'Mud Slide Slim And The Blue Horizon'

In April 1971, Just six months after his hit song "Fire and Rain" hit the No. 3 spot on the Billboard charts on Halloween 1970 and propelled the album Sweet Baby James to classic status, James Taylor released his third LP, the more cumbersomely titled Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon. For the first time, Taylor would release an album to a public very aware of him and had to face all the attendant expectations involved in following up an absolute hit.

The short span between albums was not unusual in the 60s and 70s; in fact, James caught something of a break in that the success of Sweet Baby James was something of a slow builder and by the time he and producer Peter Asher reentered the Crystal Sound Studios in January 1971, it had been more than a year since they had recorded the first Warner album. With Taylor were his long time partner Danny "Kootch" Kortchmar on guitar, Leland Sklar on bass, and Russel Kunkel on drums, a tight crew who would later go on to record albums as "The Section."

A number of guest musicians also contributed to the sessions, but none were more important than the women in Taylor's life at the time. First of which was Carole King, the Tin Pan Alley songwriter turned star who contributed piano to several songs on Sweet Baby James and was frequently on the bill with Taylor in his early concerts. The second was his only sister, Kate, who provided some backing vocals. And not least of which was one Joni Mitchell, James's love interest and house partner at the time.

The album opens with "Love Has Brought Me Around," a short and surprisingly upbeat appreciation of love that features King's piano, Joni's backing vocal, and Peter Asher on the tambourine.

Next up though is the song that really assured Taylor's ongoing stardom, a perennial classic and still Taylor's only number 1 record, "You've Got A Friend." Written not in fact by James but by Carole King, it has been said that Carole wrote the song in direct response to the "Fire and Rain" line "I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend." (An analog situation came about for Joni Mitchell, who had earlier written the song "Circle Game" in direct response to Neil Young's "Sugar Mountain.") The song was one of several songs about friendship in hard times that scored huge hits in 1969 to about 1972, taking in such perennials as "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother," "Bridge Over Troubled Water," and "Lean on Me."

The story goes that James originally heard Carole perform the song at the Troubadour and worked up his own guitar-based version and in an act of generosity, Carole let James record the song first. Not that King's version went unheard. It can be found on her smash album Tapestry, and like James's version it also featured Taylor and Mitchell, who in the Tapestry liner notes were referred to as the Taylor-Mitchell boy-girl choir. Taylor's version has become a perennial soft rock staple.

"Places In My Past" features a rare appearance by James on piano, sounding very much like King at the keys as provides a wistful remembrance and appreciation of everyone who got to him this point in his life. No other musicians are featured.

"Ridin' on A Railroad" is a country style song with John ("Gentle on My Mind") Hartford on banjo, Richard Greene on fiddle and Carole King on piano. It is a portent of much of the short country-based songs that will make up of Taylor's next album, One Man Dog.

"Soldiers" is next. Lasting barely over a minute, it is another solo performance and is as close to an anti-war song as you will get out of James.

"Mud Slide Slim" is the longest song on the album and while it does not capture quite the emotion of the previous album's title track, it is a nice musical moment, featuring prominent congas by Russ Kunkel and backing vocals by Carole King, Gale Haness, and Kate Taylor.

Side Two begins with "Hey Mister, That's Me Up On The Jukebox," in which James seems to almost parody his success in scaling the charts on the previous album with his assortment of sad songs. Featuring The Section and Carole King on piano, it is one of two Taylor songs that Linda Ronstadt recorded with Peter Asher.

The other song Ronstadt would record is the next Mud Slide track, "You Can Close Your Eyes." Over time, this song would become a Taylor classic and concert staple, and the fact that it was central to Ronstadt's most acclaimed album, Heart Like a Wheel, probably contributed to that. The track here is simply James on acoustic guitar and multi-tracked vocals, but there is a famously bootlegged concert recording that features James trading songs with Joni Mitchell and they perform a duet on this track to close. Taylor has said that the song was written for Mitchell but he clearly loves it: he often closes concerts with it and often sings it as a male-female duet, as when he did a tour in 2017 with Bonnie Raitt.

"Machine Gun-Kelly" is song about a real-life prohibition gangster written by Danny Kortchmar. Kelly was a 1930s bootlegger (not a modern hiphop artist) whose crime spree was abetted by his wife Kathryn Thome. Kootch plays congas on the track with Russ Kunkel on tambourine. When Taylor and King did their "Troubadour Reunion" tour with the Section in 2010, this song was among many songs of this era that were revived.

"Long Ago and Far Away" was the album's second single and features Joni Mitchell on prominent backing vocals and Carole King on piano, with Kootch once again on congas. It didn't scale the charts as "Friend" did, but did hit the Top 40 and is perhaps the album's loveliest moment, at least in a melancholic sense.

"Let Me Ride" is an upbeat song built around the talents of Wayne Jackson, Andrew Love and the "Memphis Horns." A nice pick-me-up that sets the stage for the album's final one-two punch.

"Highway Song" features both James and Carole on piano and features James, Kate Taylor and Peter Asher on background vocals; the title tells you all you need to know. And maybe just maybe there's some relevance to the 1970 film, the cult classic Two Lane Blacktop, which starred the unlikely pair of Taylor and Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson. While the film was not an abject failure, Taylor was not fond of it and neither he nor Wilson would go on to significant acting careers.

"Isn't It Nice To Be Home Again" concludes the album with another nostalgic ditty featuring just James on acoustic guitar, this time clocking in at under one minute.

In terms of sales, the album was about as successful as Baby James, in fact reaching No. 2 on the charts while its predecessor only reached No. 3. And the blow of peaking at number 2 on July 31 was tempered somewhat by the fact that keeping it out of the number 1 spot was Tapestry, the Carole King classic to which Taylor contributed in much the same way that King did to Mud Slide. Clearly, a lot of listeners that summer had a "friend" to listen to. And neither of these classic albums has been far from reach in the nearly five decades since.