It’s never too late to attend your first James Taylor concert | Columnists

It would be presumptuous of me to claim to know anything about the refreshing Berkshire ritual known as the annual James Taylor Fourth of July concerts at Tanglewood—especially since I attended my first one just last week. I suspect that the average, up-to-date reader of the Berkshire Eagle has helped populate the Tanglewood lawn or the Koussevitzky Music Shed several times over the years.

Maybe you were even responsible for one of those five-course candlelit meals, some even with seasonal or patriotic themes, that I watched with envy as my wife and I searched for our friends among the thousands on the lawn two hours before showtime.

If I hadn’t concluded that a James Taylor concert represented an ancient tribal ritual, at least by today’s fleeting standards of the social media age, it was hard to miss as we approached the bottleneck leading from the Lion’s Gate car park to the entrance of the famous music venue. This jam was caused by the crowds arriving at the same time, of course, but also by the carts many were pulling behind them.

I would not have been surprised to discover that these lightweight vehicles, groaning under the weight of everything from food and drinks to chairs and tables and maybe even foul weather shelters despite the atmospheric conditions on the evening of July 3 being beyond improvement, had been manufactured specifically for the Tanglewood audience. Were I more entrepreneurial, I might even try to design and market one myself – perhaps decorated with musical notes or the image of a musical giant associated with Tanglewood, such as Leonard Bernstein or perhaps even James Taylor himself.

I’m not sure why it took me so long to attend this, my first show by the legendary singer-songwriter. Perhaps it’s because no one offered me a ticket beforehand, as my friend Bruce did on this occasion. Certainly James – everyone else from Stockbridge to Boston seems to know him by his first name, so why not me – played a crucial role in my musical education. In fact, the first LP I bought, sometime in late adolescence, was “Sweet Baby James,” his second album.

I discovered his first album of the same name later, after borrowing it from a friend in college and never returning it. This song cycle was something of a revelation to me. The artist owed his fame to “Sweet Baby James,” but I found the music on his earlier album just as strong. My favorite song on that album, “Something in the Way She Moves,” opened the concert.

Life offers the average person, if they’re lucky, a handful of indescribable experiences. And one of them is hearing a beautiful song that has stuck with you for much of your life, sung by the artist who wrote it. I’m not a huge rock ‘n’ roll fan, as you may have noticed, but my casual observation is that many rock legends die young and those who survive have long since lost their voices.

James Taylor is a happy exception. He sounds just as good, if not better, than he did when “Sweet Baby James” shot to the top of the charts in 1970. And while that award isn’t comparable to his Presidential Medal of Freedom or the Tanglewood Medal he received at the end of the break, he’s one of the few artists whose songs I can sing along to loudly in the kitchen while making dinner without sounding like an idiot. The pitch and range of his rich baritone are a match for my far less celebrated instrument.

James nodded in his opening banter because the weather was perfect. I didn’t mind that I was seeing him on a screen and not in person. If you want to be completely accurate, I saw him in person too, but he was so far away that it took a bit of faith to accept that he was playing live. He and his band were about the size of ants at my distance from the stage.

But that didn’t matter. I get the impression that people come to Tanglewood – at least we merry band of lawn rats do – to enjoy the company of nature and friends. The music serves as an inspiring backdrop.

Plus, for me, this mountain cultural oasis is synonymous with apocalyptic weather. I usually keep one eye on whoever happens to be performing that night and the other on the gathering storm clouds and their battle cry of thunder and lightning. Then, when the deluge hits, I pat myself on the back, not for my good taste in music, but for making it back to the safety of my car before I got soaked. So what if I’m now stuck in rush hour traffic with everyone else trying to get off the mountain.

But as Mr. Taylor noted, the weather that evening could not have been better. The temperature was 70 degrees. The humidity was low. As the sunset flecked the dark blue sky with red clouds, you could have believed that a higher power had painted a patriotic motif not only on the Stars and Stripes tablecloth and paper plates of the sumptuous buffet belonging to the group before us—would it have killed them to offer their nearest neighbors, who were eating proletarian ham and cheese sandwiches, one of their extra mozzarella and cherry tomato skewers?—but on the sky itself.

Ralph Gardner Jr. is a journalist whose His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and New York Magazine. He can be reached at [email protected]. Find more of his work on Substack.