Songs of Innocence & Experience: James Taylor at the Chase Center, Oct. 29, 2021.
The other night I went to see James Taylor. How embarrassing, right? It’s not exactly something you brag about on Facebook, and as for sharing pictures or videos to Instagram, you’d have to have a very different set of friends than I do to bother. There is nothing cool about James Taylor, nor is he remotely photogenic; his concerts are a nest of arthritic old people who have to struggle very hard to get to their seats. Going to see James Taylor is an admission of decrepitude, but I went to see James Taylor, because a friend from childhood bought us tickets for my birthday, because as she rightly pointed out, his was the music of our shared past.
The friend who took me never goes to concerts, and one reason I think she wanted to go with me is that I always do. Just last week I saw The Rolling Stones at SoFi stadium in L.A. and the singer Graham Parker at a supper club in downtown Oakland, and as that implies getting to and from, and in and out, of concert venues big or small holds no terrors for me. I had never been to the Chase Center, which is the Warriors home court, and it was nice as those places go. Easy. Because we are both more (her) or less (me) fitness freaks, we had no trouble getting to our nosebleed seats, which, I assured her, were no worse than almost every other seat in the arena. My motto is, you’re either in the first ten rows or you may as well be anywhere else.
The Chase Center is very steep though, and we saw some pretty precarious situations unfold. A few weeks ago, someone literally died by falling out of their seat from the upper tiers, but it was at a Phish show, so the presumption is that they were out of their heads. Still!
Anyway, after we had clambered to our perch, we settled down for the show. The opener was Jackson Browne, whose music we both also loved in High School, but even though I would normally say I like his work better, and in my brain like he was a bigger artist, than Taylor at the time, I didn’t think he was very dynamic or interesting. For one thing, he mostly played new songs. The nerve of him! The poor guy, though, since truly as an older artist, you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Last week I sneered at The Rolling Stones because most of the set was written before 1980, but Browne’s set made me realize what a wise decision that could be. The audience was comatose throughout ’til finally — FINALLY — he played the songs “Doctor My Eyes” and “The Pretender”. He encored with “Running on Empty,” and people really seemed to enjoy that, especially since James Taylor joined him for it.
The good thing about Taylor coming out with Jackson Browne was that when he came back on for his own set, no one was surprised to see how aged he looked. In the interval, the women next to me had related a comedy routine she’d seen recently during which Larry David mocked bald men who wore hats to hide it, but I thought the hat was a good decision. He took it off periodically and there was something Dickensian about him, when his head wasn’t covered. He looked like Fagin in Oliver Twist.
Do you remember what he looked like back in the 1970s, though? At the time I was way too young to have a crush on an old guy in his 20s, but when I got back from the concert my sister pulled out her old vinyl copy of the album “Fire and Rain” and we gazed at it in awe. The dude was hot. In fact, one thing I remembered as I watched him perform last night was of reading Rolling Stone cover story about Carly Simon in which she related meeting him at a party and immediately retiring to the bathroom “to fuck.” I remember it because, at age 11 or so, it was so shocking. But now it makes more sense.
He is not hot now, however, not by a long shot. And the truth is, back when I was eleven, I was reading the story about Carly Simon because it was her music I was interested in, not his. But that doesn’t mean that my entire youth isn’t suffused with it. In fact, it is seeped in it, so deep. It stinks of chlorine, and sunshine, and fruity jello which we licked off our hands at swim meets, of the smell of the vinyl in the station wagons we carpooled in, of it blasting out of our close and play record players, in our bedrooms, late at night. Songs like “Mexico,” “Carolina on My Mind,” “Sweet Baby James,” “How Sweet It Is,” all that stuff. “Fire and Rain” in particular hits differently. As a kid I thought it was a pretty song about a girl named Suzanne. As an adult who has been more or less in a constant state of quasi-grieving this year, it killed me. I have a friend named Joe Sloan who passed away in his sleep last week, and my diving coach Ryan’s wife just died of breast cancer, leaving two little kids. Yeah, in the context of adulthood, that line “….but I always thought I’d see you again” is almost now almost unbearable.
To be honest, James Taylor’s show wasn’t as snoozy as I thought it would be, although it was the kind of music you have to bring your entire past to, and for me, that isn’t very enjoyable. I guess, if you cut away all the snobbery, I do like some of his songs; indeed, the only one I truly loathed was the encore, on which he was joined by Jackson Browne, and which was a Browne-written song called “Take It Easy.” Perhaps you’ve heard it: the band that it’s associated with is quite popular, but around the time it was a hit I fled AM radio for punk rock. Ever since then I have liked new music better than old and hard music rather than soft but watching James Taylor was the first time that revelling in nostalgia made sense to me.
My friend, who is not a real music person, is different, but even she had her doubts about the proceedings. As we were walking out, a cop asked us how the show was, and my friend said, “It was great! It was full of innocent old people listening to innocent old music!” And that was exactly what it was. I mean, seriously: “Shower the people you love with love?” “How sweet it is to be loved by you?” Lovely thoughts or sure, but it was sobering to think of the contrast between then and now — the half century gap, during which the world has hardened so much and that sound — his thin, reedy voice, the flat tempo, the careful instrumentation — now sounds as old-fashioned as a hurdy-gurdy, or a concertina.
Seeing that show with my friend from middle school made the experience even more poignant too: when I regard my past in her company, it feels like it went so fast and also like it’s almost over. To put it in perspective, if our own mothers (who were friends) had gone out one night to see a musician from their shared youth, it would have been by Eddie Cantor. I wonder who our teenagers would go to see fifty years from now? The Foo Fighters? Cardi B? Somehow I can’t picture it.
Songs of Innocence & Experience: James Taylor at the Chase Center, Oct. 29, 2021. was originally published in Fools Rush In Again on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.