Fire and Rain (45 page)

As early as 1957, Simon was painfully aware of show business' dark side—massive fame followed by devastating, financially strapped obscurity. “Once you're down, it can be terrible,” the sixteen-year-old Simon admitted to the
New York World-Telegram
during Tom and Jerry's “Hey, Schoolgirl” moment. “There's really nothing worse than someone who has been on the top and then is down.” Thirteen years later, the matter still weighed on him. In the wake of the breakup, Simon knew well that Garfunkel's voice, blond Afro, and surname were more immediately identifiable to the public than his own. Simon told Lewis he was worried people would confuse him with R&B singer Joe Simon, and Davis' qualms about Simon without Garfunkel didn't help matters.

But the times were shifting in Simon's favor. As the end of 1970 neared, solidarity began going the way of solipsism. The bands, one iconic '60s act after another, were crumbling, the scrap heap growing higher with each passing month. The Beatles, CSNY, and Simon and Garfunkel—and, everyone soon learned, Peter, Paul and Mary—were only the most prominent. The Stax duo Sam and Dave, who brought volcanic energy to hits like “Hold On, I'm Comin'” and “Soul Man,” announced their dissolution. The Supremes no longer included Diana Ross, who left in January to start a career of her own. A frustrated Lou Reed split from the Velvet Underground in August. Jefferson Airplane lost their original drummer, Spencer Dryden, in January, and their smooth-voiced co-lead singer, Marty Balin, would be gone by year's end. The Dave Clark Five, holdovers from the British Invasion, were now history. The Monkees, already down to only two of the four founding members, Micky Dolenz and Davy Jones, were also dust after one last illfated attempt to regain past glories with a final single in the spring.

Enter a new category and genre, one that could have had its own section
in a record store—the solo album. A year or two before, the concept was unimaginable. Bands were collectives, united fronts; rarely if ever did a member spin off and make his or her own record on the side. The very thought was an affront to accord. Those who worked on their own, like Dylan, had always done so and were continuing the long-standing tradition of the troubadour.

By October, the group albums from earlier in the year were fading on the charts:
Déjà vu
at 24,
Bridge Over Troubled Water
at 43,
Let It Be
at 57. In their places were the remnants: albums by Harrison and Stills and Young and McCartney and Starr and, soon, Lennon and Crosby and Nash. Some were statements of individuality, others of frivolity. Either way, the collective message they sent out couldn't be denied. Be it bands, community, the antiwar movement, none of it could be relied upon anymore. The rise of the solo album embodied the new self-reliance and self-absorption: the I Don't Need Anyone Else But Myself, Thanks, statement.

Earlier in the year, Simon and Garfunkel had each grown anxious over the similarities between “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “Let It Be.” Now, as the year ended, those songs, along with those on
Déjà vu
, had more in common than any of them could've imagined. The serenity of the music turned out to be merely a cover for the hidden turbulence that lay beneath. The songs meant to comfort fans were often as not a product of recording studio magic than true collaboration. CSNY's chummy onstage banter, the way each member flattered the other after a song ended, turned out to be as much show business as reality. Even Simon's supportive words toward Garfunkel's acting aspirations in “The Only Living Boy in New York” were a camouflage for far more conflicted feelings. Whether it was the music or the country, whatever hadn't already exploded in the two previous years let loose one last time, like a final blast of steam from a manhole cover. The cover flew into the air, crashed onto the street, and gradually rolled to a stop, and everyone seemed too exhausted to retrieve and replace it.

In November, Columbia Records laid claim to San Francisco. After having signed a number of local acts, including Joplin and Santana, Davis gave the go-ahead to build the label's first recording studio in the city, to be run by Roy Halee, Simon and Garfunkel's coproducer and engineer. Given Halee's association with the two men, many assumed they'd use the rooms to begin cutting new music. Instead, only one name was penciled in for sessions in December—Paul Simon.

“There was a thing called the golden age of the Beatles and when that broke up four years ago there was a huge slip-down—the energy level, the commitment disappeared,” Garfunkel said in an unpublished interview years later. “It's looser now, it's more personal, it's scattered, it's gone in lots of different directions.” Garfunkel began witnessing the transformation for himself. In New York in November, he, along with Dylan, caught the Fillmore East debut of Elton John, the British singer and pianist who'd released his first two American albums that year. The first had established him with “Your Song”; the second,
Tumbleweed Connection,
was suitably ambitious, an Englishman's take on American country. John was part introspective balladeer, part Tin Pan Alley showman, and entirely of a different mindset than those who'd come before.

During the
Carnal Knowledge
shoot in Vancouver, Garfunkel, Nicholson, and Bergen took a break from filming and swung by a nearby arena for a concert to benefit a new, pro-environment organization. The billed performers were Joni Mitchell and Phil Ochs. The unannounced guest was Mitchell's boyfriend, whose album was now one of the most played records in the country. The musician whom Garfunkel's partner hadn't heard of earlier in the year had left the clubs and cult following—if not his troubles—behind
.

CHAPTER 16

In Vancouver, British Columbia, the Stowe family had just gathered for dinner when the phone rang. To the amazement of his children, Irving Stowe, the family's bushy-bearded patriarch, found himself on the line with Joni Mitchell, talking about her friend James.

With a group of like-minded friends in the area, Stowe, a pacifist, teacher, and convert to Quakerism, was none too thrilled when he'd heard the United States would soon be conducting nuclear tests on Amchitka, a small island off the coast of Alaska. Although the government had detonated hydrogen bombs in the area before, in 1965 and 1969, the third, planned for 1971, promised to be the most brutalizing; the five-megaton bomb threatened to extinguish sea otters, bald eagles, and any other wildlife unfortunate enough to live in the area. To protest the tests, Stowe and his wife, Dorothy, had helped launch the Don't Make a Wave Committee, and his passion for music (and the Newport Folk Festivals he'd attended) led him to consider organizing a concert to raise money for their actions, which included sailing a boat to the island as a visible act of protest.

Although Joan Baez passed on an invite to the show due to her schedule (but sent a check for $10,000), she'd suggested Mitchell. Stowe reached out to Elliot Roberts, who phoned back to say Mitchell would do it. By the time Mitchell called Stowe at home two weeks before the concert, the committee had changed its name to Greenpeace. At a meeting, Stowe had flashed a peace sign and another member replied, “Let's make it a
green
peace.” The new, more compact moniker stuck.

“Hello, Joni,” Stowe said, as his family—his wife, daughter, and son—quieted down and eagerly eavesdropped. Stowe cupped his hand over the phone and turned to them. “Joni wants to know if she can bring James Taylor,” he whispered. “Who's James Taylor?”

The family members shrugged; they didn't know either. His fourteen-year-old daughter Barbara thought Mitchell might mean James Brown, but that didn't seem right. Back on the line, Stowe told Mitchell she could certainly bring her friend, then hung up and told his family not to mention it to anyone. “We don't know who this is,” he said, “and if he's no good, it could ruin the whole concert.” Later, the family ventured out to a nearby record store and, to their relief, saw
Sweet Baby James
in the window. When they asked the clerk how the album was doing, he said, excitedly, “It's number 10 on the charts!”

Like a shy kid at a prom dance, “Fire and Rain” had stood on the sidelines all year, waiting for its moment. In the spring, Warner Brothers had hesitated to release the song to radio. With its subdued tone and elliptical lyrics, it wasn't an odds-on favorite to be a hit. “I thought it was maybe too obscure in its message,” said Taylor's friend and guitarist Danny Kortchmar. “It was too dark to be a hit.” The label also hesitated when soul singer R. B. Greaves, who'd had a major hit the year before with “Take a Letter, Maria,” a story-song about a black executive in a failing marriage, released a cover of “Fire and Rain.” No one wanted Taylor competing against his own song.

Yet “Fire and Rain,” a regular part of Taylor's set on the road, was making inroads with his audiences; its understated vulnerability, uncluttered melody, and easy-to-follow metaphors drew them in. When L.A. pop star Johnny Rivers unveiled another cover of the song in August—this one a lavish production with horns and female backup singers—Warners had no choice but to promote Taylor's own version. “Finally,” announced an ad in the music press, “the original (and, we think, best) ‘Fire and Rain' is now a single.” The accompanying photo—Taylor playing
a piano in Asher's living room, a cat hovering nearby—conveyed the singer's, and song's, hypersensitive image.

Since “Sweet Baby James” hadn't made the charts, expectations were modest; true enough, “Fire and Rain” debuted on
Billboard
's Hot 100 chart at number 100. It didn't stay there long. Far faster than the song's tempo, stations in New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia pounced on it, as did outlets in Atlanta, New Orleans, and Athens, Georgia. During the final days of filming
Two-Lane Blacktop,
Taylor told director Monte Hellman that people were starting to respond to the song, but his delivery was so muted Hellman didn't know how big this news was. “Fire and Rain” also found its way onto playlists of stations at Knox College in Illinois, the Rochester Institute of Technology, and the State University of New York in Oswego. In one week, it vaulted from 83 to 50 before sneaking into the top 10 the week of October 17. Two weeks after that, it was the third most popular song in the country.

By then, the country, even the world, was exhausted after ten months of Vietnam-related anguish and homegrown terrorism, pandemonium and death on campus, and the collapse or failure of so much from the past decade, be it the Beatles or moon missions. The two previous years had jarringly demonstrated that social or political change was no longer in plain sight. It had all accelerated that year, so that the worlds of January 1970 and twelve months later felt like polar opposites.

What everyone—especially rock fans verging on age thirty—wanted was quiet, and pop was there to serve. The Carpenters, a brother-sister duo from Southern California who looked like student-council candidates and made polite music to match, had scored their first major hit in the spring with “(They Long to Be) Close to You”; in the fall, their second smash, “We've Only Just Begun,” proved America wanted more, please. Elsewhere on the radio that fall were Bread's “It Don't Matter to Me,” Elton John's “Your Song,” Gordon Lightfoot's “If You Could Read My Mind,” and Cat Stevens' “Wild World”—a parade of balladeers,

American, Canadian, and British, with less interest in making a racket and more in expressing their innermost feelings to unplugged, consoling backup. These were songs—superb ones, sometimes—for men who wanted women to know they were thoughtful and caring (and could make pretty good bedmates as well). Stevens' “Where Do the Children Play?” from the
Tea for the Tillerman
album that arrived that November, was mellow and eco-driven—the best of both new worlds.

Dylan turning to country music was one thing. The rise of this new genre, with the seemingly contradictory name “soft rock,” was a telling sign of the times. Some of the musicians, like Stevens and Neil Diamond, were once teen-market-scrubbed pop stars who'd given themselves shaggy-dog makeovers. Some, like Lightfoot, had been making folk records for years but had grown out their hair and now looked like members of the back-to-the-land movement.

In this context, “Fire and Rain” found a home. After a year of breakdowns and death, a song about a mental collapse and a friend's suicide—by a performer only too willing to let the world know he'd spent time in “a nuthouse,” as he called it onstage—felt like a natural extension of the collective mindset. The times picked “Fire and Rain” as much as any radio programmer. Taylor's good looks didn't hurt, either. In her neighborhood in Carbondale, Illinois, fourteen-year-old Shawn Colvin was babysitting for a neighbor when a friend brought over the “Fire and Rain” 45. Playing the record on the family's stereo, Colvin and her friend were instantly besotted with singer and song. (“God knows where the kid was,” Colvin recalled of the child under her care.) When they found a copy of
Sweet Baby James,
Colvin, like many that fall, was immediately taken with the handsome face on the cover. “He was dark, but he was easy on the eyes,” Colvin said. “We were all in love with him. Forget it. It was a good package.”