It couldn’t have been more than a couple of weeks into my freshman year in college when I discovered my dorm roommate’s winning strategy for romance: turn down the lights and put on James Taylor’s Greatest Hits. The sensitive-poet stylings of “Something In The Way She Moves,” “Sweet Baby James” and “You’ve Got A Friend” would set the mood before the coup de grace sealed the deal: JT’s late-evening entreaty “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight.”
Taylor’s Greatest Hits remains one of the most successful examples of such in popular music history, a sterling collection that became one of the best-selling LPs of the 1970s. One Man Dog, the 1972 album from which “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight” was drawn, is another matter.
In my column ranking Taylor’s studio albums I described One Man Dog as “[a]n early-days album that lacks the focus of subsequent efforts,” noting its “shaggy arrangements and gang vocals” and mix of short songs and shorter instrumental interludes. From the very start, the album feels like a party jam where someone accidentally set a half-full bottle down on the “record” button.
Attendees at the party include the core of Taylor’s band for the rest of the decade: childhood friend Danny (Kootch) Kortchmar on guitar and backing vocals, Lee Sklar on bass and Russ Kunkel on drums and percussion. With Carole King off promoting her solo triumph Tapestry, Craig Doegre takes over on piano and keys, while King, Carly Simon, Linda Ronstadt and a host of Taylor siblings contribute backing vocals.
The acoustic-and-bongos first verse of album opener “One Man Parade” establishes the vibe, as Taylor essays another of his lyrics about the introvert’s dilemma: throw a party or hit the road? (Or maybe one and then the other.) The lilting “Nobody But You” digs deeper: “Everybody knows that I’m just a Joe / That likes to hang around / Talkin' about my problems / Bringing other people down.” That’s why Taylor’s downbeat, introspective songs work: he 
knows they’re downbeat and introspective, and that his audience welcomes that moment of self-reflection.
The thing is, in this particular case, Taylor appears to have decided that the cure for his blues is to toss aside his songwriting ambitions and just goof around. The 1:35 “Chili Dog”—a sustained gag that probably felt funnier under the influence—gives way to the blue-eyed funk of “Fool For You,” another tune that feels unfinished at just 1:42. Then we get the first of a pair of minute-long instrumentals that feel like acoustic guitar warm-up exercises, and another vignette of a song (1:37) that doesn’t even merit a real title (it’s called “New Tune”).
Side One closes with a pair of actual completed songs, two of the strongest to be found here. Kortchmar’s thrummy road song “Back On The Street Again” fits Taylor like a glove, a keening philosophical number whose solution to the blues (dance with your baby and then hit the road) is right in Taylor’s wheelhouse. The side closes out with the plaintive, gently grooving “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight,” a cozy, laidback seduction piece finished off with a sweet Michael Brecker sax solo.
Taylor, Kortchmar and Sklar co-write “Woh, Don’t You Know,” an extra-shaggy r&b goof that’s good aimless fun. The sweet, pastoral “One Morning In May” is one of the traditional numbers Taylor likes to sneak onto albums, and then we get “Instrumental II” (another guitar exercise), before they move into a lovely cover of John McLaughlin’s searching, philosophical “Someone,” with the fusion maestro sitting in on acoustic.
From there things get sketchier still. “Hymn” is prettier than its title might imply, adding horns along the way before bleeding into the bluesy, aptly named “Fanfare.” Which then bleeds into the gospel-tinged 58-second sketch “Little David,” featuring Taylor on… chainsaw? Which then bleeds into the 29-second paean to psychedelics “Mescalito”… which morphs into the two-minute country-folk strummer “Dance”… which jump-cuts into the closing “Jig,” a horn-led instrumental that finishes off the album in a spare minute.
A generous view of this sequence would be to call it a singer-songwriter suite, but it’s not billed as such, and comes off instead as a half-assed attempt to make something (the final third of the album) out of nothing (a series of unfinished song ideas). In that sense, it’s the perfectly shambolic finish to an album that I described as having “a ‘some friends came by with a couple of joints and a bottle of tequila’ vibe that’s warm, hazy fun but ultimately leaves the album feeling tossed off.” Indeed.