King, Taylor Reunion: So Hot, Someone Fainted

by Roger Friedman
FOX News
December 3, 2007

A woman actually fainted on Friday night during Carole King and James Taylor's first show (their fifth in three days) at West Hollywood's fabled Troubador nightclub.

The woman was pressed up to the lip of the stage in the small club, and was listening to Taylor explain how he wrote the song, "Sweet Baby James," in 1969 for the 1-year-old nephew who'd been named for him.

This was maybe a couple of minutes after the audience had stopped a long cheer and standing ovation for King's blues anthem made popular by Aretha Franklin, "(You Make Me Feel Like a) Natural Woman."

And the woman in question just went down.

"That was a first," Taylor said after paramedics removed the air-deprived female to the side of the club.

"Start over!" someone shouted from the standing room only floor space. (We were watching from the mezzanine above, where four rows of bench seats were filled, literally, to the rafters with celebrities and music-industry types.)

So we heard the story again.

James Taylor and Carole King invented the singer-songwriter movement 26 years ago, and returned to reclaim it late last week for a series of rare shows at Los Angeles' Troubador. (King, by the way, is only in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a writer, not a performer. Ha!)

The six historic performances - two a night from Wednesday through Friday - featured the original band with whom they played at the small Santa Monica Boulevard club in 1971.

Taylor said he'd often mentioned over the years that they should try and do something together again. The reason last week was to raise money for six non-profit groups through a Boston firm called tickets-for-charity.com.

One of the designees was MusiCares, part of the Grammy Foundation and National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, which honored Taylor last year.

And so it was that King, who is 65 and looks 10 years younger with her trademark cascade of curly hair, and Taylor, still a lanky drink of water at 59, recreated their landmark success of 1971 with band members Russ Kunkel on drums, Leland Sklar on bass and Danny Kortchmar on lead guitar.

Carole took her place at stage right at the piano, James was front and center on acoustic guitar.

The hits never stopped coming.

The two shows I saw on Friday night were each very good, although the late show - and last one in the series - was perhaps more relaxed and better sung.

For the six shows, the small audience was consistently dotted with celebrities from Joni Mitchell, the pair's cohort from years gone by, to siblings Jane and Peter Fonda, Rob Reiner, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Marsha (Mrs. Robin) Williams, Mary Kay Place, famous record producers Russ Titelman and Don Was, Warner Bros. chief Alan Horn, Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman, Colin Farrell, Rosanna Arquette, John Lithgow, John Cusack, the Eagles' Timothy B. Schmidt and, of course, King's (first) ex-husband and legendary collaborator, Gerry Goffin.

Taylor and King were never connected romantically and only briefly as artists. (In fact, Taylor and Kunkel at some point were involved in each other's lives. But that's a different story.)

It was in 1970 that King was working on "Tapestry," the album that would become the longest running No. 1 in history (until "Thriller" 13 years later). Taylor was simultaneously recording "Sweet Baby James" in an adjacent Los Angeles studio. They wound up playing on each other's albums, and performing together live as the work progressed.

King - who'd already had a career in the 1960s as one half of a hit writing duo with husband Goffin ("The Locomotion," "Chains," "Up on the Roof") - wound up giving Taylor a song she'd finished but hadn't yet recorded: "You've Got a Friend." He made it a hit and, as he said on Friday, "played it every night for the rest of my life."

It established both of them. In their wake came Carly Simon, to whom Taylor was married for a decade, Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell, Cat Stevens and floods of sensitive singer-songwriters.

But in the beginning it was Carole and James, and they demonstrated why on Friday night amply.

The 80-minute set ran thusly: "Blossom" - James, with Carole on piano, "So Far Away"-Carole, with James on guitar, Kortchmar's "Machine Gun Kelly" - James, introducing the band and "Kootch," who wrote the song, in particular, Taylor's "Carolina in My Mind" and King's "It's Too Late" with Carole, playing boogie-woogie piano breaks and Kootch doing searing guitar riffs, especially in Friday's second show.

It's amazing to think this was once a No. 1 radio hit. Nothing this sophisticated could ever survive on Top 40 now. That was followed by King's "Smackwater Jack" and Taylor's "Country Road," "Fire and Rain" and "Steamroller Blues."

The band took a break, and Taylor continued solo with "Something in the Way She Moves" explaining this was the song that his famous producer/manager Peter Asher (who was in the recording booth for all six shows last week) took to Paul McCartney and secured his Apple Records deal in 1968.

"George Harrison liked it so much he & [beat] & wrote it," James said, alluding to the similarities to the Beatles' "Something" on Abbey Road from the following year. There were lots of inside joke chuckles. Taylor's vocal phrasing is remains precise and poignant. (Careful listeners will recognize how the song also inspired Billy Joel's early hit, "She's Got a Way About Her.")

King followed with "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow," giving credit to Goffin for the lyrics, and then got a standing ovation for a rockin' blues version of "(You Make Feel Like a) Natural Woman."

After Taylor's lusty blues attack on "Steamroller," King returned with "I Feel the Earth Move." The set finished with the pairs duet on "You've Got a Friend," "Up on the Roof" and Taylor's "You Can Close Your Eyes."

For "Friend," Taylor - in one of several anecdotes - recalled how he'd first heard King play the song at the Troubador "standing up there" - he pointed to the mezzanine - "by that Christmas-y looking light. Carole insisted I release it before she did. I had no idea I'd be singing it every night for the rest of my life."

He added: "It's the best pop song I've ever heard."

So what made this music a hit 26 years ago and work again last week? What made that woman faint? King and Taylor are often described as "soft rock," but in fact, listening to them again, this is wrong. Taylor laughed that they were once thought of as folk singers, but tried hard to avoid it.

"Assiduously," Carole added.

Thanks to the band that played on most of their albums from 1970- 77, they were neither "soft "nor folk. Their music, as shown last week, often delved into blues and R&B, sometimes using the kind of pop-jazz phrasing that eventually turned up in Joni Mitchell's music, and that of Steely Dan, Paul Simon and Sting. For lack of a better word, there's also a total honesty to it, also. The music and the lyrics ring true.

When those albums were released, there was no artifice, no PR campaign or marketing plan. King, Taylor et al were songwriters simply expressing themselves to their generation, to their peers, about what they were going through.

They put out an album per year, with two singles. Of course there were no such things as videos. The audience only knew what they looked like from the album covers or from live performances. The music had to be real, and it was.

Concord Records recorded the shows for video and audio but only for "archival" purposes until a formal announcement is made. The word is that if Taylor and King are both happy with finished product, releases will follow.

Certainly the timing could not be better. King is about to be part of a book coming out in April called "Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon & and the Journey of a Generation."

If the book is as juicy and fun as Weller's current Michelle Phillips piece in Vanity Fair, all about the 1960s and '70s romances tying Phillips to Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper, then we're in a for a good read.

These pop stars were just as interesting as the current crop of Justin, Jessica, Britney, etc - only they were talented! That, you see, made all the difference in the world, and is why anyone cares about their music enough to faint more than a quarter of a century later.