By Dave Read, July 4, 2026 performance – Music has charms to soothe the savage breast, according to William Congreve, who went on to say that it also softens rocks and bends knotted oak. It is dual savegery James Taylor soothes with music, personal and universal.
Mother nature savages everybody when it exiles us from the garden of childhood into the wilderness of adulthood. Not infrequently, those unsettling transitions lead people to over-indulge intoxicants, some to everlasting darkness, many others into the light of recovery.
An American spirit of evangelism inspires James Taylor to share the prose and poetry of his own salvation, his own fall and recovery, even if it is unlikely that an alcoholic or an addict is going to be introduced to the happy possibility of life without drink or dope at a place like Tanglewood or the Hollywood Bowl. That is why professional evangelists usually set up shop deep downtown, near the bus depot and highway underpass.
Mr. Taylor is a nimble guitar player gifted with a tenor voice clear and strong as a roaring brook. He jokes about writing the same ten songs twenty times and acknowledges the stroke of luck that pinned his star to the comet of The Beatles.
He respects the anonymity of the institution behind the lines in Sweet Baby James that always evoke a roar of local pride from the Tanglewood audience when they hear the hallowed proper nouns, Stockbridge and Berkshires.
But there was a disquieting sound from tonight’s show, a loud rolling roar elicited by his quip, I miss Richard Nixon. Just last week J.D. Vance inaugurated a campaign to exonerate the original felon-in-chief when he said, “If it happened today, Watergate would vanish in the flux of a twelve-hour news cycle.”
As designer of the “unitary executive” fallacy that allows Trump to run amok, there’s nothing funny about Nixon, nor can we rest easy with him in the grave. The second civil war is well underway; like Fort Sumter, 9/11, and Jan6, Nixon must never be joked about.
It would numb me to know the people have grown that dumb, have been addled by lie after lie after lie – by the hangover after glittering sights and sonorous sounds are allowed to trump the stark reality of common sense.