What Singer Had a Hit About Doing Drugs Again

James Taylor was just 22 years old when he achieved breakout success as a vocaliser-songwriter, just he'd already experienced the sort of pain, frustration and sublime thrills of someone twice his age. Fittingly, the vocal that launched him to stardom, the 1970 single "Fire and Rain," summoned and encapsulated the tragedies, setbacks and struggles that had marked his life to that point.

Along with his finger-picking guitar work and sweet, soothing voice, Taylor is known for his immensely personal lyrics, which often juxtaposed the music to which they were set with tales of sadness, heartbreak and depression. "Fire and Rain" was the epitome of Taylor's from-the-heart lyrical way, and to understand what he's singing about, it's imperative to know a scrap about his early life and career.

Taylor struggled with his mental health as a teenager

Though a bright student, Taylor was plagued by depression, which was exacerbated by family turmoil and instability. By 15 years former, he'd already begun performing music in coffee shops and other small-scale venues in his native Massachusetts and adopted dwelling house of North Carolina, showing flashes of his genius, but he was having trouble keeping his head above h2o at school.

"My folks were educated people, and they had expectations. I assumed it meant finishing school, finding a career, probably an academic one," he told the Chicago Tribune many years after. "But my family fell apart (through divorce), and I vicious apart. It was mysterious to me why. I had no expectations of what would happen to me."

Flailing in schoolhouse, Taylor dropped out his senior yr and instead checked himself into McLean, a psychological hospital of swell renown in Massachusetts. He spent the finish of 1965 and much of 1966 in recovery at the facility earlier checking himself out afterward nine months and went upwardly to New York's East Village to begin his musical career.

James Taylor in 1969

Photo: Jack Robinson/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

His years in New York brought his showtime tastes of success and addiction

The adjacent few years were a whirlwind for Taylor. In New York, he plugged into the Hamlet music scene, where cafes overflowed with musicians and low-rent apartments were infested with drugs. Taylor plunged headfirst into both of them, forming a ring called vThe Flight Machine and falling in with heroin addicts.

"The drummer from my band, The Flying Motorcar, was a heroin aficionado," Taylor told Oprah Winfrey in 2015. "It was a matter of fourth dimension before I got my first taste. And I was gone. Equally presently as I was introduced to opiates, I was gone."

It turned out that Taylor's family had a long history of habit, especially to opioids, and even at one point owned a sanitarium dedicated to helping people kick the habit. It was a nighttime time — The Flying Car's anthology never fabricated it past demo tapes and Taylor, strung out and dependent on drugs, wound up being whisked back home to N Carolina, where he'd cheque into rehab. This began a multi-year bike of recovery and relapse, with Taylor deciding to get loftier as his career began its rise, likewise.

"People fence about substance abuse and whether or non addiction is genetically predisposed," he later on reflected. "I think it probably is. There'southward definitely that gene in my family unit. Whether it'due south nature or nurture, we tend to be addicted."

After rehab, Taylor moved to England, fix his own picayune recording studio, and so scored an audition for The Beatles' new record label, Apple Records. He earned a contract and spent plenty of time at the studio, recording at the same time that The Beatles were putting downwards the White Album. The flow of creativity was rivaled only by the flow of drugs; Taylor had access to plenty of cheap heroin in London, and he eventually returned to the United states of america with a modestly successful debut cocky-titled album and another serious drug habit.

It was a chaotic, productive and shambolic 1968, and it set the stage for another year of highs and lows that would ultimately pb him to "Fire and Pelting."

James Taylor in 2006

Photo: KMazur/WireImage for The Recording Academy

The song'due south verses each item a hardship in Taylor's life

When Taylor got back from London, he played major festivals, garnered small-scale acclaim, then promptly hit the skids once again when he crashed his motorcycle. That fall, he moved in with his then-girlfriend Joni Mitchell in Los Angeles merely before long checked in to rehab once over again. His stay wound up being remarkably productive, even if he didn't fully shake his addiction to heroin.

It was in rehab that Taylor wrote a majority of his 2nd album, Sweetness Babe James, including that first smash hit.

The song has three verses, each detailing a hardship or distressing moment in his life. The opening lines, "Just yesterday forenoon they let me know y'all were gone/Suzanne the plans they made put an finish to y'all," referred to a friend named Suzanne Schnerr, who he knew during his time in New York. They were close pals for a while, riding the ups and downs of the music scene and heroin, and a few years after he left the city, Schnerr wound upwardly taking her ain life.

"At the time, I was recording in England with The Beatles, and my friends had sort of kept the information about this death from me because they thought, you know, `This is a crucial time for him, he'due south doing his work, and we don't desire to upset him or bring him down,'" Taylor told NPR years later. "So my friend Richard Corey told me about it, but he had known nigh it for a calendar month or so earlier he mentioned it to me. So that's where 'they permit me know you were gone' comes in."

In an interview for a biography published in 2001, Taylor said that he didn't find out about Schnerr'southward expiry until half dozen months later she took her own life. The news hit hard, contributing to an anxiety and unease that fed into the heroin habit he was trying to kick when he wrote the vocal. That addiction informed the second poesy, where he sings, "Won't you wait downwardly upon me, Jesus / You've got to aid me brand a stand / Yous've simply got to encounter me through another day," putting out a call for help equally he struggled through withdrawal.

Similarly, the 3rd verse takes inspiration from his time at McLean and the pain that came with the failure of The Flying Machines, which he slyly name-checks most the end, singing, "Sugariness dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground."

The song was laid downwards in the studio in late 1969 and released as the offset unmarried on Sweet Baby James when it came out in 1970. Information technology became his calling card, a deeply personal track that seemed to connect with anybody. It striking number 3 on the Billboard charts and has been covered more than fourscore times, including by some of the nearly prominent musicians of the 20th century. Taylor himself played it at President Barack Obama'southward second inauguration.

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Source: https://www.biography.com/news/james-taylor-fire-and-rain-inspiration-addiction

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