Fire and Rain (38 page)

Although Mitchell had far more experience in the music business and was four and a half years older, she and Taylor looked and felt like peers, and they weren't afraid to let their mutual attraction be known to everyone. In one of the first signs their affair was serious, Mitchell flew to the Arizona set for the filming. She knit Taylor a green-and-blue sweater, played guitar, and sang in the fields; they shared a motel room, inviting cast and crew for sing-alongs and bottles of wine. Taylor appeared visibly relieved by her presence. As he told
Rolling Stone
's Goodwin, “Now I have something to do with my nights.”

“I don't wanna hear about it,” Taylor, as the Driver, snapped at Oates' GTO during one scene.

“What do you mean—you don't wanna hear about it?” Oates' GTO retorted.

“It's not my problem,” the Driver said, dismissively.

The irritation in Taylor's voice wasn't always scripted. Mitchell eventually had to leave, chronicling her mixed feelings in “This Flight Tonight,” and the movie resumed its own style of cross-country tour. As the filming dragged on for forty-two days into the beginning of fall, Taylor found the process increasingly torturous. The lengthy lags between takes were foreign to him, and he'd grow annoyed when Wilson and Bird hadn't memorized their lines. (He would also look irked when Bird would periodically start singing.) In order to maintain a sense of spontaneity, Hellman only showed his cast one page of script at a time; as a result, Taylor often felt at sea.

Drugs and moments of craziness helped alleviate the boredom and occasional stress for everyone. Taylor and Oates did mescaline. Hellman wound up having an affair with Bird, despite the presence of his wife on set. Taylor had to endure on-set acting lessons. (“They had workshop classes at the beginning of the day, ‘be a tree' and that kind of bullshit,” Asher recalled.) Sometimes Taylor would ignore Hellman's request to return for another take while he continued working on a chord change or a lyric.

On camera, Taylor delivered his lines with a sullen numbness, conveying emotions by way of a haunted stare or the slightest flicker of body language. To express his dissatisfaction, he would do much the same when the cameras were off. After a reporter showed up one day, Hellman convinced Taylor to join him for an interview at a local diner. Wurlitzer did most of the chatting; Taylor mostly stared down at his shoes. At one point, Wurlitzer and the writer became aware of the smell of burning flesh—and both beheld Taylor putting out a cigarette on the back of his hand. The interview was never completed. “People were telling him what to do, and he wasn't used to that,” Stern recalled. “The side of his experience
is that he was the creator. Maybe the way he came across on screen was the way he felt about it.”

Taylor would periodically call Asher from wherever they were filming to complain about the workshops or having to move to a new town almost every day. “James had a hard time,” recalled Wurlitzer. “He was never fully at ease. He was very disoriented and bored and frustrated. But he got through it.” Sometimes, though, just barely. For the film's climactic race, Taylor sat behind the wheel, not realizing the car was already in reverse. When he pulled the clutch and stepped on the gas, the car jolted backward, almost flattening some of the cast. Everyone, including Taylor, was shaken. “We were lucky,” Hellman said, “that no one was run over.”

“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.