As Joni Mitchell became a radical, James Taylor just stayed the same
Ten miles behind me and ten thousand more to go.
— James Taylor, “Sweet Baby James”
‘Heart and humor and humility,’ he said, ‘will lighten up your heavy load.’ I left him for the refuge of the roads.
— Joni Mitchell, “Refuge of the Roads”
Sing me one more highway song.
— James Taylor, “My Travelling Star”
A queen exists to be paid homage to. In April 2000, TNT aired an all-star tribute to Joni Mitchell, recorded at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City. Among the courtiers that evening of the greatest singer-songwriter of her generation was one of Mitchell’s peers: James Taylor. Perched up in a box “on her throne,” as Taylor put it, Mitchell watched and listened as he played her his arrangement of “River.” She smiled at the irony of her lyrics — I’m going to make a lot of money / Then I’m going to quit this crazy scene — and nodded rhythmically and appreciatively during the middle trumpet solo. “Thanks for writing this,” Taylor said.
Contemporaries, Taylor and Mitchell were born out of the same musical scene, the pop-folk revival of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Living and working with the likes of David Crosby, Graham Nash, and Carole King, the Laurel Canyon neighborhood of Los Angeles was the crucible for their stripped-back sound and personal, sensitive, and confessional lyrics. The songs and albums that made their careers — for Taylor, Sweet Baby James and Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon; for Mitchell, Ladies of the Canyon and Blue — suited the mood of the time, reflecting a period of political and social tumult that had redefined American society.
“Like Paris was to the Impressionists and the post-Impressionists, L.A. was the hotbed of all musical activity. The greatest musicians in the world either live here or pass through here regularly,” Mitchell told Malka Marom in her recently-published book of conversations, Both Sides Now. “I think that a lot of beautiful music came from it, and a lot of beautiful times came through that mutual understanding. A lot of pain came from it too, because inevitably different relationships broke up and it gets complicated.”
Taylor and Mitchell’s lives intersected both personally and professionally in the early 1970s. “At the time that James and I were spending time together, he was a total unknown. Maybe I helped his career,” Mitchell joked to Marom. In 1971, Mitchell and Taylor conducted a love affair that lasted six months (according to Taylor’s future wife, Carly Simon) or a year if Taylor himself is to be believed. Much of their romance is documented in the lines of such songs as “Blue” and “All I Want,” while during that relationship Taylor would write Mitchell “You Can Close Your Eyes”:
Well, the sun is surely sinkin’ down
But the moon is slowly risin’
So this old world must still be spinnin’ ’round
Yes, and I still love youSo close your eyes
You can close your eyes
It’s all right
I don’t know no love songs
And I can’t sing the blues anymore
Yes, but I can sing this song
And you can sing this song when I’m gone
In this nascent period of their careers, Taylor and Mitchell’s sounds blended naturally. They were composing and presenting their music in similar ways: Taylor, entirely on the acoustic guitar; Mitchell, largely so, though she made use of the piano on “River” and the Appalachian dulcimer on “California.” They contributed to each other’s records: Taylor played guitar for Mitchell on “California,” “All I Want,” and “A Case of You” during the recordings for Blue, while Mitchell sang back-up vocals for various tracks on Mud Slide Slim.
But as the Laurel Canyon scene fizzled out and their brand of pop-orientated folk became passé, Taylor and Mitchell’s paths began to diverge. Court and Spark, Mitchell’s most successful commercial record released in 1974, announced the start of a period of radical musical experimentation with rock and jazz in particular, one that would alienate a great many of her fans who could not match the Mitchell of Mingus with that of Blue. That same year, Taylor published Walking Man, whose sound differed little from that of Sweet Baby James released four years prior.
Taylor and Mitchell would encounter one another as their careers developed and matured, albeit sporadically. In 1985, for example, Mitchell recorded backing vocals for Taylor’s song “Only One” for his album That’s Why I’m Here, and the same for Taylor on “Dog Eat Dog” from Mitchell’s questionable record of the same name. But suffice it to say after the early 1970s, Taylor and Mitchell very much went their own ways. This divergence would not only effect their sound — it would ultimately shape the ways in which both artists are seen and remembered.
Beginning with Sweet Baby James, James Taylor placed himself at the center of a band, working with the likes of Danny Kortchmar on guitar, Russ Kunkel on drums, and by the time of Mud Slide Slim Lee Sklar on bass. The arrangement of “You Can Close Your Eyes” with Taylor’s voice and guitar alone is a rarity, even in his early work. For Joni Mitchell, the introduction of the band with all its possibilities was a later development, really coming to the fore on Court and Spark.
“Well, my first five records, it’s basically me and my overdubs,” Mitchell told Marom, adding she had difficulty trying to find musicians who understood her and what she wanted to achieve, until it was suggested to her that she start going to jazz clubs, where she found Tom Scott and the L.A. Express:
It took me six years to find a band that inflamed me to that degree that I wanted to be part of them in a project, and that already had a working relationship member to member, in which I could just sort of fit into and where I felt that they would be sensitive to my music. It just happened to be that timing. That’s following the path of the heart.
Court and Spark was both a statement and a marker. As both a pop-rock and pop-jazz record, it demonstrated how far Mitchell had come from the bare sound of Clouds and Ladies of the Canyon, and also where she was going. As the 1970s rolled towards its conclusion, Mitchell moved further and further away from her musical origins. Jazz became a creeping influence in her work on The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Hejira — which featured the jazz bass guitarist Jaco Pastorius for the first time — and Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter.
The more jazz came to dominate her work, the less commercially successful Mitchell became. In this respect, everything rather reaches a tipping point with Mingus. This hopelessly misjudged, stinking dead dog of a record, released in 1979, came about after Charles Mingus at the very end of his life composed a series of melodies: Joni 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. Mitchell was then tasked with arranging these melodies and fashioning lyrics for them in order to create a collection of songs that could make up an album. “Coming as it did after the difficult Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter,” Noel Murray wrote at the A.V. Club, “the record effectively killed any momentum Mitchell’s career built up in the early- to mid-’70s.” “The ultimate result doesn’t serve either of their legacies particularly well,” Jessica Hopper said of Mingus in a recent review.
Mingus was arguably the height of Mitchell’s experimentation but it wasn’t the end of it. She hit peak jazz with that record, but then moved between rock-and-roll and jazz with Wild Things Run Fast, took a stab at aping the decade’s synthesized sound on the hyper-political Dog Eat Dog with mixed results, and tried out collaboration with other artists on Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm. Things settled down in the 1990s, although Taming the Tiger saw her messing around with a guitar synthesizer. The early 2000s were largely consumed by Mitchell tinkering with previous recordings, rearranging her old stuff with new orchestral patterns.
The arc’s of Mitchell’s musical development is that of a revolutionary, blurring boundaries and smashing conventions, with the according soaring highs and crashing, crushing lows. Mitchell was a radical and an uncontrollable spirit in a way that James Taylor never turned out to be — or, perhaps, never sought to be. This is not to say that his music didn’t develop, but rather instead of using new forms to express himself, Taylor’s evolution over time came within a certain musical and lyrical framework defined by Sweet Baby James and Mud Slide Slim. After the death of folk, when Mitchell went off in search of something else, Taylor stuck with it, refining the genre over time.
“James Taylor pretty much wrote the book for the singer/songwriters of the Seventies,” Dub Scoppa wrote in a review of his 1975 album Gorilla for Rolling Stone. “Taylor’s early work, characterized by subdued singing and restrained, clean backings, was also marked by an undercurrent of extreme agitation and angst. It was this sense of powerful emotions barely held in check that gave Taylor’s music its dramatic tension. When that undercurrent diminished and disappeared after the definitive Sweet Baby James, Taylor’s music lost its urgency.
“Thus began a gradual process of personal reorientation and musical redefinition. The most fascinating part of Taylor’s more recent albums has been their suggestion of a search for a new raison d’être,” Scoppa concludes. Indeed, on the final track of 1974’s Walking Man, Taylor almost seemed to be preparing for a retreat from the music industry. One way of reading “Fading Away” is seeing the vulnerability that comes with being a confessional singer-songwriter — But my cards are on the table / And there ain’t nothing up my sleeve — and what happens when the well begins to run dry. And here I thought I was a thinking man / But I’m a shrinking man, I’m sinking man / I’m fading, fading away:
But lately this old dog
Has been chasing his tail
Round and round and round
And the circles in my mind
They have been winding slowly down
Everybody’s breezing up
But I’m seizing up
I’m freezing up
And I’m fading away
Mitchell and Taylor both were searching for reasons to be by the mid-1970s. Mitchell decided that reason was to liberate pop-folk music with jazz. For Taylor, it was something else. Scoppa notes how on Gorilla, Taylor “hit upon is the unlikely mating of his familiar low-keyed, acoustic guitar-dominated style with L.A. harmony rock and the sweet, sexy school of rhythm and blues.” Far from ripping up his old style, Taylor on tracks like “You Make It Easy” and “I Was a Fool to Care” gradually evolved his existing sound so subtly that the average listener would barely notice the change but might twig that Gorilla was not quite the same as Walking Man.
This began before Gorilla in fact, with “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight” off his poorly-received cut One Man Dog. This harmonious track, a blend of jazz and pop, went onto have an afterlife in the hands of such artists as the Isley Brothers, who introduced a rhythm-and-blues feel to it. After Gorilla, Taylor himself borrowed from R&B in his recordings of Bobby Womack’s “Woman’s Got To Have It” and his collaboration with Stevie Wonder, “Don’t Be Sad Cause Your Sun Is Down” on In the Pocket. On JT, strains of rock-and-roll are to heard on “Honey Don’t Leave L.A.” and country and western on “Bartender’s Blues.”
Musically and lyrically, what Taylor was doing was looking for new ways to say the same thing. “I’ve written maybe 150 songs. But really what I’ve done is written 25 songs ten times. That’s what I do,” Taylor said in a recent interview. “I write different versions of the same thing. There are themes I will write about.” Indeed, on addiction and depression, fatherhood and family, travelling and home, Taylor has over the past forty years sought new ways to express his ideas on these themes in words and music.
“Sweet Baby James” and “Carolina in My Mind,” “Country Road” and “Fire and Rain” would create the thematic basis for the rest of James Taylor’s career. These songs catapulted him into the public consciousness, while numbers like “Shower the People” and “Your Smiling Face” kept him there, but by the early 1980s, Taylor’s career had really hit the skids. Flag and Dad Loves His Work were neither commercially or critically successful, although each contained one or two interesting songs that had an afterlife as part of his touring set: “Millworker,” “Up on the Roof,” “I Will Follow,” and “That Lonesome Road.”
His personal life was also in a state of collapse. That title, Dad Loves His Work, supposedly derives from a demand Carly Simon made to Taylor to spend less time on the road and more of his year at home with his family. The name of the album was his response; they separated in 1981 and their marriage ended in divorce in 1983. The album’s highlight, a duet with J.D. Souther called “Her Town Too,” documents the aftermath of a breakup of a long-term relationship. It is difficult to not read it autobiographically:
She gets the house and the garden
He gets the boys in the band
Some of them his friends
Some of them her friends
Some of them understand
Lord knows that this is just a small town city
Yes, and everyone can see you fall
But work was not the only reason for the end of their marriage. Throughout the 1970s, Taylor had failed to shake his addiction to heroin, what he referred to as the monkey on his back on “A Junkie’s Lament.” Oh my God, a monkey can move a man / Send him to hell / And home again / With an empty hand in the afternoon / Shooting for the moon. By the time of his separation from Simon, he was on a methadone maintenance program, as he had been from time to time throughout his marriage. He couldn’t kick that, either.
Both personally and professionally, That’s Why I’m Here — the follow-up to Dad Loves His Work — marks a turning point in Taylor’s life, and is indicative of ways in which, lyrically, he continued to be both personal and confessional in his subject matter. More than that, it indicated his willingness to return to or build upon themes set down in earlier albums. On the title track, Taylor talked about the event that, in part, caused him to finally come to terms with his drug addiction and get off methadone: the death of the actor John Belushi:
John’s gone found dead
He dies high he’s brown bread
Later said to have
Drowned in his bedAfter the laughter
The wave of the dread
It hits us like a ton of lead
Addiction and depression are present from “Fire and Rain” onwards, and after “A Junkie’s Lament” and “That Why I’m Here,” he would come back to it in “A Little More Time With You”. The image of the monkey returns, as part of a recognition that even sober the struggle against addiction is never ending. I passed on the cocaine / Said bye-bye to my methadone / Put down the bottle for one more day / Backing off of my tobacco jones / Still I feel like a hopeless junkie / Like a man who can’t say no / I look back and there’s that monkey / Rascal won’t let go, let me go. In this case, the motivation for continuing the struggle is family. I gotta spend just a little more time with you, oh yeah / So help me now.
If “Fire and Rain” established the foundation for discussing these darker themes, then “Sweet Baby James” and “Country Road” mark the beginning of Taylor’s relationship with the travelling song. Take to the highway now seems more like a statement of intent, with every album seemingly featuring a variation on the theme of journeying: “Riding on a Railroad” on Mud Slide Slim, “Walking Man” on the album of the same name, “Wandering” on Gorilla, and “Daddy’s All Gone” on In the Pocket, to name but a few. When Taylor sang, And it don’t look like / I’ll ever stop my wanderin’, he was more correct than he knew.
A recurring motif or idea is the loneliness of the road; I don’t have much to say / Thought I’d call you up anyway / Just to try to show you the way / That I feel today / Oh, I miss you, baby, Taylor sings in “Daddy’s All Gone”. But when he discussing travelling in later work, he also seems to stress the compulsive aspect of it, as if the road is calling him. They hunger for home but they never stay — the traveler is permanently unsettled. Tie me up and hold me down / Bury my feet down in the ground / Claim my name from the lost and found / And let me believe this is where I belong, he pleads in “My Travelling Star”:
Never mind the wind
Never mind the rain
Never mind the road leading home again
Never asking why
Never knowing when
Every now and then
There he goes again
Moreover, the theme of travelling — or, maybe, the theme of not being present — cannot be separated from family and home. Oftentimes, when Taylor discusses absence, he is also talking about his father, who is the character at the center of “Walking Man.” And the walking man walks / Doesn’t know nothing at all / Any other man stops and talks / But the walking man walks on by / Walk on by. Taylor then builds on this notion in “My Travelling Star,” referencing his image of his father as the walking man in the process:
My daddy used to ride the rails, they say
So they say, so they say
Soft as smoke and as tough as nails, my daddy
Boxcar Jones, old walking man
Coming back home was like going to jailThe sheets and the blankets and babies and all
He never did come back home
Never that I recall
Meanwhile, Isn’t it nice to be home again? Taylor asks on both “Isn’t It Nice to be Home Again” and “Hello Old Friend.” Home in “Carolina In My Mind” is of course something tangible, but more than that, it is a series of feelings and memories, something be longed for in times of trouble. Can’t you see the sunshine / Can’t you just feel the moonshine. This comes across more evocatively in the lines of “Copperline”, a later work with words by Reynolds Price. Carolina in Taylor’s work is the ultimate home, although it always seems slightly watercolored, even mysterious:
Branch water and tomato wine
Creosote and turpentine
Sour mash and new moon shine
Down on Copperline, down on CopperlineFirst kiss, ever I took
Like a page from a romance book
The sky opened and the earth shook
Down on Copperline, down on Copperline, yeah
“And then the line ‘down on Copperline’ came up. I don’t know where it came from or what it means,” Taylor has said of composing the song. “I’ve since interpreted it as being a place about a mile and a half away from where my home is. There was a creek that flowed by at the bottom of a hill by my house. Morgan Creek. And down there there was a stone quarry and that’s what I think about when I think about ‘Copperline.’”
Taylor has also written songs that can be seen as responses or counterpoints to earlier compositions. “Daddy’s Baby” and “Sarah Maria,” sweet songs sung to or about his baby girl, Sally, are partners to an earlier hit, “Sweet Baby James,” which Taylor often describes as a cowboy lullaby. All that I can see / Is my sweet Maria’s eyes is the female mirror of Rockabye sweet baby James. Similarly, “Another Day” — Wake up Susie / Put your shoes on / And walk with me into this light — can be seen either as a completion of “You Can Close Your Eyes” or a relative of “Fire and Rain.” These examples show more than a certain consistency in Taylor’s work, but a wholeness and completeness that is absent from Mitchell’s catalogue.
Having cut herself open and bled a thousand times on records like Blue, by the 1980s Joni Mitchell’s gaze had turned outward, not exclusively but increasingly so, and this end of introspection manifested itself in various forms. She fashioned compelling character pieces: “Beat of Black Wings,” about a young war veteran called Killer Kyle, shakin’ all over like a night-frightened child, who tells Mitchell, “There’s a war zone inside me / I can feel things exploding”; and “Sunny Sunday,” about a woman who every nightfall points a pistol through her door, aiming a single shot at the streetlight outside. But the day she hits / That’s the day she’ll leave / That one little victory, that’s all she needs.
Lyrically, she has experimented not only by attempting to make her verse as thick as possible, as on Hejira, but by adapting poetry to music. “If” was her take on Rudyard Kipling’s poem, while “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” adapted the W.B. Yeats verse, “The Second Coming.” From the Bible, “Love” takes as its source 1 Corinthians 13 (Love never looks for love / Love’s not puffed up / Or envious / Or touchy / Because it rejoices in the truth / Not in iniquity / Love sees like a child sees), and “The Sire of Sorrow (Job’s Sad Song)” has the song’s narrative voice pleading to God:
Do you have eyes?
Can you see like mankind sees?
Why have you soured and curdled me?
Oh you tireless watcher! What have I done to you?
That you make everything I dread and everything I fear come true?
And there’s her political stuff which, in its sheer ferocity, contributed to her marginalization as an artist and relegation to the fringes of our collective consciousness for decades as much as her jazz-infused melodies. Some of it was interesting, particularly the pieces that gave voice to the experiences of women and oppressed minorities: “Lakota,” “Not to Blame” (The story hit the news / From coast to coast / They said you beat the girl / You loved the most / Your charitable acts / Seemed out of place / With the beauty / With your fist marks on her face), and “The Magdalene Laundries”.
Even “Tax Free,” about televangelism, is digestible, but other songs were downright insufferable. Mitchell’s observation in “No Apologies” that Lawyers and loan sharks / Are laying America to waste / …As druglords buy up the banks / And warlords radiate the oceans is simply groanworthy boilerplate liberalism, and the same could be said of some of “Sex Kills,” her diatribe against 1990s Los Angeles and America more broadly. And the gas leaks / And the oil spills / And sex sells everything / And sex kills.
But at least those political thoughts are coherent. “Sex Kills” opened with the following: I took a look at his license plate / It said “Just Ice” / Is justice just ice? / Governed by greed and lust? / Just the strong doing what they can / And the weak suffering what they must? This is mostly babble, but nothing compared to what might be her worst song, “The Three Great Stimulants.” No-one has yet deciphered what she meant by And we call for the three great stimulants / Of the exhausted ones / Artifice brutality and innocence, dragging up Nietzsche for her awful tirade.
It is not that James Taylor excluded broader themes from his work. Indeed, they were rather prevalent on his last two albums of original music, Hourglass and October Road. “Line ‘Em Up” talked about Richard Nixon’s resignation and a mass wedding ceremony held by the Korean Unification Church in the context of having order in your life. “Gaia” was about environmentalism (Pray for the forest pray to the tree / Pray for the fish in the deep blue sea / Pray for yourself and for God’s sake / Say one for me) and “Belfast to Boston” Northern Ireland.
But to understand the difference between Mitchell and Taylor, consider “The Frozen Man.” The lyrics tell the story of William James McPhee, a seaman from Liverpool born in 1843 whose body was frozen in ice for a century only to walk to world again after being thawed and reanimated. Well, I thought it’d be nice just to visit my grave / See what kind of tombstone I might have / There lay the wife and daughter and it seemed so strange / Both of them dead and gone from extreme old age.
As remote and fanciful as the subject matter may seem on first appearance, Taylor would come to realize as he wrote the song that, like “Walking Man” and “Copperline”, “The Frozen Man” was actually about his father. “There are a lot of those can’t-quite-get-home kind of songs, or highway songs, or songs that romanticize the call of the road or the inability to settle down, the inability to find peace,” he has said. “And a lot of those wandering songs are about my dad.”
Joni Mitchell never lies.
— Q-Tip, “Got ‘Til It’s Gone”
You said you never met one girl who had as many James Taylor records as you, but I do.
— Taylor Swift, “Begin Again”
Another honor for the grande dame of singer-songwriters; in 2007, a collective of artists released A Tribute to Joni Mitchell. Björk interpreted “The Boho Dance” from The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Prince did “A Case of You”, Annie Lennox “Ladies of the Canyon”, and Elvis Costello “Edith and the Kingpin”, also from Hissing. The final track on the album was recorded by none other than James Taylor who, seven years after performing the song live in Mitchell’s presence, recorded a version of “River”:
He tried hard to help me
You know, he put me at ease
And he loved me so naughty
Made me weak in the knees
Oh, I wish I had a river I could skate away onI’m so hard to handle
I’m selfish and I’m sad
Now I’ve gone and lost the best baby
That I ever had
I wish I had a river I could skate away on
The 2000 concert and the 2007 album are indicative of the way Mitchell’s career has concluded itself. With her artistic experimentation, devil-may-care attitude towards just about everyone (including her fans), and slow and rather inglorious retreat from the public eye, Mitchell has achieved a kind of cultic status, coming to be revered and respected. She is a subject of study and interpretation, of receptions at the Hammer Museum, a collection of interviews curated by Malka Marom, and an album by Herbie Hancock who recorded jazz arrangements of her work featuring various artists including Mitchell herself on the anti-war song “The Tea Leaf Prophecy.”
The reaction to her recent hospitalization is evidence of his respect, but it is fair to say that universal respect is not the same as universal love. Let me speak, Mitchell sang on “The Sire of Sorrow,” let me spit out my bitterness — and that she has, unleashing venom in her autumn of her years in the direction of everyone from Bob Dylan (“Bob is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception.”) to Taylor Swift (“All you’ve got is a girl with high cheekbones.”).
Much of her fan base, turned off by her evolution from pop to jazz in the late 1970s and increasing politicization in the 1980s, never returned, even when her work took softer turns on beautiful songs like “Underneath the Streetlight,” “Night Ride Home,” and “Face Lift.” Whatever affection remains for her comes largely from a ragtag band of Baby Boomers who recall their worn-out vinyl copies of Blue with fondness (and this author, who listens dutifully to Dog Eat Dog in spite of itself).
James Taylor, by contrast, has kept on keeping on for more than forty years. He has honed his craft; his voice is like aged claret. He has settled down and become an adorable and avuncular fixture in the common culture: America’s slightly-odd grandpa. Beloved today by establishment figures like Barack Obama and John Kerry, he is likely to be seen where Mitchell wouldn’t be caught dead these days, serenading delegates the Democratic National Convention clad in park ranger hat or singing an awkward apology in the Hôtel de Ville in Paris in order to appease the offended French. You’ve got a friend, indeed.
Taylor today is loved by a great many people, including contemporary artists like Taylor Swift with whom he has performed “Fire and Rain” at a number of her concerts in recent years. He continues to tour each and every year, not just in the United States but in Europe too, with people paying good money to hear that 1970 hit again and again and again, as he observed in “That’s Why I’m Here”. Oh, some are like summer / Coming back every year / Got your baby, got your blanket / Got your bucket of beer / I break into a grin / From ear to ear / And suddenly / It’s perfectly clear / That’s why I’m here.
But much as respect is not the same as love, to be loved is not the same as to be respected, at least not to the same extent that Joni Mitchell is (even if, at this point, she holds the rest of society in such contempt that she can’t even see it.) Part of this has to do with his relationship with the establishment, but it also relates to the way his career has played out. Musical consistency over several decades, evidently, does not afford one the same place in the musical pantheon as radical musical experimentation with mixed results. Revolutionaries demand our respect more than evolutionary souls, radicalism more than gradualism. But there is no rhyme or reason why this should be. Perhaps it ought to change.
