James Taylor - In Concert live at the BBC 1970

00:00 With A Little Help From My Friends 03:45 Fire And Rain 07:30 Rainy Day Man 12:18 Steamroller 15:38 Greensleeves 18:40 Highway Song 23:37 Carolina In My Mind 27:54 Long Ago And Far Away 30:20 Sweet Baby James 33:37 Riding On A Railroad 36:18 You Can Close Your Eyes (incomplete)

By 1970, Taylor had already endured a lifetime’s worth of formative troubles. He’d fallen into deep depression while still in high school, spent nine months in a psychiatric hospital, taken up and quit heroin, bottomed out and spent six months in recovery, underwent vocal cord surgery, taken up methedrine, gone into methadone treatment, had an album flop, and broken his hands and feet in a motorcycle wreck. Fire and rain indeed. But he’d also found favor with the Beatles, becoming the first American signed on their Apple label and recruiting Paul McCartney and George Harrison to play on his “Carolina in My Mind.” At the end of the sixties, the world at large didn’t know the name James Taylor, but his fellow musicians knew it soon would.

Grouch: I much prefer the early Taylor to the later Taylor, and the album he cut with Apple records remains one of my favorite Taylor albums.