"Fire and Rain" is a Folk-Rock Time Machine

The first time I heard James Taylor's song "Fire and Rain" was 1970, when the 13-year-old version of me was ensconced in the passenger seat of my older brother's Camaro 327. I was sporting a pair of cheap plastic aviator-style sunglasses, a scraggly mane of hair that was getting into the parental danger zone around my collar, and some nascent fuzz that was my best effort to grow a mustache. I was pretending to gaze out the window with cool detachment as the FM radio blasted out an aural assault by one of the generic hard-rock bands of that era. But then, suddenly, that raucous cacophony was replaced by the sparse, haunting sound of an acoustic guitar and a deep, resonant male voice.

I had heard folk-rock protest songs, but this singer wasn't angry or defiant -- instead, he seemed to be struggling with despair, teetering on the edge, grasping for a way to go on. It was almost painful to listen to, but I also felt an odd thrill. It was like he was talking to me about my own murky fears and uncertainties, the sort of stuff that cool dudes with mustaches didn't dare reveal to anyone. It was as if he was saying: It'll happen to you, too, someday, but you'll get through it, like I did. That song changed me in a subtle way, one I wouldn't grasp until years later.

Considering the influence that the music had on our generation, it's strange to think of how little we really knew about James Taylor and other performers of that era -- who they really were, what moved them, how they struggled to make such powerful art. That's one reason I'm so taken with rock journalist David Browne's new book, Fire and Rain: The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor, CSNY, and the Lost Story of 1970,

Fire and Rain is not a sprawling, comprehensive look at a pivotal year in modern cultural history, like, say, Rob Kirkpatrick's 1969: The Year Everything Changed, which I reviewed in this blog post a while back. If you want to revisit the details of the Kent State massacre or the Manson trial, you'll have to look elsewhere. Instead, Browne's book zooms in on the lives and work of four artists and groups whose influence he felt as a child of that era, and pieces together the story of how they created the records that shaped the Zeitgeist.

The story begins in January 1970, as the Beatles -- already well into the throes of the discord that would end the world's greatest pop group -- gather at Abbey Road studios in London to put the final touches on the soundtrack LP for their film Let It Be. That oft-told saga is probably the least interesting section of the book, but it sets the scene, as Browne quickly segues into Paul McCartney settling into a seat at Royal Albert Hall for a concert by a group that the press is hailing as "The American Beatles" -- the country-folk-rock supergroup of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. (That hype conveniently omitted that one of the musicians, Graham Nash, actually was an Englishman who'd been in the Hollies, one of the British Invasion's biggest groups.) As asides, we learn that the Beatles' own label, Apple, inexplicably had passed on a chance to sign CSNY, and that the band is quartered at the five-star Dorchester Hotel, where the reception to honor the Beatles' movie A Hard Day's Night had been held in 1964. But now, with the Fab Four about to disintegrate, new superstars are poised to take over the Los Angeles folk-rock scene.

The narrative jumps effortlessly across the Atlantic and lands at New York University's School of the Arts, where a humble mimeographed sign announces what sounds like an April Fool's gag: a four-month, noncredit course on how to write and record a popular song, taught by Paul Simon. The students who sign up on a lark discover that the offer not only is real, but that the diminutive singer-songwriter, one-half of the most popular pop duo of the 1960s, doesn't know how to read music.

From there, by way of the Vietnam Moratorium concert and a few other digressions, we're transported to the Burbank offices of Warner Brothers Records, where a towering, rawboned young musician with resplendent shoulder-length tresses and his manager arrive to deliver a preview tape of the record that would become Sweet Baby James. The music blows away the executive who hears it, but Taylor only smiles faintly, and says little. He is, as we discover, a fragile, volatile, almost tortured sort of genius. Warner Brothers honchos, who often stopped by the studio to check on their artists, purposely stayed away from Taylor's sessions out of fear that the moody young genius might be spooked by their presence. We later learn that Taylor wrote the second verse of "Fire and Rain" in the psychiatric ward of a New York hospital shortly before undergoing treatment for heroin addiction.

Fire and Rain is a disjointed trip at times, but, ultimately, it works. Browne's work reminds me of the late Otto Friedrich's classic book about Hollywood in the 1940s, City of Nets, in the sense that, like Friedrich, he's a formidable aggregator of data. He's interviewed David Crosby, James Taylor and scores of others, both major and bit players, but he's also amassed a mountain of secondhand details gleaned from what must have been a near-comprehensive reading of period newspapers, magazines and other books, and filtered all of that through a present-day perspective to fashion a narrative that seems both fresh and revelatory.

Here's a link to Browne's website, where you can find out more about the author and his previous books, including his history of the seminal alternative music band Sonic Youth, Goodbye 20th Century.

And BTW, if you're a James Taylor fan, go to his official website and check out his extremely cool offer to teach you how to play his songs on the guitar via web video.