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Otis Taylor proved to be warm, witty, and thoughtful. The interview was a lot of fun. Rolf Olmsted: Congratulations on the Handy Nominations. I'm happy for you on that--the Acoustic Blues Artist of the Year nomination and the Contemporary Blues Album of the Year nomination. Otis Taylor: "Is that unusual?" RO: "I'll say, it's been a long time since that combination has occurred." OT: "Oh yeah?" RO: Acoustic Blues and Contemporary Blues, well for a long time it's been horn bands and like that in the Contemporary Blues Album of the Year category." OT: I'm not gonna win, you know. That's blood money for me, Charlie's [Musselwhite] gonna win. I know Charlie and I called up Charlie's wife and I said 'you know Charlie got nominated again and I'm up against him, and that means Charlie's gonna win'. Charlie's a good luck charm and if I'm up against him, Charlie's gonna win. RO: What did you think about being nominated for both Acoustic Blues Artist of the Year and Contemporary Blues Album of the Year?" OT: I didn't think about it! It never crossed my mind until you mentioned it. I was just surprised to be nominated for Acoustic Artist of the Year. I don't play that much you know. I stopped for along time. RO: You've been on the scene for a while, I bought a CD from you in August '99. OT: "Yeah but, I'm talking about someone on the scene for years." RO: "Oh right: 'An overnight sensation in only twenty years'". OT: "How do I stop it, a lot of guys been making blues and making records for a lot of years and …" "I've got some pretty stiff competition." RO: "How do you approach writing and setting songs up?" OT: "They just come to me, I don't approach it, it just happens. They just come to me. That sounds phony but it's really how it works. It's not a lot of work, a lot of the words would never cross my mind otherwise. It's why they're so simple, they're conceptual thoughts. That's why my album covers never have anything to do with the songs inside. I'll have an album with the title song but it won't have anything to do with the cover." RO: I'm looking at the CDs- I have three of them anyway. I don't have that long ago far away one." OT: 'We don't release that one any more. There's a couple great songs on that one. Just to be difficult, just to make something rare." RO: "I see where "When Negroes Walked The Earth" is on Shoelace Records." OT: "That was my own company." RO: "I figured it might be a reflection of its funding." OT: "I have this ball of shoelaces that weighs about a hundred and forty pounds. It's about 2 and a half feet in diameter. And we named the record company after the shoelace ball. It was going to be called 'Sito Music' because Otis backwards is 'Sito'. I had all the art work and stationary done. And then BMI wouldn't let me use it cause somebody else had the name. So I went to 'Shoelace Music'. My father was a painter and he signed his paintings 'Sito' so I really wanted to dedicate it to him. RO: "What'd he paint?" OT: "Some abstracts. He wasn't famous or anything. He was an African-American artist, he had some shows in California. I'm an art dealer and all the art dealers want to buy my father's paintings." RO: I read that you were an antique dealer and I've been looking at all the photos you put in your CDs, Fort Huachuca and the Kansas vagrants on "Respect The Dead". In collecting stuff do you get conceptual things out of collecting? OT: "Collecting gave me knowledge of certain things like the Ninth Cavalry, Tenth Cavalry, Twenty-fifth and Twenty-fourth Infantry [famous black US Army regiments- the 'Buffalo Soldiers']. I've done it a while, I'm old, I'm 52. RO: "I was fascinated with 'The Cookoo' [When Negroes Walked The Earth] and its reappearance in 'Ten Million Slaves' [Respect The Dead]." OT: "That's what my wife said. I didn't know I was doing that." RO: "You get together all kinds of folk and old-time music and early blues influences. OT: "Doc Watson's one of my guys. I was into him and Mike Seeger and like that. But I listened to that so long ago that I almost forgot who I listened to except Doc Watson. I used to listen to Bluegrass guys too: "Shady Grove" and those kind of songs. Doc Watson I pursued, [my memory of] the rest of the songs are like mush now. I never sat and listened to records, I hate sitting and listening. I never sat and listened to records too much as a kid. I had some of those Folkways records. Especially the banjo player Dock Boggs [known for his very unique and bluesy style of banjo playing]. I really listened to him." "Someone gave me some Searchers records. There were a couple of songs on there I really liked, it was a beautiful song (laughs). That's funny. You ever heard the Searchers? RO: "I remember the name from a real long time ago but their music is not ringing bells with me." OT: "They were a pop-rock band." [Laughter]. RO: "I love that 'dry land western' feel that some of your songs have--" OT: "Write that down" R= "'Lost My Horse' was one of those 'dry land western songs." O= "It has sort of a cajun feeling to it. It has an Appalachian feeling to it too. There' a beat that's very African music, it's in Irish music too." RO: "You've got that Native American chant feel in "Changing Rules" ("Respect The Dead") and that reluctant trooper in "Ninth Cavalry Blues". You've got that Fort Huachuca 10th Cavalry parade ground picture and those cover pictures of what looks like the high Santa Fe desert. OT: It was the desert around Calisteo right outside Santa Fe county. We took those on the day that America bombed Afganistan. (laughter). RO: "It looks cold that day." OT: "It was warm and beautiful, it was in September. It was windy, that's why it looks cold." RO: "That leads me right into my little vision [from listening to Otis Taylor's CDs]--My God, there they are sitting on a porch of a tumbledown barracks of Fort Huachuca: Charley Patton, Son House, and Richard Thompson [Otis laughs]. Eddie Turner blows me away because suddenly there's a whole techno-folkrock feel. OT: We call it 'a sound landscape.'" Eddie'll rip it up some times. When we [the trio] play live he'll go nuts sometimes and do two minute solos and come absolutely unglued. He's got lead guitarists disease. "We become like banshees. People think we're like "folk". When we roll in with the band for gigs with no drummer, We're like this wall of sound, people think we're the equivalent of [early acid-metal rock band] Blue Cheer." [Laughter] "It's different from the albums which are very passive. Kenny's an all-star rock bass player, he played with Joe Walsh, and had to really play back in those days and he's really aggressive. It's different, we're not just an acoustic act. "The Cookoo" with the band was like 'Shaq' meets "The Cookoo" [laughter] with a heavy bass line. Nobody does that." "We did "Satisfaction" for the first six months and Kenny and Eddie kept on saying to me "you're not singing it right." So the hell with it. OK, we won't do it anymore." Sings: "When I'm riding in my car, Oww! And I'm doing this and I'm doing that! I wake up and I see somebody, Yeeoww! [fakes his way through the words--much laughter]." "One day I'll do it maybe. Maybe like a gospel tune. It is a great rock and roll song. [Deadpan] I didn't write that song. I wish I'd written that song. [Laughter]." RO: "Where did the harmonica song "Baby So" [on "Respect The Dead"] come from?" OT: "I needed a harmonica song so I just took it from a guitar song. Maybe I'll put it on another album as a guitar song and nobody will pick up on it RO: "'She killed herself and blamed it on me', what a line!" OT: "She tries to ruin the other guy's life too. I always thought it ought to be a movie. I just wrote it down in a few minutes." RO: "Where did the whole harmonica style come from? 'Cause it's got a ton of feel." OT: "Well I started pushing songs on a banjo, then I put a harmonica on it. I always wanted to play like Junior Wells and get that Little Walter sound and play through amps and everything. I couldn't do that and I decided 'everybody's doing it, so why should I do like every harmonica player? That was my schtick in the late 60s, I used to play with Tommy Bolin in a blues band as a harp player and singer. Tommy was the guitar player. So I was a harp player and singer and not a guitar player. I'd play guitar, like a solo thing, but it wasn't really there. So for four years I was a bass player. I got to be a good bass player." RO: "You have a whole banjo drone thing in a lot of your songs." OT: "The whole banjo thing is way back in time. I play the banjo like a guitar and the guitar like a banjo. I play the mandolin the same way. On the new album coming out we play three mandolin songs this time. So that's what's happening with the banjo." RO: "I'm personally knocked out by "Black Witch. In another time and place, I grew up near the ghetto and I saw that very happening [like in the song]. I saw it go down in a small town. It's like you've been writing a bunch of collective memory and ghost songs of things that have been hanging around 'cause nobody talked about them.' OT: "Well you have to understand, I call them censorship--people talked about them, in their houses, but they didn't talk about them openly. Now things are different. Censorship is oppression, know what I mean? Now things are different, they can't stop me: the songs got done. A long time ago I'd have had to watch my butt. I'd have disappeared. It got done. I don't feel like a hero, I was raised up north. My parents were like immigrants, like the Irish. That's your better world." RO: "Everyday on my way to school I had to cross the Illinois Central mainline tracks coming north from Memphis and I watched a river of people going north, many times the train was so full that people were standing up. And everybody dressed to the nines. I got the idea from that. It was something to see." OT: "They got out of there." RO: "I knew why." OT: "People get oppressed all over the world. It's a very common thing. I just went over to France in December. It was 'interview city' for some reason. All the French interviewers wanted to talk to me for some reason. The first word that came out of their mouth was 'Tell me about "Ten Million Slaves"'. They were after the slave trade. I don't think they understand that their own people did more from there than the American slave laws ever did." RO: "I don't think that people understand the size of what was called "The Triangular Trade"--and how long it went on." OT: "How long the boats had people on board. They'd go to the islands and then they'd go up the coast." RO: "That image of being in the bomb shelter and suddenly being in the rows [of packed bound slaves in the slave ship holds] and 'Keep your hands on your stomach!' in "Hands On Your Stomach", that one got me good. OT: "That one's just a true story. That's one of those--You know what happened--there was this old bomb shelter--I just trip out on ideas and it just came to me. I went to do the words and I forgot a whole chorus! I had to come back and re-record it. "Oh, here's the words by the way." "Oh I forgot that line." They just come to me, I don't sit down to write a song." RO: "People and writers are almost saying about you what they say about Richard Thompson: "Old Gloom and Doom OT: "They already plugged me for that. I'm already nailed. In the movie "Songcatcher", there's a song line "They cut his head off and kicked it against the wall." I went oh, man, I wish I wrote that. O= "Another Appalachian one I like is "Oh Death", I like that one. It has a very eerie tuning to it. I used to like "Prodigal Son" [Rev. Robert Wilkins]: "I believe I will go back home. I left my father's house where I was well supplied, I did wrong and wasn't satisfied." I used to love that song-- "I believe I will go back home." RO: I always loved the way the accents fell in the words: "I beLIEVE I will GO back home and acKNOwlege that I DONE wrong." [Laughter] |