Do You Remember? #7
‘Fire and Rain’ became a hit when I was only three years old. As such, I was cheated of hearing it for the first time, or at least having any memory of having heard it, specifically, for a first time. Like ‘Happy Birthday to You’ or ‘I've Been Working on the Railroad’, the song was ubiquitous most of my young life. I could hear the chorus repeated on mainstream NY radio stations like WNBC or WYNY without ever giving thought to its meaning. I could hear it sung on TV variety shows (I'm so sure Cher sung it on her post-Sonny show, yet I have no proof), in barber shops, and department stores. James Taylor, the man who was made famous by singing and recording the song, himself parodies the way it overwhelmed his career in two of his own songs: his hilarious pantheon to selling out – ‘Money Machine’ - in which he declares triumphantly "I've seen fives and I've seen tens" and more tenderly in his later song ‘That's Why I'm Here’ where he muses about why "perfect strangers" would want to "pay good money to hear 'Fire and Rain' again and again and again." He also sang it on The Simpsons. My favorite allusion to the song is in Jim White's "Christmas Day" where he sets the scene of a heart-rendering breakup at a Greyhound station on Christmas against "a bad Muzak version of James Taylor's big hit called 'Fire and Rain'". So perfect: canned angst played off against real sorrow: mocking it. The commodification of art until it's a meaningless grotesque of itself.
"Fire and Rain" is a song about suicide, depression and addiction written by a man who was in the grips of a heroin habit that would stay with him for years to come. It chronicals the reaction to the death of the songwrite’s' friend Suzanne by her own hand, and the time he spent in mental hospitals as a teen and the struggle with his demons he was facing at the time of his earliest brushes with success. It's a very finely-crafted pop song, a late-20th century folk song in the purest sense: something one finds oneself whistling aimlessly while working. It demonstrates the best type of songwriting. When I stopped hearing the song as something that just was and started listening, I related it to every sad moment in my life: every family illness, every hurt feeling, every pointless crush.
I remember singing it in junior high chorus. Not as a song being taught in the actual class for any performance. Waiting for the chorus teacher to work out the girls' parts, my friend and I would sing it quietly on the other side of the room. He was a very good singer. I was a terrible singer who just squeaked into chorus. We weren't really harmonizing in a literal sense, but it was a way to communicate through what was already an oldie. High school was filled with heartache - real or imagined - and it was just very difficult to express those emotions or talk about them honestly. Here we sat, all of 14, claiming we had seen fire and rain, stormy days that we thought would never end. Certainly we had seen lonely times where we couldn't find a friend. And we would again. And at times, we'd come barreling towards disaster on the level of what James Taylor was really writing about and somehow we'd make it through. It was a time for me, when I realized that there would be no such thing as a sad song, as long as it was honest and true, that I wouldn't love.
‘Fire and Rain’ wasn't the only great song on 1970's Sweet Baby James. It may not have even been the best one. And, despite its iconic stature, Sweet Baby James may not even be the best James Taylor album. (That for me would either be 1977's JT or 1991's New Moon Shine.) It is an album, however, with a reputation. And that reputation seems to be the launch of the phenomenon of the 1970s singer-songwriter. It stayed on the Billboard charts for two years (despite peaking - curiously enough - at number 3) and shared the charts with the follow-up Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon the next year.
Sweet Baby James is seen by some as the killer of rock and roll in the 1970s much in the same way that Rocky, Jaws, and Star Wars are often claimed as the killer of cinema in the age of Cassevetes and Coppola. Suddenly, the radio was filled with the likes of Al Stewart and Gerry Rafferty and a commodified mellowness took the edge off of music while making it a mega-industry that could only be saved from the pit of despair by the coming of punk (or Springsteen depending on who you talk to.)
I'm here to tell you that James Taylor was not the reason the Velvet Underground never hit it big and he was also not the reason for the Eagles coming into existence. This Yankee from Massachusetts did not take a shovel and dig Laurel Canyon and I find it telling that as an older man, with his past behind him and a zen-like peace to his stature, he moved away from LA and settled in Nantucket, away from the glitter of stardom and back to the setting of the first song on Sweet Baby James. The title song and the one I probably do consider my favorite.
‘Sweet Baby James’ combines a lullaby James was writing for his nephew with a remembrance of a "dreamlike" ride through a snow-covered road in the Berkshires on the way to Boston. Each half of the song is drenched with a spiritual loneliness: an isolation without anxiety and an inner peace. It is the simplest of nursery rhymes. And it recalls another journey once chronicled by Robert Frost as the singer, really at the beginning of his life and art, admits to "ten miles behind me and 10,000 more to go." In that same chorus, he defines the way I've come to feel about spirituality and the power of music:
There's a song that they sing when they take to the highway
A song that they sing when they take to the sea
A song that they sing of their home in the sky.
Maybe you can believe it if it helps you to sleep
But singing works just fine for me.
The last two lines of that stanza should be the slogan for the American Humanist Association. Strange coming from an album where Jesus is invoked more than once. But both ‘Sweet Baby James’ and ‘Lo and Behold’ (which is practically a spiritual), despite their contradictions, share something deeper, and that's something true for the entire span of what is a very short record after all. ‘Lo and Behold’ with its cries of "you just can't kill for Jesus" and claims of "glorious sights this soul has seen" are both born of cowboy poetry and a minstrel’s tradition. Unlike much of Taylor's later work, there seems to be a distinct, definite focus on creating work that seems to escape time.
"Deep greens and blues are the colors I choose" Taylor sings in ‘Sweet Baby James’ and the album is, as such, a work inspired by nature ... country roads, simple pleasures and introspection. In ‘Anywhere Like Heaven’ he declares "There's a natural pillow for my head the grass has overgrown. I think of that place from time to time when I want to be alone." The answers are in the world around us and then ultimately in us. You might call on Jesus, but you do so in order for your own self to make a stand. You might think that all this introspection equates to navel gazing but in one of the slyest songs on the record, a man named Sunny Skies finds a way to "ease down slow and everything is fine in the end" only to find - in fact we're told we'd be "pleased to know" - he's friendless, alone and left behind. And ultimately you don't have to go it alone, as expressed in the completely joyful ‘Country Road’ where Taylor makes his case for love (even if has to be "some kind of natural born fool" to want to love again) with someone to whom he declares "your way and my way seem to be one and the same." It's all so simple and yet nothing is simple. We all have to be going down a road, measuring consequences, going through the craft of living a life.
It all has felt like a whole for me ever since I heard the entire album for the first time. There a fantastic easiness to it resulting from the stellar lineup of musicians who would end up defining the California sound for better or worse for years: Danny Kortchmar, Russ Kunkel, Randy Meisner, Leland Sklar among others. Always precise and catching the right note and yet never drowning out Taylor's guitar or his voice or the aspect of the piece that I haven't touched on yet, namely his simple melodies and his ability to write an acoustic guitar lead that takes you right into the setting of a song. And underneath: Carole King, another east-coaster, grounding the work with her piano, her voice and her common sense.
And maybe it's that easiness that allows me to listen from beginning to end despite having to hear the corny reconstructed version of ‘Oh Susannah’ or the goofy blues of ‘Steamroller’ (which I would come to find as an irritant as Taylor's live version started stretching and stretching in length) or the awfulness of the end part of ‘Suite of 20G’ (hard to argue that JT didn't kill rock and roll with lines like "when I get a common cold, wanna hear a saxophone”). But for the way the songs feel together, including gems like ‘Blossom’ not covered here, I have a soft spot in my heart for James Taylor and Sweet Baby James even if I don't visit it as much as I used to. I may not notice it every day, but it's there, under the skin, every time I go down in my dreams.
