LETTERS FROM HOME: LULLABIES TO A GENERATION'S SOUL

Aug. 23, 2001

Dear Carolyn,

At the dawn of the 1970s, I used to go to David N.'s house some mornings to hang out before my first class. David would still be in the throes of returning to reality. I would get a cup of coffee and put James Taylor's new album "Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon" on the stereo. James would sing "Riding on the Railroad" and "That's Me Up on the Jukebox," sounding exquisitely tired of making music people love to hear. "You've Got a Friend" sounded too heartfelt and earnest to these pseudo-sophisticated ears back then. I didn't know the meaning of kindred yet.

Most of the songs on that album were lullabies to a wounded generation's soul. David had a hard time waking up.

David and Chris joined DC and me at the James Taylor concert last week in St. Louis. So did Louie and his wife, in from Boston, and Chris' younger sister, Cathy, from Sacramento. Cathy's husband stayed home to baby-sit. James Taylor is too mellow for him, he said.

James Taylor earned his mellowness.

The son of the dean of the University of North Carolina medical school drops out of prep school to join a band. He moves to New York City, then at 17 admits himself to a psychiatric hospital. That's where he graduates from high school.

He joins another band, The Flying Machine. The band breaks up. He starts using heroin and moves to London. The Beatles discover him. He returns to the U.S. and goes into another mental hospital, in part to get off heroin.

The next year he breaks both hands in a motorcycle wreck. A year later, the album "Sweet Baby James" is released and zooms to number one. The single "Fire and Rain," which includes references to his institutionalization and to a friend's suicide, becomes a big hit. The song that will define his career.

A year later he's on the cover of Time magazine. Two years later he has married Carly Simon. Life is good.

In 2001, two divorces later, James is married again and mellow as ever.

To his generation, he is like an old friend whose faults we recognize in ourselves, whose preoccupations and misfortunes are our own more or less. He is still uncomfortable on stage, and shyness remains part of his charm. He still sings about showering people with love and about the dignity of working with your hands.

In 1995, he gave the commencement address at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston. Music is the real soul food, he told the graduates.

He advised them to keep their overhead down, to avoid a major drug habit and to play every day some of those days in front of other people. It will do you and them good, he said. He has lived by that advice.

Each of the five James Taylor concerts I've gone to has had a defining moment, something to remember it by. At the first one in the early '70s, a little girl in the audience loudly kept badgering him to sing "You've Got a Friend." Mellow Mr. Taylor finally shouted, "Jesus, woman, would you leave me alone?" At the concert DC and I went to in Berkeley, 10,000 people softly sang "Sweet Baby James" to him.

Last week, our little group stood in the parking lot after the concert waiting for the traffic to ease, wanting to leave and not wanting the night to end.

The talk turned to Russ Kunkel, the fuzzy-haired percussionist who made the early albums with James Taylor.

When James and Carly Simon divorced, she and Russ had a romance. James and Russ stopped playing together.

Twenty years later, Russ is back in James Taylor's band.

I guess it's easier to replace a wife than a good drummer, someone joked. I looked at David, married to my old girlfriend, Chris. We all smiled.

Love, Sam