Now 72, James Taylor finally talks about the early years

Now 72, James Taylor finally talks about the early years

Even here, in the stillness of the Berkshires forest near Lenox, Mass., James Taylor grows anxious. He has to be conscious of how he enters his days since he most often experiences stress during the first six hours of being awake.

“I was glad to get a chance to see my shrink. I haven’t seen her since before the break,” he says. “I think any attempt at mental health is an excellent idea. It’s a little bit self-centered and navel-gazing, to a certain extent, to focus on yourself to that degree. But some of us need to become conscious of what we’re doing that we need to stop doing.”

It’s still winter here, and the 71-year-old, who has just driven the mile of his maple-lined entry after visiting with his therapist, walks into The Barn — his recording studio, a building just a few paces from where he sleeps — and takes off his coat. He keeps on his trademark newsboy cap while tending to the fire in the wood-burning stove.

It’s difficult to imagine a more tranquil environment. But in recent years, Taylor says, he has found his anxiety becoming “a bear.” From the inception of his career, the musician has been open about his mental health struggles. In his senior year of high school, he spent 10 months at Boston’s McLean Hospital during his first depressive episode. A couple of years later, he checked into another residential treatment center in an attempt to kick his heroin addiction. It was there that he composed the majority of his first hit record, 1970’s “Sweet Baby James” — a story he shared whenever he spoke about his songwriting.

Which is why, when Taylor has been asked by publishers over the years to write his memoirs, he has declined. Because he finds it redundant to talk about his music — “it should be listened to, and it either connects or it doesn’t” — he has been more forthcoming about his personal struggles since he became famous 50 years ago.

“I didn’t necessarily feel worthy of anyone’s attention, so when I was interviewed, I’d just say, ‘Well, whatever you think is worthy of writing about. Here’s the whole thing,’” he says, settling into a chair at the kitchen table.

HELP PROMOTE NEW MUSIC

Then, last summer, Audible approached Taylor about collaborating on a project. Because he was preparing to release an album of classic covers — “American Standard,” which came out Feb. 28 — his manager thought that teaming up with the audio company might help to promote the new music.

Initially, Taylor envisioned creating something for Audible that would focus on his songwriting. He planned on selecting six of his tunes and talking about the process of writing them, their meaning and reception.

But when he began talking to the project’s producer, Bill Flanagan — an author and television executive who oversaw VH1’s “Storytellers” and CMT’s “Crossroads” — a different idea emerged.

“We talked on the phone about the parameters — about 90 minutes of James talking about something — and the best idea that came up was his detailing the first 21 years of his life,” says Flanagan, who has known Taylor for 35 years. “In the years I was at VH1 and MTV, he never wanted to do a ‘Behind the Music’ special — he could never be talked into it. So it was interesting to me how fully committed and into this he was once we started going. He told me a lot of stuff I never knew. And he’s one of the only rock stars you’ll ever meet who speaks in full paragraphs.”

Taylor decided to call the audio memoir “Break Shot: My First 21 Years.” The title is a reference to the first shot of a billiards game, when the cue ball slams into the other balls, sending them off into various directions. For Taylor, that moment occurred when he left his Massachusetts boarding school, Milton Academy, and went to McLean. But “it had been building,” he says, “to a real discontinuity:” His father’s alcoholism had reached a critical point. His parents’ marriage was coming to an end. The Vietnam War was underway. John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. The United States was living under the threat of nuclear annihilation amid the Cuban Missile Crisis.

BREAK IT

He was on the precipice of adulthood, but he didn’t have any direction. Growing up, Taylor often felt crushed by the weight of his family’s unspoken expectations. His father was, as he puts it, “the ultimate academician” — a star student who went from Harvard Medical School to head resident at Massachusetts General Hospital. When Taylor and his four siblings were still kids, their father uprooted them from the Northeast to North Carolina, where he would later become dean of the University of North Carolina Medical School.

But as he remembers in “Break Shot,” Taylor wasn’t getting any clear instruction from his parents on how to achieve such success — about how to apply to college or pursue a career. He grapples with his relationship to his parents throughout the audio memoir, which he says he largely felt comfortable making at all because his parents are no longer around.

Less than a month before the Jan. 31 release of the Audible project, Taylor was still uneasy about the prospect of sharing it with the world. Because the final touches had yet to be put on the audio version of the story, his representatives would allow The Los Angeles Times to review only the manuscript of “Break Shot” — and to read it on Taylor’s property.

The singer-songwriter says his hesitation came from a fear that someone might “furiously read it and mine it for its prurient or sensational aspects” before release. The abbreviated memoir does delve into his infamous drug use — he didn’t get sober until his mid-30s — and in one scene, he recalls how he accidentally gave John Lennon a dose of methadone “too big to be taken by a civilian …. I am sure glad I didn’t kill John Lennon that day,” he says.

But, as promised, he never reveals much about his intimate relationships with other living public figures. He briefly mentions taking up with Joni Mitchell, saying only: “Our romance did not last that long, but our friendship has sustained for 50 years.” And the only reference to his first wife, Carly Simon, occurs as he is recalling his childhood summers on Martha’s Vineyard, where he says he first met the Simon sisters who, at 14, were out of his league. He married Simon in 1972, a few years after “Break Shot” cuts off.

HER OWN MEMOIR

Simon — with whom Taylor has two adult children, Sally, 46, and Ben, 43 — wrote her own memoir in 2015, “Boys in the Trees.” In the book, she wrote extensively about her 10-year marriage to Taylor, detailing how she watched him shoot up in a room at the Chateau Marmont and her intense physical attraction to him.

But if Taylor was upset about the revelations in Simon’s book, he doesn’t show it.

“I think she’s been pretty kind to me, and that’s certainly her story to tell,” he says of his ex-wife, who told The Los Angeles Times in 2015 that her kids weren’t allowed to give her Taylor’s phone number.

Flanagan didn’t push for such detail, anyway, he says: “By 21, he’d spent time in a mental institution, got into a motorcycle accident, got addicted to heroin, started playing music with The Beatles. I just felt there was so much good stuff that I was very, very happy with ending it there.”

The idea of someday sharing more about his life isn’t particularly appealing to Taylor, who still has trouble viewing himself as in any way exceptional. In The Barn, memorabilia from his celebrated career — magazine covers, photos with politicians, commemorative record sale plaques — was put on the walls of the stairwell only after his assistant asked if she could take the keepsakes out of storage. (His five Grammy awards rest on shelves above her desk on the second floor of the office.)

“I certainly don’t have anything enlightening to say,” he says of the prospect of a future written memoir. “This Audible thing is fine, you know? It takes the part before I was known, and basically sort of lays it down, and I think it is an interesting story with a couple of lessons to be learned from it about parenting, about how we help young people become adults.”

JAMES THE FATHER

Taylor has two other children, 18-year-old twins Rufus and Henry, with his third wife, Caroline “Kim” Smedvig, whom he married in 2001. Like their father, the boys attend Milton Academy and both are interested in music. Rufus is a fan of musical theater, while Henry is the head of the school’s male a cappella group and plays jazz guitar.

Raising his younger boys, Taylor says, he was especially cognizant of making sure his sons realized that “their parents’ emotional needs are not their responsibility.” As he recites in “Break Shot,” he often felt he had to parent his parents — particularly during ages 7 to 9, when his father left the family for two years to serve as a medical officer for the U.S. Navy in Antarctica. The eventual divorce of Taylor’s parents was hard on him, and as an adult, he invited his father to one of his therapy sessions in New York to discuss it.

Taylor has found himself reflecting more on his youth as he ages. “It seems to be a time of summing up,” he says, “when there’s a finite amount of time that remains.” When he listens to music — which is, in fact, a rarity, because he prefers silence so he can “put something together” in his head — he finds himself returning to favorites from his childhood. “American Standard,” which he began work on in 2018, includes 14 guitar-centric arrangements of songs he treasured as a boy: “The Surrey With the Fringe on Top” from “Oklahoma!,” Henry Mancini’s “Moon River” from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught,” from “South Pacific.”

In May, Taylor is scheduled to embark on a 26-date U.S. tour with Jackson Browne to promote the new music. The tour isn’t stopping in Arkansas but opens at 7:30 p.m. May 15 at Smoothie King Center in New Orleans. On June 27, Taylor will stop at the FedEx Forum in Memphis. He is rarely at home for more than a month but tries to balance his touring schedule just enough so that he doesn’t tire of it.

“In its season, there’s nothing like it,” he says of being on the road. “I don’t know if I’ve got another studio album in me of my own material. It’s hard to know what will happen in the next 10 years. I’m still writing. I feel as though I’ve done this all my life, and I just want to take it as far as I can go.”

_

Amy Kaufman

Los Angeles Times (TNS)

_

FYI

Go Online!

“Break Shot: My First 21 Years”

By James Taylor

audible.com

Free for the next 36 days; $7.95 regular price

Categories: Music