Insider Preview: The James Taylor Story Story
Some stories have more of a story behind them than others. Granted, I’m no Dith Pran, nor even a William Miller, for that matter; pretty much everything I’ve written for the Fretboard Journal has been a simple matter of an idea followed by a couple emails and a conversation. A couple of times I’ve had to find someplace to eat while the conversation took place, and those conversations usually led to recordings that were a pain in the ass to transcribe, but that barely warrants a grumpy post on Facebook. Jason’s never threatening me at deadlines, I’m never trying to smuggle contraband photos through customs and I’ve never been, um, waylaid by groupies, so to speak. But my next story, perhaps my biggest story yet? That one has a story.
Back in the Spring of 2017 John Pizzarelli told me he had news.
A little backstory within the story: John and I have been friends more or less since we first met back in March of 2002. I was broadening my horizons, working at a hysterically popular lunch spot in Seattle, making sandwiches and slicing meat. One day, the line well out the door and me in first position at the service counter, two guys start squeezing past the line, drawing more than a few glances and my less than considered attention. One’s in a suit, for crying out loud, and the other’s in a Late Night with Conan O’Brien varsity jacket.
Oh goody.
“Can I help you!?!?” I sneer at them, channeling the former New Yorker that helped get me through the busiest of days at the restaurant.
“We’re just having a look. We’re friends of [the boss’s son],” says the guy in the suit. Wonderful, more New York hot shots to glad-hand.
I mention the line, they say they’re coming back later.
And they did, with an older gentlemen, after things had quieted down. They sat at the table and the boss took good care of them. The conversation was loud and lively. With time to think, I stood at the counter and listened, and then it clicked…
“You’re John Pizzarelli! I’ve got your records!”
Yup. John, in the suit, with his brother Martin in the Conan O’Brien jacket, and Bucky. They were performing that weekend with the Seattle Pops at Benaroya Hall. They comped us. I saw Diana Krall in the lobby during intermission. It was a great show. I got some contact info and sent John some salumi as a thank you. We struck up a correspondence, I took him to the good places to eat when he came back through Seattle, and we became friends.
Anyway, John had told me he had news before, but couldn’t tell me, yet. That was the Paul McCartney record he worked on, Kisses on the Bottom, back in 2011. He signed an NDA for that one and stuck to it. This time… well, I don’t know if he signed an NDA or not, but when James Taylor reached out and asked him to help with an album of standards, I wasn’t the first to know, but I knew long before I should have, probably. I hate to admit it, but I started scheming immediately: Brian Saunders, Fly on the Wall in James Taylor’s barn while he and John craft one hip record. John kept me in the loop, I dropped hints, John kept saying, “We’ll see,” of course. He’s making a record with freakin’ James Taylor! Is he gonna screw that up by asking if his writer-pal can ride shotgun on the next trip to the Berkshires? Nope.
Photo: Ellyn Kusmin
As Nat “King” Cole’s 2019 centennial approached I got the idea for the Oscar Moore feature that ran in Issue 45. John started working on his For Centennial Reasons record. We chatted. I wrote the story. I kinda gave up on the James Taylor idea. In September of 2019 John started talking about ideas for a new record of his own. He picked my brain for tunes. In December he booked a week at Birdland to work the material, followed by a couple days in the studio. He told me he’d like me to come to NYC, he wanted my ears on these tunes. I started scheming again, but fate intervened: in January I learned that a memorial service for a dear friend was happening in New York the week before John’s Birdland gig. There was no way I could stretch out a stay that long, so I conveyed my regrets to John, but looked forward to seeing him, nonetheless.
And, guess what? John told me that week before his run at Birdland was the week American Standard was coming out, and he’d be in New York with James, playing a couple promotional concerts and doing the talk shows. Maybe we could work something out…
We got the ball rolling. John gave me an email address, that got me forwarded to management, who passed me on to the PR firm working the release. There was back and forth. That led to more back and forth. I aimed high, hoping for some in-person time, a chance to take some photos. I lowered my expectations, but clung to a meager hope that I might get into a sound check with my camera. A phone interview was scheduled for the week before I would be in NYC. James got laryngitis and the interview was canceled. My emails stopped getting answers and I started looking for other things to do while I was in the city.
That last week of February, making that trip, the memorial service, upended plans, substitute plans somewhat tenuous, and suddenly there’s all this talk of a pandemic… I went to NYC. John still got me on the list for a couple of the shows. I met John’s co-producer on American Standard, Dave O’Donnell, who could barely contain his enthusiasm for a Fretboard Journal feature (“That’s got to happen!”). My substitute plans fell apart, then came back together, then got changed again (more about that in Issue 48). I walked from the Upper West Side to the East Village and back a couple times. I made a grumpy waiter at Barney Greengrass laugh. One night I inadvertently walked past both the apartment where my friend had died and the nursing home Bucky Pizzarelli was in. (He passed away at home a few weeks later.) I hugged so many people, and on the day New York City recorded its first case of COVID-19 I flew home to Seattle.
I tried a few more times to reach the PR folks, angling to get some time with James while he was scheduled to be in Tacoma on his summer tour, but then everything fell apart, the world locked down, the tour was canceled. I set up the home office and settled in to write the story that I did manage to get while I was in NYC.
Then, in the middle of June I just started over. I went back to that first contact John gave me. Again I was passed along to management, but rather than another handoff, we sorted it out and before long, even though, as they told me, James was even busier during the pandemic than he would have been on tour, we booked another phone interview, and on Thursday, July 16, shortly after 10am PDT, I was interviewing James Taylor for the Fretboard Journal. Look for the story in Issue 47, later this year...