More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon (25 page)

Jamie went back to Boston in January, but first crossed the river to Cambridge to talk to Stan Sheldon, a teacher who was married to his mother’s best friend. He told Sheldon that he was afraid he was going to kill himself if he went back to school. Sheldon took him to a psychiatrist, who declared an emergency. The Taylors were called, and James agreed to a voluntary commitment at McLean Hospital, the famous psychiatric facility in Belmont, Massachusetts, affiliated with Harvard Medical School. James agreed to go if he could bring his guitar with him, and he spent the next nine months, as he later called it, “knocking ’round the zoo.”

McLean was basically a luxurious asylum, and very upscale. Detox and rehab were specialties. Famous patients had included Ray Charles, the poet Robert Lowell, and members of the country’s great families. James was enrolled in McLean’s private academy, the Arlington School, from which he graduated in 1966. (This was the end of his formal education. Both his brother Liv and sister, Kate, would follow him to McLean and the Arlington School. None of the Taylor’s five children would attend college.)

At McLean, James underwent daily psychotropic medication. He ate meals with plastic utensils that were counted upon return, and stared out the barred windows while the psychiatrists tried to figure him out. When he was eligible for the draft, he was called for a
physical examination by the army, and was literally escorted to the draft board in Cambridge by men in white hospital coats.

He also wrote some songs, including “Knocking ’Round the Zoo.”

By September 1966 he felt well enough to check out. He’d had enough. The doctors told him that he was acting “against medical advice,” and that he would have to be observed by staff in a locked ward for three days before they could discharge him. So James hid himself and some of his record albums in the back of a friend’s van and escaped from McLean, hoping never to return.

He called his friend Danny Kortchmar, who was living in New York with his young wife. “Kootch,” he said, “I’m out!”

“Come to New York,” Danny said. “Let’s start a band!”

W
hile James Taylor was in the hospital, Danny Kortchmar had been working in a New York band called the King Bees, which became the house band at Arthur, the famous disco in Midtown. When James came to New York with some great new songs—“Knocking ’Round the Zoo,” “Carolina in My Mind,” the beginnings of “Rainy Day Man”—Danny knew that an incipient rock star had fallen into his lap. He proposed that James become the lead singer of a new group, the James Taylor Band. James declined this honor, and the group was renamed the Flying Machine. Joel O’Brien from the King Bees was recruited on drums. They taught the bass parts of James’s songs to their Vineyard friend Zack Wiesner (the son of MIT president Jerome Wiesner, who had been an adviser to the late president Kennedy). The band rehearsed in the basement of the Albert Hotel in the Village, and eventually got a gig replacing the hit-bound Lovin’ Spoonful as the house band at the Night Owl Café, an old Village landmark. This resulted in James writing another new
song, a rollicking R&B number called “Night Owl,” which the band recorded and released as a single that failed to get on the radio.

This lasted about seven months, well into 1967. Then James started using hard drugs. “Joel O’Brien had been doing heroin,” Kortchmar said much later, “and then one day I realized that James was, too.” This caused a rift in the Flying Machine, and eventually the band disintegrated as James’s habit became more acute. But for James, heroin was a miracle; it actually made him feel better. The drug is a potent analgesic painkiller, and for James it became a highly effective medication against acute depression and the suicidal feelings that continued to plague and frighten him. Heroin’s narcotic euphoria left him free to function, at least creatively, at a higher level than he had ever dreamed of. The downside, of course, was that heroin addiction is an expensive full-time job. After his band fell apart, James could be seen passed out on the benches of Washington Square Park after scoring another fix of the inexpensive Southeast Asian heroin that was flooding America as the Vietnam War continued. Then he turned his apartment into a crash pad for other junkies and some strippers. “I had fallen in with some people,” he said later, “who could have done me some harm. There were warrants out for these two guys, Smack and Bobby, who were staying with me. They were robbing people to get money for dope. I was addicted myself. I was getting desperate. Then I ran out of money, and no one would lend me any.”

Strung out, sick, hungry, at the end of his rope, James called his father in Chapel Hill. Isaac Taylor listened to his son. He said, “What’s your address? Stay put. I’ll be right there.” Indeed, Dr. Taylor got in the family station wagon, drove straight to New York, and rescued his son from depravity and almost certain death.

When he felt better, toward the end of 1967, James left for England to seek his fortune there. His model was Jimi Hendrix, who had left New York as an unknown the year before and now was the biggest
rock star in the world. James’s intention was to busk in the streets, write some new songs, and get discovered.

It worked.

His father’s mother had left him a little money, supposed to go to him on his twenty-first birthday. His parents let him have the legacy early—James was only nineteen at the time—which was enough for him to get to London and buy a car. He packed an old acoustic guitar he’d bought in Durham, North Carolina, when he was fourteen and flew to London, staying with friends in Notting Hill and Chelsea and, indeed, singing for money in busy tube stations with an open guitar case for the coins people tossed in. He bought a little Ford Cortina and took off for Formentera, the idyllic Mediterranean island favored by Europe’s hippies. He met a girl named Karen and together they took the ferry to neighboring Ibiza, where James wrote “Carolina in My Mind.”

James played some of his songs for friends. A young woman who worked for the BBC and knew people in Soho, where London’s music and film industry was based, encouraged him to make a demo and shop it around. James’s money was running low in early 1968, but for eight pounds (about fifty dollars) he purchased a forty-five-minute block of time in a Soho jingle studio on Greek Street. Playing by himself on a stool, recorded by one microphone, he recorded “Something in the Way She Moves,” “Carolina in My Mind,” “Rainy Day Man,” “Night Owl,” and six other songs. A few days later, he collected them pressed on an acetate disc that timed out to forty-five minutes.

Spring 1968. James Taylor called his friend Danny Kootch on a hunch he might have a connection into the London scene, and of course he did. Danny read
Billboard,
which had announced that Peter Asher, late of hit-making British Invasion stars Peter and Gordon, had taken a job with the Beatles’ record label, Apple, as a talent scout and A&R executive. Peter and Gordon had a run of fourteen hit singles in America during the previous three years, including
a number one in 1964 with “A World Without Love.” (Peter and Gordon’s hits had all been written by Paul McCartney, whose girlfriend Jane Asher was Peter’s sister.) The King Bees had toured with Peter and Gordon as their American backing band—connection made. Danny gave James a number for Peter Asher. Asher picked up the phone. He told James Taylor, “I’m listening to everything.”

James: “I went in and played ‘Something in the Way She Moves’ for Peter Asher. Then Peter played my acetate for Paul and John [Lennon], and suddenly I was on their label. It was my big break. It was like a door opened, and the rest of my life was on the other side.”

Paul McCartney: “I heard [James’s] demos. Peter played them for me, and I heard his voice and his guitar, and I thought he was great. And then Peter brought him round, and he played live [for Paul and George Harrison at Apple’s headquarters on Baker Street], so it was just like: ‘WOW! He’s great.’ And he’d been having troubles. Peter explained that he’d just got clean off drugs and was in a difficult time in his life. But he was playing great, and he had enough songs for an album.” George Harrison loved “Something in the Way She Moves” so much that he later stole the title for his song “Something.” James Taylor, after only a few months in London, became the first American musician signed to Apple Records. Somewhat in a state of shock, he called his parents in North Carolina and told them that everything was going to be fine because he was working with the Beatles now.

James needed a recording band. Peter Asher took out ads in
Melody Maker
and
New Musical Express
. They were given an attic loft at Apple and held auditions for people who answered the ads. Musicians were hired, and Joel O’Brien came from New York to play the drums. Soon James was drinking codeine cough syrup. Then he was smoking opium. Then he got back on heroin, plentiful in London’s music world. Then he was injecting speedballs, a hot combo of heroin and amphetamine. His first album, the brilliant
James Taylor,
was recorded under the influence, at Trident Studios, between July
and October 1968, while the Beatles were making their double
White Album.
Paul McCartney played bass on “Carolina.” George Harrison and Peter Asher contributed background vocals. These luminaries were “the holy host standing around me” that James sings about on “Carolina in My Mind.”

It’s not hard to know how he felt. The Beatles were angel-headed hipsters, avatars of their age, and here was James in their midst, at the zenith of their career, sponsored by them at the beginning of his. He would come into the studio as they were finishing for the day, and listen to early versions of “Hey Jude” and “Helter Skelter.” He held on to his chair while listening to the spiraling sonic vortex of “Revolution 9.”

While James was working at Apple, he was trying to stay afloat mentally, but he was, as he later said, “in disarray.” This was some heavy stuff he was living through, in his twentieth year. “I was changing houses every two weeks—high rent, too much noise—while I tried to keep to the recording schedule and fullfill Peter and Paul’s faith in me.” His girlfriend from New York, Margaret Corey, was staying with him. Her brother Richard, a friend of James’s, was around. (Their father was the comedian “Professor” Irwin Corey, a regular on Johnny Carson’s
Tonight
Show
.) In New York, James had become close to one of their friends, another troubled young soul named Suzanne Schnerr. “I knew Suzanne well in New York,” James said later. “She was from Long Island. We used to hang out together and get high.” But Susie Schnerr had committed suicide after James moved to London, and his friends let him know about it only once the Apple album was complete. James was very upset that they hadn’t told him. “Margaret and Richard and Joel [O’Brien] were all really close to Susie Schnerr. But they were also excited for me having this record deal and making this album, and when Susie killed herself, they decided not to tell me about it until later because they didn’t want to shake me up.” The day after learning of his friend’s death,
fighting despair, James wrote the first verse of a new song called “Fire and Rain” in his basement flat on Beaufort Street in Chelsea.

He was using the British equivalent of methadone to combat withdrawal from heroin, but it wasn’t working well. His album complete, he flew back to New York in late November 1968, checked into a Manhattan hospital for detoxification, and called his mother. There he wrote the second verse of “Fire and Rain.”

Trudy Taylor came to New York. A few days later, mother and son drove to western Massachusetts, where James Taylor signed himself in to the Austen Riggs Center, a private psychiatric hospital in the village of Stockbridge, amid the wintry Berkshire hills. It was there he wrote the third and final verse of “Fire and Rain.”

A
pple Records released
James Taylor
in December 1968, about a month after
The Beatles
(aka “The White Album”) came out. But James was in rehab in Massachusetts and the album didn’t sell. The American release of
James Taylor
in February 1969 barely made the charts. But at least the treatment he was receiving was beginning to work.