Since then, Taylor has made 15 albums and had songs in such high-profile films as the Mark Wahlberg vehicle Shooter and director Michael Mann’s Public Enemies, starring Johnny Depp as the gangster John Dillinger. He returned at the urging of friends and family in 1995 with his striking sound and sometimes staggeringly dark perspective-which is balanced by a rich sense of humor in conversation-at the ready.
Dissatisfaction with the business caused him to drop out of music for nearly 20 years to become an art dealer and pro bicycle team coach. Talk about putting the frosting on the cake.”Īlthough Taylor got his start at Colorado folk-music institution the Denver Folklore Center, he came of age during the height of the LSD-dappled ’60s and performed in a pair of notable blues-rock bands from the Mile-High City: playing bass with Zephyr and fronting T&O Short Line with his friend, the late guitar legend Tommy Bolin. “I was thinking about Ferguson and all this stuff with Obama and how the hatred is coming back-that’s why I did the album. “The album was finished long before the election,” Taylor explains. Elsewhere a white Southern congressman conceals his black mistress, interracial couples struggle, and in “Jump Out of Line,” which turns a one-chord arrangement into an Escher-esque soundscape, Civil Rights marchers fret about being attacked. The album begins with Taylor’s guitar echoing cadences of Africa, similar to those found in the playing of Ali Farka Touré or Rokia Traoré, on “Twelve String Mile.” And in “Banjo Bam Bam,” he picks his open-backed signature OME model as his sweet ’n’ burred baritone voice intones the thoughts of a shackled slave slowly losing his sanity. So it’s apt that Taylor’s new release-it’s provocative title, Fantasizing About Being Black, sitting comfortably alongside those of his early discs When Negroes Walked the Earth (1997) and Blue-Eyed Monster (1996)-is an exploration of race. “I have a real Otis Taylor expression,” the 68-year-old original says: “I don’t know much about the blues, but I’m good at being black.
Taylor also writes about race and social justice in an unflinching manner more akin to hip-hop. Certainly the influences of John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf, Jimi Hendrix, and other past innovators echo within his approach, but his African roots are both deep and more visible, and the psychedelic stardust he sprinkles is timelessness. Unlike most of today’s music bearing that label, Taylor’s songs never become trapped in the amber of 1950s Chicago or Memphis. Taylor has a name for his musical vision: trance blues. And while his sound is carefully layered and sculpted, it is also a beacon of simplicity. His lyrics have the bare-boned integrity of a narrative poet, and they are typically inspired by true stories culled from history, news, or the lore of his ancestors. Yet there’s an undeniable earthiness to Taylor’s method. If ghosts listen to music, it surely sounds like Otis Taylor’s.
All within a musical web that throbs to a spare, hypnotic pulse buoying his electric and acoustic guitars and banjos, abetted by flashes of electric violin, the occasional cello or harmonica, and cornet-the latter often made haunting by carefully measured delay. These are all themes that Otis Taylor explores in his songs.