralled. There were grumbles that Taylor marked the end of social protest in rock. One undergrad dubbed Taylor “post-revolutionary, post-radical decadence,” while another said, “With him, we've finally returned to TV, to middle-class values—he's a WASP Tom Jones.” Another dismissed Taylor as “the emasculation of rock, obviating everything rock has ever tried to do.” One student wondered if
“the people interested in James Taylor are those who never quite got over a fascination with Simon and Garfunkel.” (In his notes, the
Time
reporter added, “Upon whom it is now fashionable to dump.”)

They were all right, in their respective ways, but by and large, the comments were positive and confirmed the feeling that Taylor had, accidentally and unintentionally, tapped into something larger than himself. “Sometimes you have a desire for something loud to wash all your sins away,” a Wesleyan undergrad told one
Time
reporter, “and sometimes you want something quiet and lyrical.” For many, there was no better way to wind down from one year, one decade, and one moment, than with James Taylor.

EPILOGUE: DECEMBER

The Caesar bangs and straightlaced-student look that had once graced Simon and Garfunkel album covers were gone. In their place on the afternoon of December 2 was Paul Simon's counterculture makeover: longish hair pulled behind his head in a knot, beard, and red-checkered work shirt.

In an interview earlier in the year, Simon had put down “San Francisco groups” and acid rock; his fastidious, perfectionist side had no use for ramshackle songwriting or musicianship. Not only did he now resemble one of those musicians; he was on their turf at Columbia's new San Francisco studio on Folsom Street, just south of the city's seedy Union Square area. In the control booth, Simon gazed through the glass at the trio of distinguished musicians he'd assembled: drummer Jim Keltner, fresh off the Delaney and Bonnie tour and sessions with Joe Cocker and Rita Coolidge; bass player Donald “Duck” Dunn from Booker T. and the MG's; and keyboard player Michael Finnigan, who'd played on Jimi Hendrix's
Electric Ladyland
and was now the singer and organ player in a local band, the Jerry Hahn Brotherhood. Given their collective roots in soul, R&B, blues, and funk, they didn't seem the model backing band for Simon. Trying to get comfortable with them, Simon joked with Dunn and told stories about his days playing rock and roll revue shows in New York.

Before work began,
Rolling Stone
reporter Ben Fong-Torres dropped by for an interview. Simon confirmed he was working on an album of his own, without Art Garfunkel, and admitted the project was a result of
his partner's film career—about which Simon was still quietly stewing. In a comment Fong-Torres didn't include in the final version of the story, Simon groused that Garfunkel was “someone who had never acted and never been interested in the theater or movies until he met Mike Nichols.” For attribution, he confessed he only had a handful of songs and that some of them might be “dated” in two weeks' time; he also said this was the first time he'd sung without his partner since at least 1966. Apparently Simon had already deleted memories of the Shea Stadium debacle from his mind.

After Fong-Torres left, Simon and the musicians tackled the work at hand. With loyal engineer and coproducer Roy Halee at his side, Simon asked the band to play one of his semi-formed songs. As they worked their way through it, a hard-to-read but unhappy expression took over Simon's face. To Finnigan, it was clear Simon was casting about for a direction. “It didn't have a real strong sense of purpose to me,” he recalled. “Most sessions I did were a little more clear.”

At one point, Simon emerged from the booth and approached Dunn, asking if he could borrow his bass. Despite Dunn's reputation as a dependable and funky player—those were his parts on Otis Redding's “Respect,” the MGs' “Green Onions,” Sam and Dave's “Hold On, I'm Comin',” and countless other Stax and R&B hits—Simon began playing a bass line himself to demonstrate what he wanted.

Dunn wasn't amused. “Did you fly me all the way from Memphis just to give me a bass lesson?” he snapped, caustically.

With that, the musicians took a break. In the bathroom, Keltner, another formidable player, cracked, “Well, it looks like we got fired.” Finnigan was startled: What did he mean? They'd only started. Sure enough, all three were told not to come back the next day. The sessions were so exploratory they were never logged into Columbia's tape archives, and none of their work wound up on
Paul Simon
, the wonderfully eclectic and acutely personal and witty album he would release in early 1972. As
he moved into the great unknown, Simon needed more time to discover how he would sound, and fit into, a new decade.

With filming of
Carnal Knowledge
wrapping up, Garfunkel was already preparing his next role. In the coming spring, he would teach a geometry course at Litchfield Preparatory School in Litchfield, Connecticut. Like his partner, he would be a singer and instructor—and, he hoped, a revered actor as well.

The long-distance calls into Stephen Stills' Elstead manor always arrived at night. “These heavy telephone things have lately gone down,” Henry Diltz noted in his journal. “Calls from agents, lawyers. People in disfavor.” On the line from Los Angeles during the first week of December was art director Gary Burden, who'd designed the cover for
Déjà vu
. With an eye toward a concert album for Christmas release, Atlantic had recorded Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young shows at three stops on their summer tour, New York, Los Angeles, and a rescheduled Chicago date. If the label couldn't bring them together in one place, at least they could reunite them on record—and try to convince their audience that one of the preemiment bands of the year remained intact.