More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon (26 page)

Austen Riggs went deeper into a patient’s problems than merely “curing” addictive behavior. Using the psychiatric model, therapists probed into patients’ lives to discover the underlying emotional problems that caused their self-destructive behavior. In James Taylor’s case, he was helped to uncover a sense of rage—inexpressible, nonspecific anger—that might have been fueling his urge for oblivion through heroin. He may have been helped in this therapy by the timing of his parents’ divorce in 1969. Isaac Taylor’s alcoholism had become so acute that Trudy divorced him that year, which sent their five children into varying degrees of grief.

“The idea that I
have
to perform made me angry,” James said
later. “I had gotten into my music as an act of rebellion, you might say.” Now he felt that his “alienated musical soul” had turned into a businessman making a product for a corporation. “And in that way, recording an album might have made me angry. And might have made me turn to drugs to stomach that anger. Obviously, if you can’t express it, you’ll have to swallow it somehow.”

In June 1969, after five months of treatment, James left Austen Riggs drug-free, driving the Massachusetts Turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston, and then to Martha’s Vineyard. In July he performed, solo, at the Troubadour in Los Angeles for the first time. Back on the Vineyard that summer, he crashed a stolen motorcycle on a fire road in the island’s state forest, breaking both feet and both hands. The rest of the year was spent in plaster casts. In this period, James got to know his brother Alex’s baby son, James Richmond Taylor, now two years old—the original sweet baby James.

Meanwhile, in London the Beatles were imploding over acute business problems. Apple was bleeding money, much more than the company took in from sales. As record executives, the Beatles were too preoccupied to manage their label, so the products simply weren’t selling. Peter Asher left the company to go out on his own as a record producer and talent manager. He asked James if he could manage him, and James did not hesitate to say yes. Asher then persuaded Paul McCartney to cancel James’s contract with Apple so he could move to another label, and Paul convinced the rest of the Beatles that this was the right thing to do.

Peter Asher then approached Warner Bros. Records in Los Angeles in September 1969. They loved the Apple album, and signed James Taylor to the label for forty thousand dollars. When the casts came off his broken limbs, James took up his guitar and erupted into a creative state that produced many of his best songs. “I think I had built up a lot of energy,” he recalled, “because as soon as I got out of those casts, I went into Sunset Sound in L. A. and it was just explosive. That album just went so fast.”

When James got to Los Angeles, he called Danny Kortchmar, who’d been living there since the Flying Machine broke up. Kootch had joined a rock band called the City, which had an album out. Personnel included drummer Jim Gordon, bassist Charlie Larkey, and Larkey’s girlfriend, the former Brill Building songwriter Carole King. As a teenager, she had cowritten some of the biggest hits of the era, such as “Up on the Roof,” “One Fine Day,” and “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” Now, at twenty-six, she had left her husband and relocated to North Hollywood’s Laurel Canyon neighborhood, prepared to start a new career as a performing artist. She was about to make her first album under her own name, but Danny persuaded her to help him make James Taylor’s record first. Peter Asher, who was producing the record for Warner Bros., agreed that Carole King’s band would provide backing for James’s incredible book of new songs.

These included the material that would make his career, and which, he later ruefully said, he would be forced to sing for the rest of his life: the lullaby “Sweet Baby James”; “Country Road,” written in Stockbridge; the jazzy but disconsolate “Sunny Skies”; “Blossom”; “Anywhere Like Heaven”; and others, including a hip rendition of “Oh Susannah,” which he used to sing for the late Susie Schnerr. But it was the song partly inspired by her, “Fire and Rain,” that would make James Taylor the first major star of the American 1970s.

James in 1972: “‘Fire and Rain’ has three verses. The first verse [‘Suzanne the plans they made put an end to you’] is about my reactions to the death of a friend. The second verse [‘Won’t you look down on me, Jesus’] is about my arrival back in this country with a monkey on my back. And there, Jesus is an expression of my desperation in trying to get through the time when my body was aching and my time was at hand—when I
had
to do it. ‘Jesus’ was to me something you say when you’re in pain. I wasn’t actually looking for a savior…. Which I don’t believe in, although he can certainly be a
useful vehicle. The third verse of that song [‘Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground’] refers to my recuperation at Austen Riggs, which lasted about five months.”

It is the “There’s hours of time on the telephone line / To talk about things to come” lines in the last verse that give the song a message of hope and redemption, that the friendless, self-pitying singer of the album’s other songs would somehow pull through to sing again another day.

Sweet Baby James
was made in only a few weeks, for about eight thousand dollars. The basic tracks consist of James, Danny on second guitar, and Carole King on piano. Several different bassists were at the session, and the session drummer, Russ Kunkel, from nearby Long Beach, plays with an uncanny sympathy for the mood that James and Peter Asher were trying to get.

Meanwhile, James joined the community of local musicians. That spring in 1970, he participated in the sessions for Carole King’s album
Writer
. The core musicians then formed a band called Jo Mama and were signed to Atlantic Records. And James started spending serious time with Joni Mitchell at her Laurel Canyon home, where she was writing her
Blue
album. He played guitar on “California” and several other tracks on her record.

The “Sweet Baby James” single didn’t even make the charts when Warner Bros. released it in March 1970. No one played it on the radio. The album stalled at number ninety. Nothing more happened until that summer, when the “Fire and Rain” single took off and hit the Hot 100 on
Billboard
’s chart. It was then that the album took off, and things were never the same for James, or his family, again.

He was in England with Joni Mitchell when this happened, playing concerts on his own, and then supporting her when she played a show broadcast by the BBC. “Fire and Rain” was on the radio in Britain and was being recognized as a major statement from a young master songwriter. The audience was rapturous when Joni brought
him onstage. Together they played “California,” “For Free,” and “The Circle Game,” with Joni on piano and dulcimer and James on guitar. They played the world premier of “You Can Close Your Eyes,” a lullaby James wrote for Joni early in their relationship. The BBC later reported they had received a record number of requests for tapes of the concert.

When he returned to California, James took a starring role in a Hollywood movie,
Two-Lane Blacktop,
directed by Monte Hellman. It was a modest road movie about a cross-country car race. James was the driver. Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson was his mechanic. Dialogue was minimal, plot even more so, but the script had an existentialist drive, and James was interested in how film production worked. People on the set loved his record and kept telling him what a huge star he was going to be. (Neither James nor Dennis Wilson appeared in a Hollywood movie again.)

As
Sweet Baby James
smoldered its way up the sales chart and James’s fame spread nationally, the Taylor family, James’s siblings, signed recording contracts of their own. Brother Liv signed with Atlantic and released his first album that summer. Sister Kate signed with Cotillion, an Atlantic subsidiary. Even brother Alex got a deal, with the southern label Capricorn Records, and made a pretty good album in Atlanta with local musicians. James now felt in a strange position, as he told friends. With his parents divorced and his father out of the picture, it was like he had become the head of his fiercely loving but troubled family. It was a position he wasn’t comfortable being in. When
Rolling Stone
put James on its cover, the headline was “The Taylors.” The long family saga revealed that two of James’s siblings had also been hospitalized at McLean: Livingston for depression; Kate for hurting herself. No one in the Taylor family was happy with this kind of publicity.

James played guitar on the sessions for Carole King’s second album, which was made in five days in January 1971. The band was Danny’s group Jo Mama with Russ Kunkel on drums. Songs included
“I Feel the Earth Move,” “It’s Too Late,” “So Far Away,” “You’ve Got a Friend,” “Tapestry,” and “A Natural Woman.” James and Joni Mitchell both sang backup vocals. The album,
Tapestry,
was released a month later and went on to sell twenty-five million copies.

At the same time, James was helping his sister make her first record and trying to finish his third, which was taking a toll on his equipoise. He was also facing a thirty-city concert tour with Carole King, backed by the Jo Mama band. He was under a brutal corporate deadline to finish the sequel to his last album, which was now selling about a million copies a month. He sang “Fire and Rain” and “Sweet Baby James” on Johnny Cash’s popular network TV show and became a mainstream American heartthrob overnight. In March he appeared on the cover of
Time
magazine, discussing his problems, including addiction, as well as his music.

He was much more interested in the house his friends were building for him on Martha’s Vineyard than he was in making another record. He wished he had a hammer in his hand instead of a guitar. He took up heroin again, felt better, and finished his album. Decades later, looking back in candor, James said that sometimes his addictions had been “of service to me at the time.” He was a cult hero now, with people wanting to speak with him after shows. Parents brought their children backstage to meet him. His lyrics were plumbed for meaning, as if he had a secret knowledge and solutions to life’s mysteries. He was a physical wreck, but kept going.

His new album,
Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon,
came out in late March. The basic tracks are played by James, Carole King, Russ Kunkel, with Leland Sklar on bass. James appears on the album jacket with his new moustache, looking obviously stoned. The album sold like hotcakes, getting to number two. (
Tapestry
was number one.) James’s version of Carole’s “You’ve Got a Friend” was released as a single and became a big radio hit. Carole King and James Taylor were now the bestselling musicians in the country.
Mud Slide
had only a few great songs, but these included Carole’s “You’ve Got a
Friend” and “Long Ago and Far Away,” both with Joni and Carole singing backup vocals. “Hey Mister, That’s Me Up on the Jukebox” is a candid self-portrait of a young artist at the end of his rope and ready to quit. In the song, echoing mighty “Country Road,” he disappears into the land, where carpenters are working on his cabin in the woods (and he even name-checks the building crew). Artist/ craftsman Laurie Miller’s drawing of James’s austere little barn adorned the back of the album jacket.

Mud Slide Slim
firmly locked James Taylor, in the imagination of his contemporaries, into the persona of a saintly junkie, a patron saint of druggy anomie. It was an image he had never pursued, but it was commercially successful, and was inspired by who he was and what he was doing. As his legion of fans celebrated the authenticity of his songs and as his celebrity began to unfold, James described “a feeling of aura” around him. In interviews, he described the instant fame that was happening to him as a feeling he called “holiness.” He wasn’t conventionally religious, but the huge (and unexpected) success, and especially the intense national media attention, made him feel as if a glowing halo were over his head. “What’s all this talk about ‘holiness’ now?” he was asked by Joni Mitchell. He explained that it was a simplistic reaction to fame descending onto him, in an intense manner, in a short amount of time.

That’s when James Taylor went to see his drummer playing with a new girl singer at the Troubadour nightclub in Los Angeles on April 6, 1971.

T
his happened mostly because Joni Mitchell wanted to see Cat Stevens. And then Russ Kunkel, who’d worked on both their records, said he was playing with Carly Simon on the same bill, and please come on over and say hello after the show. They went with Kate Taylor and were given a good table near the stage. James hadn’t heard much about Carly Simon, and he hadn’t heard “That’s the Way I Always Heard It Should Be,” which was already a hit record in April 1971. This was mostly because he never listened to recorded music—no radio, no records, especially his own. His musical world was influenced mostly by the melodies he composed in his head. Kate told him that Carly was one of the Simon Sisters who used to play at the Mooncusser that first summer when James started playing the open-mike evenings there.