August 12, 1970—James Taylor’s quiet but pitch-black meditation on friendship, failed dreams, life and death, “Fire and Rain,” appeared for the first time on Billboard’s “Hot 100” list, driving sales of his Sweet Baby James LP—and propelling the emotionally fragile musician to the forefront of the confessional “singer-songwriter” movement of the early Seventies.
JT didn’t invent the genre, of course. Joni Mitchell, a future lover, had already come out with three confessional LPs (including Ladies of the Canyon earlier in the year), and songs from Carole King’s first solo album, Writer (recorded earlier in the year while JT was fine-tuning SBJ), were already familiar to many listeners who had been hearing her hit tunes for the past decade co-written with former husband Gerry Goffin.
JT didn’t invent the genre, of course. Joni Mitchell, a future lover, had already come out with three confessional LPs (including Ladies of the Canyon earlier in the year), and songs from Carole King’s first solo album, Writer (recorded earlier in the year while JT was fine-tuning SBJ), were already familiar to many listeners who had been hearing her hit tunes for the past decade co-written with former husband Gerry Goffin.
Taylor himself forthrightly—and accurately—has pointed to other great musician-composers who preceded him, including Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Cisco Houston, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Huddie Ledbetter and Harry Belafonte.
But Taylor’s success (triple-platinum sales for the album, a top-10 hit for the song) made record-company execs not only support projects and artists waiting in the pipeline for their chance, but led these execs to hunt down others in the hinterlands. The next two generations of musician-heroes looked to Taylor for a model on how to craft such songs, including the likes of Jackson Browne, John Mayer, David Gray, and Taylor’s future wife, Carly Simon.
I wonder if Taylor has ever chuckled at the assumptions of omniscience by so many of these major-label execs? Even those supposedly gifted with the Midas touch are not necessarily all they’re cracked up to be (see my post on how Clive Davis nearly deep-sixed a career-changing album, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison).
In Taylor’s case, the powers-that-be at Warner Brothers decided that the sophomore effort by this newcomer (he had already released an LP for the Beatles’ Apple label) could be most effectively promoted with another song they believed would make a more congenial single, the lilting lullaby “Sweet Baby James.”
A nice strategy, except that it didn’t work: “Sweet Baby James” didn’t get close to cracking the “Hot 100.” Perhaps it was because in that year of Kent State and other shocks to the national psyche, young audiences wanted something that addressed their fears. “Fire and Rain,” the follow-up single, did so.
At the two concerts when I saw Taylor perform, in the summer of 1975 and September 1986, audiences greeted the opening chords of “Fire and Rain” with giddy applause. Seldom in the history of popular music has such a downbeat song given so many people so much happiness.
In a music genre that celebrates youth, “Fire and Rain” is unusual in that it squarely confronts mortality, in the form of suicide. It was triggered by how Taylor heard of the death of a female friend from Long Island, Suzanne Schnerr, who had come to know the singer when he was living briefly in New York.
For a time, Taylor’s friends—concerned that having already been confined to the mental-health facility McLean Hospital, outside Boston, he might react catastrophically to bad news—had concealed from him the facts about Schnerr. Informed at last while he was recording in London, Taylor attempted to make sense of the shattering event in this haunting song.
Unlike the kind of socially conscious tunes that, for instance, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young were releasing at the time, “Fire and Rain” didn’t deal with major social issues. But the manic depression strongly implied in the song’s lyrics made this neglect understandable: How could you think of others’ plight when your own situation was so grim?
Taylor’s warm baritone and smooth guitar licks offered a musical reassurance that was at odds with the song’s foreboding lyrics (“My body’s aching and my time is at hand,” a reference to this addict’s continuing struggle with heroin).
Or maybe there’s another way of viewing the song’s success that makes better sense, one offered years later by JT himself, in a 2006 interview with the Boston Globe: “A song like 'Fire and Rain' takes something internal that you're struggling with and lays it out in front of you in such a way that you can at least see it. It's a way of working through it and coming to rest with it. Yes, most of my work is, for better or worse, self-referred and autobiographical. I think everybody's writing music about themselves, essentially. But mine is admittedly so, and if it has value, it's that it's emotionally useful to people.”
I wonder if Taylor has ever chuckled at the assumptions of omniscience by so many of these major-label execs? Even those supposedly gifted with the Midas touch are not necessarily all they’re cracked up to be (see my post on how Clive Davis nearly deep-sixed a career-changing album, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison).
In Taylor’s case, the powers-that-be at Warner Brothers decided that the sophomore effort by this newcomer (he had already released an LP for the Beatles’ Apple label) could be most effectively promoted with another song they believed would make a more congenial single, the lilting lullaby “Sweet Baby James.”
A nice strategy, except that it didn’t work: “Sweet Baby James” didn’t get close to cracking the “Hot 100.” Perhaps it was because in that year of Kent State and other shocks to the national psyche, young audiences wanted something that addressed their fears. “Fire and Rain,” the follow-up single, did so.
At the two concerts when I saw Taylor perform, in the summer of 1975 and September 1986, audiences greeted the opening chords of “Fire and Rain” with giddy applause. Seldom in the history of popular music has such a downbeat song given so many people so much happiness.
In a music genre that celebrates youth, “Fire and Rain” is unusual in that it squarely confronts mortality, in the form of suicide. It was triggered by how Taylor heard of the death of a female friend from Long Island, Suzanne Schnerr, who had come to know the singer when he was living briefly in New York.
For a time, Taylor’s friends—concerned that having already been confined to the mental-health facility McLean Hospital, outside Boston, he might react catastrophically to bad news—had concealed from him the facts about Schnerr. Informed at last while he was recording in London, Taylor attempted to make sense of the shattering event in this haunting song.
Unlike the kind of socially conscious tunes that, for instance, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young were releasing at the time, “Fire and Rain” didn’t deal with major social issues. But the manic depression strongly implied in the song’s lyrics made this neglect understandable: How could you think of others’ plight when your own situation was so grim?
Taylor’s warm baritone and smooth guitar licks offered a musical reassurance that was at odds with the song’s foreboding lyrics (“My body’s aching and my time is at hand,” a reference to this addict’s continuing struggle with heroin).
Or maybe there’s another way of viewing the song’s success that makes better sense, one offered years later by JT himself, in a 2006 interview with the Boston Globe: “A song like 'Fire and Rain' takes something internal that you're struggling with and lays it out in front of you in such a way that you can at least see it. It's a way of working through it and coming to rest with it. Yes, most of my work is, for better or worse, self-referred and autobiographical. I think everybody's writing music about themselves, essentially. But mine is admittedly so, and if it has value, it's that it's emotionally useful to people.”
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