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Essential listening: James Taylor's 1970 classic, 'Fire and Rain,' remains a masterpiece

It's his story, as raw and nakedly emotional as the time in life it depicts

On March 1, 1971, James Taylor appeared on the cover of Time magazine, whose headline proclaimed: "The New Rock, Bittersweet and Low." By then, he had recorded three albums, his debut coming on the Beatles' Apple Records in 1968.

But it was the first song on Side Two of Taylor's 1970 vinyl classic, Sweet Baby James, which defined his legacy as an enduring singer-songwriter in the Bob Dylan tradition.

Now 69, Taylor stands alone for having written "Fire and Rain."

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"Fire and Rain" is torn from the pages of Taylor's calamitous youth. It is a song about drug addiction and the pain of losing a friend to suicide and "sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground."

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Flying machines, in this case, refer not to plane crashes but to Taylor's first band, The Flying Machine. Its demise coincided with the lead singer's soul-crushing dependency on heroin, which he wrestled with for decades.

I have been to dozens of Taylor concerts over the years and will be there July 31 when Taylor and Bonnie Raitt christen The Ford Center at The Star in Frisco as a venue for performing arts.

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If that show holds true to all the others, the song most people will shout out wanting to hear is "Fire and Rain." The sweet chords of Taylor's guitar telegraph the opening: "Just yesterday morning, they let me know you were gone. Suzanne, the plans they made put an end to you."

I hope it goes better than it did almost 20 years ago, when Taylor appeared at the Starplex Pavilion in Fair Park. For some reason, he sang "Fire and Rain" as the first song of the second set, after intermission. The problem? Dozens of folks had not yet returned from the concession stand, so as Taylor's lilting voice began to croon, "Suzanne, the plans they made put an end to you," the guy in front of me, trying to balance six beers in a cardboard drink carrier, spilled them all.

The woman on whose lap the beer ended up hurled an obscenity, ruining the song and compromising forever the reason I had bought a ticket.

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It went so much better last summer at Wrigley Field in Chicago, where Taylor pierced the night air with as sweet a version of "Fire and Rain" as I've ever been blessed to hear. As songs go, it's perfect, as evidenced by Rolling Stone naming it one of the 500 best songs of all time. It has been recorded by everyone from Cher to John Denver to the cast of the TV series, Glee. But no one does it like Taylor, for it's his story, as raw and nakedly emotional as the time in life it depicts.

So why does an individual song resonate so strongly with an entire generation? In the same way that the movie The Graduate underscored the fears of America's youth mulling their place in the world, with the Vietnam War clouding our future and threatening our existence, "Fire and Rain" tapped into a wellspring of collective hysteria.

And yet, it did so with simplicity and grace, not unlike a prayer or a psalm.

Born in Boston, Taylor spent much of his youth in the leafy hills of North Carolina, as the son of a well-to-do doctor. But for our generation, spooked by Vietnam and the lunacy only some of us survived, affluence struck out as a foolproof deterrent. As Taylor wrote, "Lord knows when the cold wind blows, it'll turn your head around."

In the year Taylor felt inspired to write the song -- 1968 -- America would endure two assassinations (Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy) and the tsunami of riots and protests that followed.

We had the draft and we had war, but we also had the soothing calm of "Fire and Rain." And thanks to James Taylor, we always will.