In the wake of the breakup of the Beatles – who were probably the last musical group in history on which nearly everyone in the music-fan world, black, white, “serious”, pop, alt, mainstream – agreed, many different currents in pop music battled for public mindshare.
One genre that’d been largely waiting in pop music’s wings since before the Beatles got of the plane in New York was the various incarnations of folk music – both the “impure”, Bob Dylan strain that was mixing in rock and roll influences, and the more purist variety that was horrified by Dylan’s experimentation.
Naturally, over time, both subgenres mixed, frayed, developed orthodoxies, and apostates from those orthodoxies, and…well, became pretty much like any other genre of music.
And with the disappearance of the Beatles, and the retirement of the Formerly Fab Four to their single neutral musical corners, and the rest of the British Invasion either moving to consolidate their niches in pop culture (the Stones, the Who) and the deaths Hendrix and a slew of other sixties’ pioneers (Janis Joplin) and overrated hangers-on (Jim Morrison), some space appeared for some of those subgenres to make a move for center stage, as it were.
And of all of folk’s subgenres, one – the “Singer/Songwriter” – was most perfectly placed to reflect the zeitgeist of the decade. The seventies were a mewling, neutered, utterly un-funky decade, clogged with self-doubt and angst and anxiety about what one really, reallywas – and so were the Singer-Songwriters.
Loosely modeled after Bob Dylan, but with an extra helping of bathetic sensitivity and a little light on the inventiveness and the insight, the singer-songwriters were a little like the nebbishy folk musicians that’d clogged Greenwich Village and Haight Ashbury and Cedar-Riverside a decade earlier – but they’d skipped “Howl” and read “Bell Jar” instead.
They were many; John “Welcome Back Kotter” Sebastian, Dan Fogelberg, John Denver (soon to be subject of one of these pieces), Jim Croce (ditto), Jackson Browne (yep), John Prine (probably), Lobo and Terry Jacks and a zillion similar (not a chance).
But towering high above all of them, at least on the decade’s sales charts was James Taylor.
A veteran of crippling adolescent depression, a pal of the Beatles (he was recording at Apple Studios during the recording of “The White Album”, and his song “Something in the Way She Moves” reportedly influenced George Harrison’s “Something”), even-more-crippling drug addiction, and a seventies spent in the jet set married to Carly Simon, Taylor encapsulated the Singer/Songwriter genre – and the seventies itself – perfectly.
And so it should be no surprise that I couldn’t stand him.
Oh, that and the music. Taylor had a yen for making completely bloodless, desiccated covers of much better songs:
And even worse:
I mean, what did Marvin Gaye ever do to him?
So this was the stuff that I had to listen to (and play, when I started in radio in 1979) that was my frame of reference. That, and God only knows how many times Taylor (pal of Lorne Michaels, .
And so when I started this series, I thought to myself “Is there some side to James Taylor that I didn’t get to listen to on AM radio in the early eighties? Something that may have gotten buried under the mewling, puling, self-analysis?”
Well, sorta:
Hey, that’s Waddy Wachtel and Danny Kortchmar on guitar!
And every once in a while, mewling self-obsession just works.
So was my teenage (and twenty-age, and thirty-age) dismissal of Taylor fair?
Sure it was! The voice, the style, the genre…everything about James Taylor, like the entire genre he sprang from, annoys the bejeebers out of me, even thirty years later.
But a guy can take the odd guilty pleasure, right?
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