March 9, 2020 • 53 mins
Inside the Studio returns, as host Joe Levy sits down with the one of the all-time great singer-songwriters James Taylor to discuss Taylor’s first album in five years, “American Standard” (Fantasy Records), as well as Taylor’s new audio memoir, “Break Shot.” Taylor opens up his childhood, his high-school band with his older brother, and how the songs and struggles he grew up with influenced his new record of classics from the Great American Songbook. Follow Inside the Studio on iHeartRadio, or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
My Heart Radio presents Inside the Studio. I'm your host,
Joe Levy. My guest this episode is James Taylor, who
has two new recordings out right now. American Standard is
his album of classic tunes drawn from the Great American songbook.
(00:25):
Break Shot is an audio book, a memoir about his family,
his music, and his life until the age of one.
The first is full of great melodies, songs like Pennies
from Heavens, Sit Down, Your Rocking, the Boat Moon River,
all rendered with warm intimacy and delicate control. The second
(00:46):
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
(01:07):
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
(01:29):
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
(01:50):
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
(02:12):
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.
(02:33):
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
(03:02):
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
(03:25):
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
(03:45):
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
(04:09):
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
(04:29):
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
(04:50):
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
(05:14):
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
(05:37):
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
(06:03):
what are you? Beautiful? God wonderful, everything's go and my
we oh word, utiful, beautiful. I asked him what keeps
(06:38):
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.
(06:59):
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.
(07:20):
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
(07:45):
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
(08:07):
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
(08:27):
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
(08:50):
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
(09:11):
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
(09:32):
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
(09:54):
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
(10:18):
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
(10:40):
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
(11:00):
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
(11:25):
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.
(11:47):
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
(12:08):
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
(12:30):
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,
(12:51):
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,
(13:13):
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,
(13:36):
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
(13:58):
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.
(14:20):
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,
(14:43):
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
(15:06):
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
(15:27):
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
(15:49):
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
(16:12):
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
(16:34):
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
(16:58):
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
(17:20):
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.
(17:41):
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
(18:01):
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
(18:23):
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
(18:43):
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,
(19:05):
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
(19:25):
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
(19:46):
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
(20:07):
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,
(20:29):
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
(20:52):
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.
(21:15):
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
(21:35):
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
(21:56):
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
(22:18):
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
(22:40):
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
(23:03):
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
(23:23):
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
(23:44):
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,
(24:08):
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
(24:29):
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.
(24:52):
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
(25:13):
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
(25:33):
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,
(25:53):
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
(26:14):
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
(26:34):
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,
(26:57):
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.
(27:18):
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
(27:39):
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
(28:02):
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
(28:25):
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
(28:48):
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
(29:14):
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
(29:36):
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.
(30:01):
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
(30:24):
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
(30:46):
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
(31:08):
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
(31:29):
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
(31:49):
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,
(32:12):
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
(32:34):
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
(32:55):
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
(33:18):
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
(33:41):
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
(34:04):
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.
(34:25):
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
(34:48):
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
(35:09):
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,
(35:30):
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
(35:53):
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.
(36:14):
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
(36:36):
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
(36:58):
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
(37:19):
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
(37:40):
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
(38:00):
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,
(38:21):
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
(38:47):
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
(39:09):
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
(39:32):
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
(39:53):
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
(40:15):
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
(40:38):
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
(40:59):
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
(41:23):
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
(41:44):
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
(42:07):
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
(42:28):
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
(42:51):
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
(43:14):
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,
(43:35):
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
(43:56):
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
(44:23):
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,
(44:46):
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,
(45:07):
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,
(45:32):
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
(45:53):
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
(46:13):
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
(46:34):
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
(46:57):
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,
(47:20):
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
(47:42):
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
(48:06):
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,
(48:26):
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
(48:48):
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
(49:08):
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
(49:31):
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
(49:51):
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
(50:13):
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
(50:35):
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
(50:56):
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,
(51:18):
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.
(51:40):
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
(52:03):
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.
(52:25):
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
(52:45):
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,
(53:08):
or wherever you get your podcasts.
My Heart Radio presents Inside the Studio. I'm your host,
Joe Levy. My guest this episode is James Taylor, who
has two new recordings out right now. American Standard is
his album of classic tunes drawn from the Great American songbook.
(00:25):
Break Shot is an audio book, a memoir about his family,
his music, and his life until the age of one.
The first is full of great melodies, songs like Pennies
from Heavens, Sit Down, Your Rocking, the Boat Moon River,
all rendered with warm intimacy and delicate control. The second
(00:46):
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
(01:07):
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
(01:29):
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
(01:50):
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
(02:12):
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.
(02:33):
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
(03:02):
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
(03:25):
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
(03:45):
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
(04:09):
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
(04:29):
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
(04:50):
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
(05:14):
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
(05:37):
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
(06:03):
what are you? Beautiful? God wonderful, everything's go and my
we oh word, utiful, beautiful. I asked him what keeps
(06:38):
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.
(06:59):
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.
(07:20):
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
(07:45):
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
(08:07):
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
(08:27):
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
(08:50):
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
(09:11):
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
(09:32):
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
(09:54):
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
(10:18):
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
(10:40):
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
(11:00):
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
(11:25):
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.
(11:47):
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
(12:08):
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
(12:30):
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,
(12:51):
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,
(13:13):
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,
(13:36):
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
(13:58):
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.
(14:20):
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,
(14:43):
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
(15:06):
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
(15:27):
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
(15:49):
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
(16:12):
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
(16:34):
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
(16:58):
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
(17:20):
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.
(17:41):
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
(18:01):
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
(18:23):
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
(18:43):
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,
(19:05):
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
(19:25):
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
(19:46):
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
(20:07):
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,
(20:29):
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
(20:52):
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.
(21:15):
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
(21:35):
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
(21:56):
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
(22:18):
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
(22:40):
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
(23:03):
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
(23:23):
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
(23:44):
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,
(24:08):
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
(24:29):
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.
(24:52):
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
(25:13):
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
(25:33):
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,
(25:53):
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
(26:14):
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
(26:34):
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,
(26:57):
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.
(27:18):
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
(27:39):
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
(28:02):
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
(28:25):
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
(28:48):
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
(29:14):
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
(29:36):
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.
(30:01):
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
(30:24):
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
(30:46):
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
(31:08):
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
(31:29):
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
(31:49):
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,
(32:12):
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
(32:34):
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
(32:55):
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
(33:18):
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
(33:41):
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
(34:04):
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.
(34:25):
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
(34:48):
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
(35:09):
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,
(35:30):
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
(35:53):
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.
(36:14):
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
(36:36):
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
(36:58):
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
(37:19):
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
(37:40):
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
(38:00):
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,
(38:21):
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
(38:47):
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
(39:09):
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
(39:32):
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
(39:53):
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
(40:15):
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
(40:38):
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
(40:59):
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
(41:23):
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
(41:44):
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
(42:07):
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
(42:28):
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
(42:51):
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
(43:14):
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,
(43:35):
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
(43:56):
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
(44:23):
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,
(44:46):
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,
(45:07):
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,
(45:32):
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
(45:53):
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
(46:13):
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
(46:34):
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
(46:57):
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,
(47:20):
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
(47:42):
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
(48:06):
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,
(48:26):
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
(48:48):
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
(49:08):
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
(49:31):
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
(49:51):
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
(50:13):
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
(50:35):
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
(50:56):
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,
(51:18):
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.
(51:40):
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
(52:03):
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.
(52:25):
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
(52:45):
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,
(53:08):
or wherever you get your podcasts.
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