One More Time Again with James Taylor

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of seeing James Taylor and his All-Star Band at Oak Mountain Amphitheatre in Pelham, Alabama. I’ve never been much for concerts (or even group outings for that matter), but I’ve been slowly realizing most of the artists I love are either no longer with us or are unable to perform. I suppose I’ll never see Joni Mitchell, the writer of my favorite all time song (“Both Sides Now”), and I’ll certainly never see Neil Diamond or Linda Ronstadt (as both cannot sing anymore due to complications from Parkinson’s Disease). But I’ve been able to squeeze a few biggies in—some of the folks who’ve touched my life through their work.

Though I never saw Jerry Lee Lewis perform live, I did catch George Jones in his farewell tour, and I was able to see Southern comedian James Gregory earlier this year (he’s still performing but is clearly in frail health). I suppose this phenomenon of so many of my favorites fading away is a combination of growing up listening to oldies (Burt & Kurt in the mornings on Magic 96.5 in Birmingham) and a great deal of the Baby Boomer generation dying off (a booming population then, a booming death-toll now).

Taylor is 75, but you wouldn’t have known it watching him live. Spry and just as endearing as ever, he gave the best concert experience of my life (though no true Taylor fan could ever be fully satisfied because we love many more of his songs than just the “hits” he feels he must perform).

I can’t pinpoint the moment I knew I loved Taylor, but I can remember singing “Something in the Way She Moves” to a girlfriend in high school, so he must have been with me a very long time. I also shared a love of him with a college girlfriend and we wore out his 1993 double album (Live). That album is an anomaly in my collection as I detest live albums (I’m a heretic, I know, but it’s true—Diamond’s Hot August Night being another exception). That is an album that will make you weep, rejoice in the joy of life, and will be with you forever. Not only does it include every one of the “hits,” which are easy to love, but some other titles that deserve “classic” status—“Slap Leather” (the only anti-Persian Gulf War song I can think of), “Sun on the Moon,” and the lovely, doofy song “Everybody Has the Blues,” one of my favorites—sung to a sad little puppy dog (and partly inspired my play She’s Standing Behind Me).

Taylor is one of the few artists I can think of that produced great music in every decade he’s been working. Most artists who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s were at the very least dampened in the 1980s due to a combination of factors: the replacement of real instruments with synthesizers, record labels giving them short shrift (this includes a large swath of great Country/Western legends like Johnny Cash), etc. But even Taylor produced the marvelous That’s Why I’m Here (1985), an album whose titular song makes peace with the unhappy fact that artists must get sick of playing the same songs over and over again. A lyrical example from said song:

“Oh, fortune and fame's such a curious game Perfect strangers Can call you by name And pay good money to hear ‘Fire and Rain’ Again and again and again

“…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.”

I can think of no other statement made with more grace and love for his fans than that.

Of course, as the audience at Oak Mountain left that night, there were mutterings from those of us who expected our favorite tunes. Sure, I would have loved to have heard “You Can Close Your Eyes,” one of his famous lullabies that might be the prettiest tune ever put to vinyl. I overheard another Taylor fan was surprised he didn’t hear “Handy Man” as he was sure that would have been considered a “signature song.” But, even after Taylor’s (Live) album (a magnum opus, perhaps), I think of masterpieces from his 1997 offering, Hourglass that I would have loved to hear—“Enough to Be On Your Way” and “Gaia,” especially. No true master can sate all tastes for his fans in one concert. There are, as Emperor Joseph in Amadeus tells us, only so many notes one can hear in a single evening.

James Taylor’s music became especially important to me in the years 2014-2016, some of the most difficult years of my life. Attempting to make my teaching certificate mean something, I took two posts teaching drama, speech, and English in middle schools in rather difficult inner-city schools in Montgomery, Alabama. I was a warm body—very much needed but in no way the right man for the job. Being raised in private and specialized schools, the first yellow bus I rode was when I was a public school teacher and I had neither the energy nor the vim and vigor nor the understanding required to teach the looked-over, the lost, and the least of those that populate our poverty-ridden schools.

The experience left me a lesser man than I could have ever imagined. I sympathize with anyone teaching in what they call “failing schools,” but there are those who are meant to teach in such environments. Alas, I was not one of them. I would get to the school early and pull up Youtube and play what some might call my beloved “soft rock” or Country—John Denver, James Taylor—and sometimes even the overtures and preludes of Richard Wagner. They were there just to give me some calm before the storm of the day I expected (and got). Considering the fact that my last day of teaching, I was found huddled against my dry-erase board—unresponsive, crying, and with a blood pressure of 200 over 100—it is clear the peaceful music didn’t work, but it did give me more time with artists whose work (generally) calms me and gives me hope in a world full of noise and madness.

Taylor is also laudable as an artist in the regard that he is one of only five percent of people who ever come back from the curse of heroin addiction. I have a friend from church who remembers seeing him in the years when he performed very much under the influence of that heinous drug which has taken so many great artists from us, and I consider anyone who can be rehabilitated from that drug to be a miracle.

James Taylor is a miracle. But it’s not just that particular heroism. A remarkable songwriter, a remarkable singer, a heck of a guitar player and an assembler of some of the greatest musicians I’ve ever seen onstage, he means the world to me and countless others. His music, although this is cliché, is a part of our lives and highlights the ups and downs of our human experience.

The overriding feeling one leaves with from a JT concert is joy. Joy for life, hope for humankind—those things so rare in our day and age. We were all worried that night, being in an open amphitheater and with a doomed weather forecast, that we would surely be rained out. (In a way, I was hoping he wouldn’t play “Fire and Rain” and “Shower the People” just in case those songs courted the storms.) Instead, by the grace of God, the rain held off until we got in our cars and had trouble seeing our way home. Unfortunately, the breezy air was not good for "Sweet Baby James"’ voice as he had to reschedule his next several gigs due to a bout with laryngitis.

James, this is a love letter. You have given me more elation than any musical artist I can think of—even some, (let’s use some hyperbole)—Bach, for instance (a ridiculous comparison, I know), has not given me such a feeling of more love for life.

Keep going. Keep going until you can go no more. I hope we and you have many more years and make my retroactive fear of seeing you in “the last years” a load of nonsense. One more time again, as you often riff in your signature song, “Fire and Rain.” One more time again. And again.