James Taylor has crafted plenty of immortally classic songs like "Fire and Rain" and "You've
Got a Friend," but his personal life has been far from smooth.
So let's take a look to long ago and far away as we investigate the tragic life of James
Taylor.
Taylor's young adulthood was unfortunately marred by urgent health issues, both mental
and physical.
At age 16, he dropped out of high school in order to form a band with his brother, Alex.
James was living in New York at the time, and in 1965, at the age of 17, he developed
a deep and persistent depression.
He ended up spending his college fund on a stay at a psychiatric hospital.
It was then that he started taking the time to write songs in earnest, often looking inward
for material and using music for its therapeutic purposes.
After starting a band called the Flying Machine in 1966, Taylor moved to England, where he
won the favor of Peter Asher, a talent scout who worked for Apple Records at the time.
That label released Taylor's self-titled debut album in 1968.
It didn't sell very well, and Taylor couldn't immediately promote it because he returned
to the United States to seek professional help for drug addiction.
His life and career were back on track by the early 70s, only for him to suffer another
setback.
He was riding his motorcycle near his home on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts when
he crashed and sustained serious injuries, including two broken hands.
There's a common theory about the meaning behind Taylor's 1970 hit song "Fire and Rain."
Supposedly, some of his friends arranged for his girlfriend to fly in and surprise him
at one of his concerts, but the plane crashed on the way.
However, that's not quite correct, and the truth is actually more complicated and arguably
even more tragic.
Suzanne Schnerr was a friend from Taylor's teenage years whom he played with in the band
Flying Machine, and the two of them used to hang out and get high together.
In 1968, when Taylor was recording his first album, he learned that Schnerr had killed
herself months earlier.
The news had been purposely withheld from him by their mutual friends because they didn't
want to shake him up.
As for the rest of the song, according to a 1972 interview with Rolling Stone, the second
verse is about his personal and professional anxiety, while the third verse refers to his
recuperation in a residential treatment facility.
Taylor's time with Flying Machine in the late 1960s was when he honed the musical chops
that would propel his career for decades, but it was also when he got his first taste
of hard drugs.
The band's drummer, Joel O'Brien, was the one who introduced him to heroin.
That began an addiction to opiates that lasted for the better part of 20 years.
From late 1967 to early 1968, Taylor was clean.
But as he explained to Rolling Stone in 1973,
"Then I started to take a lot of codeine.
I went to Europe and started to take opium, and then I got into smack heavily for about
nine months."
"I could've disappeared down the drain really quite easily at that point."
After five months in an American rehab facility, Taylor was able to quit heroin.
Upon his discharge, a Chicago doctor got him onto a methadone maintenance regimen, but
after about 18 months of that, he was back on drugs.
He soon became reliant on methadone, using it from the mid-70s until 1983, when he decided
he needed to free himself of all intense substances.
The 1982 overdose-related death of his friend, comedian John Belushi, is what inspired his
own big life change.
His journey to sobriety utilized 12-step programs as well as vigorous exercise.
Looking back at that time in his life, he told The Telegraph in 2015,
"One thing that addiction does is, it freezes you.
You don't develop, you don't learn the skills by trial and error of having experiences and
learning from them and finding out what it is you want and how to go about getting it,
by relating with other people.
You short-circuit all of that stuff and just go for the button that says this feels good
over and over again."
"It's been my experience that drugs are just a waste of time.
I mean, they're just dead time.
They're gone.
There's nothing to be- there's nothing to be learned from them."
Taylor has been married three times.
His first one, to fellow singer-songwriter Carly Simon, whom he wed in November 1972,
was the most famous and tumultuous.
They recorded the hit novelty song "Mockingbird" together, and they also had two children,
but otherwise, their marriage was full of drama and bad news.
In her memoir Boys in the Trees, Simon wrote extensively of Taylor's drug use, emotional
distance, and infidelity.
At one point, Taylor even set up his mistress in a studio apartment a few blocks from the
family home in New York.
Their union ultimately ended in 1983 after Simon tired of Taylor's two-timing.
Taylor has reportedly remained cold toward his ex-wife in the years since their split.
When Simon wanted to perform at a charity event after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings,
she was told that she couldn't because Taylor was going to be there.
In 2018, Taylor told The Telegraph that he doesn't speak with Simon anymore, noting,
"That's sort of the point about divorce."
When you look at the careers of James Taylor and his siblings, you might start to think
that musical skills were written in the Taylor family's genetic code.
James' younger siblings, Kate and Livingston, have both released plenty of work, and their
older brother Alex was also a singer-songwriter.
He released half a dozen albums until his life was cut short when he passed away at
the age of 46.
Like other members of his family, Alex struggled with substance abuse.
In March 1993, he traveled to the Orlando area to hit the studio where he'd recorded
some of his albums.
While there, he passed out and was declared comatose by the time he arrived at a local
hospital.
He never regained consciousness and died six days later, on March 12, coincidentally James'
45th birthday.
His death was attributed to his long battle with alcoholism.
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