(7 of 10)
However promising professionally, the ragged edge of the New York rock scene was a personal disaster for James. He was 18, but as Kootch points out, he had never had any exposure to real life. "New York isn't like Martha's Vineyard." James had a little money from his parents, and he lived all alone in an uptown pad furnished with a mattress and a radio. "He got hung up on taking in weird people—runaway teen-agers and people like that." Taylor was also getting heavily into drugs, especially heroin. Zach Wiesner had quit the Flying Machine after three months. Partly from inertia and partly out of loyalty to Kootch, James hung on for a year and a half. Then he escaped—not to the structure of McLean or the tranquillity of Martha's Vineyard but to swinging London.
Living With Success
James Taylor likes to say: "I find comfort in things like earthquakes and eclipses of the moon because I have no hand in them. They relieve me of responsibility. I find comfort in writing about and projecting and thinking about the seasons and the sea, things like that, because I have no control. I find comfort in fatalism and inevitability." Well he might. For if some kind fate is guiding Taylor's professional destiny, it was at work when it sent him to London.
It was not merely that in London, as a nearly unknown singer-composer of uncertain stability, he miraculously won a record contract with Apple. What really mattered was that there he met 24-year-old Peter Asher. At the time, Asher, an Englishman and a former rock performer (Peter and Gordon), had just been installed as Apple's chief talent director. He recognized Taylor's talent, signed him, then helped push the first Taylor album to completion despite the fact that Apple was beginning to come apart at the core. Asher was responsible for the fact that a year later Taylor was able to sign up with Warner Bros, and launch Sweet Baby James. Since James' return to the U.S. in December 1968, for another sojourn in a mental hospital (this time Austen Riggs in Stockbridge, Mass.), Asher, as friend and manager, has proved himself to be a sound guide, with shrewd bargaining abilities and an instinctive feel for the fast-shifting tastes of the pop-music world.
Thanks largely to Asher, Taylor's problem from now on will not be how to secure the success he has lately won but how to live with it personally. The concept of a shy artist suddenly overwhelmed by commerce is one of the phoniest wheezes in show business. Yet given James' predilection for privacy and peace, as well as his slender hold on personal stability, it may prove genuine enough in his case.
Offstage, James seems in many ways to be the average rock-'n'-roll musician. He wears regulation T shirts, regulation Levi's, regulation cowboy boots. He crosses living rooms or recording studios with the same ten-league strides he would use heading up a country road. He eats—and drinks—anything and everything that is put before him. Like his songs, he can easily be witty. But like his songs, he is also much turned in upon himself, rarely talkative, sometimes edgy, always haunted by the precariousness of human joy.
Easing the Guilt