“You take them laigs of yorn right there,” he said, pointing, as if there were some question as to which legs we were there to consider. “I cain’t see as I ever seed laigs jest like them. But them is the Lord’s laigs an He’s seed them laigs and He’s laid His hand on them laigs.
– Harry Crews, A Childhood
Take my legs, man, I think they’ll tell it best/They turned me ’round, and then I headed west.
-Eric Taylor, “Sweet Sunny South”
There was no interstate when Eric Taylor moved with his mother to what was then rural central Georgia and what is now suburban Atlanta. No Beatles, either.
“I had friends I liked hanging out with, and we learned to play guitar together,” he said. “We were just dumb little kids, and we didn’t even know you needed an amplifier for an electric guitar. We’d seen the surfing movies and none of those guys had amps. My cousin, his mother took him to Atlanta to buy an electric guitar. They brought it home, and it took my friend’s brother to say, ‘You stupid little shit.’ That’s how we figured out about the amp.”
Then came the Beatles, and high school. Poetry, R&B and folk music. Richie Havens at the 12th Gate Coffee House. Tim Hardin, the Temptations, Phil Ochs and Dylan on the record player. Accepted at Georgetown, Eric Taylor never accepted the acceptance. He stuck around D.C. for six months or so, trying to decide what to do. He left, and ended up in Texas, in Houston, in 1970.
Eric Taylor: I first saw Townes at Mac Webster’s apartment in 1970. There was a guy face down on the bed there at Mac’s, I mean literally face down, hands up to his face. I didn’t think much of it, but Mac said it was Townes and he might be sleeping. The next day, Mac comes to this place where I’m working [washing dishes] called the Family Hand, and this guy Townes is with him. I think every girl in the place knew him. He was sweet, and kind of goofy, doing card and coin tricks for the girls, none of which worked, and that seemed to delight him even more.
I think it was the next night that he played the show there at the Family Hand. Goes without sayin’, I had never heard or seen anything like it. His guitar playing was as clean as any I’d seen. That slap flatpick thing that he did so well. His voice fit the songs that he was singing — and I don’t want to sound weepy here — the best fucking songs, without a doubt. Spiritual. There were a couple of members of the Bandito motorcycle gang in there that night and he had these guys cryin’, man. They were actually tearing up about these songs. I saw Lightnin’ play there the next night.
Have you seen the smokin’ Lightnin
Hit the music in the back?
And have you seen Rodriguez
Playing with his cane?
— Eric Taylor, “Sweet Sunny South”
So there was the Harlem Renaissance, and there was San Francisco’s Beat revolution and Dylan’s Greenwich Village, and then there was Houston in the early 1970s, and that’s no joke. Townes and Guy and Eric and an odd lawyer/genius songwriter named David Rodriguez, and gathering spots the Family Hand, Sand Mountain, the Old Quarter, Liberty Hall and Anderson Fair. Lightnin’ Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb. Vince Bell. Rodney Crowell, first with ears open to Van Zandt’s sets at Sand Mountain, later as half of a duo that played at Popeye’s supper club. Steve Earle wore denim shirts, trying hard to look like Guy Clark, and took in everything Townes said or sang.
There were more, too. Nanci Griffith, Lyle Lovett, Robert Earl Keen and Darden Smith came to listen to all this. Eventually they were sharing stages with their mentors.
Among Taylor’s tutors was Mike Condray, who ran the Family Hand and Liberty Hall. Taylor often worked for Condray, and that work often involved the aforementioned dishwashing. It could also mean running the lights (he tells a great story about getting cussed out by an uncomfortably spotlighted John Lee Hooker), or it could involve going door-to-door in an (ultimately successful) attempt to secure apricot brandy for Mississippi Fred McDowell.
“What Condray offered me for years of my life was like college,” Taylor said, “He’d say, ‘You need to be over here, looking at this. Sometimes I was too stupid to know what I was in the midst of.”
Hopkins provided the graduate study. Taylor watched him play, listened to his advice (“Quit watching my fingers and watch the strings, boy”), observed him getting knocked offstage (literally, and violently) by an irate Big Mama Thornton, played bass for him once, and visited him at his modest residence.
“He always refused to get any of our names right,” Taylor said. “He called me Larry, and then I’d correct him, say, ‘It’s Eric, Lightnin,’ and he’d say, ‘I know your name, Larry.’ He called Rex Bell ‘Rick.'”
Clark’s line is that Hopkins’ attitude towards the younger, paler Houston musicians was one of tolerance, not encouragement. But the blues legend did show Taylor some tunings, one of which Taylor used to write a tale of embittered philandering called “Hey Little Ryder”. Later, Taylor taught the tuning to Lovett, who used it to write “The Waltzing Fool”, “Old Friend” and “The Fat Girl”.
Taylor’s first real gig in Houston was not received as any sort of historical turning point. It was, however, amusing for Van Zandt.
