Free Fire and Rain by David Browne

fairly traumatized—“a bad moment for me,” he would later say. Although it was repaired, it never sounded the same.
    When a depression set in around Thanksgiving of his senior year, the family pulled him out. “I had a shattered brain,” he recalled, leading to a stint at McLean Hospital, a $36,400-a-year Boston-suburb infirmary that, with its cottages and lawns, resembled a college campus. The sight of her older brother living in a locked ward so upset Kate that she broke
down during a visit. One day at dinner in an adjoining ward, he looked over and saw—or thought he saw—Ray Charles. “I thought I was hallucinating,” he recalled. “It scared the shit out of me.” But his eyes didn’t deceive him; Charles, who’d been sent to McLean after a heroin bust, was actually there. The sight of one of his heroes in the ward haunted him for decades.
    After graduating from McLean’s affiliated school, Taylor gravitated to New York City and its folk and blues clubs. His parents put up the money for his first apartment, on the Upper West Side, where he had only a mattress and a radio. With Kortchmar and another friend, drummer Joel O’Brien, he formed a band, the Flying Machine; later, he and O’Brien relocated to the Hotel Albert on East 10th Street, home base of Tim Buckley, the Lovin’ Spoonful, and others whose music spilled out of Village clubs nearly every night. The band landed gigs at some of those spots, particularly the Night Owl, and Taylor’s songwriting began to blossom with songs like “Night Owl,” which alluded to his dark side. Like his physique, his singing voice was sturdy and stoic, with an underlying ruggedness.
    Although the Flying Machine recorded a few of its songs, the band struggled, barely taking in $10 a night at clubs. By then, Taylor had discovered heroin. “My family has a history of addiction,” he recalled, “and I’m probably genetically predisposed to substance abuse. So I didn’t stand a chance. Those drugs, powerful drugs, were as available as a beer at the bar. The places I was living, the people I was spending time with—everybody was experimenting with everything all the time. So it was just a matter of time. There wasn’t as much information available about what it meant to be getting high and how addictive things were. You still thought you could take some drugs and not get addicted to them.”
    Taylor was wrong, of course. Once again, his body crashed, and Isaac drove up to New York to haul his drug-addled son back home to North Carolina. “Sort of to lick my wounds a little bit,” James later said. He
was only home about nine months before he left again—this time for London, again with funding from his parents. Only nineteen, Taylor arrived in the city in late 1967. At first he lived with a friend of the family’s from the Vineyard who had a place in Manhattan; later, his duffel bag became his home. By coincidence, Kortchmar had a contact in London. Several years before, one of Kortchmar’s bands, the King Bees, had played behind Peter and Gordon. Kortchmar heard Asher was now working at Apple and was in charge of signing acts. Kortchmar didn’t think Taylor would actually call Asher; his friend already seemed battered by his experiences in life and the music business. But Kortchmar also knew Taylor was capable of doing the unexpected.

    Wearing a black suit with a yellow tie, Paul McCartney arrived at the Apple office on Baker Street in the early months of 1968 to chair a meeting. The Beatles’ attempt to control their destiny after the death of their manager, Brian Epstein, Apple was a multi-legged beast—part record company, boutique, film studio, electronics company, and any other whim that came to mind. Also in the meeting was Asher, newly appointed as Apple’s A&R man. Asher’s connections with McCartney ran deep. Although he’d