As Shameless Love began to make its way into the Texas folk canon, taking a place in line behind Clark’s Old No. 1, Van Zandt’s Live At The Old Quarter and Willis Alan Ramsey’s self-titled album, Taylor began withdrawing from the music business. He co-produced Griffith’s Poet In My Window (released in 1982), played around the state, got divorced and vanished.
“Are you talking about when I pulled off drugs in ’83?” he asked. “Is that what you mean? What made me do that? I think pretty much the same reason that everybody does. People can give you a lot of fiery reasons as to why you pull off of something like that. The thing for me is that it didn’t work, and I was dying. There wasn’t anything left. There’s not room for anything else when you’re strung out.”
This was not a quick trip to a rehab center, or a year spent away from the temptations of the road. This was, as the blues songs say, gone, solid gone. Years passed. Taylor became a licensed drug counselor, worked with other addicts and swore off the music business.
“Whenever it would come up, he’d say he didn’t miss it at all,” said Denice Franke. “He just came to a place where he’d had enough. He was very clear about that when he would talk to people.”
Lovett, whose career as a national recording artist began during this time, didn’t even broach the subject of returning to music with Taylor. “Oh, gosh no,” Lovett said. “I wouldn’t get in his business like that.”
After awhile, some people assumed Taylor had died. If anything, his audience was expanding at the time, largely as a result of the efforts of Lovett and Griffith. She recorded his “Storms” and “Deadwood” during this period, as well as the co-written “Ghost In The Music”; Lovett often played “Whooping Crane” in concert, and he spoke of Taylor in interviews.
Texas folk duo (Doug) Hudson and (Denice) Franke would play “Joseph Cross” and other Taylor songs as well. British folk singer June Tabor recorded “Shameless Love” and “Joseph Cross”. Taylor actually appeared once every six months or so for shows at Anderson Fair, but he didn’t end his silent treatment of the larger music industry until 1993, when he sought a publishing agreement.
To that end, during Lovett’s I Love Everybody recording sessions in Los Angeles, Taylor spent a late night cutting guitar-vocal versions of numerous songs. Lovett produced the session, occasionally reminding Taylor of forgotten lines or guitar riffs, and the songs found favor with Polygram International publishing. When I Love Everybody appeared in stores in 1994, it also included another Taylor co-write, a song called “Fat Babies” that he won’t play in concert to this day.
“Lyle and I wrote that on the way to the Kerrville Folk Festival one year,” Taylor said. “We knew people would sing along, and we wanted something they’d feel stupid singing along with.” They succeeded.
Then, newly married and having moved from irrevocably altered, musically dispirited Houston to tiny Columbus, Texas, with his wife and young daughter, Taylor decided it was time to show his cards. The cards were in the black notebook.
“For me, it came out of the blue,” said Franke, who by then was often singing onstage with Taylor at his Anderson Fair gigs. “I remember that he had a different tone at that time. He was very positive, very excited about going back. I was like, ‘Who is this guy?'”
Mark Hallman and British folk-rock icon Iain Matthews produced the comeback album, which came out in 1995 on Watermelon Records.
“I saw Eric play live several times before we made the record,” Matthews recalls. “Live, it was just him and James [Gilmer] some of the time, and Denice. The first night I saw him was at Anderson Fair, which is Eric’s crowd. It’s a big occasion when he plays there — idol worship, really. That night, he came onstage, played three songs and excused himself. He said he had to go backstage and throw up. Five minutes later, he came back, and you could only believe that’s what he’d done.”
