Kate Taylor – An Xperience Interview

Kate Taylor – An Xperience Interview – by Liam Sweeny.

James Taylor has seen fire, and he’s seen rain. But he probably first saw both of them with his sister, Kate. And I have a story. I was going to interview Kate Taylor on a Tuesday, and the prior Saturday, I was emptying our storage unit. I was throwing away beat-up, scratched records, and I was about to toss a stack in the dumpster when I happened to look before launch, and it was “Sister Kate,” Kate’s debut album. Freaky, right? Well, I went home, and the phone rang. It was Kate. I thought it was Tuesday; she thought it was Saturday. I’m sure she was right. I’m also sure that you all were meant to read this. She will be at Caffe Lena in Saratoga on November 1.

RRX: I want to talk about “Sister Kate.” We have to, because I listened to it and I was blown away. And you just have a great story personally, going back up until now. And you have something new coming up. “Why Wait!” So tell us about Kate, and how “Sister Kate” and “Why Wait” came to be?

KT: Yes.

RRX: So let’s talk about that, ‘cause I just listened to a little bit of it and it sounds very, very tasty.

KT: I had met Peter Asher with James in London back in ‘69. I had gone over there to make sure that the Beatles were taking good care of James, because that was very important for this 18-year-old person to be able to do this. So I went over, and he had been recording with Peter on the Apple label, and yes, they were taking good care of him. But in the meantime, I got to meet Peter, and we went to his sort of summer cottage.

It was in June, and we went up to the country place out there somewhere and had tea, and there were a lot of his friends there. And James and I climbed down into this ancient stone-lined, empty swimming pool that was in the backyard. And we sang some of the songs that we sang together in earlier years. And they’re like, “You know, it sounded great.” I mean, to me, it was so much fun. Well, of course, singing with James is the ultimate.

A little while later, I came back home. I just moved to Martha’s Vineyard from – I didn’t even know where I was living before – Cambridge, I guess. At one point, the phone rang, and it was Peter Asher telling me that he was moving to Los Angeles, and did I want to make a record? And I said, by all means. Well, I actually said, “Let me think about it.” Yes.

So I flew out to LA and we started to make this record. He had just finished working on James’s record, was it “Sweet Baby James,” maybe? It was his first record that he made with Peter in Los Angeles. Peter had been the head of A&R on the Beatles label. And James knocked on the drum, and that’s a whole story in itself. But Peter was now managing him and producing him. And so he set up the same situation with me.

RRX: So that must have been an amazing time.

KT: We were making “Sister Kate,” and it was a great time to be in Los Angeles. There were all these people on the cusp of these incredible careers. And of course, nobody could really anticipate what was going to happen with all these, but Jackson Browne and the Eagles, and Linda Ronstadt and Joni Mitchell and James, Carole King, you know. It was a wonderful time to be there because everything was fresh and everybody was excited, and it was kind of the beginning of this whole new phase of music in America, and there I was.

RRX: So what happened after that? Did you just keep hitting the road and the studio?

KT: I did a tour, and then I came home, and I realized that I really needed a little time to recharge and collect myself. I went home, I went into a friend’s teepee, and I said, I’ve got to have one. But I realize now that I needed grounding. I bought some canvas. I got a pattern. I sewed, hand-sewed a teepee, went up to Maine, and got the poles. Set the thing up. It was like six years later that James came into my teepee yard and said that he was changing record labels, and that they’d given him the opportunity to record someone … and he asked me if I wanted to make a record. I said, by all means, and we got working on that

RRX: Now, there’s a story about Linda Ronstadt, isn’t there?

KT: When I was in LA, Jackson Browne had approached Peter about producing him and being his manager. Peter thought about it, and he thought about James, and that perhaps it was just too close to have these two singer-songwriters on the same sort of roster, you know? Who gets what band and what … just so “two cooks.” He turned Jackson down, and then he told me that Linda Ronstadt had also asked him if he would be her manager and producer. He and I talked about it and agreed that it would also be cutting it close to the bone – Linda and I, you know, who gets what song? It was just a little bit too close.

So he turned Linda down. And then I came home and I realized that I was like a little gal with a finger in the socket. I was so excitable, and I realized that I needed some grounding. So the teepee was perfect. I didn’t know this at the time, but looking back on it, I can see that teepee was just the right medicine for me at that time.

I called Linda, or I saw her, maybe at a show. And I said, “Well, look, I’m not going to be doing any touring, and I’m not recording right now. So why don’t you call Peter and let him know that he can, that I say it’s all right if he manages and produces you.” And so she did … and they had this amazing string of incredible recordings, and it was really perfect. I feel like the fairy godmother.

I would be at home, and I met my husband, and we had our first child, and I was doing another thing. But I used to sit and watch the Grammys, and I’d see Peter win another one for best producer or something. And I said, “Now, someday I would like to work with Peter again.” He continued to work with James for about twenty years, so Peter was very close to the family. I would see him occasionally at a show, or he would come to some family events and things. So I knew him, I was in touch with him, but we were definitely in different sort of spheres.

RRX: So let’s talk about “Why Wait!” Was was that road like?

KT: In 2007 or 2008, I started to kind of rekindle my performing. I had made a record, kind of recorded it at home, called “The Beautiful Road.” I was getting back up and doing some performing, and I was going to be in the City, in New York, at the Metropolitan Room. I got in touch with Peter, and I said, ”You know, are you gonna be in New York at this time because I’ve got a show and I’d love it if you would come.” And lo and behold, he came. It was lovely to see him, and I sang it, I sang for him. I don’t know whether this was psychosomatic or what, but I had the most horrific cases of laryngitis. I rarely get this, but here I was, doing the sound check, and it was like my mouth would open and air would come out, but no sound. The waiters who were setting up the tables and things, they looked over like, “Oh no, poor girl.” But there’s something about the adrenaline that you have pumping through you when you’re on stage … so I was able to make some noise. I told the audience, I said, ‘You’re just going to have to imagine all the fabulous notes that I’m not hitting that I usually do.”

So I made it through, and it sounded OK. Peter and I kind of rekindled our friendship, and I ended up using some of his band on my shows when I got to California. I opened for him a couple of times, and we had a nice situation, just sort of very familial. And then COVID hit, and everybody was off the road.

Peter and I were out in Los Angeles and his manager realized that 2021 was the 50th anniversary of “Sister Kate.” This was 2020 or something, and we realized that an anniversary was coming up, and we decided to make a record. So I flew to Los Angeles in a hazmat suit. We started the record, and it turned out that a lot of the fellows who had been on the “Sister Kate” record were also sidelined because of COVID. They had gone on to make these amazing careers touring with giants, but they were all off the road. So a lot of the original players on “Sister Kate” came and played on “Why Wait!”

So that was really fun. It was so satisfying for me and so gratifying. I was just happy to be with these people, hear them play, watch Peter do his thing. It was nice. So we put out “Why Wait!” And then we did a tour with Albert Lee, Peter and I, and a couple of other people. It had a wonderful drummer who had worked with Paul McCartney. We did a tour, Peter and I, we fell back into our friendship again, and it was nice. That was a nice kind of bookend for that particular phase of my life and my singing career, I guess you call it. Anyway, so there you are.

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