Preview
CHIP TAYLOR AND CARRIE RODRIGUEZ
September 14 and 15
Kaos Café
It was one of those moments that raises a mountain range of flesh on the back of your neck. During a time of controversy and interracial tension, white singer Billy Vera and black singer Judy Clay stepped into the Apollo Theatre, the first black and white act to ever play there. Vera sang out, "You’ve got your world and I’ve got mine and it’s a shame," and Clay answered with, "Two grown-up worlds that will never be the same."
It was 1968 and Chip Taylor, who wrote the song with Vera, was there to see it. It was one of those moments, like meeting Sinatra or Joplin or Dylan, that Taylor thought he would never experience again.
But that was before the songwriter who penned "Wild Thing" and "Angel of the Morning" met fiddle player Carrie Rodriguez at music industry showcase South By Southwest in Austin in 2001. When Taylor met Rodriguez before his show, he was drawn to her personality. A few days later, he got a chance to see her play and immediately pitched a musical partnership.
"I asked her if she sang at the time and she said she didn’t. She tells me that the next line she gave me was really to protect her job – she wanted to work with me, so she said, ‘I’ll try to sing a little background if you want me to.’ Up until then she didn’t feel comfortable doing that," Taylor says from his home in midtown New York.
After a few gigs on the road in Holland, Rodriguez had begun to feel comfortable with a few more vocals when Taylor pushed for a duet. "(It was) because I loved the way her voice sounded against my voice."
The show was played in two parts, and Rodriguez’s looks and musical mastery earned her a lot of attention during the first half, Taylor recalls.
He told the audience the history of the song he’d penned with Vera, and crooned the first line. "Then Carrie wandered over to the microphone and sang, ‘Two grown-up worlds that will never be the same.’ When she did that, it was the most amazing reaction I ever saw at a show. It was like Rocky got off the canvas or something… They went so crazy we had to stop…. It was the high point of the show so I began to write more songs for us to sing at the end of the tour."
The duo’s first album, Let’s Leave This Town, was released in 2002 on Taylor’s own TrainWreck Records. Since then, they’ve toured constantly, including an appearance last week at the Tonder Festival in Denmark, where they went expecting to play to a few hundred people but ended up playing to thousands and closing the show. Their new album, The Trouble With Humans, will be released this fall.
The addition of Rodriguez seems to have sweetened the musical stew for Taylor, who grew so disenfranchised with the music industry that he quit it cold turkey in the early 1980s. A bone-deep New Yorker, Taylor resented pressure from his record company to move to Nashville simply because he played country music. He lived by gambling professionally for over a decade, counting cards and handicapping horses. These days, he is content to keep it low-key, meeting friends and staying close to his ex-wife, children, and grandchildren.
It’s a sweet existence for a songwriter who was once summoned to Frank Sinatra’s home to give advice on songs that would appeal to the youth movement. Taylor gave him two of his own songs and one from another writer. When Taylor was activated for stateside duty in the Vietnam War later that month, Sinatra called him back to thank him for the songs.
"He said, ‘Two things. If you have any problems when you’re in the service, you have no problems. And I’m doing a show at Caesar’s Palace, so pick your best buddy and I’ll get in touch with you.’" Sure enough, a puzzled commanding officer summoned Taylor and he was flown to see the show.
Although he was raising a family during the ’60s and didn’t go out much, Taylor did accept Clive Davis’s invitation to a party where he met Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan. "Janis was sweet. She was just like my sister. She was so nice and easy to talk to. Bob I couldn’t quite figure out because he came over and said, ‘Man, you’re Chip Taylor, oh, man, wow, man.’ He kept doing that and I didn’t know if he was kidding me or what. Somebody later told me that he did like my music, but then I couldn’t tell what he was about because he was more of a caricature of himself."
But it’s working with Rodriguez and the future, not the past, that holds allure for the musician. "Every time we’re onstage, even if we don’t know exactly what we’re gonna do, when our voices collide with each other, there’s just such inspiration floating around. I get an absolute physical chill.
"It’s a fun music business for me now, whereas at the end of the ’70s it was a battle. It’s on my own terms now." |
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