It takes courage to shine a light on your own personal shame for the whole world to see.   If that’s so, Jackson Browne, James Taylor, and Cat Stevens are warriors of their music.  I just read Hearts of Darkness by David Thompson. It sat on my shelves here in Mexicali for a long time until I finally reached for it.  In 1970-1971, all three of these guys changed the way we listened to music.  They made at it as singer-songwriters. Their songs reflect their personal sensitivities.  The book depicts the struggle each of them experienced to find their voice.

I appreciated the in-depth look into the backgrounds of each artist.  There is a lot of overlap.  Musicianship.  Folk music. Drugs.  Recording industry pressure. Joan Baez.  Joni Mitchell.  London. New York.  The Troubadour in L.A. But, today I’m not going to write much about the music.  Early on into the book, I came across James’s enrollment in McLean Mental Hospital in Massachusetts.  In high school – this was before he set out on his musical journey – James experienced extreme bouts of depression.  Back then, we didn’t know much about the treatment for mental illness. Patients were locked up in institutions like McLean and fed a lot of Thorazine for their own safety.

I know this because I’ve read the memoir Girl, Interrupted over and over with my English classes. Author Suzanna Kaysen began writing her book while she was inside Mclean.  According to how the events transpire on the pages, Susanna may have been there at the same time James was.  They were basically the same age. They shared similar backgrounds.  Suzanna even mentions James Taylor in “The Prelude to Ice Cream” chapter.   She wonders about mad poets like herself:  “Did the hospital specialize in poets and singers,” she writes, “or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness.”  Ray Charles.  Sylvia Plath.  Robert Lowell.  They had all come and gone. I know what happened to Suzanna.  I saw the movie.  Jaja. But, it wasn’t until I read Hearts of Darkness, did I realize that James graduated high school inside McLean.  At a certain point, he decided he had felt strong enough to leave.

In 1968, at the age of 20, James was in London battling heroin addiction as a member of a band Flying Machine.  The beginning lyrics of his famous song "Fire and Rain" go like this: “Just yesterday morning they let me know you were gone…  Susanne the plans they made put an end to you…I walked out this morning and I wrote down this song…”  Another Suzanne.  Another suicide.  This time the girl was a teenage friend James knew from Long Island who suffered the same fears he did, but following her commitment to a state asylum, there was no resolution.  She took her life inside.    Here is the saddest part: James’s friends kept the news of her death from hidden him for months.  At the time he was close to completing an important first album.  They didn’t want to distract him, or push him off the edge of his own sanity.  When Suzanne killed herself inside her cell, he just had no idea.   “I've seen fire and I've seen rain,” James wrote these lines in a hospital room upon his return to the U.S.  To overcome his heroin habit, he had checked himself into a rehab center in Manhattan.     “I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end….I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend..”  Here, many critics believe the “fire” lyrics refer to the electroshock therapy he received as part of his therapy.

Jackson Brown and Cat Stevens both experienced their Ups and Downs.  Jackson was born the son of a soldier  in Germany with the name Clyde Brown III.  Cat was born Steven Georgiou in London to a café-owning Greek father and a Swedish mother.  I’m equally inspired from the stories of how their music became a soundtrack for their generation.  Against all levels of industry pressure, they stood for their music, much of it dark and gloomy. They may look slight on stage, but their lyrics take up a lot of space in our hearts.  I’ll write about them another day.  Today, I have something for my student readers of Girl, Interrupted.  By the time  we get to the “Ice Cream” chapter we will be deeply engaged.