He distinguished himself in other ways throughout high school. “I would go down to this little place called Western Trading Post and get moccasins to wear to school. Those days they’d cost $20, $15. I remember this one artist, he tried to sell me a pair for $25, which I couldn’t afford. I’m sure they’re worth about $3,000 or $4,000 now,” he laughs. “So I went for the cheaper cut. And I wore them to school; I wore beaded jackets and some Indian stuff. I put together a collection in the ’70s, sold it and bought a house.”
For a time in the 1960s, Otis Taylor appeared bent for stardom. Somebody even suggested he might be the link between Taj Mahal and Jimi Hendrix; Taylor found himself playing harmonica one night during a jam session at the Family Dog in Los Angeles with Hendrix on bass. He went to London and signed (rather, had his father sign; he was too young) a contract with Blue Horizon, the English label now best known for having launched the career of Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac.
But Blue Horizon, he says, didn’t pay living expenses, and hadn’t a clue what to do with its young artist (“I was never in a studio before, I didn’t know how to make a record. They said it was too raw; I don’t know, I am raw”), and so he came home to Denver.
There were, he later found, others in England who would have signed him, but he fell into a band with a very young Tommy Bolin — the guitar phenom who later streaked through the James Gang and Deep Purple and a solo career before succumbing to heroin (he was all of 25) in late 1976.
“It wasn’t a big deal when I played with Tommy until after he died,” Taylor says. “It’s like, if you knew Billy the Kid when he was 12 years old instead of 15. We didn’t record anything, but everybody was making the same sound.”
Taylor had been a harmonica-wielding frontman and a guitar player; he finished up the first phase of his musical career playing bass in Zephyr, another Denver band in which Bolin had figured. Finally, he quit in 1977. Quit the music business and went into antiques full time: “art deco, art nouveau, arts & crafts, paintings, Tiffany jewelry, Madison Avenue, American Indian art, Polynesian or Japanese art. Decorative arts.”
And bicycle racing, which will explain how he stumbled into the story of Marshall “Major” Taylor (“He Never Raced On Sunday”, on Double V), the African-American who became world bicycling champion in 1901.
“I had this girlfriend,” he explains. “She was an amateur bicycle racer. And so I got a bike, rode with her. We had a big fancy house, so we decided to be volunteers for the Coors Bicycle Race, and put up this Scandinavian team.
“I just got more interested when I found out about Major Taylor. I had this great vision that I was going to start a black bicycle team. I kinda halfway did it; we did have blacks on the team.”
Otis Taylor didn’t become world champion in the 200-meter sprints. “I was like eighth in state for some race,” he says. “I would’ve been fourth, I got disqualified. We had a pretty powerful team, but I was a little rough they said. I deny it.” He chuckles. “He pushed me up, I pushed him down, and they said I wasn’t supposed to do that.”
Two of Taylor’s young African-American riders went on to win national championships. He began — predictably — to collect vintage bicycle racing memorabilia. “I’d get into town and tell the team, ‘I’m going away for a day, you guys do the pretrials, I’ve gotta do something.’ Go buy a bike collection in New Jersey.”
That was one of a series of collections he talks quite casually about assembling, and then selling. “I just like to collect things, because I learn about things when I collect them.” Hunting bicycling memorabilia led him to the daughter of Major Taylor, no relation: “She was like 80-something. She said, ‘If you wanna be one of my kids, I’ll adopt you.’ I bought a cycle from her.”
The peculiar conjunctions of his careers led Taylor, by now removed to Colorado Springs, back to music. The cycling team had been sponsored by Buccaneer Clothing Stores, which went bankrupt in the 1990s. The owner decided to open a coffee shop and asked Taylor’s advice on a PA system.
“I said, ‘I’ll come play,'” Taylor says, and in that moment unexpectedly ended 19 years of musical silence. “Kenny [Passarelli] was my big client when he was in town, we’re friends. We’d sit around and jam for years, never thought about it; it was just kind of how I sold him stuff, whether it was an instrument or paintings.”
Bassist Passarelli’s resume includes stints with Elton John, Joe Walsh, Dan Fogelberg, Hall & Oates, and Rick Derringer. They brought in another friend, guitarist Eddie Turner, “and I was back on the road again.”
The music and Passarelli’s studio skills led Taylor back to the business he’d abandoned. “Kenny knew exactly how to record me,” Taylor says. Their first efforts, 1997’s Blue Eyed Monster and 1998’s When Negroes Walked The Earth, appeared on Taylor’s Shoelace imprint (named for a two-foot ball of shoelaces that was apparently begun with one from Al Capone). NorthernBlues released both White African and Respect The Dead in 2001; Taylor’s management moved him to the U.S. label Telarc for last year’s Truth Is Not Fiction and this year’s Double V.
