Songs I Play: Fire & Rain

Fire & Rain is probably one of the earliest songs I learned to play on guitar. It is timeless. Something about that first slide-note combination gets me every time I play it. Its also one of Taylor’s sadder songs being about the suicide of one of his childhood friends (Suzanne Schnerr). In a later interview he said it is really a 3-part song; about his friend, his addiction to heroin and newfound fame, and the breakup of his first band, James and the Flying Machine (“…sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground…”). Carole King played piano on the recorded version and later said she wrote “You’ve Got a Friend” in response to the line “I’ve seen lonely times when I could not find a friend…”.

When I was growing up my dad had this amazing record collection  that he kept in brown cardboard boxes in our living room. All that cardboard provided the perfect scratching board and our two cats took to it like there was no tomorrow. They shredded ALL the album sides until the titles were unreadable. Going in to find Sweet Baby James was  a serious endeavor and I often got distracted among all the other great music in those boxes. Besides  the Beatles albums, that album got a LOT of play time. I wore those vinyls into the ground.

And speaking of the Beatles... James Taylor caught the attention of Paul McCartney and was invited to come to the Apple studio in 1968 while they were recording the White Album. Peter Asher, the producer, thought layering lush string sections over several of the tracks (e.g. Carolina on My Mind) was a good idea but the end result was horrific. I would suggest foregoing the auditory pain if you’re a fan and track down a bootleg of the only album he cut when he was with the Flying Machine -- a three-hour recording session done in NYC in 1966. It is raw and real and reveals the playful musical brilliance of a young JT. He’s been a very big influence on my music.

JT info gleaned from here...