For the first song on his first album in 14 years, Taylor chose “Dean Moriarty”, a six-minute, down-tempo masterpiece that demands a level of attention not normally afforded by casual radio listeners or program directors. It was a typical story of Jack Kerouac’s pal, and of auto theft and hammer throws and girls who smell like Juicy Fruit gum, leading to the same old conclusions about restlessness and emptiness. Radio ready.
“He doesn’t really have too many of those 3 minute, 30 second songs,” Matthews said. “He could have started with something else, but that doesn’t make quite the statement. Anyway, I think that album is an instant classic, on all levels.”
Matthews has spent a lifetime around some of the world’s finest musicians. Asked to compare of them to Taylor, he paused before answering, “Nobody I can think of is a parallel.”
The material [Charlie Rich] does is very much his own personal brand of soul…Where Elvis is stiff and forced into a mold which is not entirely of his making, Charlie Rich is free to be whatever he likes. He feels none of the terrible constraints of stardom.
— Peter Guralnick, Feels Like Going Home
When he walks onstage with his guitar, Taylor presents himself. There is no act. He plays the way he feels, whether up, angry, depressed or drunk.
— Lyle Lovett, Texas A&M Battalion, January 1979
I saw Charlie Rich singin’ at the Continental Ballroom
He let the whiskey do what whiskey does the best
Here’s a song about Kentucky with a big, bright blue moon
Put a little something in my glass
Can you put a little something in my glass?
— Eric Taylor, “All The Way To Heaven”
Eric Taylor has no Hank Williams complex. Taylor’s performing life is closer to the Charlie Rich thing, at least the pre- and post-countrypolitan Charlie Rich (difficult to imagine Taylor as a 1970s country star). They say Rich would play what he felt, sometimes performing different versions of the same song two and three times in a night. Rich at the Vapors in Memphis was one thing, and Rich at the Continental Ballroom in Houston was another. Taylor’s performances may vary wildly from night to night, not in quality but in mood. He brings the day’s events, a disruptive phone call or an angry conversation or a book he’s reading, into the things he says and the way he sings.
“If you want to know something, don’t ask me in an interview,” he said. “Ask me when I’m onstage. That’s when I’m the most open.”
And so it’s a strange life. Eric Taylor, a man introduced to much of America by his ex-wife or ex-protege, walks on stages and acts the way he acts, sings the way he sings, speaks his mind. No matter what audiences like to believe, that’s not the way it often works. Too risky.
The albums? God, they’re great. There’s three of them now, four if you count the hard-to-find Shameless Love LP. Nobody’s getting rich. The self-titled album on Watermelon served to reintroduce him to his core audience and to a somewhat larger group of new initiates. Then came the messy dissolution of all that appeared noble about that Texas-based record label, complete with lawsuits and the like.
The next one, 1998’s Resurrect (Koch), is an extraordinary collection of songs. “Louis Armstrong’s Broken Heart” draws mid-set standing ovations. “Texas, Texas” is, like Guy Clark’s “She Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere”, a gut-sinking evocation of one moment in time. “Four Great White Fathers” is a portrait in evil, depicting Mount Rushmore as a desecration of one of North America’s oldest churches.
“People worshiped at the Black Hills before Christ,” he said. “We’re talking about the annihilation of a culture, and in the middle of the biggest church in that culture we took are four of the men who were the commanders in chiefs of the armies that annihilated it. How would you like to live next door to the world’s largest synagogue, walk out every morning and see a swastika sticking out of it?”
The new Scuffletown contains a similarly head-on bit of American tenet-bending called “Your God”. It’s a turning around of the old Footprints story, asking “Did your god ride the bullet to the old Lorraine Motel?/Is it the blood of the lamb, is it another man down/Did he catch him as he fell?” And, in a verse inspired by the beating and dragging death of James Byrd, “Did your god ride the backroads on a Texas summer night/Did he stand there in the pine grove as they drug him out of sight?”
That’s either an intellectual browbeating or a window into uncommon humanity.
“Eric knows what he’s doing,” Lovett said. “I enjoy being around people who are clear about what they’re doing, and decisive and forceful. Eric is a kind person, a thoughtful person, but he has a big personality. So does Guy Clark. So does Hunter Thompson.
“I’m just mindful,” Lovett continued. “I think Eric’s songs are examples of what songs ought to be. Why doesn’t everyone get them? It’s one of the great ironies of the business. It’s just not fair, is it? It’s not right.”
