Author(s): RIBOWSKY MARK

Music

In 1970 a scraggly, antiheroic young man from North Carolina by way of Massachusetts began presenting a comforting new sound, a kind never heard before. Within a year of his first serious album, the rock icons of the '60s were gone: the Beatles, Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison. When young ears sought a new sound, there was Fire and Rain and You've Got a Friend, and a new Southern California-fed branch of pop music. Taylor was its reluctant leader. Remarkably, while so many other stars have fallen, Taylor has survived: his 2015 release, Before This World , edged out Taylor Swift and went to #1 on the charts. Today he is in better physical and probably mental condition than during the whirlwind when he influenced music so heavily, the decade when magazines and newspapers printed feverish stories about his gawky hunkiness, his love affair with Joni Mitchell, his glittery but bollixed marriage to Carly Simon, his endlessly carried-out heroin habit, and sometimes even his music. Despite it all, Taylor has become the nearest thing to rock royalty in America. Based on fresh interviews with musicians, producers, record company people, and music journalists, as well as previously published interviews, reviews, and profiles, Sweet Dreams and Flying Machines is the definitive biography of an elusive superstar.