Happy birthday, James Taylor! Read our 1971 cover story on the singer-songwriter
The Taylor family history might have been written by Eugene O’Neill in collaboration with Tennessee Williams. An old North Carolina family, they have tended to produce doctors, alcoholics and suicides — sometimes all three at once. Dr. Isaac Taylor, James’ father, was delivered at birth by his grandfather, also a physician. A week later, Dr. Taylor’s mother died and within two months his grandfather, filled with guilt, had drunk himself to death.
“God, that was moving for a father to hear,” he says. “Aggressive fathers sometimes feel guilty because they have to spend so much time away from their family.” James became infatuated with music earlier than the other Taylors. He picked up some chords from a kid at summer camp, made some up, and tried to analyze what he heard on records. He often played with Liv, and they even performed hillbilly songs at hootenannies. Then he met Kootch.
That summer, Kate also made her debut, singing and waiting on tables at the Galley, a greasy spoon in the fishing village of Menemsha. The school that James went back to was Milton Academy, a boarding school just outside of Boston. James arrived at Milton in the eighth grade and was promptly nicknamed “Moose,” because of his gangliness. “At a school where sports were so popular, it was unusual for anyone so unathletic as James to be so well-liked,” says his tenth grade English teacher. Aside from writing, James was guitar-playing in his room.
James has spoken his mind about McLean in “Knockin’ Round the Zoo.” As the song says, “There’s bars on all the windows and they’re countin’ up the spoons.” Well, not bars — actually 2000 pound test “security screens.” Inmates eat off heavy plastic dinner service with specially designed utensils. The aides do count up every bit of metal after meals.
“After several months,” says James, “I really wanted to leave and they were going to discharge me and let me out, but they don’t let go very easily. And I was self-committed, so I could have signed a yellow sheet, they call it, and gotten out a.m.a. [against medical advice] that way. But that involved spending three days locked in the ward and usually by that time you change your mind. I had a friend with a Dodge truck.
“It was a very good group, I’ll tell ya,” says James. “And we really flashed on ourselves.” Kootch played lead and James played rhythm. “We were fairly conscientious, considering how goofed up we were,” says Kootch. Meaning goofed up on drugs. “They were interested in my doing something that pleased me,” says James, “and they never implied that I was doing the wrong thing, not even once. I don’t even think that there were any thought in either of my parents’ heads or my brothers’ and sister’s that I should be doing something else and that’s why I never got any vibes that way.
Except for a brief, drunken gig at a discotheque in the Bahamas, the Flying Machine spent a cold, stoned winter in New York. By the spring of 1967, the Flying Machine was, as “Fire and Rain” says, in pieces on the floor. “We busted up ’cause we were all fucked up, man,” says Kootch. “James couldn’t stand scuffling and being fucked over, hungry and miserable, and he had to escape.”
“Richard would just write out an arrangement completely. There was no head session involved, except on ‘Carolina’ and ‘Rainy Day Man.’ It always happened in two separate phases. ‘Sunshine, Sunshine’ — I recorded a demo of it and he took it and wrote a very specific arrangement to it with three against four and I had to play guitar inside that too. I remember it as being pretty confining. And Richard is a fine arranger, indeed.
Once, James dropped acid and, filled with artificial energy, ran around the rooftops “jumping great gaps between the roofs and swinging on fire escapes.” Another time, James and Bishop were driving home at night, strung-out, when a man ran in front of the car, connected with the fender and flipped eight feet in the air. “Jesus Christ, I thought I’d killed that cat and I went into some heavy freaker right there, man, on the spot.
“The first verse,” James explains, “was a reaction to a friend of mine killing herself. But I don’t think there is such a thing as suicide, or if there is such a thing as suicide there’s no other kind of death, except for accidental death and ‘acts of God’ as they say. I think circumstances always kill, that’s what killed her. I often wonder if her parents know that that first verse is about her and about me.
“I used to be really hung up on ambivalence and dichotomies, especially when I was having a lot of trouble with my head about conflicting things,” says James. “… about something going into your mind and striking all the resonant frequencies that belong to it, and the fact that one thing from without can strike about a million things at the same time and half of them can be positive and half of them can be negative. I felt as though I was being ripped apart by dichotomies.
For instance, most people suspect that James’ fame has generated the careers of his three siblings. That is not entirely the case. Livingston launched his own career long before James’ first album caught on. In 1968, soon after having entered McLean for “adolescent turmoil,” he began to make the rounds of minor-league Boston folk clubs, playing hoots and picking up an occasional job at the going rate of $15 for four nights’ work.
“Yeah, those two songs are very similar. After I wrote the first verse of ‘Blossom’ I said, ‘Gee, that’s Livingston’s tune.’ I was aware of his influence in it.” “Liv and I used to play together a lot,” says James. They developed the same finger-picking style, and they both mainly use the bottom of the neck. “There’s only a limited amount down there,” says James. “It really amazes me that there’s not more repetition between Livingston and me than there is.
Liv, the author of “I Can’t Get Home Again,” has tacitly declared his independence from the rest of the family. With his girlfriend, Maggie, he has created a quiet, relaxed home of his own just outside of Boston. Occasionally he lashes out at Alec for cashing in on his success, but he also clearly feels uneasy about having benefitted from James’ fame.
Why had he moved to the Vineyard? “Well,” said Alec, taking a swig of ale and licking the drops from his mustache, “this might as well be the whole earth right here. It’s detached, quiet, everybody knows each other, waves to each other, doesn’t talk to each other.” “And I said yeah,” says Alec. “I said, C’mon, knock it off, ’cause I’d been trying to get in the studio there for two years to do a fuckin’ demo and they wouldn’t even turn their heads around. Everybody liked me, but … then James’ album took off again and Liv’s album was doing really well and so they said, ‘Hey, we’d better get a hold of this guy whether he can sing or not, the name’s there.’ I knew that, and I knew the name was worth somethin’.
Kate Taylor lives in a storefront, a bakery converted into a studio by a Vineyard sculptor. The large, single room contains a phonograph, a spinning wheel, some pussywillows in the window, a bed, a table and a Franklin stove. It has the quaint, bare look of a hundred Cape Cod studios. After several months, Kate left McLean and enrolled in Boston’s Berklee School, a jazz institute, “to learn how to write songs like Laura Nyro.” She failed miserably. “I was too scared,” she says. She also went on a brief trip to London with James, who took her to Apple. Together, they sang for Peter Asher. Two months later, Peter handed her a record contract. “It was pretty nice,” she says, “’cause when I sang I was pretty nervous and stuff.
“I don’t think I’ll be around in ten years,” Alec says. “If I am still singin’ then, that’s great, but I’m not counting on it.” James is sawing off lengths of batten and hammering them to the side of the house. In his new chin whiskers, his Mark Trail shirt and his straw hat, he is the image of the demon-farmer. He does not stop working to greet us; in fact, he actively ignores us. Alec acts as intermediary and holds a mumbled conference with James: He comes back with the intelligence that James will talk to us tonight over dinner and that the photographer can go to work.
‘That’s you,” cries Baby James. James gets up and leaves the room. He loathes having James the pop star invade the privacy of James the islander. Not to mention the press. The interview he finally gives recalls Dylan’s exercises in evasion. He throws up smokescreens of trivial details but never makes a cleancut generalization. What statements he makes he whittles down with contradictions until they are almost meaningless. “No, that’s not true,” he says at the end of one story, or “No, all that’s bullshit.”
After the first, tentative talk, we drove to Alec’s house. Hugh and his old lady have come over to help consume a fifth of Scotch. Alec is under doctor’s orders not to talk or smoke for a week, but he is puffing on a Winston, garrulously organizing a concert for 300 people at the Community Center. He, James, Kate, and Joni Mitchell have agreed to perform at a benefit for the Free School, where Baby James goes, and now he is trying to enlist Hugh.
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