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Whether or not the dream is over for good, the man who best sums up the new sound of rock—as well as being its most radiantly successful practitioner—is a brooding, sensitive 22-year-old rich man's son who sings, he says, "because I don't know how to talk." James Taylor's first album came out only two years ago on the prestigious Apple label. It sold only 30,000 copies its first year. Today Taylor is one of the best and steadiest national record sellers since the loudest days of Beatlemania. Sweet Baby James, his second album, has already sold 1,600,000 copies and, along with his hit single Fire and Rain, has been nominated for five Grammy Awards. A third album, Mud Slide Slim, will be released next month. Last month, Taylor was included in the predominantly classical Great Performers series at New York City's Lincoln Center. He has just finished a movie, Two-Lane Blacktop, for late spring release, and last week he began a sell-out national concert tour of 27 cities.
These and other abundant signs of commercial achievement measure, but do not begin to explain, James Taylor's peculiar hold on the ear and imagination of youthful Americans. A good deal of his success is based on the kind of personal magnetism that has been making baritones and matinee idols rich and famous for generations, a particular masculine presence. Lean and hard (6 ft. 3 in., 155 Ibs.), often mustachioed, always with hair breaking at his shoulders, Taylor physically projects a blend of Heathcliffian inner fire with a melancholy sorrows-of-young-Werther look that can strike to the female heart—at any age. Half explaining, half apologizing for her delight in Fire and Rain, a University of Michigan coed who is also a trained musician admits: "I don't know why I love it. I know I shouldn't, because he doesn't really sing. He just sort of intones."
What Taylor intones is far more artful than it seems at first. For if his voice is spare and strangely uninflected, his guitar fingering lends sudden lights and shadows to the barest melody. Musically, Taylor is a fusion of the three black and white mainstreams of pop: the lonely twang of country, the pithy narrative of folk and the rhythmic melancholy of blues. Beyond that, Taylor's use of elemental imagery—darkness and sunlight, references to roads traveled and untraveled. to fears spoken and left unsaid—reaches a level both of intimacy and controlled emotion rarely achieved in purely pop music. He can, says one of his campus admirers, "turn an arena into a living room."
Listeners do not need to know anything about him to enjoy his music. Taylor is a master of many styles and subjects. The song Sweet Baby James is simply one of the best lullabies ever composed. In Suite for 20 G, he can ease into a cool, rock-'n'-roll-flavored parody of the 1950s, or do wailing variations on old-fashioned blues (Oh Baby Don't You Loose Your Lip on Me).
Yet much of the time Taylor sings about himself, and most of his fans feel instinctively that the anguished outlines of his private life—as well as those of his two brothers, Livingston, 20, and Alex, 23, and his sister Kate, 21, all now launched on singing careers—could be their own. The four singing Taylors, in fact, run some risk of becoming a sort of One Man's Family of rock.