For generations, the music of James Taylor has been the sound of serenity. But before the singer could become an institution, first he had to be institutionalized.

One of five children born to a well-off family whose father would become dean of the University of North Carolina's School of Medicine, Taylor played cello as a child before picking up the guitar. By the age of 15, the prep-school kid was playing summer coffeehouse gigs around Martha's Vineyard with his buddy, future session guitarist Danny Kortchmar.

The introspective young man struggled to graduate from high school, finding himself deeply depressed and sleeping 20 hours a day. He checked himself into McLean Hospital, a historic mental health facility outside Boston, where he found his footing at the hospital's affiliated school. Students there weren't expected to fulfill the rote learning of typical high schools – the "jive nothingness," as the singer told Time magazine after his breakthrough. "You can't tell a whole bunch of potential suicides that they have to have a high school diploma," Taylor said.

Upon leaving McLean, Taylor headed for New York, where he hooked up with Kortchmar and began playing around Greenwich Village in a band called the Flying Machine. He also sank quickly into heavy drug abuse, developing a heroin addiction in a time and place where it was as easy to score a fix as it was to buy a drink, as he later recalled. After being carted out of the city by his father, the singer made another change, moving to London in 1967.

There he delivered a demo to Peter Asher, one-half of the singing duo Peter and Gordon and A&R head of the Beatles' Apple Records. Paul McCartney loved the newcomer, and Apple would soon release his self-titled debut, which included early versions of two Taylor classics, 'Something in the Way She Moves' and 'Carolina in My Mind,' as well as a manic song about his stay at McLean ('Knockin' 'Round the Zoo').

But it wasn't until Taylor's second album, 'Sweet Baby James,' was released by Warner Bros. in 1970 that the talented singer would truly establish his career. The focal point was a haunting song called 'Fire and Rain.' An immediate success, the song went to No. 3 on the pop chart, as new fans tried to decode the ominous lyrics. Who was this Suzanne, for whom "the plans they made put an end to you"? And what exactly did the singer mean by "Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground"?

Many listeners took the lyrics literally, and rumors began to circulate that Taylor's girlfriend had died in a plane crash en route to visit him. The real-life Suzanne was Suzanne Schnerr, a girl from Long Island who knew Taylor in New York and later committed suicide. A bit less dramatically, the reference to "flying machines" was simply an acknowledgment of Taylor's despair at the failure of his early band. Nevertheless, the song was about as bleak as it gets in the Top 40. Oddly, Taylor's song about hitting bottom put him on top to stay.