Something Else! Interview:
Iconoclastic bluesman
Otis Taylor
A musical alchemist and stirring modern-day storyteller, Otis Taylor is just as apt to experiment well beyond the Delta tradition as he is to explore the raw passions of this nation’s fight for racial justice. This isn’t your grandfather’s blues.
Witness the forthcoming Contraband, due February 13 from Telarc/Concord, this haunting mixture of ominous guitar and banjo work (yes, banjo), wildly inventive syncopated rhythms, and a series of raw themes dealing with searing personal demons, the scourge of war, and the scalding verities of love. Collaborators include cornetist Ron Miles, pedal steel guitarist Chuck Campbell and djembe player Fara Tolno of West Africa — in itself, a road map to the musical complexities of Taylor’s work.
No small amount of the album’s roiling emotions can be traced back to a furious bout of solo recording in advance of major surgery. In April 2010, just before the release of Taylor’s Clovis People Vol. 3, doctors discovered a cyst the size of a softball pushing against the Boulder, Colo.-native’s spine. He recorded seven of the songs included here while enduring excruciating pain, forming the acoustic backbone of Contraband, then went in to have it removed.
Healthy now, Taylor completed the album and is now preparing for a new tour. He joined us for the latest SER Sitdown to talk about his rediscovery of the banjo, working with famous players like Tommy Bolin and Gary Moore, and the future of blues music …
NICK DERISO: Describe your journey back to the banjo, an instrument that for too long had lost its association with the African-American experience. You described it, as an album title in 2008, as “recapturing the banjo.”
OTIS TAYLOR: The funny part about it, I started playing banjo when I was 14 and half, right? And I didn’t know until about 15 or 16 years ago that the banjo came from Africa. I saw my teacher, and I asked him: “Why didn’t you tell me?” And he said: “I didn’t think it was any big deal.” Nobody told me. They knew, but nobody ever talked about. It gets institutionalized. All the bluegrass guys never talked about it, either.NICK DERISO: As old-timey as that can sometimes sound, though, it’s part of a larger mosaic in your sound that includes something akin to avant-garde jazz with its trance-like grooves.
OTIS TAYLOR: When I was a kid, my favorite blues guys were guys like Howlin’ Wolf, some of the Willie Dixon stuff, John Lee Hooker. Those were my favorites. I wasn’t a big B.B. King guy, because it had more chord changes — it was so smooth. I was into the funky stuff. “Boogie Chillin?’” No chord changes! That was trance music! So, I’ve always been looking for that. It’s not an accident. I’m always trying to get another sound, something different than the last album. I’m looking for sounds, or combinations. Old-timey music to me sounds very African. It’s all interlocked. When I play banjo, I play it the same way I play guitar. I play the guitar the same way I play banjo. Nobody plays like me on the banjo. I meet famous banjo players, and they say: “What the hell are you doing?” When I play guitar, it’s the same way: “What are you doing?” It’s all one thing to me. There’s something in the way I strum, no matter what I pick up.
NICK DERISO: Over the years, you collaborated often with Gary Moore, who recently passed. What was that like?
OTIS TAYLOR: It was a real experience. I learned about touring at a high level — and how to be a diva. I learned that promoters weren’t treating me good enough! (Laughs.) I learned a lot about touring. They traveled with their own chefs! He ended up playing on three of my albums. Gary could play any kind of music — Irish music, jazz. People don’t know how talented he was a guitar player. He could play anything. If it had stings on it, he could figure it out. He was one of those people. Musically, I don’t think it changed anything for me. We were playing different music. But whenever I play my guitar, I always think about Gary. He told me once: “Your signature is your tone.” So, whenever I try to play lead, that always comes into my head. I think: “I gotta work on my tone.” It’s something that’s engrained in me now.NICK DERISO: Early on, you also worked with childhood friend Tommy Bolin in a pre-Deep Purple project called T&O Short Line. Did you see him as a blossoming heavy metal god?
OTIS TAYLOR: There was no heavy metal back then. Tommy was heavy metal, as one of the pioneers. Before he came along, there was no such thing. When I was young, there were two kinds of music – bubblegum and blues rock. There was Herman’s Hermits and Paul Revere and the Raiders, and in the middle was the Beatles. Then there was the Rolling Stones, Eric Burden. They were blues-rock bands. Then Cream came along and got more aggressive with it, and that guitar sound turned into heavy metal. When it came to Tommy, everybody said I impacted him more than he impacted me. I try to tell people, and it’s so hard: When you know a kid from when you’re 10 years old, can it really impact you? We were really just being kids. I had a chance to meet Fred McDowell, and Son House — and they were just old black people to me, old guys from the neighborhood. They were stars, but most of the kids didn’t like their music, because it was old fashioned. They were just happy to talk to me because I was really into it. So that impacted me. When I met Tommy, he wasn’t a star yet. I remember we were playing this bar, it was sound check. And Tommy came in and said: “I just got a gig with Deep Purple.” We were so happy for him. “We know somebody who’s a star now.” It was a big deal. But my influences were further back.
NICK DERISO: What does helping to expose a younger generation to this music, through the Blues in the Schools program that your wife created, mean to you? Are the children receptive?
OTIS TAYLOR: They’re receptive, but you have to work them just right. When they come into the classroom or auditorium, they’re not your fans, you know? You have to win them over. If they start getting wiggly in their seats, you have to tighten up! Seriously, though, it’s the hardest gig I have to do. But it you talk to 500 kids and five of them like it, then that’s five more kids you have who like the blues. And if they like they blues, they will like it for their whole lives. It’s not something that’s going to be a fad. It’s not fad music. We have to try to reach them, or we’re all going to be resident artists at retirement homes — because that’s where the music will be.NICK DERISO: The blues establishment, in many ways, is lost in the same history-obsessed maze as the jazz establishment. By being so hung up on what came before, they risk killing off the genre. There has to be an embrace of the new — the new characters, the new artists, the new sounds.
OTIS TAYLOR: When you’re talking to blues fanatics, ask them a question: “What if the greatest blues musician hasn’t been born yet?” Then you’ll find out where they’re coming from. Do you really think things aren’t as bad in the ghetto right now – with kids killing kids? Is that any less depressing? They say we have freedom these days. Sure, freedom for kids to shoot you with guns. (Laughs ruefully.)NICK DERISO: That’s like a line from a poetry slam.
OTIS TAYLOR: I just made that up! Write that down and send that to me so I can remember it! (Laughs.) That’s how you tell, though. Say that to somebody and you can tell how closed minded they are. If they start talking Robert Johnson this, and Robert Johnson that, then you know. The music, back then, couldn’t do what we can now. They weren’t talking about lynchings. They talked about love, because that was what the record companies wanted to hear. They didn’t talk about revolution. They didn’t talk about the brutality of the existence. They didn’t say much about Jim Crow, just “Spoonful” or “Big-legged Woman.” If they had talked about that other stuff, they would have brought their whole house down. I mean, look at what happened years later when Billie Holiday did “Strange Fruit.” There were race riots. That’s what happened when you talked about that stuff.
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Otis Taylor on "One Million Slaves,"
January 26, 2012 On this special edition of Something Else! Reviews’ One Track Mind, we hand the reins over to Otis Taylor — whose newest release Contraband will be issued on February 13 by Telarc/Concord Music.
Find out more about this uniquely modern bluesman’s creative impetus, as he explores signature cuts from his new album and a catalog that’s quickly growing in stature. Taylor, after an early period of musicmaking in a series of teen-era blues-rock bands, left the stage from 1977 until 1995 — only to restart his career with an attendant burst of avant-garde creativity.
[SOMETHING ELSE! INTERVIEW: Otis Taylor discusses the state of the blues today, career intersections with Tommy Bolin and Gary Moore -- and the forgotten African-American legacy surrounding the banjo.]
Contraband, which takes its title from the name given to runaway slaves who escaped across Union lines during the Civil War, follows and then expands upon the Colorado-based guitarist’s tradition of heart-rending narratives and brilliantly complex instrumentation — all woven together inside of a pounding, trance-like groove. He has quickly become one of the most exciting and original voices in a genre badly in need of both …
“RESURRECTION BLUES,” (WHITE AFRICAN, 2001): A stand-out cut on the project that introduced Taylor’s brand of bone-chilling trance blues to a wider audience. The album, which ended up earning four W.C. Handy nominations on the way to best new artist debut honors, was brutally frank in its discussion of a series of devastating twists of fate – from an old South lynching (“Saint Martha Blues”) to the plight of the homelessness (“Hungry People”) to the desperate feeling of being unable to afford care for a dying child (“3 Days and 3 Nights”). On a song-cycle filled with them, however, Taylor has called “Resurrection Blues” – told from the point of view of Jesus, as he contemplates crucifixion – his most intense composition ever.
OTIS TAYLOR: The album started out slow. Most albums, the first song is a fast song – a more “up” song. I started off slow and then I got slower – and then I got slower. And then I got darker and darker. I started off with a lynching, then “Resurrection Blues” – about a guy who’s dying. Then I did “Three Days and Three Nights,” about a guy watching his daughter die – you know, “if I fall asleep, Jesus will hold your hand.” Those were some of my best lines, I think. It was just dark. Most people wouldn’t do something like that. Blues fans like it, but they kind of didn’t, at the same time: “Nice album, but he ain’t playing at our festival.” I don’t think there was a big commercial appeal for it. I was named entertainer of the year, and I only got two blues festivals that year. They weren’t ready for it; they still aren’t. People are still having trouble with what I do.
“OPEN THESE BARS,” (CONTRABAND, 2012): The longest cut on Taylor’s forthcoming album takes the listener into the relentless, harrowing loneliness of a jail cell as a black man contemplates an imprisonment simply for looking at a white woman in the dangerous darkness of Jim Crow America. Riven by fear, Taylor’s character can only cry, with a resigned helplessness, “Let me go, let me go, let me go.” Over and over, he says these searing words – knowing, as do we, that they will simply echo forever off the stone walls around him.
OTIS TAYLOR: My albums can be designed to take you on a heavy journey. But what do they use in Hollywood to get the movie going? Music. So music is really just a path for my words. There was a time when black people couldn’t say what they wanted to say. Luckily, I’ve come of age in a time when I can do that. I don’t use a lot of words either, so that makes it that much more intense. Then I say them like mantras. It can be cryptic at times, I guess. But I’m not any darker than Appalachian people. I don’t know what it is, but people aren’t used to hearing things like that in the blues – even though the blues are supposed to be sad music. I don’t know what happened. It was like blues fans got a little too happy with the music.
“WALK ON WATER,” (TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN FICTION, 2003): Part of a turbulent and striking album of blues turned almost inside out by scorching psychedelia and fever-dream narratives. After years away from the music, Taylor was creating now at a furious pace, and his third album in three years seemed to lead him to ever broadening musical vistas. The truth is, though, that Taylor actually came of age during a period of rangy experimentation, having worked in rock and fusion outfits that, at one point, included future Deep Purple frontman Tommy Bolin.
OTIS TAYLOR: I was always psychedelic. My very first band (called the Butterscotch Fire Department Blues Band) was blues rock. That’s what we all played – and that’s what Tommy played. We were doing songs for 20 minutes, back then. I did songs a lot longer when I was younger. I listen now and I think: “Wow, that’s going on for a while.” So, it’s nothing new. I was writing dark lyrics from the beginning too. I was writing it pretty simply, but I was still writing about issues.
“FEW FEET AWAY,” (DEFINITION OF A CIRCLE, 2007): A standout collaboration with his daughter Cassie, who had been part of Taylor’s recordings since 2004’s Truth with Double V, when the teen was still splitting time between the road and working at Starr’s Clothing in Boulder, Colo. Of course, Double V ended up earning album of the year honors from Down Beat – just as Circle would in ’07 – and Taylor was named best blues entertainer in the Living Blues magazine readers poll. Cassie – whose symbiotic work alongside dad was a big part of that success – remained an integral part of his recordings, playing bass and singing, for the next seven years. She released her solo debut in 2011.
OTIS TAYLOR: Everybody has a certain style that they play with. With bass players, I always say: “Don’t follow me. Play the beat – even if I change the beat!” (Laughs.) I can weave in and out, but they have to stay on the beat. Many of my albums don’t have any drums on them. But the beat was always there – that comes from the bass. Working with her, it’s a family thing. You know, your kids act like your wife or you. The way I play music is the same way Cassie plays music. I used to be a bass player, so Cassie plays bass like I would play bass.
“ONE MILLION SLAVES,” (RECAPTURING THE BANJO, 2008): One of more memorable narrative moments in Taylor’s career, as he connects the suffering of generations of enslaved people with the times that still try men’s hearts and minds today. The track’s soul-shivering lyricism, and its driving banjo-laden groove, has made it a soundtrack favorite – notably during the Michael Mann film “Public Enemies,” starring Johnny Depp. It’s also appeared as the closing song on the FX program “Justified,” and in a commercial for the 2011 season of “Sons of Guns” on the Discovery channel. For all of the memorable imagery to be found here, though, Taylor still finds great mystery in his writing process.
OTIS TAYLOR: I try to get the stories across, but I always try to sing in second person – like a third party. Sometimes it’s the words first, sometimes the music. You’re just walking down the street, or in the shower, and something comes to you. Songs will come to me while I’m practicing, just messing around. I play to keep my calluses and these lyrics will come to me, almost subconsciously. Sometimes I will sit down and try to write a song, and I don’t do as well with that. They come to me like dreams. I’ll wake up at 4 in the morning and I have to pee, then a song comes to your head. You have to sit there and write it down. That’s how I come to them.
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