POP MUSIC REVIEW : Taylor Finds Lots of Friends in San Diego

For an artist once so terrified of live performance that he would become physically ill before going onstage--who purposely would leave his eyeglasses backstage so he wouldn’t be able to see faces in the audience--James Taylor has become a remarkably warm and adroit performer.

On Tuesday night at the Embarcadero Marina Park South, the now unabashedly bespectacled 44-year-old alternately charmed, moved, soothed, tickled and seduced a crowd of 4,500 with more than two hours of music from his 24-year oeuvre . The concert was part of the “SummerPops Extra!” series and also was a benefit for Taylor’s pet environmental organization, the Natural Resources Defense Council, which had a table at the site.

For most of the show, Taylor would be backed by his nine-piece band, but he began the show alone, without fanfare, taking his solitary position under the stage’s bright blue shell while there still was half an hour of sunlight left. By any definition, Taylor remains a striking figure. Tall, gangly, slightly rumpled, with a rapidly retreating hairline and wire-rim glasses, he looks like someone who might peddle leather belts at a flea market.

The Everyman look is genuine enough--in spite of his station, the North Carolinian always has viewed himself as jes’ folks. Still, as a live survey of his work would demonstrate, Taylor’s apparent ordinariness conceals a complex psyche, a deep reservoir of emotion and sophisticated musical sensibilities. In Tuesday’s show, Taylor’s simple persona also acted as silent foil for drollery that kept the audience chuckling throughout the concert.

Shortly after Taylor began playing the guitar intro to 1970’s “Sweet Baby James,” a military helicopter passed nearby on its way across San Diego Bay, and all but drowned him out. A bemused Taylor watched it for a moment, then called out, “Could you turn down the music, please? I can hardly hear the helicopter!”

Once into the song, however, Taylor reminded the crowd why, more than two decades after he graced the cover of Time magazine as the avatar of the then-emerging “singer-songwriter” subgenre, he remains its exemplar.

It wasn’t just the cask-mellowed voice--distinctive for its odd blend of soft and nasal qualities--or the trademark acoustic guitar fingerings, which in combination have defined the Taylor “style.” It was, instead, the care and attention Taylor showed in re-creating the tune, as though he were lifting an heirloom from a velvet box.

An important key to the artistic success of Taylor’s latter-day concerts--and, consequently, their emotional impact on fans--is his faithfulness to his muse and his respect for his own music. Not only does he not stray into stylistic areas beyond his ken, but also in plumbing his older material Taylor allows each tune room to breathe; there are no double-time medleys or wacky re-interpretations.

Unlike a number of his peers, Taylor understands that songs are more than melody, chords and words; they are distinct moods and feelings conveyed by a precise arrangement of musical elements that, when radically altered, no longer convey them. If it is surprising that Taylor still can muster enough enthusiasm to give fresh readings to songs he’s performed a million times, it’s also a measure of his artistry that the songs have lost none of their original luster while taking on the patina of “classic” songwriting.

Tuesday’s program was rich with tunes from early in Taylor’s career, including “Something in the Way She Moves” and “Carolina in My Mind” (1968); “Fire and Rain” and “Country Road” (1970); “Long Ago and Far Away” and Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend” (1971). Predictably, these drew the biggest response from long-time fans, for whom the tunes are youthful signposts of a generation now into middle age.

Taylor’s frequently autobiographical lyrics might be fed by the converging streams of his confessional impulse and his compulsion to view his own life from an ironic distance. But the listener always has been able to find a self-reflective space between the two. Taylor’s music reaches into those rooms of the heart we normally keep closed, and, when he reopened old doors Tuesday night, one could almost sense Taylor and his fans renewing a treasured bond.

That the terminally shy Taylor could deftly balance the poignancy of his songs with the dry wit of a natural comedian is testimony to his development as an entertainer. During his introductions of the band, for example, he gestured to pianist Don Grolnick.

“On grand piano,” Taylor said, then paused. “It’s a great thing, actually, a real improvement over the horse-drawn pianos of yesteryear.”

When he finished with the intros, Taylor nervously fiddled with his guitar. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, another song,” he deadpanned to scattered snickers. “ ‘Cause that’s basically what we do.” More chortles. “It’s really that simple.” Guffaws.

Proof that Taylor’s reputation is not limited to the distant past came when he and the band played selections from his more recent albums. Taylor’s post-40 music resonates with the melancholy wisdom that comes with maturity, and such songs as “Never Die Young” (1988) and the current “The Frozen Man” and “Shed a Little Light” were greeted with lusty cheers by a mixed assemblage of old and young fans.

But Taylor couldn’t resist having some fun at his own expense, eliciting more laughs with his introduction of a segment of tracks from the current album, “New Moon Shine.”

“These next few songs are from the new album,” he said. “It sounds just like the old stuff, so you shouldn’t be alarmed.”

The crack band, which included four backup vocalists, sparkled on renditions of “Copperline,” the anti-Persian Gulf War “Slap Leather,” “(I’ve Got to) Stop Thinkin’ ‘Bout That,” and Sam Cooke’s “Everybody Loves to Cha Cha Cha.”

Throughout the concert, in fact, the band exhibited a commendable versatility in drawing out the influences in Taylor’s music: the funky rock of the Danny Kortchmar-penned “Honey, Don’t Leave L.A.”; the Motown-ish strut of “Your Smiling Face”; the straight blues of “Steamroller”; the Latin flavors of “First of May” and “Mexico”; the country-folk of his early nuggets.

But even his musicians couldn’t match Taylor’s ability to shift emotional gears. The audience was still hooting its approval of “Your Smiling Face”--in the middle of which the angular Taylor cracked everyone up with some hilarious mimicry of rock-star stage movements--when Taylor began singing 1976’s gentle “Shower the People.” Taylor’s breathless, slightly hesitant vocal focused keen attention on the opening lines. The song’s delicate skeleton was exposed in that moment of fragility.

The concert, with intermission, lasted almost 2 1/2 hours. But Taylor’s third encore--the Scottish folk ballad “Wild Mountain Thyme,” the definitive interpretation of which was recorded by the Byrds in 1966--sent one away feeling that, like life itself, the best concerts seem to end much too soon.