Gracefully
Insane: Life and Death Inside America's Premier Mental Hospital
a book by Alex Beam, columnist for The Boston Globe
read review from Publishers Weekly
Excerpt from chapter entitled Diagnosis: Hippiephrenia...as it appeared in the Boston Globe 11/26/2001
DURING HIS FIRST MAJOR CONCERT
TOUR IN 1969, JAMES TAYLOR used to introduce his song "Knockin' 'Round the Zoo" with a few words about his
stay at McLean Hospital in Belmont. "Here's a tune I wrote at McLean
to make a million bucks," he told one youthful audience. "McLean,
that's a mental hospital - OK, anybody here from McLean? Let's hear it
for McLean." Few people clapped, of course, because very few young
people had spent time in mental institutions. But Taylor, then sporting
a shoulder-length mop of dark, grimy hair, would grin sheepishly at the
smattering of applause, and proceed with his cryptic paean to his nine-month-long
stay in the "zoo":
There's bars on all the windows and they're counting up the spoons
And if I'm feeling edgy, there's a chick who's paid to be my slave
But she'll hit me with a needle if she thinks I'm trying to misbehave.
To the mellow, preppy cohort of the '60s generation, the soft- singing Taylor siblings - James, his talented brother, Livingston, and the singer always known as Sister Kate - put McLean on the map. "For the Taylors," Time magazine noted sardonically in a 1971 cover story on James, "the McLean experience would soon become what Harvard is for the Saltonstalls - something of a family tradition." A washout at Milton Academy, James thrived at McLean's newly opened Arlington School, which provided classroom instruction for troubled youths. "We didn't have that jive nothingness that pushes most kids through high school," he says. "You can't tell a whole bunch of potential suicides that they have to have a high school diploma." The product of a liberal, moneyed Cambridge household, Taylor relished the reassuring structure of the typical McLean day: "Above all, the day was planned for me there, and I began to have a sense of time and structure, like canals and railroad tracks." Taylor never claimed that McLean "cured" him - less than three years after "escaping" from the hospital, he found himself addicted to heroin and checked in to the more bucolic, 23-bed Austen Riggs sanatorium in Stockbridge in the Berkshires - but it enabled him to establish a modus vivendi with the modern world. He and his sister both have homes on Martha's Vineyard, and both have compared the island's laid-back ambience to the asylum of McLean. "It was a pretty slow pace," Kate recalls. "Very slow. No pressure. And that continues for me, living on Martha's Vineyard, out here at the end of the trail."
Although James wrote his first two songs while still a patient in 1965, his path to success ran through New York City and then London, where he met Beatles producer Peter Asher, who fine-tuned the Taylor sound for the Apple label. (James's "escape" from Mc Lean is still the subject of legend. Because he had committed himself voluntarily, he couldn't escape. He did, however, bolt for Manhattan without signing the customary "three-day," the required three days' notice before checking oneself out.) But Kate and subsequently Livingston launched their careers at McLean.
Searching for therapies that
might connect with their music- addled, alienated charges, in 1967
McLean hired a young rock musician named Paul Roberts to conduct music
therapy classes. Roberts had studied psychology at Brandeis University
in Waltham and tried to play music on the wards at Metropolitan State,
a public hospital near McLean where he had gone to work as an aide
to avoid the Vietnam draft [note: It was a mental hospital named Metropolitan
State Children’s Unit. I worked on
a ward of adolescent boys, for six months. Avoiding military conscription
wasn’t an issue; I was ineligible for the draft due to a medical
deferment. PR]. "It was sort of prison-like," Roberts recalls. "Their
method of containing someone was to throw him in a locked room." The
nurses started commenting that guitar-strumming didn't figure in his
job description. Roberts got the hint and began looking around for work.
A friend mentioned that nearby McLean, far better endowed than the struggling
state hospital, and actually had a music therapy department. But they
didn't have a sitar-playing cool guy; as it happened, McLean and Roberts
had been looking for each other.
McLean had three practice rooms, each with its own piano, and the administration
was perfectly happy to turn the cafeteria over to any of the four bands
that Roberts organized: the Zoo; the Strawberry Discharge; Ronnie and
the Waverley Squares (McLean overlooks Waverley Square); and, most famously,
Sister Kate's Soul Stew and Submarine Sandwich Shoppe, headlined by Kate
Taylor.
The Sandwich Shoppe played for money at Brandeis, at a Cambridge peace
fair, and for a "social" at the Institute of Living, a mental
hospital in Hartford. Roberts wasn't exactly sure what he was doing,
but whatever he was doing, it was working.
One catatonic patient, a gifted saxophone player, first began communicating
with fellow band members, and only later with his therapists. One of
the bands became a long-running group therapy session, trying for its
members but ultimately useful in resolving shared conflicts. Ronnie of
the Waverley Squares was a Janis Joplin- like blues belter. "They
couldn't give her enough Thorazine on the unit, but in music therapy,
she was normal," Roberts remembers. Kate Taylor was revealed to
be a hauntingly mellifluous singer and signed a recording contract soon
after leaving the hospital.
"Some of the psychiatrists were hip to the fact that real therapy was
taking place," says Roberts, who now pursues his singing career with his
wife in Redbird, Colorado. "People were getting better, but I didn't know
or care why it was working. I was just experimenting in the dark. These kids
needed to express themselves through loud rock music, and it worked. I was
putting in 60, 70, 80 hours a week. I was completely enthralled by what was
going on."
Roberts prepared a lengthy presentation on his band therapies for his
academic mentor, who just happened to be Morris Schwartz of Brandeis
(the "Morrie" of later Tuesdays With Morrie fame). Roberts's
report included interviews with his performers, most of whom testified
to finding extraordinary release with their bands. A vocalist named Laura
told Roberts: "It's magic, almost. I mean, I have said that I'm
going to kill myself in the morning, and then in the afternoon I'm singing
my heart out. It's brought me time and time again out of depression."
Roberts's Brandeis roommate had been an academically gifted history student,
Jon Landau, who had musical ambitions of his own. Landau had his own
band, and once when Roberts dropped over to his house, the music therapist
started talking up the talents of a severely withdrawn vocalist and guitar
player, Livingston Taylor - James and Kate's younger brother. Livingston
was at the Arlington School and was supplementing his musical education
at the Berkley College of Music in Boston's Back Bay. Landau forsook
his own musical ambitions and produced his first record, Livingston Taylor,
a beautiful collection of ballads released in 1970. It included at least
one song with a McLean theme: "Doctor Man." A second Landau-Taylor
collaboration, Liv, included "Carolina Day," with words memorializing
Liv's therapist, Dr. Harvey Shein.
Landau, who worked as a rock critic at The Real Paper, went on to become
one of the most famous and powerful music producers of all time when
he abandoned journalism to manage the career of a singer who he believed
represented "the future of rock and roll": Bruce Springsteen.
Surprising as it may seem, many
former patients, the ones who got out of McLean in one piece, have
positive memories of their time there. James Taylor now calls his McLean
time "a
lifesaver."
"I've always thought of it like a pardon," he says, "or like
a reprieve, with a sort of medical stamp of approval. Once I got there, my
main concern was that they wouldn't let me stay, that they'd find out that
I wasn't a serious case, that my bed might be needed by someone more worthy.
I didn't want to be turned out of the place. I didn't want to go back to the
life that I had been unable to lead."
"You had some of the most spirited people of our day in there; it was
much more interesting than a lot of the progressive colleges of our time," says
Ellen Ratner. After leaving McLean, Ratner, now a syndicated talk show host
in Washington, D.C., attended Goddard College in Vermont and received a master's
degree from Harvard. "I got more of an education at McLean than at Goddard,
Harvard, and covering the White House," she says. "It was nirvana
for me. I was on a hall with all the Seven Sisters represented. I was in high
Boston culture. Al Capp's daughter was there, [the poets] Anne Sexton and Robert
Lowell were there. I could go out any time I wanted; I had more freedom than
any teenager I knew.
"McLean Hospital seemed like a great option for me. And it was. It was
one of the best experiences of my life."
