'Flag'

James Taylor's ninth album, Flag, was once again produced by Peter Asher at the Sound Factory in Hollywood but the results were not as successful as sessions two years earlier for the previous album, the classic JT. Despite any credit points for the clever cover concept--the flag signal flag depicted is the universal symbol for "man overboard"--Flag was released to lukewarm reviews at best on May 1, 1979.

The general cast was the same, with plenty of guest stars on board as well, but most of the songs and the general mood were certainly a cut below what this crew waxed on JT. Perhaps Taylor indeed was a "man overboard."

The album opens with the upbeat "Company Man" featuring Graham Nash on backing vocals, Don Grolnick on clavinet, and "the Section" filling out the rest instrumentally. It's about what you'd expect from a Taylor rocker, but no more and certainly no rival for the opening kick "Your Smiling Face" gave the previous album.

The second track, "Johnnie Comes Back," is another rocker, nicely done by a group featuring legendary LA session man Waddy Wachtel on electric guitar. Steve Forman adds tambourine and timbales, and Ralph Schuckett plays organ. While not a hit, this is a track that if done earlier, might have rectified the only flaw of the JT album--the lack of an effective track to offset the album's overly mellow vibe.

Maybe Taylor was aware of the "mellow" complaints because the third track is also decidely not a ballad. Instead, it is a not so successful cover of Lennon/McCartney's "Day Tripper," which lacks the rock energy of the original and to be honest is rather embarrassing. Clearly, Taylor aims to provide an R&B spin to the tune, but as so often happens when he forces it, Taylor's voice lacks the needed soul to make it work. It's clearly a labor of love (neither he nor Asher would have touched a Beatle classic otherwise), but in the end the attempt is futile. David Spinozza, who produced James's Walking Man album five years earlier, arranged and conducted the strings, but they somehow compounded the song's problems rather than solving them.

"I Will Not Lie For You" is next and is really not worth writing home about. By this time, it was clear that Taylor's goal was a ballad-free side. But ballads being his strength, this was obviously part of the problem for not only the music critics but also Taylor aficionados.

"Brother Trucker" was one of two songs on the album written for Stephen Schwartz's musical Workin' (based on the writings of the great Studs Turkel). One was pretty good (see below) and then there was this one. It features James' brother Alex on backing vocals, but it's not particularly successful at much of anything. It certainly wasn't Rogers and Hart.

"Is That The Way You Look" starts with a spoken word interlude then goes into a rather mediocre doo-wop based song. Pointlessly angry, it serves little than to add two minutes to the side one running.

On to side 2 (a dated concept to be sure) so here come the ballads? Yes, but the starting point is a bit unsettling. "B. S. U. R. (S. U. C.S,I,M.I.M) is probably the most ridiculous song in the Taylor catalog, using the letters to create a platitude that is as confounding as to why Taylor suddenly felt his guitar should consistently play second place to the electric piano as a primary instrument. It's something that would continue to confound listeners over the next several albums, though it was never dressing for a lyric as dreadful as this one.

The first few notes of the next track bring back the golden days of the Taylor guitar, and that turns out to be so for a very good reason. "Rainy Day Man" is actually a rerecording of a song from James' first album on Apple Records, stripping away the strings and artifice much as he had when he rerecorded "Carolina In My Mind" and "Something In the Way She Moves" for his Warner Brothers Greatest Hits album. And once again, this version sounds more typical of the recording style that first won James wide fandom.

There are two reasons "Rainy Day Man" didn't fully reestablish as a Taylor standard quite like the earlier Apple remakes. First, Bonnie Raitt had scored fairly widespread FM success (albeit not chart success) with the song a few years earlier. More important, Flag sold nowhere near what Greatest Hits did. It's an excellent Taylor song, and this verision also marks the recording debut of backing vocalists David Lasley and Arnold McCuller, who would become a signature part of Taylor's sound for the next four decades.

"Millworker" is the second song from Stephen Schwarz' musical Working, and it's the far superior and more relatable of the two. The song is written from the perspective of a young woman working in a mill, lamenting the hours lost in such monotonous work for the benefit of the mill owner she never meets. Even handling the vocal across genders, it is the most effective ballad on the album, and might have been seen as the most effective song of the show had anyone seen it. Its Broadway run was a dozen shows.

The song has had an afterlife, however, being performed very effectively by Emmylou Harris on her 1981 album Evangeline, and in a Musicares tribute to James by Bruce Springsteen.

"Up On The Roof " is a song written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin. Obviously, covering a song by his friend Carole was a winning strategy for James, who went straight to number one when he covered "You've Got a Friend." But that time, he took her song right off the vine; this song was vintage wine, having already been taken to the charttops by the Drifters who recorded it in 1962. In fact there was a King/James version of the song already released on Carole's 1971 live album from Carnegie Hall. Hitting the charts in the Summer of 1979, the song was his last top 40 hit to date (save for a duet with J.D. Souther on his next solo album.) Arguably, it is probably the highlight of the album.

However, just when you thought the album just might be redeemable another miscalculation comes to the fore. "Chanson Francaise" was James first attempt at writing a French song (he would do so again--at least partially--on "Ananas" on his 1997 album Hourglass) and the results aren't pretty. I'm sure he found humor in using the word "baby" as the French translation for "baby," but it's a shallow joke and if you take time to check out the full translation you'll find the whole enterprise less than an inch deep. And the tune is nothing special either.

Finally is "Sleep Come Free Me" one of James's more effective slow blues-like numbers. Putting himself in the character of a convicted murderer, James effectively takes the role of someone lamenting being "more like an animal and less like a man." On a better Taylor album, it would have been a strong track. Here it gets lost in all the silliness.

And that's the story of Flag, where the strong songs become victims of James's worst tendencies. It's telling that there are dichotomies here: his songs for Working are one good, one not; his covers are also one hit and one not; and a song like "Sleep Come Free Me" is undone by the song that precedes it.

Flag in fact lacks the one thing that marks all the previous Taylor albums--a single song that feels self-revelatory or personal. When his best originals are one written from the point of view of a poor factory girl and another written in about 1967, there is trouble on the ship. Man overboard.