- Born
James Wesley Voight and raised in Yonkers, NY, the son of a professional
golfer, Taylor is the brother of Academy Award-winning actor Jon Voight.
- Taylor’s
first chart hit as a songwriter was “He Sits At My Table,”
recorded by Willie Nelson. His songs soon caught the ear of RCA Records
Nashville A&R head Chet Atkins, who found it hard to believe that
their writer was based in New York City. “But wherever he’s
from,” Atkins wrote Taylor’s publisher, “I want
to hear every song he writes.” Country artists that have recorded
Taylor songs include Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, George Strait,
Anne Murray, Bobby Bare and Emmylou Harris.
- In
addition to “Wild Thing” and “Angel of the Morning,”
Taylor’s songwriting was a constant chart presence in the 1960s
with hits like “Can’t Let Go” by The Hollies, “Make
Me Belong To You” by Barbara Lewis, “I Can Make It With
You” by both The Pozo-Seco Singers and Jackie DeShannon, “Welcome
Home” by Walter Jackson, “Step Out Of Your Mind”
by The American Breed, “Country Girl - City Man” and “Storybook
Children” by Billy Vera & Judy Clay and “I’ll
Hold Out My Hand” by The Clique..
- Top
artists that have recorded Chip Taylor songs include Frank Sinatra,
Fats Domino, Dean Martin, Janis Joplin, Ike & Tina Turner, Linda
Ronstadt, The Pretenders and Bonnie Raitt.
- Other
acts from across the range of popular music that have covered Chip
Taylor songs include P.P. Arnold, The Box Tops, Terry Cashman, Popa
Chubby, Marshall Crenshaw, Jackie DeShannon, Stoney Edwards, Lorraine
Ellison, Esteban, Percy Faith, The Fania All-Stars, Jose Feliciano,
Rosie Flores, Lita Ford, Four Bitchin’ Babes, Ace Frehley, Bobby
Fuller, Rodney Hayden, Nona Hendryx, Al Hirt, Walter Jackson, The
Kingsmen, H.P. Lovecraft, Melanie, Garnett Mims, Olivia Newton-John,
Genya Ravan, Duke Reid, Cliff Richard, Evie Sands, Andres Segovia,
Nina Simone, Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazelwood, Sloan, Smith, Darden
Smith, Ronnie Spector, B.J. Thomas, The Tremeloes, Bonnie Tyler and
Midge Ure.
- “Angel
of the Morning” has hit the Top 10 three times: In 1968 by Merrilee
Rush, 1981 by Juice Newton and 2001 by Shaggy.
- Noted
artists that have appeared on Taylor’s recent albums include
Lucinda Williams, Rick Danko, John Prine, Guy Clark, Rodney Crowell,
Bill Frisell, Evie Sands and P.P. Arnold.
- Taylor
has produced records for Neil Diamond, James Taylor and The Original
Flying Machine, Evie Sands, Carrie Rodriguez, Kendel Carson and John
Platania.
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| BIOGRAPHY
If you’ve
ever wondered how Chip Taylor, the songwriter whose hits include “Wild
Thing” and “Angel of the Morning” and whose songs
have been recorded by Johnny Cash, Peggy Lee, Dusty Springfield, Aretha
Franklin, Frank Sinatra, and the Hollies wound up pursuing a career
as a country performer, don’t worry. With the release of his latest
album, Yonkers NY, he takes you back to the start of his life and explains
it in a collection of songs with the patented Chip Taylor charm and
grace.
Yonkers NY is a depiction of a fairly normal childhood spent in the
suburbs of New York City with loving parents and two older brothers
who only tormented young Chip in the ways older brothers always do.
The family was subtly different from its grey-flannel-suit-wearing suburban
neighbors in that the elder Taylor was a golf pro, not a businessman
commuter (although he managed to convince his youngest son for years
that he was also an FBI agent), as well as a high-stakes gambler on
occasion.
Chip’s parents weren’t your normal uptight suburban family.
“My dad and mom would let me stay up late to listen to the radio
because it was important to me. It was okay to break the rules, as long
as we broke them when we were following our passions; they were okay
with that. They listened to what we were interested in. Barry was into
rocks and the mountains right away, and I was listening to music and
telling my brothers about that and Jon was doing dialects and little
performances. It was already ingrained in us; we were old hands when
it came time to do what we were going to do.”
Chip tells the story of his discovering his passions in eleven brilliantly
crafted songs on Yonkers NY, introducing the family in the album’s
first song, “Barry, Go On,” with the subject being the three
Voight kids, Barry (now a renowned vulcanologist), Jonny (actor Jon
Voight) and Jamie (James Voight, Taylor’s birth-name). “Charcoal
Sky” introduces us to trains, then as now an essential way of
getting around in suburban New York, while “Gin Rummy Rules”
introduces young Jamie to mathematics as he sits with his father at
the game he attends in nearby Mount Vernon three nights a week.
“Hey Jonny” turns the story in a new direction as Jamie
and his older brother discover rock and roll as Bill Haley rocks the
silver screen: “Hey Jonny, did you feel that movie?” Chip
certainly did, and it changed his life, setting him on the path he’s
still following. For much of the 1960s, he and the band he put together
with his friend Greg Gwardyak in Yonkers played and recorded country
music until a chance recording of one of Chip’s songs by Willie
Nelson made him realize that he didn’t have to beat himself up
on the road, but could make good money writing songs for other people.
“Without Horses” tells the tale of another passion: gambling
on horse races, something he’s always been very good at. All through
the 1960s he’d place bets with his bookie (who at one point was
Meyer Lansky) and then go to work writing songs, picking up his winnings
at the end of the day.
“No Dice” would seem to continue the gambling theme, but
it’s actually about teen romance, which was also part of a young
man’s life, while “Bastard Brothers” is an affectionate
swipe at his siblings who got tired of hearing Jamie saw away at a violin
and begged their parents to get him another instrument for Christmas.
He got a ukulele, which immediately stole his heart and led to his acquiring
a guitar not much later. His life could have been much different if
it weren’t for his bastard brothers! “Piece of the Sky”
is the only non-autobiographical song here, a fantasy of having a band
with Janis Joplin and selling six million records. Or maybe it is autobiographical,
since what musician doesn’t have similar fantasies?
“Saw Mill River Road,” though, is all true details: Taylor’s
first professional band, with Gwardyak, came together in Yonkers and
was called the Town and Country Brothers. The competition was the Hudson
Valley Boys, who had a long-standing Friday night gig at a place called
the Chat & Chew in Ardsley, New York, and would call Chip to the
stage every time he went to see them so he could sing a couple of numbers.
“Yonkers Girls” is a tribute to the fans the band had, and
generally to the girls from the towns in the area, delivered with good
humor and a lot of affection.
And, finally, there’s “Yonkers, NY,” ending the song-cycle
with a look back at what became of the people and places of Taylor’s
childhood, all mixed together the way fifty-year-old memories get, and
wrapping up the story of an American childhood and adolescence.
Taylor got out of Yonkers when Greg Gwardyak got the Town and Country
Brothers a record deal. “I was signed to King Records at 15 because
Greg was so passionate about these demos that we’d made that he
walked the street in New York until he got us a deal. It was about passion.
I could say I wanted to be in the music business, but it was because
Greg was walking the streets that I actually got into it.”
Eventually, Taylor gave up performing for songwriting, than took up
performing again in the 1970s, when he recorded three highly-regarded
albums for Warner Bros. When they failed to sell enough to impress the
company (although they created a cult following both in the United States
and Europe which has only grown over the years), Taylor retired to gamble
full-time. In 1993, he felt the old itch and un-retired, and in 2001
he met fiddler Carrie Rodriguez at the South by Southwest event in Austin,
Texas, initiating a creative partnership that would catapult both to
the upper ranks of Americana music and see them perform all over the
world. The two parted ways in 2006 so that Rodriguez could concentrate
on her solo career, but Taylor has continued, releasing Songs from a
Dutch Tour in 2008, and, now, Yonkers NY.
All in
all, the songs on Yonkers NY bear out what Chip Taylor has to say about
songwriting generally. “I like to feel things. My whole life has
been governed by chills, to be able to experience something in silence
without a lot of talk around you. To hear the radio late at night. These
days I sit here in the morning, with a couple of guitars, a Martin 0018
and a D-25 Gibson a few feet away and I can just sit here and not listen
to anything except the breeze blowing outside. I’ve got my minidisc
player so that if a chill comes over me I can record it immediately.
I couldn’t love my life any more. The thing is to create every
day. I just wait for the chill and leave the crafting ‘til the
end. The magic has to be there and often times it comes without syllables,
just sounds of things and chords and melody. And you let that flow out
of you.”
That’s what he’s done on Yonkers NY, with his superb band,
consisting of John Platania, electric guitar; Greg Leisz, steel guitar,
dobro, and mandolin; Tony Mercadante, electric bass; Seth Farber, piano
and accordion; Kendel Carson, fiddle; and Tony Leone, drums.
Yonkers NY is being released by Train Wreck Records on September 29th
in a deluxe package with a 35-page book designed by Andy Taray. The
book is filled with photographs of the Voight family and, of course,
Yonkers itself, and also contains lyrics to all the songs, as well as
Taylor’s commentary on them. The album will contain two discs,
one of which will have the full cycle, including Taylor’s spoken
material, in which he tells stories and shares memories of this period
of his life, the second of which will contain edited versions, with
just the songs. The chills are added at no extra cost. |
