Has Tanglewood heard James Taylor’s swan song?
By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July 4, 2025 – After Many a Summer Dies the Swan is a 1939 novel by Aldous Huxley, the Englishman who moved to California to tell Americans about our Brave New World. The title repurposes a line from British Lord Tennyson about Tithonus, to whom Zeus granted immortality, but not eternal youth.
The summer of 1968 was when Zeus introduced James Taylor to the Beatles, at the moment they needed someone to make a record that would carry their brand into the pop music marketplace. Something in the way James sang and played guitar pleased the Fab Four, so they put their brand on his first record, which catapulted him to the head of the class of songwriters who would sing for their supper, stardom, and/or asylum (not the label).
However fraught was that early launch, it did land him on the Tanglewood stage by the summer of 1974; 51 summers later, those youthful songs still draw many thousands of fans to the Berkshires every year. If its true that he composes and sings for his own well-being, then his method is generic enough to be helpful to his massed band of fans, even as it gets thinned by the Grim Reaper (not the band).
When his friend Carole King heard his loneliness in Fire and Rain, she responded with You’ve Got a Friend, which delivers generic medicine to anyone Mr. Lonely brushes up against (not the song).
Exiting the pretty full Koussevitsky Music Shed Friday, July 4, 2025, people wondered aloud if he meant it when he hinted that what he was doing he was doing for the last time, or one final time. Last time at Tanglewood? Last time on the Fourth of July? Last time with his All Star band?
At the score of shows I’ve attended, the loudest roar always is elicited by the line about the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston being covered with snow. Not so tonight, not even close. After he introduced the Carole King song, then said “No Kings,” the audience let loose a frightful roar of derision.
Such is the dormant power in the hands of America’s pop music idols. They sing for their suppers, they find asylum in the embrace of mass fandom. But they don’t use the stage or the microphone to berate republicans, because republicans buy records and concert tickets too.
Same as James Taylor, I’m enrolled in the 48th Light Infantry of the vaunted Baby Boom Brigade. But republicans have breached the walls of my asylum, and various benefits birthright citizenship used to qualify me for decrease as benefits increase for them that has millions, billions more than they need.
As silent as the Koussevitsky Music Shed is an hour after every show, it remains to be seen whether the pen is mightier than the microphone. God bless us all if the repairs required to mend the torn fabric of the American republic require other weaponry than what delivered Common Sense to our revolutionary founders 249 years ago!
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