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There were screens on the windows. Hospital personnel counted up the silverware after meals to be sure no patient had concealed a potential weapon. But to James, compared to Milton it seemed paradise regained. Besides doctors and nurses, there were plenty of hi-fi sets. "Above all," James says, "the day was planned for me there, and I began to have a sense of line and structure, like canals and railroad tracks." The hospital even had a high school, from which James duly graduated. He still has high praise for it because it genuinely interested students in learning. "We didn't have that jive nothingness that pushes most kids through high school," he says. "You can't tell a whole bunch of potential suicides that they must have a high school diploma." Indeed, for the Taylors, the McLean experience would soon become what Harvard is for the Saltonstalls—something of a family tradition. Hardly had James graduated when Brother Livingston turned up after withdrawing from a Quaker school in Westtown, Pa. By the time Kate arrived in 1967—on a transfer from the Cambridge School of Weston, Mass.—McLean had even instituted musical therapy. Kate played and sang with an inmate group called Sister Kate's Soul Stew Kitchen, gaining psychological confidence and laying the groundwork for a pop-music career at the same time.
Christianity as a Buffer
Milton cost $2,700 a year. McLean customarily runs around $36,000. But besides structure and schooling, it provided James with an opportunity to think. He began to reflect upon what it takes to survive—beyond sensitivity and naked faith in human nature. Says he: "In a euphoric society existentialism would be fine. The way things are now, though, it certainly is necessary to have buffers like Christianity. To me Jesus is a metaphor, but also a manifestation of needs and feelings people have deep within themselves." After nine months of thinking things out at McLean, James also came to realize that the only other buffer he had against the world was music. Without waiting the three days normally required for discharge, he piled his stuff into a friend's station wagon and escaped to New York.
Kootch had been playing in a rock band called the King Bees. Now he was forming a new band, the Flying Machine. With James on guitar and doubling as composer-vocalist, Kootch also on guitar and Zachary Wiesner, son of M.I.T. Provost Jerome Wiesner, on bass, the group was soon able to earn something like $12 a night. Despite its low income, it was quite a good band. What it proved while it lasted was that Taylor had somehow evolved into an accomplished musician. Most of his songs—including Knocking 'Round the Zoo, Night Owl and Rainy Day Man, which were later recorded for Apple in the James Taylor album—were first written for the Flying Machine.