June, 1994

James Taylor has accepted that his fans and the media have an image of him that will never change: the leader of the sensitive singer-songwriter movement; a soft-hit radio staple; a lover of hard-core grunge music. So it doesn't really bother him when...whoa, back up a minute. James Taylor, grunge beast? The guy who wrote "Fire and Rain" and "Shower the People" goes home and cranks up "Smells like Teen Spirit" and "Heart Shaped Box"? Sure. And when you stop and think about it, it makes sense.

Taylor, a big Nirvana fan, felt a genuine empathy when Kurt Cobain killed himself. Unlike the rest of us, Taylor walked in those shoes 20 years earlier. "I can't help but think about that with him and identifying with it a little bit," Taylor, 46, said. "No matter what happened, he was forced into a position he hated being in." 

When you think of it, the parallels between Cobain's and Taylor's early success are remarkable. Taylor was only 22, Cobain just 25, when they both made deeply personal music that redefined rock. Both rocketed to sudden fame and found solace in drugs. Both poured personal pain and confession into their songs, with Taylor's "Fire and Rain" and "Long Ago and Far Away" being every bit as bleak as Cobain's "Dumb" or "Rape Me." 

And there came a point where Taylor himself was in danger of being a casualty of what he calls "the toxic effect of the marketplace." "That definitely happened," Taylor said. "It's sort of a loss of innocence. It's easy to sort of get lost. I feel tempted to talk about Kurt Cobain a little bit. I really dug his music. It seemed like that transition really hurt for him-- becoming known, pre-empted, co-opted, public, all that stuff."

"To be a musician, especially a singer-songwriter-- well, you don't do that if you have a thriving social life. You do it because there's an element of alienation in your life. For people like that to suddenly go from that kind of private existence to major public exposure can be a wrenching experience, to say the least." "It's something that has to be survived. Some people celebrate it. They do it beautifully-- Phil Collins or someone. Other people, it kills them, like Kurt Cobain," Taylor said. He sighed. "I'm somewhere in the middle, I guess." 

Taylor is still quietly traveling that middle road, releasing albums that routinely go platinum and doing summer tours that pack amphitheaters. He is putting together a set featuring songs he had never performed in public, including his own "Fool to Care" and covers of Chuck Berry's "Memphis" and "The Promised Land." And though fame is sometimes tough, Taylor makes it clear in a rare interview that he's not complaining. "It seems a little ungenerous and small to be complaining about such good fortune," he acknowledged. For Taylor, he poured it back into his art, in songs such as "He Mr. That's Me Up On the Jukebox" and "Company Man". 

His rapid-fire success in the early 70's ran counter to what was going on in rock music at the time. It was in the wake of the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," and the trend was toward orchestras, horns, spacy sound effects, the works. Taylor's breakthrough album, "Sweet Baby James," featured quiet acoustic guitar and his mournful vocals. By downsizing, he sparked a quiet, totally unplanned revolution in music. "It was quite momentary. You didn't think about five years down the line," he said. "To me, life itself was like that then. It was very free. We just went in and did it. At the time, I didn't know how to think about things like the marketplace or what people were listening to." 

Along with Neil Young, Lou Reed and Keith Richards, Taylor is one of a few artists embracing his years and the musical wisdom that has come with them. Compared with those peers, though, "I tend to be more conflicted and depressed, to tell you the truth. It's a miracle to me some mornings that I can get my socks on," he said. "Actually, that's not so much the case anymore. But there's an element of truth to that." 

Even with a fairly comfortable upbringing, Taylor is able to bring a sense of down-to-earth reality to his work, even when writing about a dirt-poor factory employee in "Millworker" or a convicted murderer in "Sleep Come Free Me." Writing in character "is a very refreshing thing, rather than constantly being self-referred or writing about your own emotional life. That's compelling early on in life and less so later." 

"There's a stage of your life where it's an urgent process to try and invent who you are and assemble your persona-- a sort of finding-yourself phase," he said. "Later you just want to lose yourself. You want to have some relief from the delusionary system you've surrounded yourself with." 

His latest effort has become one of his most successful ones. "James Taylor Live" has gone platinum (more than 1 million copies sold), remarkable for a double live CD of a performer well into the third decade of his career. An abbreviated version will be released this summer. And European bootleggers have also put out a double disc of Taylor's live 1981 radio broadcast from Atlanta. Taylor has recorded a few gigs in the past, and a live album has been on tap several times. But while he's comfortable on stage, the idea of tape rolling always made him nervous. 

"The effect of knowing you're recording it makes you think about what you just did rather than what you're about to do," Taylor said. 

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