Mark Ribowsky wants everyone to love James Taylor, but he realizes that he will never be able to make fans of us all. In Sweet Dreams and Flying Machines (Chicago Review Press), Ribowsky acknowledges that Taylor’s sensitive persona resulted in a little too much sentimentality and helped launch the formulaic pop appreciated by “well-off yuppies perched in open-air cafes sipping chamomile tea or lattes.” And yet, to quote Taylor’s erstwhile wife, Carly Simon, “Nobody does it better.”
The son of emotionally troubled affluence, Taylor knocked around the Greenwich Village scene. Two of his songs were recorded by folk singer Tom Rush on The Circle Game (1968). Off to London for a season, Taylor busked on the romantic streets of Notting Hill and became the first non-Brit signed to The Beatles’ Apple Records. He struck Paul McCartney with his softly romantic yet somehow edgy voice, the Julian Bream classical influence on his otherwise folky guitar playing and the soul-searching introspection of his lyrics. Apple released his eponymous debut (1968) in an elaborate production by Peter Asher with fashionably Baroque pop touches. George Harrison sang back-up vocals on Taylor’s “Something in the Way She Moves” and borrowed the title for the opening line of “Something.” “Carolina in My Mind,” an oddly bittersweet paean to Taylor’s home state, received airplay, yet the album and his career were enmeshed in the deteriorating politics of Apple Records. Taylor left for Los Angeles to attend the birth of a movement oxymoronically dubbed “soft rock.”
Los Angeles was the epicenter for soft rock both because it had recently become a center for the music industry and also for a prominent club with roots in the folk-blues revival, The Troubadour, where a coterie of prominent musicians gathered. Taylor was drawn to the milieu along with Jackson Browne, escaping the decadence of New York’s Andy Warhol crowd, and Carol King, renewing her life and music after divorcing Gerry Goffin. From his aerie in faraway Woodstock, New York, Bob Dylan seemed to grant his imprimatur on soft rock with albums such as New Morning, which extolled the virtues of rural family life.
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The emotional genesis of soft rock was in reaction against the turbulence of the decade just ended. Jackson Browne’s “Take it Easy” was heard as a call to simmer down and take stock. Graham Nash’s “Our House” was an advertisement for a quiet life after the upheaval. Taylor’s first album for Warner Brothers, Sweet Baby James (1970), was in keeping yet distinct from the trend. The album’s hit, “Fire and Rain,” was a cryptic plea from a heroin addict whose friend had committed suicide and whose musical career was in pieces. Pop music fans had no way of interpreting the lyrics yet were drawn to its mournful self-pity buoyed by just enough resilience to keep it from being maudlin. The words fit the introspective mood of self-searching that emerged from the 1960s. Asher produced the music without a hint of bathos.
Tellingly, two thirds of Sweet Dreams and Flying Machines is over by the time the author reaches 1975. By then, Taylor had run out of anything interesting to say; he marriage to (and divorce from) singer Carly Simon put him in the celebrity press; his mellowness triggered an antithesis in the form of glam and then punk rock. Although Taylor has long since receded into easy listening radio formats, he remains a bankable recording artist. His 1976 greatest hits collection continues to sell half a million copies each year. Although seldom thought of any longer as a rock artist, he found new audiences elsewhere, including country star Garth Brooks, who calls him one of his favorite artists. Taylor remains quietly active, playing benefit concerts and working for social causes.
