“Impossibly good”: The moment James Taylor got The Beatles’ seal of approval
To be the Hall of Fame-inducted, six-time Grammy-winning rocker with the name of James Taylor should probably not incur issues of self-esteem, unless the most respected ears in music are in the room, that is.
It’s coming up to six decades to a day that changed the now 20-album strong Bostonian’s life, as he faced the scrutiny of The Beatles themselves.
A 19-year-old with a small opioid habit and a lot of ambition made a trip to London after a failed attempt at collaborating with his first band, Flying Machine, so he recorded a 20-minute demo that he got to Peter Asher, the new talent scout for The Beatles’ new Apple label. As hindsight would have assumed to be a given, Mr Asher saw a walking hit when he heard one, and secured the singer an audition with none other than George Harrison and Paul McCartney.
“The Beatles’ offices were in Baker Street then, and I auditioned there,” Taylor recalled during an interview with Uncut, “Paul recalls my playing with him and George in a small room. They asked Peter if he would like to produce me, and he said, ‘Yeah’.” That monumental day made a teenage James Taylor the first non-British and outside artist to be signed to The Beatles’ label.
“It was unbelievable,” he giddily recalled in 2021 while speaking to Guitar World, “To be in London, the first person signed to their label in 1968, was really like catching the big wave”.
At the time, the Fab Four had been recording their ninth studio album, known as the White Album, at Soho’s Trident studios, since Abbey Road did not have a working eight-track machine, and Taylor recorded his debut album between their recording sessions. Both Harrison and McCartney went on to play on his album James Taylor, which was released in 1969 to critical success. However, the label’s change in direction meant that most acts that were not The Beatles got dropped, but Peter Asher kept on producing him.
Nonetheless, Taylor still remembers the Beatles on good terms: “We are still good and dear friends. Although, in my opinion, the first album was a little over-produced, to have been acknowledged by and green-lighted by The Beatles was for me like a dream.”
The partnership lived on in The Beatles’ own work, too, as Taylor’s auditioning song ‘Something In The Way She Moves’ later went on to inspire The Beatles’ ageless hit ‘Something’. After being sung to by this powerful young voice, Harrison made it ‘Something’ of his own for 1969’s Abbey Road. Although his generosity could have been seen as young naivety, Taylor was seemingly happy to share the track: “I don’t think he intentionally ripped anything off, and all music is borrowed from other music,” he explained in the book Hearts of Darkness: James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Cat Stevens, and the Unlikely Rise of the Singer-Songwriter.
Although he later went on to have his stardom in another continent, for another label, and long after The Beatles split, that moment in a room in London with the band’s approval was fundamental to a young man’s success: “That was like something that would happen in a sort of daydream. It was just totally improbable and impossibly good”.
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