Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty
Nineteen-year-oldJames Taylorarrived in London with his guitar and little else. It was the fall of 1967, and he wasrecovering from a crippling drug addictionand the devastating collapse of his first band, the Flying Machine. Still reeling from the pain of both, he was ready to give music another try. “I went over to visit a friend,” he tells PEOPLE. “I didn’t have plans to come back. I had a one-way ticket.”
He scraped together £20 and booked 45 minutes at a small SoHo studio to make a demo. “I came out with an acetate disc and two reel-to-reel copies of my songs. Four songs.” With a tape in hand, he started to approach record companies, the all-important gatekeepers. “Success was getting a record contract,” Taylor explains. “In those days that’s how you got on the radio, that’s how you got an audience, and that’s how you got a career.” He was aiming high. The Beatles had recently launched their own record label, Apple, and were actively seeking new talent to develop. Their offices had been inundated following anopen call for submissions, but Taylor had an insider connection — albeit a circuitous one.
His childhood friend and former Flying Machine bandmate Danny “Kootch” Kortchmar had been in a band called the King Bees, which had accompanied the British pop duo Peter & Gordon on tour several years prior. The “Peter” in question was Peter Asher, brother of Paul McCartney’s girlfriend, actress Jane Asher. McCartney was particularly close to his almost-brother-in-law. During the years he’d lived in the Asher family townhouse on Wimpole Street, they slept literally across the hall from one another, and frequently socialized in theLondon’s intellectual circles. McCartney had pennedseveral of Peter & Gordon’s early hits, and when the group split in 1967, he tapped Asher to head up A&R at their fledgling label.
Peter Asher.Don Paulsen/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty
For an aspiring artist in the late ‘60s, Peter Asher was a good man to know. “I called Kootch up and said, ‘Do you still have a number for Peter Asher?’” Taylor recalls. “And he said, ‘I don’t know if it’s any good but this is the number that I’ve got.’ I called it up, Peter answered, and I said, ‘I’m a friend of Danny’s, a songwriter from North Carolina. I’ve got a demo. Could you take a listen to it?’” Asher liked what he heard and invited Taylor toApple’s Central London offices. “He said, ‘You can play for whatever Beatle is in the building at the time.’ And that’s what happened.”
With Asher acting as producer, Taylor recorded his first album in the fall of 1968, literally following the Beatles into London’s Trident Studios after they had recorded “Hey Jude” andtracks for ‘The White Album.’For a young artist, the experience was both intimidating and inspiring. “It was like, ‘Holy cow,I can’t believe this,’” he remembers. Asher and Taylor took a page from the Fab Four’s musical playbook, tapping arranger Richard Hewson to score orchestral linking passages between songs. “It was all very new and experimental. We were trying to be like the Beatles a little bit. I was just finding my way.” McCartney and Harrison directly contributed to the session, pitching in on bass and backing vocals respectively on the track “Carolina in My Mind.”
Hisself-titled debutwas released that December, but it got lost in the shuffle of the label’s increasingly dire business problems. “I’m sure Apple was hemorrhaging money like crazy. Nobody was really paying attention to running it like a commercial venture. If it was going to break even, or even lose a little bit, that was fine with the Beatles. While it was open, it was a real resource. It was great.”
For more on James Taylor’s road to fame and peace through music, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE — on newsstands now.
source: people.com
