As a Man Grows Older

Chip Taylor gets back on track with his music

by Grant Alden

In the keen clarity of night, just before descending into dream’s solace – a craving that can no longer be admitted into the busy hours of daylight – there is always time enough to suspect that one has not fulfilled the promises of youth. That moment when the fulcrum shifts and truth is more important than the rent, and the slippage of time is more troubling than the chattering clutch.

Truth. Which eventually cloaks itself in the same shades of gray that color our days, the same one as the other. Perhaps that’s why, in the hunger of innocence, the best work is done by young physicists, painters, and poets, and the most elegant compromises are fashioned by the aged, who have grown accustomed to that enterprise.

Not always.

Not quite always, for we have the careers of Stephen Hawking, Pablo Picasso, Neil Young…others; not so many, but enough. Enough so that it is still possible to go willing and armed deep into the night, to remember that it’s the going and the enduring that matters, and to accept whatever truths that may reveal.

One morning last year Chip Taylor woke up and picked up his guitar, instead of the Daily Racing Form. And he began writing songs again, a habit he’d mostly dropped back in 1979. That was when Capitol, like Columbia and Warner Bros. before them, dropped Taylor. This would be a matter of small consequence, except that Mr. Taylor is one of those scattered few whose work has continued to endure the vagaries of radio programmers everywhere.

To wit: He wrote "Wild Thing".

And "Angel Of The Morning". And Anne Murray’s "Son Of A Rotten Gambler", co-wrote the Janis Joplin epic "Try (Just A Little Bit Harder)", co-wrote the Hollies’ "I Can’t Let Go"…stuff like that. Maybe somebody else has had cuts by Jimi Hendrix, Frank Sinatra and Willie Nelson, but it’s got to be a pretty elite club.

It is possible that he has just released his best song (and with it The Living Room Tapes, his finest album since 1973’s Last Chance), though it’s hard to imagine that "Grandma’s White LaBaron" will become a radio staple. Nor that anybody else could sing it. It’s about his mother, her living and her dying. And it has about it the unmistakable stain of truth, hard-won words sung gently into the good night.

Conventionally told, Chip Taylor’s story should be a morality play of redemption: Talented writer succumbs to the temptations of gambling, abandons his muse for years, returns to his true calling only at his mother’s deathbed, finds success, happiness, and the girl in the coda at the end. Oddly enough, it’s the succumbing and temptation parts of that sentence that are inaccurate, though the gal was still up in the air at last report. See, Chip Taylor was as good a gambler as he was a songwriter, and there is an excess of discipline in his story, not dissipation.

Indeed, Taylor has walked away from a very successful career to play music to small audiences wherever he’s welcome. That’s the remarkable and almost inexplicable part of his story, but we rush ahead of ourselves.

"Ever since I was 18 or 19 years old," he says in a quiet, rich voice, sitting a few steps from his guitar in a Nashville songwriter’s suite, "my drive was music and gambling. When I had my first hits, I allocated a certain amount of time to both. I never really slept much, so it was a lot of work and I loved both things."

Taylor is the middle son of Elmer and Barbara Voight, a remarkable upstate New York couple – Elmer was a teaching golf pro; his short stint on the PGA tour ended with a back injury at the Bahama Open – whose three sons became a volcano scientist, an actor, and a songwriter. (The actor is Jon Voight, known for his roles in Deliverance, Midnight Cowboy and more than a dozen other films. Chip Taylor, born James Wesley Voight, changed his name because he didn’t think the original fit.)

Chip drifted through a couple colleges in the early ’60s, worked for a short time as a golf pro and became a staff writer for April-Blackwood Music. In which capacity he dashed off a song for a group called Jordan Christopher & The Wild Ones. Their version of "Wild Thing" disappeared without a ripple, and only a quirk in April-Blackwood’s English publishing deal placed the single in the Troggs’ hands. He also produced a bit, notably the Flying Machine, in which James Taylor (no relation) was first found.

Like most songwriters, Chip hoped to sing his own work. In the late ’60s he formed a duo with Al Georgoni (with whom he wrote "I Can’t Let Go"); they recorded one LP for Buddah as Just Us, then added Trade Martin and cut two more LPs as Georgoni, Martin and Taylor. Chip went solo, first for Buddah, then three LPs for Warner Bros., one for CBS, and one for Capitol.

All along the problem seems to have been that Chip Taylor’s music didn’t quite fit anywhere. His are deceptively simple structures, the words given plenty of room and space, attractive places for singers to let their voices, imagination and emotion take flight. Rather like Willie Nelson’s songs. Like Nelson, Taylor half-sings, half-talks his way across melodies that do not require operatic range. In Chip’s case, he’s simply too self-effacing to attack the microphone.

"So I had this record out that I really believed in," he says, glancing out at the rain. "I don’t think the album was really that good. I’d say my most inspired work was the Last Chance album that came out in ’73. I loved that album. And after that I was trying to find a way to fit in to different places. But the single was called ‘One Night Out With The Boys’, and I loved this single. It just felt good to me, I thought it sounded like a hit.

"I wouldn’t let the record company release it until we had an understanding with the country division that they would promote it, because I didn’t want to go through what I had gone through before with Columbia. Their country division just refused to promote my record. So the Capitol people promised me they would, the record came out, and sure enough within a couple of weeks the thing was the most requested record wherever it was played. A couple of easy listening stations and three country stations. I talked to distributors, [and they] said it’s the hottest little jukebox single they had, and in a couple of weeks I was just really excited."

And then Taylor called one of the stations that was playing his single, only to be told by the program director that they’d been asked to stop playing it. By Capitol’s country division. "In retrospect, I look back and I can understand this," he says, utterly without rancor. "Let’s say if I was down in Nashville signing six or seven artists. I would say, Well, these are my artists. Who’s this guy coming in from New York with a record that I now have to include as part of my package?"

In the end, and to keep the corporate peace, his record was dropped. "I had some wonderful sentiment from the Capitol people," he says, "but it really killed me. I said, ‘What am I gonna do now?’ I had another album ready to make, and I had the budget for it, and I had even started working on the next project. I just stopped making records. Neil Diamond’s manager took over Polygram Records and asked me if I would help him make some decisions, because they were in the hole $60 million."

He spent a few months helping with Polygram’s reorganization before turning to his other love. "It wasn’t like I totally said I wouldn’t write a song again, or anything like that," Taylor says, but his schedule was a bit full. "In the middle ’80s I got to be partners with probably the best handicapper in the world, the guy who’s made more money at it, and a wonderful, wonderful guy. His name’s Earnest Bahlman.

"So it wasn’t like it wasn’t lucrative; it was. But it certainly was an obsessive thing, because pretty much I’m obsessive no matter what the hell I do. Gambling was the thing I’d wake up at 8:30, work like crazy for like three hours, talk to my partner Ernie for about an hour and a half, go over every race, and every little possible thing you could think about. We each had hired people at the race track to look at the horses as they came out, to look at the shoes and stuff like that, and get back to us on cellular phones about any changes.

"I’d usually drive out to Long Island and spend my afternoons with him, betting, at an off-track betting satellite where he bet so much money that they gave him an office. And maybe at six o’clock I’d drive back to my apartment and shower and change my clothes and go down to the Soho Kitchen and lay my race track work out for the next day and start to work on that. And maybe at eleven o’clock I’d break for two hours and socialize and go out and have a few drinks.

"And my life was like that. I’d do the same thing the next day. Every once in a while I’d write a song. I had no calluses on my fingers. That went on until, I guess, ’95, when my mom was real ill. I started to go down to her house and sing for her. And I would sing for her and remember the look in her eyes. And it just made me feel so good.

"Playing for her, seeing her response, I remembered when I used to do it. Not so much when I did it as a business in the ’70s, when I was trying to break, trying to make these hits and whatever I was doing. But the way I did the Last Chance album, that spirit in a way, [the way] I did it when I was younger, when I was in high school. So I got that whole spirit back.

"[Gambling] was a very unsocial thing. I mean, yes, I had my social stuff with Ernie, because when you’re working with a master and he’s patting you on the back and saying great job and high fivin’ all day long and you’re winning all this money, it’s great. Hit pick-sixes for hundreds of thousands of dollars. I remember one day hitting a pick-six for $32,000, and it was like nothing. In retrospect I look back and say, What, are you kidding? I could use that to pay for my shortfall for my touring this year."

In 1995, Taylor put his racing records to the side and began to make records of his own. Three all at once, more or less, beginning with a friend’s suggestion that he record his most famous songs by way of reintroduction. "So I was doing the Hit Man album at the same time I was doing The Living Room Tapes. Actually, I was doing another album, too, like a folk-rock album." There was, of course, the matter of finding a label willing to release Taylor’s music once again.

"I had lots of problems," he admits. "And then this one label was interested in Vermont. Peter Gallway, one of the artists on that label, had seen me do a show and suggested I call this guy. I did and sent him my records, this Mitch Cantor at Gadfly Records. And Mitch liked my stuff very much, he said, ‘Yeah, I’ll put your stuff out.’ He did it with such a nice spirit that I didn’t even want to look anymore."

Taylor toured some of the East Coast behind Hit Man, selling copies of The Living Room Tapes from the stage; it was finally released more formally in late March, complete with a party at Douglas Corner in Nashville. Guy Clark sang along for a few songs (including a reluctant "Wild Thing"); Lucinda Williams dropped by to say hello and ended up singing on Taylor’s next record.

Something changed within Chip Taylor during all those years at the track, and if he knows how it happened – or even what it was – he isn’t saying. But somehow, at fifty-something, he has at last come to believe in the worth of his work.

"I don’t know. It just started with my mom," he says. "That spirit just spiraled. I don’t know why the hell Jon [his brother] is working so hard now, but maybe it was the same kind of spirit that I’ve had since mom passed away. I think he did six movies in the last 12 years, and now all the sudden he’s done seven in the last year, or something like that.

"I’m just loving what I’m doing, and I’m not afraid of it anymore," he adds, and there is the innocence of a child gazing at the blue ocean in his voice. "I’m not afraid like I used to be, years ago, when somebody from the Rolling Stones camp called my then-publisher and said, I think we can hook something up with Chip and Mick." He shakes his head and laughs softly.

"Right away it was like, ‘No way I can do that.’ I didn’t even think about it. I was embarrassed. I didn’t want to go over there and have them see how limited I was. Because I only played three or four chords, and I could lock myself in the studio and get out of me something that I wanted, but I thought I was doing it with mirrors."

Funny thing is, as hard as Taylor tried for stardom in the ’70s, he never really toured. Sure, he played around New York (usually when he was hunting a new deal), and spent a month in Holland, where he had a No. 2 record one season. "I’ve done more touring since October than I did in my entire life. And I’m a singer-songwriter," he laughs, and stumbles on something as if for the first time. "I mean, how do you expect to be successful if you don’t play for people? It’s pretty simple, isn’t it? You’d think I would know that."

Italo Svevo, an Italian industrialist, was 46 years old in 1907 when he showed his second book to a young James Joyce, who was his English teacher. Joyce was quite taken with the novel and suggested its English title As A Man Grows Older. It is the story of an aging man’s fascination with a young woman. It may also be a metaphor for the difficulty of pursuing one’s art past the fire of youth, but I found the novel in my early twenties and never finished it.

Chip Taylor’s new songs are compelling because, like Svevo, the circumstances of his life do not force him to fashion art out of economic desperation. Instead, his work is the product of rigorous self-examination, discipline, and an almost zen stripping away of ego. As simple as they are, they hide nothing. The Living Room Tapes includes songs to the four important women in Taylor’s life: His mother, his ex-wife who is also the mother of his two children (later, he asks that I turn the tape back on so he can tell me how wonderful his grown kids are), the woman he nearly married during the gambling years, and the woman he met recently, to whom he has written his next CD.

He’s still learning. One day he turned to Cody Melville, the singer-songwriter he has pressed into service as a manager. "I said, ‘Boy I love Chrissie Hynde’s version of "Angel of the Morning".’ She sings with such passion, it’s one of the best versions I’ve heard of that song. He says, ‘What the hell are you telling me for? Tell her.’

"He sent a letter over to Chrissie, and within a couple of weeks got a response back from her manager of how excited Chrissie was to get my note, and then a couple weeks after that, another message, would I write a song for Chrissie? Which I did. I don’t know if it’ll ever be recorded, but she’s holding it, and I think it’s a real cool song, she just inspired me to do it. Garth Brooks is holding the same song."

Taylor also has spent time writing with Randy Travis, who is now in search of a new record label. "I liked his earlier things more, probably, but I love him as an artist, and I was so shocked that he’s such a good songwriter. And we wrote great together."

Mostly, though, Taylor is enjoying himself, and the possibilities his life has offered up. "Wherever it goes, as long as it keeps going, will be fine with me," he says. "As long as I can continue to write my songs, make my records, record them with the spirit that I want to record them, and get them out for the public and still play for people…if I can break out even and make a little bit of money, then that’ll be fine."

No Depression co-editor Grant Alden saw the Troggs play "Wild Thing" three times in one night during the early ’80s.