Muggy, mellow evening at SPAC

by Jim Kunstler, The Knickerbocker News, July 15, 1974

LINDA RONSTADT AND JAMES TAYLOR IN CONCERT AT THE SARATOGA PERFORMING ARTS CENTER

Oh my, what a hot, muggy night in the North Country. Even so, Linda Ronstadt, opening the evening’s rather mellow agenda, made grown men weep down there in the $7.50 seats. Her voice was as sweet and as thick as buckwheat honey, and not a few red hippie hankies were pulled out of pockets and applied to the eyes.

She has a real bent for the sentimental ballad, which can be a dangerous thing, like a little knowledge. But she is saved by a really immense talent and superb control.

Wearing a black print dress and open-toed spike heels, she opened her set with the ballad “Colorado” and accompanied herself on the guitar, which she put down at the song’s end and abandoned (wisely) for the duration. She served up a healthy parcel of her hit songs, including “Love Has No Pride,” but when she came around to “Long Long Time,” the ballad which pretty much made her career a few years ago, hearts seemed to melt around the pavilion like butter under a hot knife.

When James Taylor ranged out, minutes later, he had something other than Carolina on his mind. Specifically, he had insects on his mind. For the night before, he told the crowd, he played in the Yale Bowl, wearing the self-same white mandarin costume he was sporting now. It was a rueful night down in New Haven, he said. Under the hot lights, in that white suit, they came screaming out of the sky at him like so many Messerschmitts—luna months, 17-year-locusts, and God-knows-what-else. But now out on the SPAC stage, Taylor said, “One thing’s missing here—there’s no insects. Looks like a nice intimate night. Just me and my guitar and 15,000 people.”

Taylor opened his act with a half-dozen solo numbers. At length, Carolina did enter his mind. And, while singing his song on that subject, an incendiary device blew up somewhere outside the pavilion. The performer’s eyes shot out into the ozone of bodies on the lawn, and seeing nothing, returned to the interior focus of concentration, the performer never having broken stride. These are the hazards of rock and roll. White suits, moths, weird noises.

Taylor then introduced his back-up band, led very adroitly by superb guitarist David Spinnozza. He did the obligatory and still lovely numbers from his earlier albums, including “Fire and Rain” and “Walking on a Country Road,” and a really stirring “Fade Away” from his recently released album, “Walking Away.”

James Taylor is one hell of a guitar player.

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