His songs spoke to a traumatised and disillusioned audience
CULTURAL ERAS rarely, if ever, fit neatly into the decades allotted to them. The 1950s, for instance, did not really shuffle off until 1963 But there is one tidy bit of date-keeping, and that is the end of the 1960s. In 1969 the Beatles made their final recordings, the mayhem of the Altamont festival proved a horrific inversion of Woodstock and Charles Manson showed how easily the hippie dream could be corrupted by narcissism and violence.
Mr Taylor became the voice of a generation quite by accident. Brought up in North Carolina, he had experienced by the end of his teens extreme highs and lows: he was institutionalised for severe depression, spared conscription for Vietnam only by his illness, signed in a rush of enthusiasm by the Beatles’ Apple label and afflicted by an addiction to heroin.
That line prompted Mr Taylor’s pianist, Carole King—still a year away from her own “Tapestry” album and solo stardom—to write “You’ve Got A Friend”. Mr Taylor’s version of that song would become his biggest hit after it appeared on his next album, “Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon” . The themes on those first two Warner albums mirrored a national mood in America, particularly among Mr Taylor’s young, white, progressive audience.
Mr Taylor would make four more studio albums for Warner—all six have just been reissued in a remastered box set—along with a blockbuster greatest-hits collection. While peers such as Neil Young and the Eagles became more expansive in style, he went the other way, turning ever inwards on the gently eccentric home-studio-recorded “One Man Dog” , followed by “Walking Man” . “Walking Man” was a commercial and critical flop, and it remains underrated to this day.
His final two Warner albums, “Gorilla” and “In The Pocket” , saw him reclaim his commercial standing—if not his unsought position at the heart of American culture—with a smooth soft-rock sound from which he would seldom thereafter stray very far. It could at times be tepid, but when inspiration struck him, as it still frequently did, it was a style that permitted marvellous subtlety. By this time Mr Taylor appeared a much happier man.
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