|
Griffondor1 liked a video
(2 weeks ago)
James Taylor music: http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.htm... Watch the full show: http://thesixtiesarchive.blogspot.com...
Once recovered, Taylor mo...
more
James Taylor music: http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.htm... Watch the full show: http://thesixtiesarchive.blogspot.com...
Once recovered, Taylor moved to California, keeping Asher as his manager and record producer. In December 1969, he held the recording sessions for his second album there. Entitled Sweet Baby James, and with the participation of Carole King, the album was released in February 1970 and was Taylor's critical and popular triumph, buoyed by the single "Fire and Rain", a song about Taylor's experience in psychiatric institutions and the suicide of his friend, Suzanne Schnerr. Both the album and the single reached #3 in the Billboard charts, with Sweet Baby James selling more than 3 million copies in the United States alone. This success piqued tremendous interest in Taylor — prompting a 1971 Time Magazine cover story — and the single, "Carolina in My Mind", put him back into the charts. Sweet Baby James was received at its time as a folk-rock masterpiece, an album that effectively showcased Taylor's talents to the mainstream public, marked the direction he would take in following years, and made Taylor one of the main forces of the nascent movement. It earned several Grammy Award nominations including one for Album of the Year, and would be listed at #103 on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time in 2003. ("Fire and Rain" was also listed #227 on Rolling Stone's list of the Greatest Songs of All Time).
During the time Sweet Baby James was released, Taylor appeared with Dennis Wilson of The Beach Boys in a Monte Hellman film, Two-Lane Blacktop. In October 1970, he performed with Joni Mitchell, Phil Ochs, and the Canadian band Chilliwack at a Vancouver benefit concert that funded Greenpeace's protests of 1971 nuclear weapons tests by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission at Amchitka, Alaska. (This performance was released in 2009 on the album Amchitka, The 1970 Concert That Launched Greenpeace.) In January 1971, sessions for Taylor's next album, Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon, began. Released in April, the album also gained massive critical acclaim and contained Taylor's biggest Pop single in the U.S., a version of the Carole King standard "You've Got a Friend" (featuring backing vocals by Joni Mitchell), which reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in late July. The album itself reached #2 in the album charts, which would be Taylor's highest position ever on this list. In early 1972, Taylor received his first Grammy Award, for (Best Pop Vocal Performance, Male) for "You've Got a Friend" (King also won Song of the Year for the same song on that ceremony). The album went on to sell 2½ million copies in the United States alone.
November 1972 saw the release of Taylor's fourth album, One Man Dog. A concept album primarily recorded in his home recording studio, it featured cameos by Linda Ronstadt and consisted of eighteen short pieces of music put together. It was received with generally lukewarm reviews and, despite making the Top 10 of the Billboard Album Charts, overall sales were disappointing. The lead single "Don't Let Me Be Lonely Tonight" peaked at #18 on the Hot 100, and the follow-up, "One Man Parade", barely reached the Top 75. Almost simultaneously, Taylor married fellow singer-songwriter Carly Simon on November 3, in a small ceremony at her Murray Hill, Manhattan apartment. A post-concert party following a Taylor performance at Radio City Music Hall turned into a large-scale wedding party, and the Simon-Taylor marriage would find much public attention over the following years. They had two children, Sarah Maria "Sally" Taylor, born January 7, 1974, and Benjamin Simon "Ben" Taylor, born January 22, 1977.
less
|
|
