Fire and Rain (17 page)

PART TWO

SPRING INTO SUMMER A Feeling I Can't Hide

CHAPTER 5

When it came time to name the album, Peter Asher thought the answer was obvious:
Sweet Baby James
. Asher felt it was the perfect title, clever and attention getting. Taylor wasn't taken with the idea; after all, he pointed out, the song with that title was about his older brother Alex's son. He didn't want anyone to think he was referring to himself. But a deadline loomed for the record's early-March release, and besides, Warners head Joe Smith thought the title track could be Taylor's first hit.
Sweet Baby James
it would be.

As potential hits went, “Sweet Baby James” hardly fit the bill when it arrived as a 45-rpm single in late February. An idly strummed waltz, it loped rather than bolted; Carole King's piano and Russ Kunkel's drums clomped along agreeably, and the pedal steel guitar of Red Rhodes, the player of choice for L.A. acts like the Byrds and the Monkees' Mike Nesmith, gently curlicued around Taylor's voice. To Warners executive Stan Cornyn, the music wasn't all that different from crooners of a previous generation—it just sported longer hair. “If someone who you could say was today's version of Steve and Eydie and Vic Damone—that good voice you liked to hear, that your mother would not say ‘Turn that down'—James was certainly there,” Cornyn recalled.

From the plaintive sound of Taylor's voice to the crisp, woodsy crackle of his fingerpicked guitar,
Sweet Baby James
was undeniably old-fashioned—pre- rather than post-hippie. The songs referenced country roads, the Berkshires, and highways. A version of Stephen Foster's “Oh, Susannah,” a song the Taylor family had tackled together back in the
Carolinas, evoked the traditional folk songs Taylor had grown up with, as did his own “Lo and Behold,” whose chorus, a choir of overdubbed Taylors, harked back to work-song spirituals. “Anywhere Like Heaven” was Bakersfield country music after a long drought. Even Taylor's phrasing—like “
dough
-gies” for “doggies” on “Sweet Baby James”—felt more Midwestern than southern Californian.

Asher and Taylor knew they'd overplayed their hand on his first album, which was too ornate and fussy. The comparatively uncomplicated arrangements worked out in Asher's living room for
Sweet Baby James
were intended to ensure that Taylor would now be the focus.
Sweet Baby James
shared several things in common with its predecessor. Each contained songs that focused mostly on voice and guitar, each had infusions of brass and horns, and each alluded to inner pain. But if
James Taylor
was the musical equivalent of a British tea parlor, its follow-up was an unvarnished log cabin. “Sunny Skies” was nudged along by arm-in-arm acoustic guitars and a temperate drum tap. “Fire and Rain” was a masterpiece of production accents, from the dramatic tumble of Kunkel's drums before the final verse to the use of a cello (played by another session man, Bobby West) instead of an electric bass to underscore the melancholy on the song. Asher only let loose as a producer on the album's last track, “Suite for 20G,” which piled on horns, Kunkel's toughest beat on the record, and Kortchmar's sputtering electric leads.

Much like the man at the center of it,
Sweet Baby James
could be droll and loose, as if the quasi-redneck Carolina kid in Taylor's upbringing would peek out from time to time. “Oh Baby, Don't You Loose Your Lip on Me” mocked misogynistic white blues, even if some in Taylor's inner circle thought there was a hint of truth to its machismo. (Kortchmar, who tossed off the song in the studio one night with Taylor between takes, considered it such a throwaway that he was surprised to find it on the finished album.) “Steamroller” was a brassier, hammier update of “The Blues Are Just a Bad Dream” from the debut album.

In the year and a half since the making of
James Taylor
, rock and roll had gone through another of its seismic shifts. By early 1970, the music's unplugged kick—instigated in part by Dylan's
John Wesley Harding
and some of the Beatles' White Album, both from 1968—no longer seemed like merely one of its periodic makeovers. Everyone wanted in, the more denim jackets the better. Thanks to acts like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, acoustic guitar sales were surging for the first time since the mid'60s folk boom. “Many groups are completely abandoning amplification,”
Billboard
noted in January, quoting instrument store owners who were grappling with boxes of unsold electric guitars and amplifiers. Egged on by their friend Crosby, even the Grateful Dead were trying their hand at rustic melodies and harmonies, recording (in just nine costefficient days) an album that would eventually be called
Workingman's Dead
. The movement was a perfect musical-cultural storm, rooted partly in the “back to the land” scene that begat books like the
Whole Earth Catalog
and in the rock and roll fans now pushing thirty and wanting less aggressive soundtracks for their lives.

Still, even
Workingman's Dead
and Dylan's 1969
Nashville Skyline
, a proudly corny celebration of Music Row bonhomie, connoted a communal experience between the musicians and their fans.
Sweet Baby James
was the awkward loner in the corner. “Lately, I've been lonesome/It seems my dreams have frozen,” Taylor sang in “Blossom,” King's piano following his voice and guitar like a companion walking alongside a friend down a country lane. Even when Taylor sang of the open road, he never sounded like someone who'd be particularly happy there. In its quietly determined way,
Sweet Baby James
made disconnection sound like a natural, comforting state of mind. Taylor allowed himself a rare “whoo!” during “Country Road,” but only as the song faded out.

The reviews were largely kind: “Taylor seems to have found the ideal musical vehicle to say what he has to say,” nodded
Rolling Stone
. Few, other than the
Village Voice
's Robert Christgau (who gave itaCplus),
were put off. Yet the album's restrained nature led to an equally low-key response. In the same issue that noted
Bridge Over Troubled Water
was the top-selling album in the country,
Billboard
called
Sweet Baby James
“the finest folk effort of the year and should bring his ever-widening audience to chart proportions.” That the album was relegated to a tiny review—not a prominent one like those accorded to releases that week by the Doors, Joan Baez, and Van Morrison—implied it was destined to be a cult item, “a must for folk-blues buffs,” as the review declared. A week later,
Sweet Baby James
debuted on the
Billboard
album chart at number 90 and only inched up a few spots in the weeks ahead.

Before the album was even for sale, Taylor began gearing up for his first tour to promote it, warming up with six nights at the Troubadour on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood. Heavy on cozy ambience and music-business types, the club was an entry point for new acts and a place for established names to be seen and hang out. Taylor's shows attracted a few pop names, including Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas, thereby confirming Taylor's status within his community. Whether or not it translated beyond the Canyon wasn't anyone's leading concern. “We were living in our own world,” John Fischbach recalled. “We were having our own Woodstock every day.”

Beyond Laurel Canyon, the country felt like it was exploding, often literally. Despite a rash of nonviolent protests that included the October Moratorium in Washington, the pro-peace movement's growing frustration over Vietnam was turning into a depression. That depression was turning into anger and desperation, and the desperation was turning to destruction.

The exact number of bombs set off by a variety of radical offshoots depended on the source. CBS News placed the nationwide tally between January 1969 and the spring of 1970 at 4,330, about twenty a week in
California alone. The U.S. Treasury estimated forty a week. In Manhattan, between August and October 1969, explosive devices had gone off in three buildings on Wall Street and in Macy's, followed by bombs at the Chase Manhattan Bank, the RCA Building, and General Motors in November. A letter sent by the bombers to UPI stated their motives: The enemy was the “giant corporations . . . Spiro Agnew may be a household word, but it [the public] has rarely seen men like David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan, James Roche of General Motors and Michael Haider of Standard Oil, who run the system behind the scenes.” Eventually implicated were employees of the
Rat,
an underground newspaper, and a man
Time
described as a “health faddist.” In February 1970, the detonations in the New York area continued—at a GE center in Queens and outside the home of State Supreme Court justice John Murtagh, who presided at a pretrial hearing involving Black Panthers accused of trying to blow up public spaces.

Obtaining the materials to make a bomb was, one network news report said, “ridiculously simple.” Dynamite came from anywhere, swiped from construction sites or military bases or, in some cases, purchased over the counter. (Where
did
those seven thousand dynamite blasting caps swiped from a Maryland plant in March go, exactly?) The laws for selling dynamite varied from state to state. In Oregon, all anyone needed was a name, address, and license-plate number. Other states required a blasting permit, making the process more difficult. “The underground promises more bombings,” said one CBS reporter, “and it is clear that existing controls are totally inadequate to stop them.” Working on the script for his second film,
Bananas,
that spring—it would begin filming in May—Woody Allen acknowledged the prosaic ordinariness of the explosions. When his character asks out a New York leftie played by Allen's ex-wife Louise Lasser, she replies, “Call me Saturday . . . I maybe bombing an office building, but I'll know later.”

In New York City, the relative ease with which explosives could be
obtained and detonated by anyone determined or crazy enough to do it was slammed home at noon on Friday, March 6. One moment, 18 West 11th Street was a ten-room brownstone that dated back to the 1840s. The next moment it was a roof and a stairwell, a massive, gaping, flamespewing hole in between. After neighbors and nearby drivers heard a massive explosion, the roof collapsed, along with all four floors; the twofoot-thick walls were scarred with holes that ascended twenty feet. The first to scurry from the building were rats, along with a few cats, followed by two girls—one nude, another just wearing a T-shirt—who were discovered by rescue workers and led to a building across the street. Dustin Hoffman, who lived next door, at 16 West 11th, joined the gawkers on the street. Clutching a Tiffany lamp and several paintings he'd taken with him, he noticed that his desk, which shared a wall with number 18, had fallen through the wall and into the burning rubble.

When police and firemen began sifting through the wreckage of the explosion, they found the body of one man beneath the debris, followed by an even grislier discovery. A large power shovel cleaning debris out of the basement scooped up a body with two missing hands, one leg, and a mangled head, nails jutting out of the torso's flesh. At first, the fire department assumed a gas leak caused the blast, but when an intact gas furnace was unearthed in the basement rubble on Monday morning, suspicions that bombs were involved were confirmed. The dead turned out to be three members of the radical group the Weathermen. One of them, Terry Robbins, had accidentally set off the bombs as he was assembling them. (The other dead were Theodore Gold and Diana Oughton, while Kathy Boudin and Cathy Wilkerson, whose father owned the building, escaped, at least for a while; they were the two young women seen fleeing.) Along with body parts, police discovered sixty sticks of unexploded dynamite, caps to set them off, primitive nail bombs, and a map of the tunnels beneath Columbia University, one of the Weathermen's intended targets.

Both the city and the country barely had time to digest what had happened when, five days later, explosions detonated in three office buildings in midtown Manhattan, in roughly the same area—42nd Street between Lexington and Third; Park Avenue and 55th; and Third Avenue at 46th. The targets were Mobil, IBM, and General Telephone and Electronics, respectively. In each case, no one was hurt; police had been tipped to the pending explosions and their precise times by an anonymous caller a half hour before. Streets were strewn with glass, elevators were deluged with water, and the buildings sustained structural damage. Over the next two days, six hundred bomb threats were called in to the city. On March 15, the
Times
reported, with no sense of sarcasm, that “the number of bomb threats in the city declined sharply for the first time since Thursday.” An anonymous caller to the New York Police Department credited the Mobil, IBM, and General Telephone bombings to a previously unknown group called the Revolutionary Force 9.