From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar

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Speaker 2 From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios.

Speaker 3 Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
If you're a James Taylor fan, what would you ask him? If you could ask him anything, the New Yorker's Adam Gopnik got his chance.

Speaker 3 James, this evening runs the risk of being an episode in the Chris Farley show. I don't know if you remember Chris Farley on Saturday Night Live, when he would have people he admired on.

Speaker 3 He would just say, do you remember when you wrote Fire and Rain? And say, that was great.

Speaker 3 And I could go through everything you've done and simply stand here and sweat and say, that was great.

Speaker 3 But I will try at least to find out why it's all been so great.

Speaker 3 Thinking about your music, one of the things that's always sort of stunned me about is when you first appeared, you had a distinctive way of playing the guitar, which wasn't like anybody else's, distinctive kind of voicings.

Speaker 3 And you had an amazing harmonic language.

Speaker 3 You know, I always think when I go through your sheet music and see that wonderful song like Don't Let Me Be Lonely Tonight starts with an E minor ninth chord and then goes to a major seventh chord.

Speaker 3 Those weren't the C, A minor, F G progressions of pop music at the time. Did you study music? How was it that the language of music came to be the language you speak so naturally?

Speaker 5 I studied cello when I was a kid. My parents thought it would be good for, there were five of us.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 I got the cello and I played for about four years, badly, reluctantly. I was a bad student and it never gave me the kind of feedback that I needed to have it take off

Speaker 5 have its own momentum, its own reason to continue. But all along I noticed that the guitar was going to be it for me and

Speaker 5 I finally prevailed on my folks.

Speaker 5 We lived in North Carolina. My mother would bring little groups of us up on the train to Manhattan to expose us to something other than trees.
And

Speaker 5 we...

Speaker 3 Was it art or music or? Yeah, it was the shows that she took you to?

Speaker 5 Museums and shows,

Speaker 5 yeah, and the city itself.

Speaker 5 My folks loved the Rogers and Hammerston,

Speaker 5 Rogers and Hart, Cole Porter, My Fair Lady in South Pacific and Oklahoma, and

Speaker 5 some light classics and some folk music too.

Speaker 5 And of course, I loved Elvis and I loved the Beatles and I loved Ray Charles. When I was exposed to those things, that's sort of the second tier of stuff I was exposed to,

Speaker 5 that amazed me too and it just opened my eyes and I wanted to explore that music and I wanted to sing it, I wanted to play it. But I was 12 when I got a guitar here in Manhattan at Shermer's.
Really?

Speaker 5 The Shermer Music Company.

Speaker 3 So you drove up with your mother to.

Speaker 5 Well, we took the train up and I think it was my mom and my dad on that trip. And we went to Shermer's and found a guitar.

Speaker 5 I saw the Fender Electrics, the shape,

Speaker 5 the amazing finish of them, the way they looked, the chrome, the mother of toilet seat, you know,

Speaker 5 but

Speaker 5 they wouldn't go for it. So

Speaker 5 it was a classic guitar. And I, you know, immediately I got, I'll show you what the first thing I ever played on it was.

Speaker 5 Simple, but

Speaker 5 it spoke to me, and

Speaker 5 it just immediately started making sounds that I wanted to hear more of. And the cello never did.

Speaker 3 You sold the cello at that point and pawned it on 46 trims.

Speaker 5 I don't know what happened to that damn cello. It's got to be around somewhere.
I hope someone's playing it.

Speaker 3 And you started to compose just the the way kids do, teenagers do on the guitar. You just chord to chord and

Speaker 3 idea to idea. What was the first song you ever wrote that you thought was a good song?

Speaker 5 I wrote a song called when I was 13 or 14 called Roll River Roll.

Speaker 4 Which is pretty awful.

Speaker 5 I can play it for you.

Speaker 4 Would you please? Yes.

Speaker 3 I don't think this is ever here.

Speaker 3 James Taylor's first song.

Speaker 3 Has this been widely covered, James Taylor?

Speaker 4 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 5 It hasn't been been widely covered. And the fact that nobody here tonight has ever heard it

Speaker 5 is proof of

Speaker 5 how lame it was. You know, it was really

Speaker 5 this is something called Travis picking that we've all learned.

Speaker 4 Right.

Speaker 5 Sort of a walking thumb

Speaker 5 and then the one or two fingers thrown in.

Speaker 4 Roll river roll

Speaker 4 long as you can be.

Speaker 4 Longest river I've done seen, roving to sea.

Speaker 5 Went like that.

Speaker 4 And then

Speaker 3 more of it. But you know, the strange thing is, James, I never heard that.
It sounds like a James Taylor song, you know? I mean.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it does. You know, I mean.

Speaker 3 It I the not the oompa part maybe so much at the beginning, but the the way that the bass line goes down and

Speaker 3 all of that. Ends on the minor.
Ends on the minor, exactly, yeah.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it does. It had a certain.

Speaker 3 It hints at things you will write. Yes.

Speaker 3 Everybody,

Speaker 3 I think everybody here knows that you went off to London eventually and

Speaker 3 you recorded that first record. How old were you

Speaker 5 when you did that, James?

Speaker 5 I guess I was 19 when I went to London and got my recording contract with Apple Records with the Beatles.

Speaker 5 And that was such an amazing reversal of

Speaker 5 fortune for me.

Speaker 5 That was the door that opened and let me through to the life that I've lived ever since. And it was my big break.
I'd been at it since, you know.

Speaker 5 When I came to New York in 1966, and instead of graduating high school, I came here and I started with Danny Korchmore, a band called The Flying Machine,

Speaker 5 which

Speaker 5 was ill-fated. And

Speaker 5 we had problems and

Speaker 5 typical problems and

Speaker 5 never got our recording deal that we needed. We signed one, but the people who signed it just, they couldn't follow through with it.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 4 after that,

Speaker 5 fell to pieces in 1966 when I was 18.

Speaker 5 I went home to North Carolina to recover a little bit.

Speaker 5 I needed soup. I needed a bed.

Speaker 5 I needed my parents. I needed to go home.

Speaker 5 My dad actually heard me on the phone. I called him in North Carolina from...

Speaker 5 from New York and the band had been broken up for about a month and he could hear that I wasn't well and he said, you just stay right there. He got my address.
He said, you stay right there.

Speaker 5 I'll be there in 10 hours. And he was.

Speaker 3 That's wonderful.

Speaker 5 I just sat there for 10 hours and my dad showed up in a station wagon and took me home. That's one of my, you know, my treasures, that little, that memory, that thing he did.

Speaker 5 I wrote a song about it called Jump Up Behind Me.

Speaker 4 This land is a lovely green. It reminds me of my own home.
Such children I've seldom seen, even in my own home.

Speaker 4 The sky's so bright and clean.

Speaker 3 Well, well, speaking of that, one of the things that was so potent about your music when,

Speaker 3 as a very young man, people first started paying attention to it was that it seemed to be so amazingly emotionally accessible. It seemed to sum up so many of the longings of

Speaker 3 a generation, so many people, song like Rainy Day Man or Something's Wrong.

Speaker 3 And then more famously in the next go-round and the next group of songs, Fire and Rain, and those things.

Speaker 3 Was it strange and difficult to have, to see your own experience turning into songs and then becoming these kinds of universal vehicles for other people's feelings?

Speaker 5 Very strange indeed. And

Speaker 5 you know, I think that that's,

Speaker 5 obviously you want success, you want to be heard, you want to be listened to and

Speaker 5 encouraged.

Speaker 5 But it's always that moment of going from the private thing and in the case of a singer-songwriter who doesn't have a band who's sort of going there with him and a sort of a posse or a crowd or a tribe that's that's you're running with and doing it with, when you're doing it alone and by yourself,

Speaker 5 it is a very strange transition to make. And

Speaker 5 I wrote songs about that too. Hey Mr., That's Me Up on the Jukebox or Fading Away

Speaker 5 or Company Man. Those are songs about

Speaker 5 the difficulty of starting off with a very private and personal thing.

Speaker 5 And as my friend David Crosby says, you know, the first album you make is the result of 10 years of work, then you've got a year to make the next one.

Speaker 5 But those first songs weren't written with an audience in mind, except in the most general sense.

Speaker 5 They really were personal,

Speaker 5 like diary entries or poems that you write for yourself. But then when you take the stuff to market and

Speaker 5 engage the music business and the popular culture and all that stuff, it can be,

Speaker 5 that's a very

Speaker 5 interesting thing to try to negotiate and to make, to go public with it and to make a living. I'm sure that writing has a similar, there's a similar thing to it

Speaker 5 when you take your work to market.

Speaker 3 But it had to be, you were saying, it had to be peculiar because yes, of course it's true for everyone, but a writer, maybe six people read it.

Speaker 3 And when a musician genuinely develops the following, it's millions of people who see your music as their internal, not just as your journal, but

Speaker 3 as their internal diary. And that's an extraordinarily rich time.
It must be. What's the first song of that body of work that you feel, a lot of it you still perform, that you feel is strong,

Speaker 3 is a finished song that you feel good about?

Speaker 5 I guess something in the way she moves is probably the first song that I... I had written

Speaker 5 Knocking Around the Zoo and

Speaker 5 a song called Sunshine, Sunshine before

Speaker 5 Something in the Way She Moves.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 5 actually all the songs on the first album, some of them before, some of them after Something in the Way She Moves, but that was the first one that I thought really worked as a song.

Speaker 3 You still do material from that period and you and

Speaker 3 I know you've talked about it a lot.

Speaker 3 But one of the things that interests me, if you don't mind, just to fast forward a little bit, as a listener of yours, as a follower of yours, one of the things that seemed to me to be true and I wonder if you if it was true is that some in the kind of mid-70s you were searching a bit for a sound for for work and then beginning in the late 70s you started doing a couple of things you started doing covers for the first time you started doing Motown covers how sweet it is and so on and it seemed as though there was a kind of rebirth through sort of being free to do other people's work as well as yours and sort of shedding the skin of Sweet Baby James and of that material.

Speaker 3 Was that a fantasy or did you feel some of that?

Speaker 5 You know, it just wasn't

Speaker 5 very carefully considered ahead of time.

Speaker 5 All of those cover tunes that I would do were things that would be thought of at the spur of the moment in the recording studio after we had already recorded two songs that day.

Speaker 5 That's the way it was with How Sweet It Is. That's the way it was with Handyman.
And we're going to be paying for it anyway. So you still feel strong and energetic.

Speaker 5 And Cooch says, why don't we try how sweet it is?

Speaker 5 How sweet it is to be loved by you.

Speaker 5 How sweet it is to be loved by you.

Speaker 3 James Taylor talking with Adam Gopnik at the New Yorker Festival.

Speaker 3 Ahead this hour, we'll hear a live performance from James Taylor. It's the New Yorker Radio Hour.
Stick around.

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Speaker 3 This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

Speaker 3 James Taylor joined Adam Gopnick in conversation at the New Yorker Festival, and they talked there about how Taylor formed his very distinctive sound, which was so influenced by Brazilian music, and in particular, Antonio Carlos Jobim.

Speaker 3 Of that beautiful song, Only a Dream in Rio. Did Brazilian music open up your ears and

Speaker 3 your musical vocabulary? It sure did.

Speaker 5 You know,

Speaker 5 I mentioned the Broadway stuff, the folk music and the light classics that my parents listened to and some satirical stuff, Tom Lehre.

Speaker 5 The next level of that was what my brother Alex brought into the house.

Speaker 5 He brought Ray Charles and Joe Tex and Don Covey and the Hot Nuts and the...

Speaker 5 you know, which were a beach music band.

Speaker 5 And his stuff extended into some light jazz, and one of them was that

Speaker 5 that great

Speaker 5 album recorded in 1963 in three days here in manhattan uh Astra Gilberto João Gilberto

Speaker 5 girl from Iberima

Speaker 4 goes walking and when she passes each one she passes goes ah

Speaker 5 and that stuff had a huge effect on me I love loved the chords. I loved the, you know, for a guitarist, that Brazilian thing is just a rich vein to get into.

Speaker 4 And man,

Speaker 5 I couldn't get enough. So, and I, you know, that song more recently, the.

Speaker 4 da da da da da da da da la la la la. La la la la la la la.

Speaker 5 The idea of that song is it was sort of like one note samba.

Speaker 4 It's just that da da da da da da.

Speaker 5 And then

Speaker 3 the change of harmony

Speaker 5 underneath it, and that's a very Brazilian, very jobime thing to do. So I was hugely impressed by that stuff, and

Speaker 5 it was a great source for me.

Speaker 5 What happened is I developed a little bit of a guitar style from playing Christmas carols

Speaker 5 and hymns

Speaker 5 from school.

Speaker 5 God, that's Deutschland Uberalis too, isn't it?

Speaker 4 What that is.

Speaker 3 That's the part you want to keep quiet if you can, James. Right, there we go.
That influence.

Speaker 4 Yeah, you really Sorry, yeah. No, I only learned that.
I only came to realize that later.

Speaker 5 We can cut, we can edit right here.

Speaker 4 So, yeah.

Speaker 5 No,

Speaker 5 I played hymns, I played

Speaker 5 Christmas carols, and it gave me that sort of very bedrock kind of

Speaker 5 Western musical,

Speaker 5 that kind of thing.

Speaker 5 And from then, I fell into the Beatles and Joe Beam.

Speaker 5 And it really,

Speaker 5 I found that I had enough of a technique to be able to adapt those things into it. But the technique itself,

Speaker 5 I would, I think I'm playing Ray Charles. I think I'm playing Joe Beam.
I think I'm playing Paul McCartney, Lennon McCartney, I think I'm playing

Speaker 5 Hollandozi or Holland. I think I'm, you know, but actually, or Sam Cook or Marvin Gay, but

Speaker 5 it actually

Speaker 5 is put through this sort of narrow filter of my technique.

Speaker 3 Of your guitar, of your guitar,

Speaker 5 and it makes it sound like James Taylor, like

Speaker 5 Carol's tune up on the roof, which we did all summer long, and we went back and forth between her version of it and mine. It started being like

Speaker 4 when this old world starts getting me down,

Speaker 4 and people are just too much

Speaker 4 for me to fake.

Speaker 5 Well, when I adapted the tune and we did it, it was like,

Speaker 4 when this old world starts getting me down

Speaker 4 and people are just too much

Speaker 4 for me to fake

Speaker 4 I climb way up to the top of the stairs And all my cares are just

Speaker 4 bright and deep.

Speaker 3 All that inner voicing of of the, so now we know

Speaker 5 Beatles,

Speaker 3 Beatles chords, Beatles beats, Brazilian chords, and Bach harmonies,

Speaker 3 and you have a James Taylor tune. It's just too painful to have James Taylor up here and not hear you play.
Would you play a few things for us?

Speaker 3 We were ring around the rosy children

Speaker 4 They were circles around the sun

Speaker 4 Never give up never slow down

Speaker 4 Never grow old never ever die young

Speaker 4 Synchronize with the rising moon

Speaker 4 Even with the evening star, they were true love, all written in stone. They were never alone, they were never that far apart.

Speaker 4 And we couldn't bear to believe they might make it.

Speaker 4 We had to close our eyes

Speaker 4 to cut up our losses and to do gold doses. And brass and our tears and sighs.

Speaker 4 you can see them on the street on a Saturday night

Speaker 4 everyone used to run them down they're a little too sweet they're a little too tight they're not enough tough this town though

Speaker 4 we couldn't touch them with a ten-foot pole

Speaker 4 No, it didn't seem to rattle at all. They refused to get

Speaker 4 body and soul, had much more with their backs up against the wall.

Speaker 4 Oh, hold them up, hold them up,

Speaker 4 never do let them fall. Prey to the dust and the rust and the ruin that names us, shames us, claims us all.

Speaker 4 I guess it had to happen someday soon.

Speaker 4 There wasn't nothing to hold them down. They would rise from us like a big balloon.

Speaker 4 Take the sky and forsake the ground.

Speaker 4 Yes, other hearts were broken.

Speaker 4 And I know other dreams ran dry. But our golden ones sailed on and on

Speaker 4 to another land beneath another

Speaker 4 sky. Let other

Speaker 4 hearts be broken.

Speaker 4 Let other dreams run dry. Let our golden ones sail on and on

Speaker 4 to another land beneath another

Speaker 4 sky

Speaker 4 beneath another sky.

Speaker 4 Hold them up,

Speaker 4 hold them up,

Speaker 4 hold them up,

Speaker 4 hold them up,

Speaker 4 hold them up,

Speaker 4 hold them up. Won't you hold them up?

Speaker 4 Thank you.

Speaker 4 You never die young.

Speaker 5 I'm going to try, I'm going to play that first song, very early song, first presentable song I think that I ever wrote.

Speaker 4 Well, there's something in the way she moves,

Speaker 4 looks my way or calls my my name

Speaker 4 That seems to leave this troubled world behind

Speaker 4 And if I'm feeling down and blue

Speaker 4 And troubled by some foolish game

Speaker 4 She always seems to make me change my mind

Speaker 4 I feel fine anytime if she's around me now

Speaker 4 She's around me now

Speaker 4 Almost all the time

Speaker 4 If I'm well you can tell if she's been with me now

Speaker 4 She's been with me now

Speaker 4 quite a long long time and I feel fine

Speaker 4 Every now and then, the things that I lean on lose their meaning, and I find myself convening into places where I should never let me go.

Speaker 4 She has a power to go,

Speaker 4 no one else can find me, and silently remind me

Speaker 4 of the happiness and

Speaker 4 times that I know

Speaker 4 you know

Speaker 4 well, I guess I just got to know them.

Speaker 4 It isn't what she's got to say

Speaker 4 how she thinks or where she's been.

Speaker 4 To me, the words are nice the way they sound.

Speaker 4 I like to hear them best that way.

Speaker 4 Doesn't much matter what they mean

Speaker 4 She says them mostly just to come you down

Speaker 4 I feel fine anytime that she is around me now

Speaker 4 She's around me now

Speaker 4 I've been just about all the time

Speaker 4 If I'm well, you can tell that she's been with me now.

Speaker 4 She's been with me now

Speaker 4 quite a long,

Speaker 4 quite a long time,

Speaker 4 quite a long, long time.

Speaker 4 And I feel

Speaker 4 fun.

Speaker 3 I have been playing, I have two children, and for the last 16 years, I've been playing You Can Close Your Eyes for Them every night when they go to sleep.

Speaker 3 And they always ask me, Daddy, did you make up that song? And I say, I did, actually. Yes, of course.

Speaker 3 But now they're here tonight, and they'll be aware that I didn't, actually.

Speaker 3 James did. But I wonder if on behalf of this audience who I know are all moving their fingers, would you teach me to play that song properly?

Speaker 5 I will indeed, yeah. So let's get a guitar.

Speaker 3 Is there a guitar?

Speaker 5 Can I get one? A guitar and plug it in.

Speaker 4 Thanks.

Speaker 5 Thank you.

Speaker 5 I bring two in case. These are Olson guitars made by a guy in

Speaker 5 Minneapolis, St. Paul, and he

Speaker 5 managed in 1985 to get one into a hotel room that I was checking into in Minneapolis, and I've never looked back. So

Speaker 5 this is the first one that

Speaker 5 this is the most recent one he built.

Speaker 3 So this is, so I'll take it home tonight.

Speaker 5 Now,

Speaker 3 we're in D, which Miles Davis said was the key that belonged to you.

Speaker 5 Well, it's true.

Speaker 5 I met Miles Davis once up on 94th Street, and it was, you know, it's one of those things that you

Speaker 5 take as with you as

Speaker 5 the great man, indeed, that he noticed me enough

Speaker 5 to mention, he said, you know,

Speaker 5 D is your key.

Speaker 3 The oracle had spoken.

Speaker 4 The oracle had spoken. So that's it.

Speaker 3 And D was your key.

Speaker 3 So we start on D, so where it's.

Speaker 4 The sun is short, it can sing

Speaker 4 down.

Speaker 4 That's good. Actually, before we go,

Speaker 5 that is, before we go any further, I sing this song at home too, and I've actually more and more recently gotten used to singing it with my dear wife, Kim, who is here.

Speaker 5 And I'm going to pull it, she's going to kill me. Pull me up.

Speaker 5 Pull her up on the stage.

Speaker 5 She's here somewhere. Oh, she is here.

Speaker 3 Hi, Kim.

Speaker 4 Hello. Good.

Speaker 3 So this is sort of of like open mic night.

Speaker 4 It's open mic night. That's right.

Speaker 5 We are.

Speaker 5 We're going to go out with a whimper here. So

Speaker 5 again.

Speaker 4 When the sun is shortly sinking

Speaker 4 down,

Speaker 4 but the moon is slowly rising

Speaker 4 So this old world must still be spinning around

Speaker 4 And I

Speaker 4 still love

Speaker 4 you

Speaker 4 So close your

Speaker 4 eyes

Speaker 4 You can close your eyes.

Speaker 4 It's alright.

Speaker 4 Great.

Speaker 4 I don't know no love songs.

Speaker 4 I can't sing the rules

Speaker 4 anymore.

Speaker 3 That was Adam Kopnick on the guitar, accompanied by James Taylor and his wife Kim.

Speaker 3 I'm David Remnick. Please join me next week.

Speaker 4 And until then, have a great week.

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