She was “afraid we were going to attach ourselves down there. The Taylors’ annual sojourns on Martha’s Vineyard were attempts by Trudy “to save us from North Carolina,” James would one day reveal to Marc Maron, the WTF podcast host. Like the Taylors, we spent part of every summer in Massachusetts, in the process becoming, like James, fans of the Boston Red Sox, who back then were still the accursed icons of impossible dreams, and beloved for that reason.
JAME TAYLOR CHRISTMAS HOW TO
The records helped James learn how to write songs they helped me learn to love them. Both of our houses were stocked with a variety of LPs: classical, Broadway show tunes, folk songs, so-called “world music”-Celtic, bossa nova, calypso. His mother, Trudy, was a New Englander, as was my mother, Gloria, and both were musically gifted, Trudy a trained opera singer and my mother a whiz on the piano and accordion. I could imagine my ancestors and descendants feeling exactly what I was feeling, that sense of connection backward and forward across time, the similarities of our Carolinian souls, our easy intoxication not only by gin but by summer nights like this. For an ecstatic minute or so, I felt as if I had boarded the infinite train of generations linked by love to a common place. We talked a little about James, among other things, before staggering out into the voluptuous, tree-shrouded summer dark of North Campus, weaving our way along the sidewalks between the ancient brick dormitories of Old East and Old West, heading toward Franklin Street under the canopy of oaks and tulip poplars. I remember drinking gin and tonics on a June night at the Carolina Inn with my father and Ike late in their lives. They taught at the University of North Carolina medical school, shared similar convictions about the need for socialized medicine, and were often paid by poor patients in vegetables and gratitude. His father, Ike, and my father, Bill, were both North Carolina natives, bald-headed charmers who liked to drink.
I didn’t know him because he’s about a decade older, and had already gone off to London, where he was hanging out with the Beatles and cutting his first record while I was still bell-bottoming my way through the final days of elementary school. Other than the fact that he is one of the greatest singer-songwriters in American musical history, and I am not, he and I have a lot in common. I think I understand why James Taylor came home to Chapel Hill. “Don’t move.” He drove the ten hours from Chapel Hill to New York in the family station wagon, loaded the car with James’s few possessions, and took his son, who slept nearly the whole way, back to the family home in the Morgan Creek neighborhood to recover. In 1967, when he was nineteen and suffering from his first bout of heroin addiction in New York, James Taylor and his father spoke on the telephone.
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