Fire and Rain

by David Browne

  “That was a nightmare,” Taylor told Asher when filming wrapped up. “I don’t want to do that again.” Asher agreed that movie stardom was probably not in his client’s future. (“Management error,” Asher conceded.) But no one was too troubled. Nearly six months after the release of Sweet Baby James, the music side of Taylor’s career appeared to be finally catching fire.

  The rental car pulled onto the campus of Beaver College, outside Philadelphia. In the driver’s seat was Carole King. Next to her, his head down, nodding off for one reason or another, was Taylor.

  The filming for Two-Lane Blacktop completed, Taylor had returned to the road for another string of college gigs. Together with Walter Robinson, an African American bass player who knew him from Martha’s Vineyard, Taylor and King drove to and from campuses around the Northeast and Midwest. King’s first album under her own name—an overly eclectic collection of pop and quasi-psychedelia called Writer, which featured Taylor on guitar—had just been released. But as with Sweet Baby James, sales were initially modest. Whatever money they stood to make would come from the road.

  On their drives, Taylor, King, and Robinson were often the only ones in the car; no record company personnel, managers, or security types were around. Sitting in the backseat this weekend was a writer from the prestigious New York Times Magazine—Susan Braudy, who’d known several of the Weather Underground during their college days and had visited the site of the brownstone explosion in March. At the dawn of her career in publishing, Braudy had been contacted by an editor at the magazine who’d summered in Martha’s Vineyard and had heard the positive murmur about Taylor. Although the newspaper hadn’t run a review of Taylor’s Gaslight show six months earlier, the Times Magazine had decided to cover this rising star.

  Braudy had firsthand evidence of Taylor’s growing fan base as soon as she arrived on the Beaver campus with King, Taylor, and Robinson. As they strolled across the lawns and into the gymnasium where Taylor’s show would take place, girls began pointing and screaming. (Stern had experienced these episodes herself with Taylor in the spring. Walking into a venue alongside him, she was stopped by one female fan. “Are you with James Taylor?” she asked. When Stern nodded yes, the girl swooned, “You are so lucky.”) Braudy also observed the ways in which Taylor knew how to work his particular brand of unassuming, anti-star charisma. Escorted into a basement that would serve as a de facto dressing room, Taylor found a corner and curled up in a batting cage as everyone watched—a solitary moment that also served to effectively make everyone notice him.

  Once the show began, the girls in the gym were indifferent to King, occasionally booing her. They wanted the headliner and no one else. Once Taylor ambled onstage, they relaxed immediately. He told his usual self-deprecating jokes or shaggy-dog stories as if he were a modern counterculture update of Will Rogers. Then he closed his eyes and began singing. Neither Braudy nor the girls in the crowd had heard a voice quite like that, soft and gentle yet masculine and far from effeminate. His phrasing was both casual and folksy but firm and precise. Even when he’d make a reference to the coming apocalypse—telling another college audience it was coming and he was considering buying land in Nova Scotia when it arrived—few were unnerved.

  Braudy would glance around the halls and see girls crying as he sang. “We love you, James!” one screamed, prompting Taylor to reply, with equal degrees of modesty and cockiness, “How many are there of you now?” The answer to that question always arrived after the performance. Lining up in front of the dressing room, girls—never boys—would press flowers, notes, or lollipops into Taylor’s hands. Taylor passed some of the gifts on to King; others, like a pair of green gloves, went to Braudy.

  During interviews with Braudy in his hotel rooms or at restaurants, Taylor revealed more of himself than he had to other writers by that point. He complained about the making of Two-Lane Blacktop. “I don’t like to fight with people,” he told her. “I like to please people too much, but I didn’t like someone else being in control of my work.” He told her his only enemy was Allen Klein, who was threatening to sue him and Peter Asher for breach of contract. (Asher and Taylor were prepared to countersue for lack of royalty payments on the first album, but Klein never followed through on his threat.) Taylor remained a Beatles fan: In a motel room during the making of Two-Lane Blacktop, he was overheard singing “Mean Mr. Mustard” from Abbey Road.

  Although Braudy never saw Taylor get high, she noticed his nose always appeared to be running and he spoke in unusual cadences—very fast before slowing down. To herself, she concluded he was essentially sedated in one way or another. When the topic came up, Taylor denied he was a junkie and even talked about the detrimental effects of hard drugs. “Heroin, it deadens your senses,” he told her during one conversation. “You don’t think. You take all your problems and trade them in for one problem—a whole physical and mental process of deterioration. A lot of creative energy comes out of a very painful place. A lot of artists do their thing as a kind of remedial action. Junk shuts off a lot of that.”

  Braudy accepted his explanation. But in one of his motel rooms, she went into the bathroom and noticed a bent spoon and other drug paraphernalia on the floor behind the toilet. Braudy decided not to include it in the subsequent story that ran in the Times Magazine. She wasn’t sure Taylor’s inordinately sensitive fans were prepared to know that much about their newfound hero.

  PART FOUR

  FALL INTO WINTER Gone Your Way, I’ll Go Mine

  CHAPTER 13

  He knew the question was coming; it was only a matter of when and how to respond. But somebody was bound to bring it up. In those early days of autumn, one person or another always did.

  His hair pulled back in a ponytail, his bearded face gaunt and vigilant, George Harrison took his place behind a small bank of microphones in London in the middle of September. Joined by his friend Ravi Shankar, Harrison was making his first public appearance in months to promote a series of Indian music concerts at the Royal Festival Hall. With rock fans’ interest in Indian raga declining—for Western ears, the novelty had worn off—a plug by a Beatle was guaranteed to bring out the press and, with any luck, sell a few more tickets to the shows.

  At first the questions from the assembled reporters focused on Harrison’s love of India’s music, culture, and religion, to which he’d been introduced four years before and which he had incorporated into Beatle records and his side projects. Casually dressed in denim, Harrison neither looked nor sounded happy to be on display. He answered a question about whether he still meditated with a curt “yes,” then spoke of how Eastern music was far superior to Western. “These Indian singers have more soul than Aretha Franklin will ever have and you can quote me on that,” he said, a revealing moment of honesty, haughtiness, or both.

  Eventually, the moment he’d been dreading arrived: A reporter asked about the future of the Beatles, especially now that McCartney had published his damning letter in Melody Maker. To the surprise of no one who knew him, Harrison said nothing, turned, and walked away, and the press conference disintegrated. “George could be very disagreeable,” recalled Apple’s Peter Brown. “He was argumentative and stubborn. More than most.” Then Harrison quickly paused and, over his shoulder, said, “It looks like we need a new bass player, doesn’t it?” He’d tossed off that joke at least once before, in the studio with Dylan and Charlie Daniels, but this time the edge in his voice was more apparent.

  Harrison had reason to be grumpy. The past few months had found him clashing with McCartney and Phil Spector, and he was beginning to suspect something was taking place between his wife, Pattie, and his friend Eric Clapton. Yet one encouraging bit of news was in the air: At the time of the press conference, Harrison had only a few more songs to complete for his first album proper, All Things Must Pass, whose title alone was a less-than-veiled comment on life after the Beatles.

  Harrison had considered making an album even before McCartney’s announcement; Chris O’Dell,
the former Apple employee and Harrison friend, recalled him talking about cutting a single during the early months of 1970. But McCartney’s news inspired Harrison to finally compile all the material he’d been storing away. Fresh off the Let It Be experience, Harrison hired Phil Spector, who, with Harrison, assembled a veritable army of musicians, from Clapton, Procol Harum’s Gary Brooker, Billy Preston, and former Traffic guitarist Dave Mason to old friends Klaus Voormann and Ringo Starr. With an impressive cadre of players and nearly two dozen songs, Harrison would finally make the case for his own career, just as the other Beatles already had with their individual albums and singles.

  The bushel of material amounted to a journey through Harrison’s mind, past and present. The songs dating back to the waning days of the Beatles revealed the strain on his psyche and patience at the time. Written during the filming of Let It Be, “Wah-Wah” equated band meetings with a massive, lingering headache. Harrison would later claim “Isn’t It a Pity” was a comment on a low point in an unspecified relationship— presumably with Boyd—but its coda, a sarcastic take on the sing-along finale to McCartney’s “Hey Jude,” couldn’t have made the subject of his words more apparent. “Run of the Mill” chronicled, with admittedly oblique imagery, the time when the business of running Apple began to wear on the band, while “Beware of Darkness” was, he later wrote, “selfexplanatory”—a take on the sinister side of the music business some felt was aimed at Harrison’s otherwise ally, Allen Klein.

  The post-Beatles George, or the one he hoped to become now that he was free of them, poked through optimistically. His relaxed, inspiring bonding with Dylan emerged in a version of Dylan’s “If Not for You” and “I’d Have You Anytime,” a country-lilt ballad they’d written together. Harrison made Dylan the subject, again abstractly, of “Behind That Locked Door,” a show of love and support for his songwriter friend. The Krishna George, the one who would find peace and tranquility on his own, commandeered “My Sweet Lord” and “Awaiting on You All.”

  Fortunately, Spector didn’t allow Harrison’s tendency toward stern, sour-faced lyrics to derail him. Applying his Wall of Sound approach to a rock orchestra, Spector transformed “Wah-Wah,” “What Is Life,” and “Awaiting on You All” into joyful cacophonies—thundering herds of multiple guitars, percussion, and choirs that did a more than commendable job of smoothing over Harrison’s sometimes strained voice and rhymes (“visas” and “Jesus” in the case of the latter song). Spector brought out the hooks and energy in Harrison’s songs; he even made the chant “Krishna, Krishna” in “My Sweet Lord” palatable. The ballads, like the title song, had a stately, nineteenth-century eloquence, the musical equivalent to Harrison’s Friar Park mansion. From the springy guitar lick that drove “What Is Life” to Pete Drake’s sweet pedal steel in “Behind That Locked Door,” the album—the two LPs of original songs, anyway, not the third disc of ho-hum jam sessions with the musicians—was unflaggingly warm and inviting, as if Spector had yanked out the best side of his collaborator’s personality.

  Far more than McCartney’s or Starr’s projects, the start of Harrison’s record sealed the band’s fate for those who worked regularly with them. “It was, ‘This is what we’re going to be doing now—four solo albums,’” recalled engineer John Kurlander, who worked on some of the sessions. To Spector’s frustration, though, All Things Must Pass took months to complete. The sessions began in late May and stretched out, languidly, throughout the summer. In a corner of the studio, Harrison constructed a small shrine, complete with lit incense sticks and a framed picture of the beloved spiritual teacher and yoga master Paramahansa Yogananda. “George took his time,” Voormann recalled. “He got comfortable. He made the studio into his little home.”

  As the work dragged on, far longer than he expected, Spector grew bored and irascible. Drummer Alan White, who’d played on Lennon’s “Instant Karma,” noticed a gun sitting on the recording console. He’d heard stories about Spector’s unpredictable, explosive side, but the sight of a weapon took White and others off guard.

  One day, late in the sessions, Spector showed up drunk, and Voormann watched as the producer fell backward off a chair, hurting his arm. Visibly unhappy, Harrison told Spector he’d finish the record without him. By then, the bulk of the project had been completed, and Harrison wrapped it up himself at EMI Studios in September and October. Once and only once, he popped into an adjoining room to check on the status of another historic event, the album on which John Lennon was putting the consequences of his primal scream therapy onto record for the first time.

  To Dan Richter, the change in the Lennons was apparent as soon as they returned home to Tittenhurst from Bel Air. For starters, their hair was longer, the close-cropped look of six months before relegated to history. Lennon made jokes about gaining weight from eating too much ice cream in Hollywood, and his sense of humor, his engagement, were again on display.

  So, apparently, was his relationship with Ono. “Take a picture of us,” Lennon asked him one fall day, “we’ve got this drawing.” Lennon showed Richter a sketch of a man and woman sitting together against a tree. Once, Richter had been able to tell Lennon and Ono’s handwriting apart. But no longer; the penmanship on this piece of paper was such a melding of their two styles that he couldn’t tell which one had drawn it. Wow, Richter thought, they’re even drawing alike. Whatever turbulence had been taking place between Lennon and Ono had been resolved, at least for the time being.

  Richter grabbed what he called a “cheap plastic camera” and the three of them headed out to the front of the main house, right off the large front yard. It was a sunny, beautifully crisp afternoon, and Lennon and Ono ran between the trees together like children just dismissed from school. “They had a lot of energy,” Richter recalled. “The whole purging that had taken place with the Janov thing put them in a very positive space.” With their original sketch in mind, Lennon and Ono finally sat down and leaned against a tree, Ono in Lennon’s lap. Richter snapped away before Lennon and Ono reversed positions, Ono now cradling Lennon.

  From the start, the photos were intended to grace the covers of separate albums Lennon and Ono had finished making after they’d arrived back in England. In late September, Lennon reached out to Starr and Voormann, telling them he had a group of new songs he wanted to record, quickly. When Voormann heard Lennon had hired Spector again, he envisioned another crowd-of-thousands production. Instead, he found himself in the studio with only Lennon and Starr, Spector keeping an exceedingly low profile and allowing Lennon to shape his own sound. (Coming on the heels of the Harrison sessions, Spector may have been humbled; he also instinctively knew Lennon was opting for a different approach and went out of his way to respect his wishes.) “Phil was very subdued and melded in,” Voormann recalled. “He did not push any Phil Spector sound on us.” Starr later recalled having no memory whatsoever of Spector being around.

  That sound, as Voormann and Starr discovered, was naked and minimalist; most of the songs were played only by the core trio of Lennon, Voormann, and Starr. Lennon wrote out the lyrics on large pieces of paper, the chords listed underneath them. The trio ran through each song a few times, Lennon alternating between piano and guitar, and then recorded them. Voormann flubbed a few notes here and there, but in they stayed. Lennon was taking the original concept of Let It Be and pushing it as far as he could.

  One night, Lennon insisted on recording in spite of a voice raspy from oversinging. With special guest Billy Preston accompanying him with churchly, dramatic piano flourishes, Lennon launched into “God,” which worked itself up to a relentless, unapologetic list of everything in which he no longer believed: Jesus, John Kennedy, Buddha, yoga, Elvis, the Bhagavad Gita, Dylan (“Zimmerman,” as he called him), and, finally, the Beatles. Beforehand, he pulled Voormann aside. The last line was going to be “I don’t believe in Beatles, I just believe in me.” Should he add, “and Yoko,” he asked? He didn’t want to hurt her feelings. Voormann didn’t know what to say; it
was Lennon’s choice. In the final version, he had it both ways: He believed in “me . . . Yoko and me.” Clearly Lennon wanted to keep everything copacetic with Ono.

  If McCartney didn’t demand much, Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band demanded everything—complete concentration and immersion in Lennon’s state of mind, and a tolerance for a sonic approach that was akin to stripped-down wood. It was pop music, but not pop like anyone, especially Beatle fans, had envisioned. “Mother,” his way of confronting the mommy and daddy issues that haunted him, was more a pained mantra than a song, Lennon’s voice rising up to a scream at the end of each line. “I Found Out,” which lashed out equally at Jesus and Harrison’s beloved Krishna, was gut-bucket Liverpool blues. “Working Class Hero,” featuring just Lennon’s voice and shuddering acoustic guitar strums, was as unflinching as the starkest black-and-white photograph. The songs were open wounds, the arrangements—like Lennon’s voice and guitar on “I Found Out” or his equally ravaged guitar work on “Well Well Well”—scratching at them until they bled.

  Lennon and Spector were savvy enough record-makers to know a few gentler moments were called for, so out came “Hold On,” Lennon’s reassuring words to himself, Ono, and the world, floating along on his gentle tremolo guitar, and “Love,” a gorgeous quasi-prayer whose delicate arrangement—Lennon’s guitar, Spector’s piano, and Voormann’s bass—enhanced its natural beauty. Starting with the funeral bell that opened it, Plastic Ono Band was neither easy to listen to nor meant to be.