Given the era that I came of age my embrace of rock and roll was seriously delayed. Prior to late adolescence I owned but two records, both of them 45s. They were Wipeout by the Surfaris and A Well Respected Man by the Kinks. I bought the songs when I was twelve years old after hearing bunkmates play them at summer camp.
My first LP was James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James. I must have been sixteen or seventeen. It was his second album for Apple Records. His eponymous debut album, as he recalled on Wednesday night at Tanglewood, came after a nervous audition for Paul McCartney and George Harrison. Apparently, he was able to overcome his awe of the Beatles because Apple, their new record label, signed him as their first non-British act.
Taylor told the story — I’m tempted to call him James both because of the way his career coincides with my life and because he seems to be on a first name basis with the fans that have attended his sold-out Tanglewood shows for fifty years — after a montage of clips of the musician singing Something In the Way She Moves over the decades, my favorite song on that first album, played on the jumbo screen on Tanglewood’s lawn. Then Taylor and his talented live band took over, gracefully eliding into the song on stage. At intermission he was awarded the Tanglewood Medal to add to his Presidential Medal of Freedom, Kennedy Center Honors and induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
I also own that first album but I didn’t buy it. I stole it. I didn’t really steal it. I borrowed it from my friend Brook Richardson in college and neglected to return it. I’m hoping that she also confiscated one of my albums. But given how paltry my record collection was back then that’s unlikely.
My relationship with Tanglewood was almost as slow to materialize as that with rock and roll. It was only in the last decade or so that I attended my first performance at the celebrated music venue in the Berkshires and my reaction was mixed. The beauty of the place, with its mountain vistas, is unassailable. But the bumper to bumper traffic arriving and leaving, often accompanied by apocalyptic summer downpours, made me wonder whether I wouldn’t have been just as happy at home.
I was prepared for the worst on Wednesday night, given that the crowd for James Taylor, a Berkshires resident and hometown hero — so what if he grew up in North Carolina before attending Milton Academy — dwarfs a typical Boston Symphony Orchestra concert featuring the works of, say, Prokofiev and Dworák.
But Tanglewood has parking down to a science and we were able to locate our friends with a minimum of anguish, among the thousands of others already crowding the lawn two hours before showtime. Speaking only for myself, you come for the food, drink, company and outdoors and stay for the show.
Our dinners — ham and cheese sandwiches on a baguette — were made mockery of by the candlelight spreads on adjoining properties. But the beauty of wine, or in my case a flask of vodka washed down with a cold IPA, is that it quickly levels the playing field.
Watching a concert on a distant screen arguably had less of an impact than if we’d scored seats in the Koussevitzky Music Shed. But outdoors had its compensations. The sound was crystalline as it carried Taylor’s warm instantly recognizable baritone across the lawn and into the darkening skies. Not only did the weather cooperate but the sunset painted the heavens in patriotic blues and stripes of reddening clouds on July 4th eve.
There’s something inescapably emotional, even for those of us who try to hide ours, when you hear the opening chords of songs that have provided the soundtrack to your own life — Sweet Baby James, Carolina In My Mind, Fire and Rain. Predictably, a cheer went up when James sang “The first of December was covered with snow/so was the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston.” But the evening’s charmed spirit transcended the music or the fortuitous meteorology. It felt like a shared gift briefly held before being sent off into the ether to mingle with the brightening stars.
Coming at the end of days that saw the Supreme Court rewrite the Constitution and Joe Biden’s alarming slide into senescence — my hunch is that he’d still score a landslide victory were November’s election limited only to the Tanglewood demographic — the show felt like a unifying and much needed sedative.
The American flag was displayed in the non-confrontational way that I remembered it, as an inclusive symbol and in the case of that neighbor’s spread as the motif on their paper tablecloth. As I said, I liked my sandwich but if you’re going to go to the effort of carting in a feast — mozzarella skewers, chicken and biscuits, fruit salad in individual stars and stripes bowls— you ought to at least invite your immediate lawn neighbors to share the leftovers.
And on an enchanting evening when everything else seemed to go right we escaped the Tanglewood parking lot and made it home without encountering a single jam. Of course, we left a bit early. We were loading our folding chairs into the trunk of our car to the distant accompaniment of You’ve Got a Friend. But it was a small price to pay for a night where the forces of affection seemed everywhere.
Ralph Gardner, Jr. is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found be found on Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.
