James Taylor

all rendered with warm intimacy and delicate control. The second delivers strikingly direct accounts of Taylor's joys and struggles, including the depression that saw him hospitalized as a senior in high school and the heroin addiction that began not too long after, when he'd moved to New York City in nineteen sixty six or so to try and make it as a musician, playing a regular gig at a Grantwich village club called the Night Owl with his friend Danny

Kortchmer and their band, The Flying Machine. It took Taylor a few more years than that to find fame and fortune, and as he recounts in Breakshot, it also took a fair amount of Luck. He tells a story in the memoir by Turns horrifying and hilarious of a car accident in London where he was living in nineteen sixty eight while he recorded his debut album for the Beatles label Apple.

And while we're talking about Luck, let's talk about recording for the Beatles label Apple in nineteen while the Beatles are working on the White album. But anyway, driving home early one morning, Taylor talks about how he was high and holding drugs that he'd scored, and he hit a man, and when the cops showed up, he was pretty sure that both his career and his life were over before

they had really be one. But it turned out the man that he'd hit was okay, and then in fact, he'd been running away from the cops, who ended up thanking Taylor for stopping the guy. Beatles are Not. That first album went nowhere, But in early nine seventy, Taylor released Sweet Baby James with his first hit, Fire and Rain. That album, that song, they would help defind a style that itself helped define the nineteen seventies confessional singer songwriting.

And then you know you were gone, Susan fans, You may put an end to walk out this morn and wrote down the song just can't themod send I've seen and I'm seen, though, Taylor, it's planes in breakshot exactly how autobiographical many of his songs are. Who the Suzanne of Fire and Rain was and how she died. His

music might be more confessional in feeling than fact. I mean, you could listen to the title track of Sweet Baby James for most of your life and fully understand the sweetly exhausted, deep green and blue emotions it describes without ever knowing that it was an account of James driving home to North Carolina to meet his nephew, his older brother Alex's newborn son also named James, or maybe that's

just me. I mean, I listened to that song for decades, at least once on the very turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston that it talks about, and I definitely understood all the feelings without ever really knowing the story. At first. American Standard seems like something completely different. I mean, this is James Taylor singing other people's songs and show tunes aren't exactly confessions, but look at it this way. American Standard is Taylor's first album in five years, but hardly

his first time playing covers. He's been singing them for a long time. If you don't count his version of the nineteenth century Stephen Foster song Old Susannah on Sweet Baby James, then you'd have to count his version of Carol King's You've Got a Friend on his next album, mud Slide Slim. And then there's his duet with his then wife Carly Simon on Anez and Charlie Fox's mocking Bird in nineteen seventy four, and his great reworking of the nineteen sixty Jimmy Jones hit Handyman on j T

in V seven. I mean he released a whole album called Covers in two thousand and eight and the More Covers EP in two thousand and nine, and both of those have a lot of old soul R and B and motown songs on them. In a way, those covers are a form of autobiography. As he explained Send Break Shot and talked about in depth with me, Taylor grew up playing that kind of music alongside his brother Alex in a band they had called the Fabulous Corsairs. An

American standard tells Taylor's story in a similar way. These are songs he grew up hearing. Some were on albums in his parents record collection in North Carolina. Some he heard on family trips to New York City to see Broadway shows, a regular event organized by his mom. He does a version of Surrey with the Fringe on Top from Oklahoma on the new album, and it's not even

his first time recording a song from Oklahoma. More Covers starts with a lovely version of Oh What a Beautiful Morning that has that James Taylor trademark mix of bluesy fingerpicking and reserved bossonova swing me bloody dude, ore, Oh what are you? Beautiful? God wonderful, everything's go and my we oh word, utiful, beautiful. I asked him what keeps him going back to songs from that musical. It's really

part of my DNA by now. I just listened to the cast album so many times, you know, when I was, when I was a kid. You know, it's it's a great one. It's got people will say, we're in love, it's got, everything's up to date in Kansas City. That's a great tune, you know. And uh, poor Judd is dead. That's that's also great. I don't know, I'm just a gal that can't say no. They're funny. Uh. They pushed the plot along, they established the characters, they deepen an

emotional moment. You know, it's excellent songwriting craft. You know, it's like these guys really knew what they were doing. And in my opinion, it's the epitome of popular music. You know, that's sort of the high water mark for American popular music. Break Shot is an inside look at how Taylor's music first came together, the sounds and experiences that shaped him, and it also talks about how his

family came apart during that same time. American Standard shows where his music came from and how it keeps going. When we sat down to talk, he had much more to say about both. James Taylor, Welcome to Inside the Studio. Thank you, Thank you. Joe. So, you have a new audio memoir, Breakshot. It's about your first twenty one years on this earth, and also a new album, American Standard, which is a collection that draws from the Great American Songbook.

And right at the start of Breakshot, you refer to yourself as a professional biographer or autobiographer who usually talks about yourself with your guitar in your hand. That's right. It's just the nature of the way I write songs. They're very personal and they're very internal process sort of brought out into the open end. So I I do think of myself as basically navigating through life and describing

that process. But what I was really struck by listening to the new record is that although these are other people's songs, there's a definite autobiographical quality to it, at least in that these are songs you grew up. It's true. I grew up listening to these songs, and when I picked up the guitar, I started trying to play them.

And so the songs that we chose for the album actually are songs that I've had guitar arrangements of for many years, many years, and um and I got together with another great guitar player, John Pitsorelli, and John and I basically went back and forth and sort of solidified the arrangements and then cut them with two guitars, and that that basically is the is the core of the album. That those were the basic tracks. We cut them over about a two week period, but then we came back

and worked on them. Uh, worked on the vocals, added solos here and there, and sometimes some rhythms, sometimes some drums. This you did your workspace at home the barn, going back starting to about two years ago in and you've said that that work in that way you and a and another guitarist is a little bit of a break from your normal m O. Yeah, it is. What I'm used to doing is write a song on the guitar, and then I typically will take it to my bass player and Jimmy Johnson or and or my my piano

player Larry Golding's or Jeff Babco. That basically is the process of taking it from the guitar and teaching it to a band, typically Mike Landau on electric guitar, Jimmy Johnson on bass, Steve Gadd on drums, and you know that will be the rhythm section that cuts the song. But in this case, I wanted to keep the guitar the center of the arrangement because above all, these are guitar arrangements, my own guitar arrangements of these songs that I've lived with so many years, so it's got a

really intimate quality to it. Two people sitting playing guitar, particularly on your version of God Bless the Child. I was struck by just how intimate that was. Then that's good shall get Then that's not loose, so the vibe said, and it still is nude. Mom may have popa me have God Bless the Child. That's God his own. And

I was wondering. You know, you say these are songs that you first learned you were, say, fourteen fifteen years old, learning guitar um and is this the way you would have played them with your family, with your brothers, or say on the vineyard growing up playing with Danny Korchmar. You know that this two guitar approaches it a throwback in a way to that time. Yeah, some of them were.

I think relatively few. Um of these songs would I have played with my family, although my brother and living soon and I might have shared a couple of and Cooch and I actually did play God Bless the Child together in in the sixties when we were here in New York with our our Flying Machine band. Um that was that was one of our our favorites. Uh we We did a number of songs from that era actually, and the Flying Machine so yeah, it's um. They they've

all been with me for a long time. And I wanted to keep the focus on the guitar because often when you when you bring in a rhythm section, the guitar sort of disappears into it, you know, and I wanted to have that stay central. We wanted our songs to be simple and cut down to their essentials, but we also wanted to acknowledge how sophisticated and how rich these things were harmonically. You know, Back in those days, songs were written to be sung by anonymous you didn't

know who would sing it. They were usually sold as sheet music. For one thirty three and a third LPs came out, they people started listening to these, you know, to recordings of these songs, but a lot of them were written before recording was good enough. You'd want someone to sit down at the piano with a sheet music, you know. I just think that nowadays, when we listen to recorded music, we're listening to a performance. We're listening to a specific artist and their statement of this song.

But it's different from a song being enough on its own to hold your attention to to do its work, or as you're saying, because sheet music was so popular, made to be sung at home right exactly, or in the pub or at a party or yeah, and that gets too although we we we lose track of this sometimes that that gets to the almost folk music quality of this kind of stuff, that that there was a communal experience. These songs went out into the world, not just on records, but his sheet music and went into

people's home. Some of these songs deep act to the twenties. Probably the most modern is Moon River, but some of them my Blue Heaven, go back to the twenties, and I was struck by how foundational they were too, even that rocket experience in the fifties and sixties, because of course My Blue Heaven Fats Domino great version of it. But even I was amazed. When I was researching teach me Tonight what you do on this record, I was amazed. I didn't know Stevie Wonder in the four Tops cut

it um and and a little different than your version. Well, you know, my version is very much defined by my guitar technique and what my voice can do. So those limiting sort of lenses give it a sound. And you know, it's important that when you do a song. You you bring something new to it. You don't want to just copy something that someone else has done. What you're going to do is get a sort of a pale imitation of it. You need to you need to take it

somewhere new and again. These songs have been made me for for a long time. But my my point is this that when you listen to music today, you're listening to a performance the way this person performed it on that record. That's what you're hearing, But you're not hearing the song. You know, if you try to get these songs to stand on their own, some of them do, certainly.

But these songs from the American Songbook, you know as done by Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington, Nat King, Cole written by the Gershman's or Cole Porter or Frank Lesser, you know, the Rogers and Hammerstein, Rogers and Heart Learner and Low. They are at such a high level of musical sophistication, and all they have to sell them are the melody, the lyric and the

harmonic context or the changes the arrangement. Then they go out into the world and get repeated a million times. But the songwriting craft itself is such a high quality. There really where we peeked out. And certainly they're what informed my music when I was growing up, with a number of other things blues, uh, Celtic music that's sort of English, Protestant hymnal Afro, Cuban music, Brazilian music. They also informed Lennon McCartney. They sang till there was You

from from the music Man. These songs have had a huge influence on that generation of songwriters, and I think it's important to reintroduce them to keep them alive in our musical culture, because they're really an education. You know, not to be too preachy about it, you know, but they are great preach. Please go ahead, brother. There's a right cold and haze on the meadow. There's a righte cold in haze on the meadow. The corn is as I as an elefantsa and looks like it's climb and clean.

Do the guy. You talked about them as an education. It was important to your parents, to your mother to educate you in this way. You talked about taking trips from Durham, North Carolina, up to New York every two or three months, to go to museums, but also to go to Broadway shows. That's right. She would take two or three of us. There were five of us kids, and she take a batch up um, usually the older ones, and uh, you know, expose us to a little big city.

You know. When I was twelve, I got my first guitar on one of those trips to New York. You know, So that was I had played the cello before that, but but very reluctantly and not very well, although I think I think it did give me a you know, contributed also to what musical sund I had. So this first guitar is something you mentioned in break point. You say you got at home, restrung it pretty much immediately changed the nylon strings out for steel strings, right, and uh,

your brother spray painted it blue. Yeah, he didn't do it right away. That was a couple of years later that he got hold of it. He hung it up in the closet by one of its strengths. He basically pulled the string out, wrapped it around the closet pole so that was suspended by a string, and then just put newspapers underneath it and spray painted it blue all over the frets, the strings everything. He also, uh he strung it to be to an open tuning, which meant

it could be played with a bottleneck, you know. So he he was just dabbling himself with it. I see. Okay, So the the the idea of blue guitar strung to an open tuning to play the blues, it was a whole concept away. Yeah, yeah, it was. And and you know at that point, I I'd gone off to school, I was no longer around, so he he just uh, you know, I probably had my next guitar by then, which I had borrowed from a from a friend of

the family. He had a Gibson J forty five and uh and that was my second guitar and was this year older brother Alex spray painted. So this was something that fascinated me. You talked about when you were, I believe, a junior in high school in Great Point. You talked about coming home for that year and playing in his band.

Tell me a little bit about that. Well, you know, it was a typical high school garage band, you know, Alex said, you know, as I as I say in the in the memoir, he had really taken root in the South and the Southern culture, and he had discovered soul music, you know, and brought it into the house and all of us were just had our our minds expanded by Ray Charleson don Cove and Jackie Wilson and the Coasters and uh, you know, the Stax volt stable and so many and in the motown uh sounds and

stuff in the in the early sixties. It was just amazingly rich ground and it changed everything for me. But he wanted to play these songs and um with a number of other high school students. We we got together a guy, Cam Shannon played Oregon, Vic Lipscomb played the bass,

I played guitar. Alex sang um and I can't remember who our drummer was right now, but at any rate, we started hiring out to play play uh sort of fraternity parties at at the college, you know, University of North Carolina was the was what the town was basically built around. So we played for those audiences. We played for sock hops or uh you know, senior proms or

whatever we could get. And we we you know, we had a U haul in a station wagon and we we hauled this stuff around and play and you were called the fabulous course aeras the fabulous Okay, and this kind of music in North Carolina at that time played for those audiences. This is a culture called beach music. Can you can you tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, you know, beach music was was what was played from Washington,

d c. Down To the beginnings of Florida. It was like there was an entire seen spring break summertime on the water. It was where college students went from from all over the South. They went to the to the beach. And the bands that played those places, those centers of sort of you know, exuberance and uh, disinhibition, those sort of party centrals. There were bands that played those and that that was known as beach music. Primarily it was sold African American artists and uh, you know, it just

caught on. It was a huge thing in the South, and we wanted to play those tunes. There was a circuit in the South. You know, this is in the segregated South in the early sixties and late fifties. You know, the civil rights movement was definitely on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was was an early center of of resistance in the and you know, this was

going on all over the South at that time. Black acts that wanted to play the South had to be extremely careful you know where they where they they stepped and uh so there was a group of clubs called the Chitland Circuit. You know. Um, there were a couple of clubs in in Raleigh and in Durham that we're on that circuit. And my brother just he took us to those places. I was a year younger than he, but he, you know, he said, come on, we're gonna

hear We're gonna hear James Brown. It's gonna take your head off. So it was too It was amazing going back to that moment. You just brought up the civil rights error in the South on an American standard. You do. You've got to be carefully taught. You got to be talked to hate fear. You got to be talk from year to year. It's got to be drunk in your dear little here, You've got to be carefully talked. A song from South Pacific, you describe it as an important

song to your mother. Can you tell me a little more about that and why it was appropriate for this record, which is tends more towards love songs that this record, but that song stands out, Yeah, and the plot of the musical South Pacific. It's a statement about about bigotry and about umcial hatred and and about the sort of

rules that society puts down that that limit people. And uh, you know, basically what it says is that it's not human nature to hate people for this reason, just because there of another race or because there's something a general about you know that that you've arbitrarily sort of drawn a line and decided to hate people that are across that line. Um, you have to be taught to do that by your parents, by your society, by your church, by you know, your your context. You know, you have

to be taught to hate. It's not natural. And that's what the song says. And it was an important song to my mom um in many ways. North Carolina was a was a culture shock to her, without a question. And your dad came from there. My dad came from North Carolina, went to the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and then he went to medical school at Harvard and did his residency and internship at Boston City and Mass General.

And that's where he met my mom while he was he was up there, and after they married and had a home mess of kids. In a very short time, Dad moved us all down to North Carolina, where he had taken a job at U n C. Where he had gone to school and studied pre men. Anyway, from my mom, that was she was a very progressive, as was my father, very politically progressive in liberal and my dad had grown up with it and he under sort

of understood it, hated it, but understood it. But my mom was just so shocked by it because she was the daughter of a fisherman from Newburyport, Massachusetts, and so she got involved inevitably in the civil rights disobedience protests,

picket lines and the like. That song is a rare thing to make that kind of a statement and a musical in point of factory, those who don't know, South Pacific drew a lot of heat came to Broadway in the late forties, and and for its content, drew a fair amount of heat at the at the height of the Blacklist, that song in particular got it condemned his communist propaganda. Hard to see how but okay, well, I

think tensions ran high in those days. You heard it growing up in the in the South in the fifties, and you describe the South in the fifties is as fighting the last battle of the Civil War. You're you're recording it now in putting it out on a record in Does it seem odd to you that it's still relevant, that it's still a statement in today's world. Yeah, I mean, uh, it's it's remarkable. I don't think it's odd, um, because I think this kind of racial hatred or fear dies slowly.

And um, I believe that some of our politicians, um, have decided to use that fear in order to court a segment of the population. I believe there's an old division in this country. We fought a Civil war to survive it, as Abraham Lincoln said, war deciding whether this nature, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. It is central to our history that there's a division, this North South division. And I feel as though the

Republican Party has made a deal with the devil. I feel as though they have actually redivided us into sort of union and confederacy again. And you know, the entire South was democrat before, before the Civil Rights Act, and within ten years it had all flopped over to the Party of Lincoln, supposedly saying quotes the Party of Lincoln. That's why they were Democrats, because Lincoln was a republic And it's my feeling that in a way we have

a Confederate administration in the in the White House. Sorry to say it. I know many people in the South will disagree with me, and it seems to me as though people have, for political reasons, re opened that wound. And so a song like this, you've got to be carefully taught to hate the people your relatives hate as

just too much relevance today, that's right. Well, it's frustrating that we're making such slow progress, and I think that we have to accept it as a national priority that we get over this racial hatred and this this racial stereotyping. We have to commit ourselves to it and and get serious about it as if it were a matter of national survival, because it really is. I mean, there are things that are the people's business that we need to do, and one of them is bringing human activity in line

with the health of the planet. Another is uh, finally seeing to this unique American problem of racial hateen so on American standard. Many of these songs are familiar and beloved. Moon River, the Nearness of You. There's one I'd never heard before, and I'm gonna guess you you know exactly which one I'm talking about. As easy as rolling off a lot, as easy as roll an awful long. I found it easy, baby to found love. It was as easy as rolling cigarettes. If that ain't easy, maybe they're

simple things to do. For Rest, Let's cuddle. I loved cuddle. So this is a song from a nineteen eight Looney Tunes cartoon. How did it end up on this record? I remembered the song from the cartoon, you know, worked it up on the guitar, and when I played it to John Pizzarelli, who is my collaborator in this in this project, my co producer. Um. When I played it for John, you know, he loved it. He said that that's a great tune, you know. And we had to change it a little bit and expand it in a

couple of places. And then it's sung by, uh, by two characters in the cartoon, male and female, and uh, you know, it had to be brought in line with one person singing it rather than shared. But it, But basically that's the that's the song. I went and found this cartoon online. I believe it's called Cat College and the cat Nip College with Yes, that's right, like crazy Cat and the cool cats are in school singing history swing style, and one of them is a dunce because

he has no rhythm. He gets his rhythm from a cuckoo clock and then rushes off and serenades a very comely looking kitten. He's a hot kitten. That that it's true. But yeah, I just had to ask. This is from a thirty eight cartoon. You probably saw it as a kid. Did you really remember it all these years? If you have a certain kind of memory for for lyrics and music, that just, um, it's a different got to be a different place in your brain. I can remember songs and Italian.

I don't speak any Italian at all, but I can remember La doni mobile or unami. And it's because it's connected with a song that I remember all those words, and because it's in a musical context. But otherwise I can't remember Italian. You know, I can? So is easy as rolling off log When you remember this, what did you remember the whole cartoon? Did you remember the song the lyrics, I mean, did you have to go look it up when you were Yeah, we looked it up.

I showed it to uh, to John and to Dave o'donnallld, my my other co producer, and uh, you know, they dug the song and we decided to give it a try. We we must have cut twenty two songs and all, and and only put fourteen on the records. I really was amazed by this. But also, as you you said that just the active memory, there are cartoons with songs in them. I remember, but those are songs that you go on hearing. But this one you you couldn't have

heard since back then. Well, you know when I when I told Cooch, I talked to Cooch about the songs I was thinking of recording. I told him about that one, and he said, yeah, yeah, you you were always going on about that song. You know, I remember that. You know, when you're in a band with someone, you're gonna share pretty much whatever musical thoughts and directs and you have, and whatever is in there is going to come out

like God Bless the Child, or like you know. Another song that Coots and I did was Pennies from Heaven or It's Only a Paper Move, both of which are on this record. Wow, so Coots knew a lot about what songs I thought were important to me. I want to ask you a little more about Breakshot. This memoir is very personal, very revealing a number of things in it you've talked about before, although there are certainly some stories that I've never heard before. But let's just start

with the title breakshot. Where does that come from? You know, a breakshot in pool is where you where you rack up the balls into a triangle. They're all very neatly ordered and positioned on the pool table, and then you start the game. You break the game with the breakshot, where you where you take the Q ball and typically send it at speed into that triangle of balls and they just go everywhere. You know. It's just it's from

order to chaos in a second. And that very much seemed to me to properly describe the moment in my family's life when we sort of jumped the rails and suddenly we were all in the wind. You know, in that moment, as you explained in the memoir, is in the mid sixties, that's right, nineteen nineteen sixty five for me and what was going on right then. I had spent a year at home with the year when I was in my brother's band, nineteen sixty four sixty five. At the end of that year, I realized that I'd

been gone from home for too long. There was no place for me there. I just felt, well, you know, if I've got to finish up my high school, if they'll take me back at the school I left, I think I'll be better positioned that You've been going to boarding school at Milton Academy, just outside of Boston. Yeah, And I thought if I went back to Milton, if they'd have me, I'd be better positioned to to apply to college. So I went back to Milton. They did

take me back. They didn't have a room for me, but one of the teachers they put me up in his quarters. And things started to go downhill for me, and at the time my I didn't feel it. You know, my family had said, sure, come back home, and then I had said, no, I want to go back there. I felt like I remembered all the feelings that that why I wanted to leave in the first place. It it's a very different place today. Than it was then.

But uh, it was sort of an anachronism. It was it was preparing people for a life that didn't exist anymore, like sort of a class society that didn't exist. And it's definitely changed its tune. I have two kids there now, my my two twin boys are going to Milton right now. But I didn't feel like I could talk to my parents, and they themselves were so preoccupied with the dissolution of

their own marriage. And my father had had had a drinking problem for a long time, and it was it was sort of progressing to the point where he he was getting in in real desperate straits. So I just spiraled down. My family came up to see my mother's family in Newburyport over the Thanksgiving break, and while we were on that break, a family friend and a couple and one of the teachers at school. The guy was was putting me up, took my parents aside and said,

you know, get over yourselves. Your son's in trouble, you know. And so I went to see a professional and he suggested that I spend a couple of weeks being, you know, sort of under observation, just to to see what how serious a situation. This was that he didn't want to take chances with with my survival. I went in for two weeks and and stayed there for ten months. Spent my entire college fund on a mental hospital. This was

this was mc McLean Hospital. Yeah, a great place. But I don't think I benefited at all from any psychotherapy there. I think that basically the fact that I had dismissed my family's expectations of me, that was the main thing I got was freedom was was Okay, we don't have any expectations of you anymore. You know, it's it's canceled because you had gone back to Milton with the idea of going to college. Your father was a doctor. You've

said you were interested in chemistry. You might have ended up as a chemistry or pharmacist or write something down that medicine and Jason, well, the well the pharmacist is a is a joke, just you know, referring to my my trouble with addiction for many years. But but yes, really, uh my interest in chemistry, you know, but in fact

I was you know, that did interest me. But I was getting very mixed signals from my family about what their expectations were, and I was a very driven by my sense of duty and my and what people expected of me. I was a good son. I was the sort of opposite pull to my brother Alex, who was a real rebel and who, when my father was away for two years, went to war with my mother in the most alarming way. So I tried the other tack.

I tried to be concerned for my mom was pretty upset during that period time when my dad was away. So I tried to be as helpful as I could, you know, And I took as my own responsibility her sort of her state, her mental state, her spirit. Rich relations, bring crusts of bread and such. You can help yourself. Don't don't take too much. Mom may have top of me. Have a godless chime that can stand up and saying I've got my You're dad went for two years to

the South Pole. Is that right? Yeah? It was between fifty seven and fifty nine, I believe, or fifty six and fifty eight, Probably between fifty six. Yeah. I was wondering because I was thinking about the freedom you're describing this being free of expectations. You really removed yourself from the world for a moment. Do you think that your father might have had a similar feeling disappearing to the

south Pole. Yes, I do think so. Well, it's clear that he found his marriage intolerable because ultimately it ended, But it was also my father had his own sort of tragic childhood. His mother died giving birth to him. His grandfather had delivered him and felt responsible, and himself was dead within two months of her death. His father fell off the deep end and disappeared down into a bottle, and my father was raised next door by his aunt.

And I think my dad always had a very conditional feeling about about being in his life and a sense of shame and questioning self doubt surrounding his his childhood is the circumstances of his birth. I believe that this was a sort of engine that drove him to perfection. You know, he was a real star academician, and he was He built a medical school at the University of North Carolina. He was the dean of medicine there. It went from a two year program to a four year

program under his his auspices. But the thing is, he had always identified with the polar explorers, and I believe that's because he felt so isolated and he felt the sense of will and of uh fortitude and of us as sort of facing up to hardship that that he identified with it in Shackleton and ross In, uh In Scott in Ahmudsen in Uh, you know, all of these polar explorers that he when I when he died, I inherited his books and he had an extreme library on

all these guys, you know. And so when he was drafted, they took a rain check on his military service during his education becoming a doctor, because you know, they thought he'd be more valuable to them once he was a doctor. So, uh, they took a rain check, but they drafted him in nineteen fifty five. He was stationed at but As the Naval Hospital, being a Navy doc. That was a very bad fit for my dad and U. When somebody came up and said, Admiral Bird is leading his final expedition

to the South Pole. We're gonna it was the International Geophysical Year. It was Admiral Bird, and you know he was putting it together. He wasn't there, but uh, you know they're going to go to the South Pole. They're gonna send a crew of Navy e sebes down there to build this scientific base at McMurdo Sound, which is like a city on the ice now, and there was nothing there when when he went and and so my dad volunteered. He said, I'll be the doctor for this.

Two men or so that's they're going down to build this this, you know, And and he basically disappeared because there was no communication. You know. Sometimes you could bounce a ham radio signal loss the ionosphere or whatever, and then back down to Earth you could get a signal to Australia and then someone would forward that, right. But letters came once a year when the supply ship picked

him up. Once a year, good heavens, packets of letters, all numbered, that we would read and in order every day. You must have missed him terribly. I'm a similar lot, but I think my brother Alex really suffered from from his absence. In your own moment of isolation at McClean, you found this kind of freedom and you were able from that to pursue a career in music. Is that what you knew you might want to do before you went there? Yeah, you know. I played in a band,

Um Cooch and I had a a duo together. It was part of what Cooch used to call the great folk Scare of the early sixties. This would have been on Martha's Vineyard. On Martha's Vineyard and in Boston and in New York there was a very strong scene folk music scene, great country, blues, Celtic music, jug band music, you know, great stuff. And it was an easy way to get started. You just needed a guitar on a microphone,

you know. So but at any rate, I saw myself doing that and I used to play it open mic nights and stuff and and Cooch and I actually when I was fifteen and he was seventeen, we actually had a gig together on the vineyard at a sort of summer iteration of a folk club that was in Boston. It was an incredible period, you know, it was. It was great. We were listening to a lot of music and there was a sense that we could do this,

you know. So one so I got I broke free. Um, I got together with Cooch again, and he said, let's go to New York and do it. Let's go. You know, I was eighteen and free. Things moved not instantly forward for you, but quickly enough. Within a few years you were in London. You cut a record for Apple, and then you came to the States and and you and Peter Asher, we're looking for a record deal. And I was really struck by something that comes out and breakshot

and this is just amazing. You talk about playing at the Newport Folk Festival in July of nineteen sixty nine. You, I guess didn't have a record deal at that point, but I just want to linger on who was on the bill. That would have been Joni Mitchell, Johnny Cash, Van Morrison, Harlo Guthrie, Chris Chris Stafferson, Pete Seeger and Muddy Waters. Wow, talk about getting your money's worth. Yeah, no, it was. It was a great bill. And and of course in those days, the Newport posts Folk Festival was

a big deal. You know. That was like if you were in the business and a lot of people were you you showed up at that when George Ween called and said will you come play this festival? That was where you got hurt and um and so so yeah, you know, Dylan had gone electric. There h two summers previous, uh in sixty seven or sixty eight, I'm not sure which one, but you know that had been a big

six I think actually see change it was a Titanic. Yeah, but Doug Kirshaw was also on the bill, the Raging Cajun, you know, and uh um Man who else? Uh it was? It was. It was a great year just because I worked at Rolling Stone for a long time and from working on an anniversary issue. I know something else that happened in Newport that year, which was the magazines then chief photographer Baron Wollman was backstage just before you played.

He shot a couple of frames of you, and a couple of years later that became your first Rolling Stone cover. I just want to pull this out for those of you at home. It's a it's a black and white photo, quite striking. Yeah, that's uh, you know, that's the severe sensitive look there. When we're working at that anniversary issue. Uh. We got a quote from Peter Asher about that picture. He said, that's the James I know. Well, he is intense. He can scare the ship out of people with a

stare like that. Peter knows me. I guess I wouldn't have thought so, but you would not have described yourself as a scary guy. No, I wouldn't ask my wife, what do you think when you look at that photo? Now. Yeah, you know, I'm still that same person. That's that That's the the sense that you get. One of the things that you learn as you get older is that you're the same person that or when you're seventeen. I'm sure

you know that. I know that too, you know, but you'll be that person for the rest of your life, you don't. You feel like, um, someone who's when you're eighteen and you see somebody who's seventy, you think, well that they speak a totally different language and come from a different world. You know, I'll never be that person, But in fact that person is still an eighteen year old inside. Well, you're going on tour this year. You're gonna be playing shows with Bonnie Rait and Jackson Brown. Yeah,

talk to me about that. How is touring change for you? You've talked about the poll between the road and the domesticity of home life. Does the road still have a pull for you? Oh? Yeah, well, you know, of course it does. I think of it as as what my work is, you know, Um, ultimately that's what I do for a living because of the connection with the audience. Yes, and also it's the thing that makes me an income. I mean, it's the thing that we live off in

my in my family. It's uh, it's my work. And I think that musicians sometimes presumed to call themselves artists, but if I am an artist, it's my art. You know, it's my medium and that and and recorded music is my also my medium. And how things change for you on the road and the many years you've been playing, well, um, I think it's it's a known quantity to me now and I'm familiar with with what it is and how to do it. I have a method, so I'm better

at surviving it now. And when you say you have a method, do you mean a method of survival or okay, a method of getting through it, of getting enough rest, of getting the right food, getting through the the couple of weeks until the next break. Also how to balance home life and life on the road, so you just sort of get better at it. I'm told you traveled here today to New York with your dog. Did your dog come on the on the road with you? No? No, not so far. You know, coming to New York is

stressed enough for an old dog. You know, she's she's an old girl, uh, twelve years old. Now that's that's getting getting up there, even for a pug. A little dogs seem to live longer. We're hoping that she will be with us for a while yet, but you know, she's getting what's her name ting t I n G. She's named after a soft drink that they sell in the Caribbean. I think it's a Jamaican soft drink. Tastes like grapefruit, very sweet, tangy, most refreshing. I recommend it heartily.

Just before we go, I want to ask you about something in breakshot that that struck me. When you're talking about music, you talk about how it's true to the laws of physics. Music is not arbitrary, it's empirically real and true. It follows the rules. Music takes us outside the prison of the self, which is an ecstatic thing. And one thing I was by you know, your your dad was a man of science in medicine, and here you are talking about music in a somewhat scientific way.

And I wondered if after all of this freedom and searching and breaking away, there was also a sense of coming back to some of those core values you grew up with. Oh no, I think I've always been my father. It's a huge uh, you know, a very large percentage of who I am, and uh, I think I identify myself in his image. Really, I admire him hugely. I love him and I miss him. I'm glad he's not seeing what's happening to our government, but because that would

definitely send him around the band. But I wish I could talk to him about it, tell you the truth. So yeah, yeah, No, my dad was a remarkable man. My mother too, remarkable woman. But m hm, so you you didn't follow your dad in the medicine, but you are out there ministering to the people in your own way. Well know, Uh, I think my dad was really glad to see me make a go of it in music. You know, I think I never got even a hint of resistance from him that that I shouldn't be doing this.

He could easily have said, uh, snap, to get with it, kid, you know, this's your chances are absolutely nothing, and you've got a good education. Go for it, you know, get back in line, pull you, get over yourself, you know. But you know he didn't. He gave me. He let me run and all of those expectations that I found it so hard to escape from, almost you know, like chemotherapy, hard. You know, all of those things, uh were my own anxiety. It wasn't born home by my folks. Uh, they were

really glad for me. So your own prison of the self, as it were in music in that sense, was your escape. Yeah, yeah, it was. I think in that way music saved my But I was lucky also to survive. I did some very stupid uh you know some years that we're just really high risk, unnecessarily so, and a lot of people around us died. You know, we lost so many really talented people. Thought I'd see you one more time again.

There's just a few things are coming my way this time around as fire and well, we're we'required to still have you with us. And I just wanna thank you for being here. Inside the Studio. Thank you, Joe. It's nice to talk to you. Inside the Studio is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, check out the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.