How James Taylor captured America’s post-sixties blues

By D.B.

CULTURAL ERAS rarely, if ever, fit neatly into the decades allotted to them. The 1950s, for instance, did not really shuffle off until 1963 (when according to Philip Larkin, a British poet, “sexual intercourse began”.) But there is one tidy bit of date-keeping, and that is the end of the 1960s. In 1969 the Beatles made their final recordings, the mayhem of the Altamont festival proved a horrific inversion of Woodstock and Charles Manson showed how easily the hippie dream could be corrupted by narcissism and violence. Come 1970, the counterculture’s surge of idealism and optimism had rolled back and left its proponents cold, anxious and confused. It was, as it turned out, the very moment for James Taylor.

Mr Taylor became the voice of a generation quite by accident. Brought up in North Carolina, he had experienced by the end of his teens extreme highs and lows: he was institutionalised for severe depression, spared conscription for Vietnam only by his illness, signed in a rush of enthusiasm by the Beatles’ Apple label and afflicted by an addiction to heroin. Apple—uproarious, impulsive and chaotic—was the wrong fit for the quiet, melancholic and reflective Mr Taylor, and his first, self-titled album (1968) was misarranged into a baroque curio. A plainer sound and a starker time awaited him. Warner Bros records signed him, and keeping his faith in Peter Asher, a British producer who had brought him to Apple, Mr Taylor moved from London to California and recorded a second LP, “Sweet Baby James”. It was released in February 1970, a month before his 22nd birthday.

From the first bars of the exquisite title track it was obvious Mr Taylor had found his voice. What nobody could have predicted was how deeply and widely this music would resonate. A brief country-pop tune, constructed in waltz time, “Sweet Baby James” was suffused with weariness and loneliness, yet it was also a soothing lullaby. It would be “Fire and Rain”, the second single from the album, which made Mr Taylor not only a star, but the star of the day. A sorrowful look at his life up to that point, prompted by the suicide of a friend who had suffered from mental-health problems akin to his own, it chimed with the bewildered dejection of those whose hopes had soared and crashed in the bygone decade. “I've seen fire and I've seen rain / I’ve seen sunny days that I thought would never end,” he sang. “I’ve seen lonely times when I could not find a friend...”

That line prompted Mr Taylor’s pianist, Carole King—still a year away from her own “Tapestry” album and solo stardom—to write “You’ve Got A Friend”. Mr Taylor’s version of that song would become his biggest hit after it appeared on his next album, “Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon” (1971). The themes on those first two Warner albums mirrored a national mood in America, particularly among Mr Taylor’s young, white, progressive audience. He sang of retreat, of pain and loss, of refuge in home, nature and loved ones. Time magazine featured him on its cover with the headline, “The New Rock: Bittersweet And Low”. He was often described as a folk singer, but he was seldom that. His chief sources were country, and rhythm & blues: he combined and switched between them with naturalness and ease.

Mr Taylor would make four more studio albums for Warner—all six have just been reissued in a remastered box set—along with a blockbuster greatest-hits collection. While peers such as Neil Young and the Eagles became more expansive in style, he went the other way, turning ever inwards on the gently eccentric home-studio-recorded “One Man Dog” (1972), followed by “Walking Man” (1974). “Walking Man” was a commercial and critical flop, and it remains underrated to this day. It contains some of his best and most soulful work.

His final two Warner albums, “Gorilla” (1975) and “In The Pocket” (1976), saw him reclaim his commercial standing—if not his unsought position at the heart of American culture—with a smooth soft-rock sound from which he would seldom thereafter stray very far. It could at times be tepid, but when inspiration struck him, as it still frequently did, it was a style that permitted marvellous subtlety. By this time Mr Taylor appeared a much happier man. Perhaps because among the burdens of which he had been relieved was that of singing on behalf of millions, when you had meant only to sing for yourself.

“The Warner Bros. Albums: 1970–1976” is available now