![]() ![]() “It’s like when you take your report card home from school and you know that if you hand it to him before he’s had his first drink, you’re going to get one response and if you hand it to him after his first drink, you’ll get another.” “There’s a mysterious energy to someone who lives with a tragedy like this,” Taylor says of his father. He went to the bottom of the world and returned with a serious drinking problem. He spent two years on an expedition to the south pole, where he held the keys to the liquor cabinet of 100 men. Not long after moving the family to North Carolina, Taylor’s father was assigned to the navy. She saw the north-eastern state of Massachusetts as a “lost Eden” and would spend her days doing sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, on protests, and hauling her five kids to Martha’s Vineyard every summer to “restore our Yankee credentials”. His father, a doctor, moved the family to the south when he became the dean of the medical school of the University of North Carolina his mother didn’t want to go, and fought against the politics she found there. It’s a subtle exploration of the “ripples”, as Taylor puts it.īorn in Boston in 1948, Taylor was, according to his memoir, “brought up devoted to progressive politics, self-improvement and the arts”. ![]() But the memoir is mostly about the shattering effect that early childhood trauma, addiction and grief can have generations later. It covers his father’s alcoholism and his brother’s death from the disease, as well as his own drug addiction, all of which, he worries, could be sensationalised. He is anxious, he says, about how the memoir will be received. He has also released an audio memoir – Break Shot – which takes him back to his turbulent early years, finishing with that first London trip. It’s what informed me as a songwriter, and others of my generation Lennon and McCartney, Randy Newman, Elton and Bernie, Paul Simon. ![]() It was sheet music, anyone would sing it, so the songs had to stand on their own. He says there was a period when his generation wanted to distance themselves from this music, but he now recognises it as “the pinnacle of American popular song. It’s the personal stuff I like, for better or for worse.” He is here to promote his 19th album, American Standard a covers album of the old standards and Broadway show tunes he was raised on. Taylor is in a reflective mood when we meet, and says he is always like this. Before he sold 100m records, performed for the Obamas and the Clintons, and then, decades later, appeared on stage with one of the world’s biggest pop stars, Taylor Swift, who is named after him. Before his marriage to Carly Simon, which opened up his personal life – including his long battle with heroin addiction – to public consciousness. Before he wrote his pivotal album Sweet Baby James during a stint in a psychiatric hospital. Before he met David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, Neil Young, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Carole King and Joni Mitchell. This was before he moved to Laurel Canyon with the rest of the denim-draped California dreamers who defined the sound of the late 60s and far beyond. “The moment.” He made his first trip here in 1968, playing for Paul McCartney and George Harrison and becoming the first artist signed to the Beatles’ record label, Apple Records. Originally published by Playboy Press in 1972, The Longest Cocktail Party has proven itself a timeless chronicle of this most colorful period in pop history.J ames Taylor looks out at the sprawling London skyline. Alfred Music is proud to offer this latest edition, which features a new and insightful foreword by the author. Written by Richard DiLello, who served as Apple Record's 'House Hippie' from 1968 to 1970, this unusual first-hand glimpse into The Beatles' empire humorously chronicles the stranger-than-life stories that were to become legendary, including visits by the Hell's Angels and endless tales of celebrity antics. The Longest Cocktail Party is a rare exception. Much has been written about this period in the history of The Beatles' evolution and dissolution-some of it true, some of it wildly exaggerated, but not much of it first-hand. The Beatles started out with the greatest of intentions, but reality soon got in the way. Apple Records was a noble experiment created in the spirit of the 1960s by four musicians who came to represent everything that was best about those tumultuous, experimental, and liberating times. ![]()
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