(3 of 10)
Like so many other troubled, dislocated young Americans, Taylor may at first seem self-indulgent in his woe. What he has endured and sings about, with much restraint and dignity, are mainly "head" problems, those pains that a lavish quota of middle-class advantages—plenty of money, a loving family, good schools, health, charm and talent—do not seem to prevent, and may in fact exacerbate. Drugs, underachievement, the failure of will, alienation, the doorway to suicide, the struggle back to life—James Taylor has been there himself.
It seems to add something to the impact of a song like Fire and Rain to know that the lyric is really a mini-trilogy dealing with three bad times in the singer's life. Part I goes back to a moment of sadness—and a sense of failure—when he was making his first record in London in 1968. A girl he knew died at the time, but his friends did not tell him until the record was finished because they thought he was "too strung out" to handle the news:
I've seen lonely times when
I could not find a friend,
But I always thought I'd
see you again.
Part II finds Taylor bottoming out in the New York drug-scene abyss:
Won't you look down upon
me Jesus?
You've got to help me make a stand,
You've just got to see me
through another day.
The song's final stanza is a footnote to 1968, when James left New York trying to escape heroin and personal squalor, and thus brought to an end The Flying Machine, a struggling group started by his friend Danny Kootch:
There's hours of time on the
telephone line
To talk about things to come,
Sweet dreams and flying machines
in pieces on the ground.
Taylor's voice is mercifully free of the whiny self-pity that haunts most singers of lovelorn pop lyrics. Even his most self-revealing effort. Knocking 'Round the Zoo, which tells what it was like in a mental hospital, where James spent nine months, comes out heavily armed with witty, riffy musical irony—at least until the end, when Taylor tacks a chilling descant of bedlamite sounds onto the following stanza:
Now my friends all come to see me,
they point at me and stare,
Said he's just like the rest of us
so what's he doing in there?
They hide in their movie theaters
drinking juice—keeping tight
'Cause they're certain about one
thing, that zoo's no place to
spend the night.
Today Taylor's experiences seem frighteningly in tune with the troubles of his age. "Right now," remarks Danny Kootch, who first met James in the late 1950s and now not only plays guitar with Taylor but leads his own group Jo Mama, "if you're not alienated, you're weird. All you have to do is grow your hair long and everybody talks to you. But in those days you felt, 'What's the matter with me that I can't exist in this world?' Either you ended up very neurotic and screwed up, or you got strength from it." James eventually ended up doing a little of both.