James Taylor: Sweet baby James tells all
by Seth Rogovoy

(Pittsfield, Mass., July 15, 1998) -- Avoid a major drug habit. Don't get married and have children until you're ready to settle down. Try to stay out of debt.

When all was said and done, that was the advice that James Taylor had for a group of students from the Tanglewood Music Center who enjoyed a relaxed, intimate, hourlong chat with the famed, folk-pop singer- songwriter on Monday night at Miss Hall's School.

Peppered with questions from students and faculty member Joel Smirnoff, who acted as the evening's emcee, Taylor responded with remarkable candor while at the same time revealing himself to be incredibly thoughtful, self-reflective and articulate on a wide range of subjects ranging from the music business to the secret of life, to paraphrase one of his song titles.

"Talking about music is shooting yourself in the foot," Taylor said toward the end of the hour, which was also attended by a handful of Boston Symphony Orchestra staffers and guests, including music director Seiji Ozawa and Andre Previn, the composer, conductor and pianist who is an artist-in-residence at Tanglewood this summer.

But in spite of Taylor's ambivalence toward talking about his songs, he generously opened a window into his creative process, detailing the genesis of his first hit single, the now concert standard, "Fire and Rain."

The song was written "over a very difficult three-month period," said Taylor. While in England recording his debut album with The Beatles -- who had signed him to their label, Apple -- a close friend back home had committed suicide.

Not wanting to disturb his good fortune or jinx the recording session with the bad news, Taylor's friends kept it from him, and he didn't learn about her death until he returned to the U.S. -- hence, the song's famous opening line, "Just yesterday morning, they let me know you were gone."

The second verse, full of personal desperation and pleas to Jesus to "help me to make a stand," was written here in the Berkshires shortly thereafter, during a five-month stay at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, to which Taylor had checked into in order to kick an addiction to heroin.

A calm, casually-dressed Taylor, seated in a wing-backed easy chair, also allowed occasional flashes of his trademark dry wit to penetrate his Buddha-like serenity. The song's third verse, joked Taylor, was "just tacked onto the end -- extra stuff."

While acknowledging that his success as "the quintessential, sensitive singer-songwriter" stems from songs that "are very personal, autobiographical statements...containing sticky, juicy, intimate stuff," Taylor said this occasionally makes him uncomfortable.

"The degree to which I am myself for a living is frightening.... Sometimes I wish I had more of a global, Tin Pan Alley, journeyman's craft," he said.

Then again, Taylor made clear that he wasn't bemoaning his fate. "I've been allowed a very unique career," he said. "It's a very self- expressive thing I do....I've made a living at it. It's a unique thing not to have to pay more attention to the marketplace, which is punishing for artists."

In one of several attempts to connect what he does directly to his audience's pursuits, Taylor said, "I think one of the missions of Tanglewood is to protect artists -- to help people find their place in the world and to make a living, but also to protect the music and the people."

While Taylor himself is totally unschooled as a musician and otherwise -- he does not read music and referred to himself as a high- school dropout -- the picture he drew of his supportive home life mirrored that of his vision of Tanglewood, as a place where the pursuit of one's art is to be encouraged irrespective of market forces. Taylor said that while his parents might have harbored secret doubts about the wisdom of pursuing a career in music, they never let on about their ambivalence. In fact, he said, he was raised to believe that living a good life should take precedence over everything else.

His parents were so supportive of his endeavors at a time when he was living dangerously -- "it's a miracle that I'm alive at all," he said - - that they "were either oblivious or bold on my behalf."

In trying to establish a common bond between himself and the music students -- or to define where their arts diverged -- Taylor was very curious about the use of improvisation and personal expression in their work. Turning the tables on his audience, he asked them how much leeway they were given to improvise within the constraints of their scores. He seemed surprised at the consensus response: none at all.

Seizing the opportunity, Ozawa interjected here that his experience working with Wynton Marsalis a few years ago at Tanglewood was an eye- opener, and that he hoped to incorporate the art of improvisation into the music center training. Andre Previn, whose career spans both classical music and jazz, warned that the two are by their very nature diametrically opposed to each other, and that there is no need to mix them. Taylor went ahead and encouraged the students to find a musical "wheel" and experiment with it as a means of personal expression.

Music, he said, "is the truest language we have -- true to the laws of the physical universe, a language that speaks to your heart, to trees, to your cat. It's soul food. That's the reason we do it -- relief from the insanity all around us."

As for what originally motivated him to pick up the guitar, with characteristic bluntness and affability Taylor replied, "I wanted to meet girls."

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[This article originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on July 16, 1998. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1998. All rights reserved.]