There's a bus every other hour
- James Taylor, "Daddy's All Gone," 1976
Dr. Isaac Taylor is nervous, apprehensive. Not finishing his sentences.
He wants to talk about his celebrated son but doesn't want to give away
any "nuggets." He phones his son's wife to make sure I'm "clean." He
starts to talk, and he wants to be upbeat and easygoing about his boy,
but it's not coming out that way. He knows it's mostly sounding sad,
wounded.
We get on the subject of "Jamie's" new record, Dad Loves His Work, and
suddenly Dr. Taylor knows what he wants to say: "This dad certainly
loves his work. I've been very happy with my career."
Isaac Taylor was dean of the University of North Carolina's medical
school before retiring in 1971, but he still holds a part-time post
there. Now he has an administrative job at the Boston University
Medical Center. He's busy, but he also has a lot of time to, well,
think. "Looking back, I wish I had found work that could have kept me
at home." His voice trails off, and then he asserts, "I made a point of
taking the children to my laboratory to see what I did all week, perhaps
just as James is trying to do with his new album. I was doing
experiments with heart tissue, and I had a colony of hibernating
hamsters. I feel sure Jamie and the other children enjoyed seeing
them."
There is an awkward silence.
"It was just a conscious attempt to get closer to my children. On Dad
Loves His Work, I think Jamie wants his children to know that although
he's away a lot and seems very burdened by his life, he loves his work,
and they shouldn't worry about him. As for me and him, I don't
contribute to his life now, except when he needs me or when somebody's
ill. When his son, Ben, was sick with kidney problems last year, James
called for advice, and I got a great deal of satisfaction out of being
able to help."
He adds that when James was two years old, he got out a wire
recorder-this was before the days of portable tap recorders-and had
James sing along with him on "Little Red Wagon Painted Blue." He says
it was James' first recording, right? He says he's sorry he lost the
damned thing.
"You know, I tell my friends, in jest, that I didn't want James to be a
doctor and that I'd tell him to get on back to his guitar and practice,
because that's where his future would lie. But that's not true, really.
I didn't do to that."
James Taylor wasn't aware of it at the time, but the cover of his 1979
Flag album, the modest-selling record that preceded his recent success
with Dad Loves His Work, was the nautical symbol for "man overboard."
And in the months that followed its release, Taylor sank into as
difficult a period as he's experienced in his notoriously troubled
passage.
"This past year has been the worst in my Life," he says bluntly. "I see
myself, basically, as a depressed person who tends to hole up and shut
systems down. And a lot of things have been happening at once."
Taylor's latest troubles include a crisis in confidence concerning his
career ("I am a little scared") and strained relations with his wife,
both of which have led to serious doubts about how he rears his own
children.
"I was recently telling a friend how much I loved my father, and how
much I missed him when he made a two-year-long trip to Antarctica when I
was young, and how much I missed him whenever he went to work. I'm a
traveling father now, and when I leave, my son cries."
"See, Dad Loves His Work is a little whimsical but also sad. Wanting to
do your work, wanting to be responsible, loving you father for wanting
to be responsible and good and then having work take him away from you
when you want him most - it's like a curse."
"But I think it's important for children to get the feeling that you
enjoy yourself and that life is enjoyable. I see some people - including
myself - frequently saying, with a moan, 'I'm sorry, daddy has to go to
work now.' And my son is crying and my daughter is removing herself from
me, and I'm saying, 'I don't want to go.'"
"Well, that's not right. I want them to know I'm gonna enjoy it. They
miss me, but I'm having a good time. I'd like them to think fondly of
me."
"James loves to travel," says wife Carly Simon. "He has a love of
mobilization, and I've given him a hard time for that. I've never spent
a night away from Ben and just a few away from Sally. James' own
father's absence was very painful to him, and he felt slightly
responsible. He had the grandiose and very mistaken idea that because he
loved and admired his mother and got to know her better than he did his
dad, his father was jealous of their relationship and left all the time
from that reason. James had built up an Oedipal dilemma in his mind."
"James' work is extremely good for him," Carly continues. "It holds him
together. And he's usually most healthy physically and mentally when
he's on tour. But while he feels justified by his Dad Loves His Work
philosophy, it's still difficult for his children, especially Ben.
James is really a country boy, likes being on the loose and
disorganized, and it's one of our incompatibilities. When he comes back
from the road, there's always a feeling of anticlimax, of relief
followed by 'Jesus! Now what?' It seems that sons cannot help following
in their father's footsteps, whether they like the path or not."
After ten albums, numerous hit singles (the latest being "Her Town Too,"
his duet with J.D. Souther), near-constant touring for adoring
audiences, a movie career (Two-Lane Blacktop, No Nukes) and some
composing for the screen and stage (Studs Terkel and Stephen Schwartz'
Working, the films Times Square and Brubaker, his songs were not used in
the latter two), Taylor, at thirty-three, is assured a place in the
entertainment-industry pantheon.
In 1969, with the release of his debut LP, James Taylor, on the Beatles'
Apple label, he achieved instant prominence and drew considerable praise
for the confessional boldness of his dark folk narratives-inky,
anguish-wracked songs that would have made for unnerving listening had
they not been structured around the bright resonances of his nasal North
Carolina twang and the clipped, suspended chordings of his ringing
acoustic guitar. He crooned about confinement in a mental institution,
about nervous breakdowns and dungeon-deep depressions, and somehow he
left such disquieting realities a little gentler on our minds.
He was handsome in a spindly, lantern-jawed way-his friends in boarding
school called him "Moose" - and everybody wanted to embrace and unravel
his cool, crisp mysteries. By the time he scored a Number One smash in
1970 with "Fire and Rain," a song partly written about a friend who had
committed suicide, he looked to be a talent capable of great things but
destined for self-destruction before he had barely developed his gifts.
James, like brother Livingston and sister Kate, had spent time in McLean
Hospital, a mental institution outside Boston.
Suddenly, this fragile young man with the gothic Southern lineage was a
mainstream superstar. He was on the cover of Time. He was twenty-two.
He seemed doomed.
Now, on a Thursday afternoon in the spring of 1981, he just seems a
little tired - and anxious. Raw boned and lanky as ever, dressed in baggy
jeans, rubber-soled canvas slippers with rent seams (Whoa," he says with
wild eyes and a manic grin, wiggling his protruding toes, "these here
slippers are trying to be sandals!") and a rumpled white dress shirt
with a large jelly stain below the pocket, James is plunking out "Fire
and Rain" at a television sound stage on Cahuenga Boulevard in Los
Angeles. He's whipping his band (with guest star J.D. Souther) into
shape for yet another road show, and the spring and summer dates are to
be taped for a live album, tentatively titled Bicycle Built for a King.
(Debilitated at the beginning of the tour, Taylor would grow so weak
with pneumonia he would be in danger of collapsing while doing his
shows.)
James steps down from the raised platform he's playing on and extends
his hand in a firm greeting. I see that he's balding, and the
affliction seems incongruous with his adolescent demeanor. When I
express surprise at what a sturdy old warhorse "Fire and Rain" is after
all this time, he smirks and says, "Well, sometimes when I sing 'Fire
and Rain' at a show, I think someone in the audience is thinking, "Aw,
you poor guy. You got so upset you had to take two Valiums, eh?"
He excuses himself to confer with his road manager and then hurries
back. "Hey, ah, I don't mean to make this interview problematic for
you," he says nervously, "but are your bags in the car?"
Huh?
"Well, instead of flying back to New York tomorrow morning as I'd
planned, I'd like to fly back tonight, If you can get your stuff, we
can talk on the plane. That way, I can spend about twelve hours in New
York with my son before I fly to Berkeley for the first show of the tour
on Saturday night."
I nod, slowly comprehending the urgency of his request. He must read
the puzzlement in my face, because he confides, "Yeah, it amazes me
that, with only twenty-four hours off, there's nothing I'd rather do in
the world than sit on an airplane. I'll spend fifteen hours in transit
during the next thirty-six; then, the rest of the time, I'll watch TV
with the kids or read them a story or do whatever silly thing they want
to do. It just pleases me."
He shrugs. I leave to get my luggage.
I first encountered James Taylor in the flesh one chilly July night in
1980, at a house not far from Taylor's own on Martha's Vineyard. I was
visiting Timothy Mayer, a friend of James' who wrote "Sugar Trade" with
Taylor and Jimmy Buffett for Dad. When I strolled into the living
room, it took me a full minute to realize that the tall, gangling man
hunched over on an couch was James. He and Mayer each had an open case
of Crolsch beer next to them. When they rose in unison, stepped over to
a walk-in freezer and extracted yet another case and a half, I stole a
second glance at the open boxes and discovered they contained empties,
their white ceramic tops all neatly reclamped.
The two men were engaged in a lively, rather erudite conversation about
public comprehension of "popular" music through the ages, from Bach's
private clavichord recitals to Strauss waltzes to Frank Sinatra. It's
amazing what people will fixate on when they're shitfaced.
Mayer praised James for the internal rhymes in his songs. "This year, I'm gonna work on the externals," he said with a smile.
As the evening flowed onward, and great insights stumbled into muddled
pronouncements, James was politely asked to clear the air with a song
or two. I had heard that he was not overly fond of holding court with
his guitar, but he gingerly lifted his Martin to his lap and called for a
request. I suggested "She Caught the Katy," and his tight lips broke
into a scamp's smile.
"Oh, I do know that little tune," he said with mock innocence and began
to pick and sing. It seemed remarkable, considering his intake of beer,
that he never slurred a work or flubbed a note, but that feat was soon
overshadowed by his ability to sustain interest in the song for a solid
hour and a half. Eventually, he moved on to material as diverse as the
Sam and Dave hit "I Thank You," Walter Robinson's "Harriet Tubman," his
own hilarious "Is That The Way You Look?" and a few Hoagy Carmichael
tunes.
The sun was winding its way through the snarled scrub forest pressed
against the window when the guitar finally, carefully, laid in its case.
Then James stood with a studied steadiness and said, "I certainly want
to thank you gents for your company, and I wish you all a good day."
With that, he made his way through the labyrinth of beer crates,
electric cables and amplifiers and disappeared around the bend into the
guest bedroom. There was a crash, a wheeze of bedsprings and the birds
began to chirp.
Driving away, I decided he was not the James Taylor I would have
expected to meet. I was unprepared for his animation, his good humor,
his cordial manner. And then I began to think back on what I had read
about the man and his family background, tormented past, painful
professional ascent. Despite much press about his problems over the
last decade with drugs and married life, Taylor remains a cryptic
personality, a maddeningly shy man surrounded by protective friends and
relatives. One day, I wanted to hear this guy explain himself.
James is a dreamer," says Carly. "He dreams a lot about being where
he's not, doing things he isn't doing, seeing things he hasn't seen.
He's not well organized and usually lets people plan his day for him,
especially in the city, though in the country he'll get up and say,
"Okay, I'll sail or row today," or "I'll ride my bike or swim."
"He is an odd mixture of dependence and independence - quite a paradox.
He seemed to be independent as a child because he could, and still can,
be aloof and closed off. But when James was sent away to school, his
great need to be connected to a home and his parents became critical and
traumatic."
Quiet, reclusive, James enjoyed his boyhood years in the picturesque
college town of Chapel Hill; he felt "centered" by the family home. When
he wanted to be alone, he would walk out the front door of the tasteful
manse and down the great knoll on which it was built, disappearing into
twenty-five acres of encircling woods.
The South was a special place to him; he loved the lazy pace of its
people and their tendency to back off when they weren't wanted and draw
near when they were. North Carolina was an elemental environment where
the lushness of the landscape, intensity of the sun, fury of the
thunderstorms and the brittle sounds made by insects at night culminated
in a powerful, benign presence. For James, the countryside was a
constant companion.
In the perpetual absence of his father, James clung to the rest of his
family the way he hugged his big cello during the Taylor's "kitchen
concerts" - informal recitals at which Alex played violin, Kate and
Livingston manned the piano and mother Trudy sang. During the summer,
the clan migrated to Martha's Vineyard, and James was particularly fond
of the fact that it was an island.
When he needed to open up to people, he had friend Stan Sheldon to turn
to. But he would avoid that kind of intimacy until it was nearly too
late.
James' unfettered existence disintegrated when his parents decided he
ought to choose a direction in life; so at the age of fourteen, he was
packed off to a Massachusetts boarding school, Milton Academy, where he
was expected to cultivate a new independence, succeed academically and
get his ass into a good college.
For anybody else, it might have been the best move in the world, but for
young James, it was, as he says, "wrong, wrong." the school was
"high-powered; it functioned by means of "fear-tactic stuff," and there
were "no girls in sight." James was jolted; he began to realize that he
was not wrapped tight enough for this kind of jostling, and he left
school and returned in his junior year to Chapel Hill, only to be
confronted with another unsettling reality.
"I'd lost touch with everyone in Carolina," he says with a shudder. "I
thought, 'What the hell, finish boarding school and aim for college,
because the past has nothing more to offer."
Milton Academy took him back - his grades had been good - but he felt as if
he were ambling across and abyss. It didn't help matters that he was
assigned a small room by himself in the schoolmaster's house. He'd
always preferred to be alone before; why was it so fucking frightening
now?
"I got more and more depressed," he says, "and I was sleeping twenty
hours a day. Finally, at Thanksgiving, I started thinking about
suicide."
Home for the holidays, he grew panicky at the prospect of returning to
Milton but was too paralyzed by fear of failure to speak of it.
Vacation ended. It was time to go. He walked out the front door, down
the knoll and went back to school, he was afraid he was going to take
his own life.
"He sent me to a shrink," says James, "and I broke down in the shrink's
office. He said, 'Listen, I'm gonna put you under observation for a
while in a psychiatric hospital.'"
Taylor's tenure at McLean lasted several months and was a numbing
routing of medication, drab meals eaten with plastic forks (confiscated
afterward) and weekly consultations with conservative psychiatrists. He
didn't relish the time he spent looking out through 2000-pound-test
security screens on the windows, but he had willingly committed himself
to McLean because he saw his "certified crazy papers" as his best exit
from Milton Academy-and the draft.
When the army finally beckoned, Taylor asked a husky attendant named
Carl and a similarly formidable friend to dress up in the trademark
white suits and accompany him to the draft board. They flanked James
during his entire interview, answered all the questions for him, and
ensured that he received a clean bill of mental health.
Taylor eventually slipped out of McLean in a friend's truck and sped to
New York, where he renewed his boyhood friendship with Danny "Kootch"
Kortchmar and composed such bleak ballads as "Don't Talk Now," "The
Blues Is Just A Bad Dream" and "Rainy Day Man."
Together their spirits soared in a four-man group called the Flying
Machine - until James' wings were clipped by a mounting heroin habit with
which he would struggle for the next nine years.
"It was a dreadful, stressful situation James got into when he was
seventeen," says Dr. Taylor. "He called me and I flew into New York,
rented a station wagon, loaded it with his stuff and we went back to
Chapel Hill. Six month later, he went to Europe to seek his fortune."
That trip resulted in his being signed to Apple through the good graces
of A&R man Peter Asher, now his producer and manager. Last fall, James
returned to London on a vacation with his wife and children, feeling, as
he sings in "London Town" on Dad, "I do believe/I must believe/I think
I can begin again/Become the man I was back when."
"I saw some of the places where I used to live, a basement in Beaufort
Gardens," he says. "It has a machine that you would put a two-shilling
piece into in return for a few minutes of gas heat. I explained this to
Carly and the kids. It was a great time for me back then because I was
totally free."
"I think of that early time in London when I sing 'Carolina In My
Mind.' I was homesick when I wrote it, and the 'holy host of others
standing 'round me' refers to the Beatles. The lyric dealt with being
somewhere else, which has always made me feel real good, and it
encouraged me that I could write a song that strong. I can always count
on a goose pimple or two when I sing it."
Famous for the artful angst in many of his songs, Taylor is also one of
rock & roll's reigning eccentrics, and he concedes that he's capable of
"monumental silliness." Indeed, his sense of humor about his own
existence has fortified him against his fears, and even his wife marvels
at how "spontaneously goofy and verbally witty" this customarily
retiring man can be.
Has James ever composed any screwball songs he wouldn't dare commit to
vinyl?
"Oh, sure," he says. "I wrote a song called 'I Guess I'll Always,
Always, Always, Always....' that went on forever. It had a few chord
changes but no word changes. And I wrote 'Mona,' a tune about a pig of
mine. I was thinking about killing the pig because she was old. I had
a new baby [Ben], and my brother Alex noted that the pig sometimes got
out and was rambunctious. In fact, I once saw it kill another little
pig. They can get ornery in old age. So Alex said, rightly, 'That pig
might kill one of your kids. You gotta be careful.' I was afraid it
was true, so I was considering bumping her off, and I wrote a song about
it."
He carefully recites some lyrics:
Oh, Mona, Mona
"That's a sweet little song, huh? I occasionally play it at picnics."
Drummer Rick Marotta, a longtime friend and one-time neighbor of James
and Carly's, offers more evidence of Taylor's peculiar levity. When he
hears I plan to take the red-eye flight with James, he offered some
counsel.
"I'm warning you," he blurts. "You won't believe it till you see it,
but he'll talk your ears off, and he can drive you crazy when he calls
for stationary and starts drawing to explain his points. His sense of
humor gets pretty bizarre; he takes those airline cards with the
emergency instructions and writes on them: HAVE A NICE TRIP. HOPE YOU
DON'T DIE."
"Your brother's an architect?" James explains after we've taken our seats
in the plane's first-class lounge. "Let me get some stationery. I want
to explain this dream house I've been thinking about building for about
three years."
He calls for the steward, asks for paper and pencil and sits back
sipping beer until the man returns. Comfortable in a gray felt fedora
and a blue "Gangster Chronicles" promo jacket that hides the jelly
stain, he takes the paper and begins to sketch in broad, hasty strokes.
"It has three floors and a duct running under the house that pushes cool
air out and draws warm air in on a seasonal basis," he says intently,
referring to floor plans that becomes almost indecipherable in their
complexity. He remains engrossed in the dream house until a casual
mention of the space shuttle voyage plunges us into a discussion of its
shortcomings, which somehow segues into the "kinks" in the origin of
prehistoric species and, at length, his own evolution.
During the last year, James has evidently been thinking a great deal
about the road behind him, as well as the uncharted course ahead, and as
our plane hums on through the night, the talk turns both introspective
and retrospective.
"For a long time, all of the album titles were names for myself," he
volunteers. "A large amount of the stuff I was doing was
self-definition, exercises in trying different aspects of myself on for
size - sometimes fanciful, sometimes serious, sometimes happenstantial."
"People will see me write a song that they think is about Carly," he
says, popping another beer, "or people I know hear themselves described
in a song I write and they say, 'How can you do that?! The song you've
written about me makes me feel terrible!'"
"It's taken so out of form," he maintains, exasperated. "You can't
really nail down a person that way, ever. What it comes down to is, if
somebody chooses to let this obvious encapsulation or distortion or
angle on them supersede the relationship itself, then what does that say
for the friendship?"
"Although I did not write 'You've Got A Friend,' I sometimes expect
someone to come up to me after I've sung it and say, "You call yourself
a friend?!"
I ask for another example of a song that has elicited this kind of
reaction. "The song 'B.S.U.R.' on Flag was inspired by the cartoons of William
Steig, who has a book out called 'CDB!' about how to take letters and
numbers and turn them into sentences, like 'IMAUMBN'-'I am a human
being'-or-'URNNML'-'You are an animal.' Well, my sister and I used to
play that game. So I wrote 'B.S.U.R.' (which contains the verse: "She's
been holding on too long/Hoping I'm gonna change/Giving it up just a
little bit more/Each time I come home/Looking and acting strange/Putting
her down for putting up with me") and Carly was fine about the song,
sang on it, but other people were appalled that I could put our
relationship on the line that way. She's written a song 'Fair Weather
Father' that seems to paint me pretty ugly, but I sang backup on it, and
I don't take it seriously."
"For an intimate relationship with one's mate, the only really important
thing is feelings. That's the main thing; whether or not someone's
right or wrong doesn't make a damned bit of difference! You can be
seething about something that's so petty you hardly dare bring it up,
but the fact is that you must say, 'I am furious.' "
"There's always a risk. I mean, your wife may call up your friends and
say things about you that you trusted her with, or in a loose moment, I
might say something about Carly to a reporter, or she might say
something to magazines about me. Well, I accept that as a possibility.
A close friend called me about a recent article on Carly. I haven't
read the article, because I don't want to take it seriously when I know
I shouldn't. My friend said, 'Read it. You've been dealt roughly
with.' I said, 'I don't think Carly had any intention of hurting me, and
I'm not going to indulge.' "
Is there a threshold there that shouldn't be crossed?
"The threshold is whether you are betraying a confidence that is still
valuable to you. It has to be looked at in terms of whether or not it
damages you."
I ask about the great solitude of the character in what I have always
considered one of Taylor's finest songs, "Walking Man."
"It was about the coming of winter and the way I feel about it," he says
somberly, shifting in his seat. "I panic a little bit when I feel it
coming on. It's always reminded me of having to go back to school, and
maybe it's a primal thing of realizing that winter means you're going to
have to put up with a tough time - the dark, difficult, cold times you
have to be prepared for."
"I didn't know James felt that way about winter," Carly later says, "but
winter seems to remind him of the rejections he felt as a child. He
always wants to spend winter on the Vineyard, which is a sore point
between us, because as a city person, I find it harsh, boring, desolate,
while he enjoys the isolation."
"He also has a fear, a great dread of imminent catastrophe, and he wants
to have his own self-contained oasis on the Vineyard, where we can farm
our own land, draw water from our own well, and so on. He often talks
about how we'll live in safety when 'the catastrophe' comes."
"All of that aside, I've always felt awfully guilty that I'm not on the
Vineyard in winter - that I'm not capable of doing what my husband expects
of me. After all, he's spent so many winters in New York."
James has his own pangs of conscience concerning his marriage, and as he
begins to talk about "Hour That The Morning Comes" on Dad, a good deal
of his guilt comes to the fore.
"'Hour That The Morning Comes' is about people at a party," he says.
"The first one is Carly, who doesn't get drunk and has a good time
without hurting herself. The second guy, with his head 'kacked' - that's
a junkie term - in his lap, is just someone who's miserable. The next
person, the fool with the lamp shade on, is somebody else I know, and
the 'secret agent man' is a dealer, or someone with an angle he has to
play out at the party."
"I don't have much moderation in my drinking," he states firmly. "If I
get intoxicated, I lose control. And I've sometimes made mistakes when
I was too high that I deeply regret. I can get real sad thinking about
things I've said to people and ways I've made people I love feel because
I was so out of it. But those are in the past."
Yet they haunt him still, as with the tale behind the terrifying "Sleep
Come Free Me" on Flag.
"Bob Rafelson, the director, came to the Vineyard one time and asked me
if I wanted to act in "Brubaker", which he started making before
something took him off the project. He said he was also looking for a
song for the movie, and I came right out with this line 'Ten lonely
years without a woman,' which was part of the original lyric. Then, to
make it rhyme, I made it 'Ten lonely years of my life taken.'
"A couple of weeks before that, I had gone on a bender, and I got so
drunk that I blacked out a whole rampage of awful behavior. I don't
know where I got the energy for it. I can remember that I played 'She
Caught The Katy,' which I love, at a party for something like eight
hours straight, and when someone finally threatened, or offered, to beat
me on the head lest I keep playing the song, I actually bit a big hole
in the guitar. And this guitar belonged to a good friend of mine, so it
was bad thing to have done."
"I have also recently watched a TV program on angel dust, where some
poor bastard killed a man and couldn't remember afterward. So I began
to think of how some person could end up with no memory of what he had
to pay for with his time in prison."
"When I came to, I heard for days about my behavior - some people just
gave me dirty looks - so I wrote that into the song":
Now the state of Alabama says I killed a man
When I remind him of his lengthy rendition of "Katy" that night at Tim
Mayer's house, he shakes his head.
"I go on and on with that tune."
Has he always had this outrageous nature?
"You bet," he says. "A long time ago in London - when I was nineteen or
twenty - I took an acid trip with a friend. There was a candle burning in
the middle of the table and we were peaking. It melted down into the
dish it was sitting in and made a great pool of wax. And as it did, I
took some match sticks and made a little cabin out of them. Pretty soon
the wax was vaporizing inside the cabin and giving off a nice light."
"I went out the window at this point, and I swung from one fire escape
to another on these buildings. I used to get crazy on this drug. Then
I walked along a ledge, stories and stories up, and jumped into a tree
in a park along Baker street. I climbed out of the tree, hopped into my
car, a Cortina GT, and blasted around the West End, doing about
eighty - just screaming. It was a golden time, and I was right in the
pocket."
"When I came back to the apartment, I came up the fire escape and in
through the window. I found that everyone was kind of spooked and
dragged. This plate of matches had become a nova and blown up. The
plate was in shards; there was a hole in the table and a big hole in the
ceiling. I later thought of that as being pretty irresponsible."
"That same year, I spent about two days on the island of Formentera
drinking Romilar and riding a bicycle, just chanting. It was a
hypnotic, anti-psychedelic experience. It was nice."
Gravely concerned about the quality of his fatherhood, the detrimental
effects of his wanderlust and personal excesses, the significance of his
work and the security of his family life, James Taylor is seeing old
patterns and images he thought were long dispersed flooding back into
the here and now. Like the bedeviled millworker he wrote about in the
song of the same name, Taylor finds himself riding home in the evening,
staring at his hands, perplexed as to what he's ultimately wrought.
"Perhaps I'm at a contradictory point," he says softly. "I'm trying to
be a public figure and at the same time be average. It's like
proclaiming my ordinariness."
"One of the things that's positive about Japanese culture is that people
strive to be ordinary," he continues. "In other words, what in this
country would be displayed as a status symbol - a piece of art, for
instance - well, I've heard of an industrialist in Japan buying a Monet
and hanging it in the bathroom, loving it, but not wanting to be
presumptuous about owning it, or not letting possession of it rock the
boat. Maybe it's a Zen kind of thing.
"Being a celebrity is not so great a gig, and it's not as good as being
a good musician or having a particular skill. Celebrity always misses
the point, and you end up disappointing the people who thought you were
what you never said you were. And from this, people approach your
children not only for who they are but for reasons beyond their
knowledge or control. To be a celebrity raising children is tough."
"Now for me, I really don't ever have any problem walking on the street,
going to a restaurant, walking away from a concert."
"This is a bit of what 'Walking Man' tries to say. I've seen a lot of
high-flying people hit the big time and then wonder why the fuck they
don't feel special. Everybody's calling them special. That's one of the
things that I think makes stars tend to take drugs, drink too much."
As our plane begins its descent into New York, James reaffirms his vow
to curb his own vices, especially drinking. I ask what dreams he has in
store for the future.
"Well, my brother Hugh and I have been considering a little undertaking
for some years now, and this may be the summer we finally get started on
it."
What undertaking is that?
"We want to open our own brewery on the Vineyard. How does Taylor's
Lighthouse Lager sound to you?"
There's even a midnight train
But that don't leave me the power
To see your face again
It's not that simple
So much of you to love
Too much of you to take care of
And here I'm thinking 'bout you lying underground
Pushing up a pine tree in my field
Oh, Mona, Mona, you can close your eyes
I've got a twelve-guage surprise waiting for you.
The jury reached the same conclusion
I remember I was there
With a tire iron in my hand
The rest is all confusion.