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Introduction by Jim Liddane
Chip Taylor, born James Wesley Voight on March 21, 1940, in Yonkers, New York, is truly a legend - an American songwriter, singer, and performer best known for penning classic songs like "Wild Thing" and "Angel of the Morning." He is also the brother of actor Jon Voight and geologist Barry Voight, and the uncle of actress Angelina Jolie and despite being born into a family that found success in other fields, Chip Taylor carved out a distinctive path in the music industry, leaving a significant mark on both rock and country music.
Chip’s early life was filled with music, as he developed an interest in songwriting and performing from a young age. In the 1960s, he signed with Scepter Records and quickly established himself as a skilled and versatile songwriter. One of his most famous early compositions was "Wild Thing," written in 1965 and initially recorded by The Wild Ones. However, it was the version by The Troggs in 1966 that became a global hit, reaching number one on the Billboard Hot 100. The song, with its raw, primal energy and simple yet infectious lyrics, became an anthem of the era and remains one of the most recognizable rock songs of all time. "Wild Thing" has been covered by numerous artists and even today, continues to be a staple of rock music.
Not long after the success of "Wild Thing," Taylor wrote another hit, "Angel of the Morning." This song, first recorded by Merrilee Rush in 1968, too became a major hit. "Angel of the Morning" has a much different tone than "Wild Thing," with its tender, emotional lyrics about love and vulnerability. The song has been covered by many artists over the years, including Juice Newton in 1981, whose version also became a hit. Both "Wild Thing" and "Angel of the Morning" highlight Taylor’s range as a songwriter, capable of writing songs that resonate across genres and emotions.
In addition to these two iconic songs, Taylor wrote for a wide variety of artists throughout the 1960s and 1970s, contributing to the success of musicians in both rock and country. His ability to write compelling melodies and lyrics made him a sought-after collaborator. Despite his success as a songwriter, Taylor was also drawn to performing. He began recording his own music, blending country, rock, and folk influences into a unique style that resonated with audiences, though his success as a performer was modest compared to his songwriting achievements.
In the mid-1990s, after a long hiatus, Taylor returned to music, this time as a more mature artist with a focus on Americana, roots, and country music. He began recording and performing again, finding a new audience for his reflective, introspective songs. His later albums, such as "The Living Room Tapes" and "Yonkers, NY", showcase his storytelling abilities, often drawing from his own life experiences. Taylor's music during this period became more personal, exploring themes of family, memory, and the passage of time.
Throughout his later career, Taylor continued to tour and release albums, often collaborating with other artists. He formed a notable partnership with singer and violinist Carrie Rodriguez, and together they released several well-received albums blending country, folk, and Americana influences. Taylor’s ability to adapt to different musical styles and his willingness to experiment helped him maintain relevance in the evolving music landscape.
In addition to his musical achievements, Taylor has also been active in supporting songwriters' rights, advocating for fair compensation and creative freedom within the music industry. His contributions to the songwriting community have been widely recognized, and he has earned a place as one of the most influential songwriters of his generation.
Chip Taylor’s career has been marked by his independence and willingness to follow his passions, whether in music or gambling. His songs, particularly "Wild Thing" and "Angel of the Morning," remain timeless classics that have left an indelible mark on popular culture. Today, he continues to be celebrated for his contributions to both rock and country music, and his legacy as a songwriter and performer remains strong.
Harvey Rachlin interviewed Chip for the International Songwriters Association's publication "Songwriter Magazine".
Prologue
Songwriter Chip Taylor stepped into immortality early in his career when he wrote a pair of blockbuster hits that ensured his legacy in pop music history. What are the songs? They’re the raucously earthy “Wild Thing” and the divinely dulcet “Angel of the Morning.” The former is one of the most universally well-known rock ‘n roll songs of all time, and the latter has been acclaimed as one of the greatest country songs of all time. If the diversity of these two songs makes you furl your brows in wonder for coming from the pen of the same writer, consider that Chip Taylor is one complex fellow - he eschews formulaic tunes and instead writes from the heart no matter what the outcome.
Taylor plied his craft around New York City in the early Sixties when it was still the golden age of rock ‘n roll. He knew and worked with many of rock’s early hit makers--both behind the scenes and in front--but unless you’re a student of rock ‘n roll or were there yourself at the time, you’d probably need the Brill Building History of Rock ‘n Roll to derive the full richness of his anecdotes. For example, he casually talks about his publishers Aaron Schroeder and Wally Gold but modestly doesn’t tell you they co-wrote some of early rock’s greatest songs themselves; together they penned hits such as Elvis Presley’s “Good Luck Charm” and “It’s Now or Never” and separately they had a hand in tunes such as “Big Hunk ‘O Love” (Schroeder) and “It’s My Party” (Gold).
After all these years, when many of his contemporaries are no longer making hits, Chip Taylor, amazingly, still is. And he’s not just tearing up the charts as a songwriter but as an artist as well. Indeed, Taylor is not just a survivor but a savvy musician-entrepreneur who knows how to swoon the public heart while staying true to his roots. To this end he paired himself with the talented (not to mention stunningly adorable) fiddler cum singer Carrie Rodriguez and to his credit is enjoying some of the greatest success he’s ever had. Chip and Carrie’s 2002 album Let’s Leave This Town was a critical and commercial success, with two singles releases, “Sweet Tequila Blues” and “Extra” both soaring to the Number One position on the European Independent Country Music chart.
Chip Taylor songs have been recorded by dozens of the music world’s most popular stars. At the risk of delivering a laundry list of artists (and this is only a partial list) Chip Taylor’s songs have been etched into musical posterity by such artists as Frank Sinatra, Johnny Cash, Fats Domino, Cliff Richard, Olivia Newton-John, Jose Feliciano, the Hollies, Waylon Jennings, B. J. Thomas, Hanks Williams, Jr., Janis Joplin, Melanie, the Brown Family, Bonnie Tyler, Emmylou Harris, the Ventures, Dusty Springfield, Monty & the Pythons, Willie Nelson, Anne Murray, Evie Sands, Al Hirt, Linda Ronstadt, Jackie DeShannon, the Kingsmen, Ronnie Spector, Bobby Bare, B.J. Thomas, Nona Hendrix, Ace Frehley, Percy Faith, the American Breed, Bonnie Raitt, and Shaggy.
Talking about posterity, Taylor’s songs endure in forms other than vinyl. “Wild Thing” has been used in numerous movies, ads and TV shows but perhaps its most famous performance was when Jimi Hendrix, not exactly known as a reticent guitar player, played the tune at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 in one of his most “wild” renditions before pouring lighter fluid on his instrument ad setting it on fire. Not a shabby legacy for a song!
Despite Chip Taylor’s great success, his story is really a poignant one. After writing himself into the music books at a tender age he became a recording artist, was dropped by his label and abandoned his music career only to become a highly successful professional gambler. Then, after heartfelt episodes in which he soothed his beloved ailing mother with his music he decided to return to his first love, only to emerge at the top of his game. This compelling story could pass for dramatic fiction but it’s all part of the colourful tapestry of the life of songwriter Chip Taylor. Cinematically, it exudes the exhilarating triumph of Rocky and the penetrating pathos of Midnight Cowboy. Oops, did we just mention that spectacular Jon Voight film?" Forgive us, then, for forgetting to tell you that acclaimed actor Jon Voight just happens to be Chip Taylor’s brother (making, of course, hotter-than-plutonium actress Angelina Jolie his niece).
Combining all the elements of riveting fiction Taylor’s tale is a spellbinding parable for the ages. In the interview that follows he talks about his life, a life that has already had elements presented on stage and which maybe one day will light up the small or large screen.
Philosophically and musically speaking, who is Chip Taylor?
I’m one of three brothers, born and raised in a little town called Yonkers outside of New York City. We were a close family. Mom and Dad are now passed away but their spirit remains strong with us. One of the great things about the family is that we were brought up to think there was nothing we couldn’t do. My brothers were very passionate about their dreams and their desires just like I was about mine. I guess if I looked closely at myself I’d say that I worked hard at everything I wanted to do and was very passionate about whatever I was interested in; I always listened to the voices inside me, just like my brothers did.
I never let the typical obstacles stop me from doing anything; if I wanted to get from point A to point B and people said you couldn’t do it or it was very difficult it just made it more interesting and likely that I’d find a way to do it. In my efforts to get from point A to point B I sometimes look back and say I could have done better with smelling the roses or something like that. It’s always been a constant struggle to me, to be a better person. I think that’s part of the beauty of life, that struggle to know when you think you could do better, and oftentimes I know that. I’ve got good examples in my own family of people who have kind of balanced that ledger in terms of honesty and hard work and accomplishment for the greater good. I think they balanced that ledger pretty much on the plus side and whenever I think I’m failing a little bit and think my character is showing too many flaws one of the things I do is look at pictures of my brothers and my Mom and Dad. I have them in my house and I can just look at them and get that spirit back and get myself back in the right direction because they’re very good examples for me.
I was born James Wesley Voight and somehow in the beginning of my music career they asked me to change my name and Chip Taylor became my name as I started in the music business. That’s what I’m known as now and my brothers call me that and Dad and Mom did as well so Chip Taylor as my name evolved rather quickly when I got into the music business.
How did you become interested in music?
Ever since I was a little kid I remember liking music but the real turning point came in my life when I was about seven or eight years old. My Mom and Dad had tickets to a Broadway play and they had an extra ticket. Someone couldn’t go and they were having a difficult time getting a baby-sitter for me; my brothers were someplace else, with the grandparents or something. When they couldn’t get the baby-sitter they decided they were going to take me to this Broadway play and I fought them every step of the way. I didn’t want to go. But the final result was I had to go and I was very upset about that. I remember distinctly, we sat in about the fourth row of this play - it was My Wild Irish Rose - and by the time the first few minutes rolled around in the play, the orchestra started to play, the first song was sung, and I had this unbelievable chill all over my body. It was a real physical sensation, and it’s just those kinds of sensations that have guided me pretty much through life. I just sat there in the theatre totally mesmerised. I didn’t even know what was going on inside me except that I was absolutely loving this thing, this musical experience. When we got in the car and started home I was in the back seat and I didn’t want to talk to my Mom or Dad. I guess they thought maybe I was sleeping but I wasn’t sleeping I just wanted to feel that feeling and block everything out. Sitting in the back seat of the car as this little kid I was thinking to myself that music would be my life.
It was from that point on that I really got involved with listening to the radio every time I could and changing the dials and listening to whatever music I could find. My Dad and Mom used to let me stay up late at night and listen to the radio because they knew I had such a passion for it, and very late one night I found a station out of Wheeling, West Virginia, that absolutely changed my life. First, it was music I loved and it was also this unbelievably warm, sad music and that was the thing of it that really got me. It was the power, it was the sadness, the honesty of it that just chilled my body and even though it was making you sad for the most part, it was just beautiful to me. I absolutely loved it. I liked some of the up-tempo and happy things too but mostly it was the passion of being deeply touched by something, and often times in a very sad way, but I loved that music.
When did you first begin playing music?
I guess sometime when I was about five or six years old I expressed an interest in the violin and so my Mom and Dad bought me that instrument. Unbeknownst to me at the time - I found this out later on in life - I was annoying my brothers so much with my scratchy violin playing that they had went to my mother and father and said you gotta do something about this because we can’t take it anymore. So that next Christmas when I was about eight years old, underneath the Christmas tree was a ukulele and so all of a sudden I was no longer a fiddle player. I turned to the ukulele, which of course later would make it easier for me to learn guitar. But musical instruments, that was the start of it for me: first the fiddle and then the ukulele.
Did your brothers have show-biz aspirations when they were young too?
I mentioned that I’m one of three boys in my family. We’re all close in age, just a little over a year apart. I’m the youngest. The middle guy you all know, Jon Voight, the actor. He was gifted even when he was a kid, when he was just 8 or 9. He had a terrific comedic sense and could do any accent. He would make us laugh like hell every night doing Sid Caesar-like routines, Caesar being a popular comedian in the Fifties who had his own TV show. In high school Jon starred in plays in comedic roles. Barry, the oldest, loved wildlife and studying rocks. At a very early age he used to go out in the woods with Uncle George and bring back interesting rocks and crystals and teach us about that. Barry went on to invent the formula for predicting volcanic eruptions. He became a geologist and developed a formula that predicted when volcanoes will erupt. He got quite famous in the Seventies when he predicted the specific area of the eruption at Mt. St. Helens. He’s saved a lot of lives and he monitors dangerous volcanic activity all over the world and helps determine when to evacuate people. He’s refused any notoriety for his brilliant work and does it because it’s a part of who he is. Several of his dear friends and colleagues have been killed doing such work. Me, I had my ear glued to the radio at an early age. I loved playing my ukulele and singing along, dreaming of one day being a country singer.
Did you have any other interests when you were growing up?
I also loved sports when I was in school. My Dad was a golf professional and I captained the golf team when I was a junior and senior in high school. My brother Jon captained the team when I was a sophomore and we were quite good and won some junior championships. Barry really didn’t play golf back in high school. That wasn’t his interest then. But he’s actually more interested in golf than either of us is now. He enjoys playing all around the world. Some courses he loves playing; he tells us all about these great courses in Ireland. But back in those days when I played golf I also was part of a very good basketball team. I was a starting point guard. I went to Archbishop Stepinac, an all boys, Catholic high school.
What were you doing with music then?
In high school everybody knew my passion for music and I sang with doo-wop groups and whatever. When I was a sophomore there was a country band in town. A couple of the kids in it went to my school. They had a trio and the lead singer was leaving the band and the two other musicians came up to me and said we need a replacement and we’d like you to give it a try but the thing is you have to learn to play the guitar by Thursday and I think it was like Monday. So I played a little bit of ukulele and the fellow - Greg Guardiack was his name - lent me one of his guitars and taught me that week and I learned three chords and put a capo on and by Thursday I was playing in some bar in Mount Vernon. I continued with that group, the Town and Country Brothers, and then started writing songs and we just had wonderful days together and it was all about music.
Even though I was very interested in sports it was music that really held my passion. After school I’d be with the band; Ted, Greg and I would listen to music and practice and we would look forward to our next engagement. I wrote a couple of songs. We made a demo of those songs and we sent them around to various record companies; I was a sophomore or junior in high school at the time. Everybody passed on it except for one label, King Records, which was a black label although they had a country division in Tennessee.
How did you break into the music business?
In New York King Records had a guy, Henry Glover, who signed Hank Ballard and the Midnighters. I was a real fan of Hank’s early stuff and the race records down south because a year or so previous to that I was on a bus coming back from a local movie theatre and I found this magazine under my seat that listed the top ten records in Atlanta, Georgia and the top three things on it were “Work With Me Annie,” “Sexy Ways,” and “Annie Had a Baby,” all done by Hank Ballard. They were number one, two, and three at the time on the Atlanta charts and they all sold a million records. I couldn’t hear this stuff on the radio around New York because it was banned. But a guy I knew at the record store was able to order me some copies and I loved them. They all sounded pretty much alike but they were pretty cool. I got to know those records and loved the race records from down south. That was a part of the influence of my writing.
Getting back to Henry Glover, he signed as I mentioned Hank Ballard and also James Brown and here he was, loving this little demo tape that I brought in to him, to this all-black label out of New York City, and this wonderfully talented A&R guy thought we had something special. All the pop labels turned us down but Henry signed us to a record deal. A shame of this whole thing was that we did have a sound: “The Town and Country Brothers” had this cool little rock-a-billy sound with a little blues touched in. We weren’t great musicians but we had a great feel and what happened was that the head of the record company, Sid Nathan - I guess he saw me as his great white hope - suggested to Henry that they spare no expense to make me a star. They were a little nervous that we were amateurish, but that was the great thing about the groups that came up in those days. Buddy Holly and his boys had their own thing, and we had our own thing. We went to the session and Henry, I think against his own better judgement, hired these great blues musicians in New York, Mickey Baker, from Mickey and Sylvia, and Panama Frances on drums and I forget who the bass player was, but they became the backing band for me singing. The other boys, Greg and Ted - part of “The Town and Country Brothers” - were just there on the sidelines. And I think that was the shame of it really. The records really didn’t make any noise. They got played in some R&B stations because I guess King Records had some power in those areas but nothing really happened. I made a little noise with a thing called “I’m Moving In,” which sounded much like one of those Fabian records from back in the day. The demos I kind of liked and maybe someday if I could dig those up I’ll put them out on a little EP to show how I started.
I guess I should say that around this time I met my childhood sweetheart, Joannie, Joan Carol Fry. I saw her at a local country club and as often is the case with me I’m very taken by instinctive things. I remember seeing her from a couple hundred yards away, and watching her for a few minutes talking to her girlfriends. I turned to a friend of mine and said I’m gonna marry that girl. I fell in love with Joan and around this time I was trying to figure out, I guess, as I was ending my high school years, how I was going to be able to make a living and get married and support a family because that was in the back of my mind.
Did you have any career backup plan?
I was a little lost with what I was going to do with my life because here I was in high school and my records weren’t really happening. I had a little success but no money coming in from it. I was a very good golfer as I mentioned before, and I was thinking maybe I’d become a professional golfer. That was my second choice so I went to Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama actually to play golf and to see if I could hone my skills at that. But the music was so in me and I felt so far away from it being at Spring Hill that I left after six months and that was it. I couldn’t wait to get back to New York and try to find a way back into the music business. I decided I’d better go to school as well so I went to the University of Hartford in Connecticut. I was going to the business school there, trying to schedule my classes in such a way that I could make the two-hour drive into New York City and continue my music career. I would drive to the city two or three days a week and return to Hartford in the evening. I would leave at 10 in the morning to get there around noon, then stay till 6 at night and go back to school and keep doing that as much as I could. So music was what I wanted to do.
How did you come to be a writer in the 1960s with April- Blackwood?
Around that time, just after the King Records thing didn’t work out, I wrote a song that came to the attention of an arranger and producer at Warner Brothers, Stanley Applebaum. It came to Stanley’s attention from Burt Bacharach, whom I had met and who had known Stanley. Burt was a fan of one of my songs.
Burt had heard a little demo I did of this song called “Here I Am.” He used to play at a place called Chuck’s Composite on the East Side and whenever I would go there in the evening and he would see me come in he would play my song and it was such a thrilling thing for me to have this brilliant musician playing my little song. You have to understand that I was a guy who only knew three or four chords. I had discovered this feeling of the 9th and little sounds meant a lot to me. So I had this song that was kind of interesting to Burt. He wrote several songs that used the same thing around that period of time. I think I probably influenced him on some of that. Anyway, here I am with “the only way to love someone, stand by and come what may, when blue skies turn to grey, open up your arms and say…here I am…” which Burt played. He told Stanley about the song and Stanley recorded me for Warner Brothers and I had my first somewhat of a hit record on Warner Brothers with “Here I Am.” It went into the 80s or 70s or something like that. But in some areas of the country it was number one; like in Connecticut it was a very big record. Even though it wasn’t huge it kind of got my juices flowing. I made a follow up which didn’t make as much noise but by then I was really backed strongly with people starting to get interested in my songs so I started going in the direction of trying to get people to record my songs, still going back and forth from the University of Hartford.
When I graduated from the University of Hartford, I guess this was around 1960, I still wasn’t sure whether to pursue golf or to continue my efforts of trying of get people to record my songs. You can make money in golf if you give lessons and play in tournaments, and I finished sixth in my first professional golf tournament. But my passion was still in music and I was running into the city trying to get publishers interested in my songs. The first song I had published was called “Just A Little Bit Later On Down The Line.” I remember playing it for the publisher, Aaron Schroeder, who was involved with Gene Pitney among others. The song I played for him was a country song. Here I was in New York City, this kid, with a dungaree jacket on and jeans and everybody else was dressed in mohair suits so I kind of stood out. I think half the publishers didn’t know what the heck I was doing because it was country flavoured. But they all wanted it down in Nashville so they were very ready to listen to my songs. Aaron listened and said, “I like that song” so he called in his partner Wally Gold. Wally, who was a very good musician, listened and gave this “hmm very good, very interesting Aaron. I do like that.” So they said “We’re going to publish this song for you, Chip. We think we can get a record on this song.” I was really excited. I got to the elevator and I was just flying, thinking here’s a really top-notch publisher publishing one of my songs. Aaron stopped me and said, “Chip before that elevator comes, come here a second.” I walked over to the door. He had an envelope in his hand and he said, “Before you ever leave a publisher’s office when someone wants to publish your song, don’t leave without one of these.” In the envelope was a check for thirty dollars as an advance against royalties. I was so excited. I thought, damn, if I could just write five or six of these a week I could make a living!
That was a tremendous thing for me that start with Aaron. Then I started writing more and more songs, and out of the blue there was interest from Chet Atkins, who was not only the great guitar player we know of, but at the time the head of A&R for RCA Victor in Nashville, Tennessee. He had the most influence on the songs that were recorded by his artists. He called up a man named Jerry Typer who worked for a little publishing company, and then Jerry called me and said, “Chip listen to this” and he read me this note from Chet which said, “Jerry we want something like this. That song you sent me I’m going to record. I don’t know who this guy Chip Taylor is and it’s hard for me to believe he’s from New York but I want to hear every song he writes.” Well that was it for me. There was no turning back from this.
Where was this company based?
Now we got to understand that the publishing company I worked for was located at 1650 Broadway, which is at 51st Street between Broadway and 7th Avenue and that’s where I went every day. I had a little space that I worked out of and right around the corner on Broadway was the Brill Building and it housed Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller and Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil and Ellie Greenwich. Down the block on Sixth Avenue was Screen Gems Music, which housed two of my favorite writers, Gerry Goffin and Carole King, amongst others. It was this wonderful group of writers back in that time. I guess we felt like we were really changing the business because before us it was kind of this show, pop kind of stuff that was very timid and very white in its approach and we were kind of taking over and bringing some soul back. Gerry Goffin and Carol King were brilliant soul writers. Leiber and Stoller were great craftsmen. We all drew on soul in our own way. Mine was more organic soul, like the southern stuff I mentioned, based on very simple chord progressions for the most part.
Describe how you wrote “Wild Thing”.
People were starting to take note of my work and there were several fans of it even though I didn’t have any big recordings at the time. Then I got a call one day from an A&R producer named Jerry Granaham who was head of A&R for one of the record companies. He said “I never met you Chip, but a lot of people are talking about your songs and I wonder if you have something for a new group of mine called Jordan Christopher and the Wild Ones.” I didn’t at the time so I said, “I’ll try and write you something rather than send you over what I have.” He said he had three songs for the session but they were all written by the group and I guess he thought they weren’t good enough and he wanted another one so I started chugging away on this chord progression, which turned out to be “Wild Thing.”
It was very simple and every so often I would stop and say something and I wasn’t exactly sure what I was going to stop and say. I kind of had the chorus down but I wasn’t sure how the rest of it would go. Kind of like the blues singers who used to write those blues songs; they would write them as they sang them. That’s why they would repeat a line a couple times and then figure out what they were gonna say next. I wasn’t sure whether to try my hand at recording it because I wasn’t sure the song was finished. But I decided to let the spirit of it take over in the recording session and instead of doing a demo I had planned to do for Chet Atkins, a country song, I decided to take a chance with this thing, which as I say turned out to be “Wild Thing.”
I had the engineer set up my microphone and I asked him to turn the lights out when I walked in and to put the tape on record. I just sat on my stool and chugged this thing out for about five minutes and said whatever came to my mind and then listened back and edited it and made it a little shorter to about three and a half minutes and my engineer friend was playing along with his hands and it sounded like a ocarina, like you do when you put a blade of grass in your hands and you make that sound. It sounded like a whistle, this ocarina, and I loved what he was doing as the tape was playing so I said let me overdub that and I’ll engineer that and you go out there and I hummed him a little melody to play on the instrumental. So when the Troggs heard my demo they tried to copy it. My demo sounds exactly like the Troggs record except I was playing a big old acoustic guitar instead of an electric guitar and I was stomping on the floor and banging on things to get some of the passion out of the song and I had this little thing that sounded like an ocarina and the Troggs copied that as well. Pretty much the Troggs record was the demo I made and that was a wonderful thing to get a group like the Troggs and their producer Larry Page to make this wonderful record.
That was the fear you had back then when you wrote a song, that whoever recorded it would do it in too poppy a way, which was really what happened with Jordan Christopher. They did record it in this very poppy way and it didn’t really have any of the original power of the demo. But the Troggs record certainly did. I think it’s one of the greatest rock records ever made in terms of capturing the spirit of the song. It was just a terrific record and it’s the one that Jimi Hendrix heard and went crazy for. He heard the Troggs record and told his girlfriend, “I just heard something I can’t believe” and so I owe an awful lot to Reg Presley and the boys because they just did a great job with it.
What were your initial expectations for “Wild Thing”?
The deal with “Wild Thing,” was that they recorded it as like the fourth song on their album. I think it took them fifteen minutes to record it. That wasn’t the one they were thinking was going to be the record but when they finished it they all decided that that was the single. They were going to take a chance with it. They weren’t sure what was going to happen. But it zoomed up the charts and within two weeks it got to number two, I think, so we knew we had a smash hit.
Here’s a funny music business story. The head of the company it was coming out on, Atlantic Records, was a good friend of mine and just the greatest damn music guy, Jerry Wexler. You couldn’t beat this guy but once in a while we all make mistakes and Jerry made one here. He called me up on the phone a couple of weeks before the song was going to be released and said, “Chip, I know you’ve been calling me to find out when your song’s gonna be released. I got some good news and some bad news for you. The good news is that you’re gonna make a lot of money and the song’s coming out in two weeks. The bad news is that you don’t have the A side because “Wild Thing” could never be a hit here in the states. The other song will be an absolute monster here in the states. “Wild Thing” is just not a U.S. record.” I said “Jerry, I’m from the U.S. What are you talking about?”
I was very upset about it and I didn’t even want to look at the trade papers when the record came out. They took out full page ads for the other side of it. Then I picked up the paper about two weeks after its release and I was looking at these little mini-charts they have, the various towns across the United States, and something caught my eye and I looked closer and there it was at the top like in Oklahoma or something. “Wild Thing” was number one even though it wasn’t being promoted. I turned the page and “Wild Thing” was number one in Boston or some place even though it wasn’t being promoted. I found about three or four of those cities and I started to get excited. The next week I opened the trade paper and it was number one in about fifteen cities without being promoted. That week I got a call from Jerry Wexler. He said, “I made a mistake!” So “Wild Thing” zoomed up the charts to number one and all of a sudden I was a rock ‘n roll writer.
Everybody seems to know “Wild Thing.” It is a legendary Sixties song that is timeless and has universal appeal. Why do you think the song has been so incredibly successful, what does it mean to you, and do you think future generations will embrace the tune?
“Wild Thing” seems to have a power of its own. I remember when I came back to making music, about five or six years ago which I’ll talk about later, I was in Italy and I was sitting on Lake Monigore on a bench there and there were a couple of little Italian kids, four or five years old with their mothers sitting there and I was just smiling at them and all of a sudden I just started to play the groove to “Wild Thing.” I started to sing it a little bit and these kids just stopped in their tracks, they were bouncing up and down and they were dancing and it was just like the spirit of the song had some kind of spell that made those kids feel so good and I think that that’s what this thing has. It’s got some kind of magic.
Even though it’s a very sexy song it’s gone way beyond being a sexy song. It has a fun spirit and you can do it in a lot of different ways. It can be very sexy and it can be just a damn lot of fun. It’s almost like nobody ever wrote the damn thing, that it’s been here forever.
When you meet people in a general social setting, how do they react when they learn you’re the writer of "Wild Thing"?
It’s okay, you know. People say I wrote "Wild Thing" and congratulate me and stuff like that and have a little fun with it. It’s a thing I love to perform, particularly now that I’m on the road with Carrie Rodriguez, who I’ll tell you more about later. We sing it together and she does one of the verses. It’s so much fun to sing it with her. Social settings, yeah, maybe it has it’s own little fun power where people get excited that I wrote it and want to shake my hand and stuff. But when you go to a club and play, unless you’re doing one of those retro shows with a bunch of those kinds of artists, people don’t come to see me because I wrote those hits. If that’s all I did, I would have nobody in the audience. I’d have four or five people because people go to see the people who recorded those songs not the people who wrote them, with almost no exception to that unless the writer has a power of his own as far as a performer goes. So people come to see you for what you’ve done lately or stuff that you’ve sung yourself.
The people that come to my shows are people that know me from the "Last Chance" days in the 70’s, right after I wrote all those rock ‘n roll hits. I had started a solo career and put an album out called "Gasoline" that got quite good reviews and then another album for Warner Brothers called "Last Chance" and another one called "This Side of the Big River" and then another one called "Some of Us." Those records have an underground power around the world. It’s not humongous, but if I play any place, any venue, people will bring in those vinyls and I’ll have a small built-in audience.
Since I started recording again during the last five or six years that audience has grown and grown for me not as a rock ‘n roll songwriter returning to the scene but as a folk artist. I’m with the top people in Europe and we play shows together. I think Steve Earle and Buddy and Julie Miller, and Lucinda Williams are just really wonderful. That’s the ball game we’re playing now and that’s exactly where I began my love of music - country and folk music - and I’m so glad to be a part of that.
Describe how you wrote "Angel of the Morning."
As I remember it I was driving into the city one day and I heard "Ruby Tuesday" on the radio and I thought that that was just about the best pop ballad out there at the time because it had some juice to it. I had at one time heard somebody playing a real slowed-down version of "Wild Thing" or something that sounded like "Wild Thing" and I thought that that would fit a ballad as well. I was fooling around with a new chord I learned, I’m not exactly sure what it was, just that I had taken my finger off one of the notes and it became some other kind of suspension or something and so I was using that with a similar chord on "Wild Thing." As far as the people or the person that was "Angel of the Morning" or "Wild Thing," I don’t think of that so much. When I write I’m just letting stuff flow out of me from someplace inside. I’m a stream-of-consciousness kind of writer so I wasn’t thinking of any particular person when I started to write that song. I just was humming nonsense things to myself over those chord patterns. Nothing happened for the longest time and then finally, all of a sudden from out of nowhere came these lines "There’ll be no strings to bind your hands, not if my love can’t bind your heart…" and they came with the melody attached to that chord progression and I had this chill just like I did when I first heard country music or when I went to My Wild Irish Rose as a kid. I had this physical sensation all over my body. Those words combined with that melody just gave me that. It sounded like one of the most beautiful things I’d ever heard. I didn’t know what it meant or where the song would take me. I didn’t have a tape recorder to help me out then so I just had to remember what I was singing. Most of the time I had a reel-to-reel tape recorder, but not there at the office. So I just had to keep singing what I had over and over again to myself. I had put my guitar down but then picked it up again. I sang the line again and I got that same feeling. It took me about forty-five minutes to get to that line but when the line came out the song wrote itself very, very fast and I was kind of on fire through that whole thing and it took about ten or fifteen minutes to finish the song and I thought it was very, very special.
What were your initial expectations for "Angel of the Morning" and describe how it became a hit since Juice Newton wasn’t the first artist to record it.
I didn’t quite know what to do with it. Al and I were producing a girl named Evie Sands at the time. I was always kind of shy at playing my songs for people. I could go in a demo studio and get some juice out of a song and then let people hear the demo but for me to play it live for somebody was hard. I had not demoed the song and we were producing Evie so I finally got the courage up to play it for Al, my partner, and Evie one day, and they both loved it. I was going to record the song with somebody else because I was a little afraid that they wouldn’t like it. I really feel bad about that because I had practised it with another girl and I told her I had to wait to see if Evie wanted to do it because we were producing her. I probably should have just played it for Evie and Al first before I even thought of doing it with somebody else. But I was kind of expecting that maybe they wouldn’t like it. But they did like it so we recorded it with Evie and made a wonderful record with her.
It was a tough thing. Evie’s record came out on Cameo Parkway Records and two weeks after its release it seemed the record was going to be a smash because every place it was played it was the number one requested record. But the record company went bankrupt and there were no records to be had and the recording was held up in litigation with the bankruptcy. Some people I knew down in Memphis, Chips Moman and Tommy Cogbill, were fans of the song and Chips and Tommy were producing and doing wonderful records together and they produced it with a girl named Merrilee Rush. I remember it took them a long time to mix it and finally Tommy said "We haven’t hooked it yet. We haven’t hooked this mix yet" and one night Tommy just got in there by himself and he called me the next day and he said "I hooked it last night, Chip. It’s really good."
When the record came out I put it in my desk because it wasn’t like Evie’s. I did like the record but I was so discouraged about Evie’s record not happening that I put the Merrilee Rush in my desk and forgot about it for a while. Actually her record made a little noise and then stopped. A few months after the record came out I took it out and I played it and I said "Gee, this is a good record. I wonder what’s going on with this." I saw on the charts in Seattle that it was still number one so I called up this Seattle station and said "Merrilee’s from this area, is that the reason this is still number one?" They said, "No, she’s had lots of records out. This is a genuine record. You should call the Portland station; the same thing’s happening with them. The company isn’t quite behind it and they’ve kind of forgotten about it." I called the Portland station and they told me the same thing: that it’s a genuine record and had been their number one request for months. I talked to the publishing company people and we decided to hire a promotion man and see if we could re-break the record. We put a promotion man on in California. He worked hard for a couple of weeks and said this was "the easiest thing I’ve had to promote in my life." It was considered a dead record and because of this re-promotion it got alive again. I told the record company what we were doing and they said "If you have any luck let us know." We told them and they got together and all of a sudden the record was resurfaced and went to number three on the charts and number one in many places. So never say never if you believe in something. I keep thinking if we hadn’t re-promoted it that that would have been it for the song.
Are "Wild Thing" and "Angel of the Morning" still active in terms of radio airplays, cover records, print licensing, and other uses?
Yes, "Wild Thing" and "Angel of the Morning" are still extremely active. "Angel of the Morning" is one of the most played songs of all time. It’s in the top five or something like that. Shaggy had a big hit with it; his rap version of it last year added to the airplay. I think if it’s hit once more it’ll probably be the most played song of all time. "Wild Thing" is used more in terms of movies and commercials and things like that and oftentimes people wonder about that. They ask did you get screwed like so many writers did? Well, I’m sure some people did get bad deals but a large number of people who talk about their songs are talking about the half that the publishing company owns. Normally the deal, back in those days anyway, was you wrote a song, if you had a good publisher he got half of it and you owned half of it and he’s the one that exploited it for you. If the publisher was good and they got you a hit record on something then I think they deserved what they got. A lot of people these days say "Yeah, well, I gave my copyright away." Well, if they’re talking about giving away half of it back then and the publisher did a good job of getting them a hit record then I think they truly have no complaints and I really have no complaints. The company did a wonderful job with it.
It was CBS then and it’s now EMI. The people there that control those copyrights and work with them work hand in hand with me and they call me every step of the way to tell me what’s going on with the song. If someone wants to use it for a commercial and I don’t think it’s something I want to be a part of it’s refused. "Wild Thing" is probably one of the most requested songs in terms of all of those kinds of things. The people at EMI are very nice to work with. We have a lot of fun with the song and as I say it’s still very active. But I really don’t think about it much these days because I’m focused on what’s coming tomorrow and I’m so inspired to make music again. Tomorrow’s the most important day for me, not yesterday.
Speaking of "Wild Thing" and "Angel of the Morning," how do you write such diverse songs?
I don’t look at them as so diverse. I drew on the race records from down south and my love of country music to kind of form my own kind of rock and roll, which, as I said before, is kind of Memphis-based. I think both "Wild Thing" and "Angel of the Morning" have that passion in them. Even though "Angel of the Morning" is a pretty ballad, if you look at the undercurrent, it’s very soulful and very strong in its emotional power. Even though you may look at "Wild Thing" as a dumb little rock ‘n roll song, I didn’t write it like that and when Jimi Hendrix sang it he didn’t sing it like that nor did the Troggs or Lucinda Williams when she sang it with me on stage in Nashville a couple of years ago. There’s something to be said for the mirrored image of those songs. They’re not as diverse. As I mentioned before, the chords in "Angel of the Morning" are similar to those in "Wild Thing"; they’re just played in a little different spirit.
Describe in detail how you write songs including special techniques (if any), any special places where you like to write, whether music or lyrics come first, whether you run a tape recorder, whether you use any modern technologies to help you, how the songwriting craft may have changed for you over the years, and as much other information and insights as you can think of.
I’ve kind of already described how I like to write. I don’t really have a favorite place to write, it’s just when the mood takes me. I have a guitar laying around almost every place I go. If I’m going away someplace, there’s always a guitar in the car, or here in my apartment. I’m looking around now; there are three guitars here in my apartment. Depending on my mood, I’ll pick up one or the other and I’ll start humming nonsense things. Again, it’s usually never a thing like "Oh, I wanna write songs about that." It’s usually something that’s going on inside me, like if I’m angry at something or I had an argument with a girlfriend or I just met somebody that I’m crazy about or I had a relationship with a friend that is moving me in some emotional way. And usually I’ll pick up the guitar at those times, let’s say it’s an argument I had with a girlfriend, and I won’t want to talk it but that’s what will be inside me and there’ll be some need for me to write because the damn guitar and music is my therapy, I’ll pick up the guitar and let it come out.
Things that are going on in my life often come out in songs but I don’t try to predict that before I pick up the guitar. I just let it come out. I never think of a lyric first. I never think of an idea first. I try to let my mind go as blank as I can and let something from very deep inside erupt. If it erupts in some silly stupid way I try not to proceed with it. If it erupts in some way that sounds inspired and beautiful and poetic to me then I’ll continue. If for some reason it sounds kind of charming to me then I’ll continue; otherwise, I won’t.
As far as collaboration goes, I write with very few people mainly because I like the challenge of finding out what’s inside of me and I don’t want to write predictable kinds of things. Most of the time when people write in Nashville or wherever and they get together they say what they should write about: what’s a good title, what’s a good line, and so forth. I don’t like to write that way. I like to write from spirit so when I do write with the people I write with I have to be very comfortable with them.
I’ve written some very good things with Billy Vera and Al Gorgoni and now with Carrie. Most of the time what happens is that what we’re working mostly on is the setting for a song to evolve from or maybe a feeling, a chord progression. Usually they’ll kind of encourage me to let stuff come out of me because that’s what I’m good at, at finding something deep inside. When that comes out maybe they’ll help with a line or two or a bit of the melody. That’s the only way I can find to write. If I’m stopped from letting that emotional thing come out of me then I don’t want to proceed; I’d rather not write then with somebody else because I don’t want to write prepared songs.
I encourage my new partner Carrie Rodriquez, who I think is a terrific and wonderful girl. First I had to convince her to sing because she never thought she could sing. But I convinced her to sing and now she’s one of the folk stars, voted number one in the polls; and it’s wonderful to see somebody who thought they couldn’t do something do it. She’s a brilliant fiddle player but now she has this real wonderful character to her vocal performances and she’s great.
She had never had written anything before and I convinced her to start writing. I told her to just come up with some grooves for me and we’d get together and see how it works. So she came in with a couple of little grooves. She played them on her fiddle or on her mandolin, which she’s just learning to play, and she’d set a little tone for something where I probably would never have found myself; I definitely wouldn’t have found that area of emotion myself if it wasn’t for her setting the groove.
Then something will start to come out of me and it’ll fly pretty fast. When it comes out of me I don’t want it to be stopped so I just keep letting it fly out and then Carrie might have an idea for a line within the framework of something that’s kind of flowing out of me and that’s usually how I write in a collaboration.
In some songs their ideas are set up before they’re written. I’m not into that kind of writing or that kind of music. Writers like the late Townes Van Zandt, Lucinda Williams and John Prine--they’re are my favorite writers. And I’m quite sure they craft after the fact not before it. They’re letting the stuff just flow out of them.
The only technology I use is a portable tape recorder and I don’t care about the quality of it, I just want to have one around so that if an idea strikes me at four in the morning, if I start singing a melody or something, or I pick up a guitar I just want to make sure that I can remember it the next day. Back in my early days I didn’t have this advantage.
Have you written songs whose success fell short of your expectations for them?
I’ve had a couple of occasions where I felt I got a little bit unlucky with what could have happened with the songs or with the recordings. But before I mention those I want to say how fortunate I’ve been to have great records of so many of my songs. "Angel of the Morning," I’ve had so many damn good records of that song and "Wild Thing," I had the Troggs, the Hendrix version, and others. To go back to "Angel of the Morning" again, I’ve had wonderful records by Merrilee Rush, Juice Newton, Chrissie Hynde, Nina Simone, P. P. Arnold in England. So I’ve been very fortunate. But every once in a while something would happen and I’ll give you a couple of examples of silly music business things that can hurt a song.
I had a song called "Son of a Rotten Gambler," which was recorded by Anne Murray as well as Emmylou Harris and several other people. Anne Murray’s version was in an album and they didn’t release it as a single. They released four singles from the album and it was getting late in the summer now. Anne was doing a little tour and she said, "You know my favorite song on the album is "Son of a Rotten Gambler. Would you do me a favor and release that as a single?" So they released it as a single and all of a sudden it started to take off. Nothing had hit before in the album. The album had sold around 600,000 copies because it was Anne Murray. Now all of a sudden, "Son of a Rotten Gambler" was huge. It was bulleting up the country charts and every place I was down south, because this was 1974 and I was on a little tour myself, it was number one. I could see the momentum building and it was just hugely successful. It was heading for a huge pop hit as well. I predicted it was going to go to the top five. Now it was getting close to October and they had scheduled her next record. What happens in the music business with record companies is everybody depends on the last quarter to bail them out for the year so that all of the executives can get their bonuses and all of that so they had this other record scheduled for release just as "Son of a Rotten Gambler" was bulleting up the charts. They knew if "Son of a Rotten Gambler" did go top five then maybe they would have sold two or three hundred thousand more albums. They knew that if they released a new album by Anne Murray they would definitely sell five or six hundred thousand by Christmas. In the overall view of those kinds of things it’s silly because if you have a real big hit it doesn’t matter what time of the year it is; if it costs you a few dollars in sales for one period of time in the catalog you way make up for it in the years to come.
My advice is never stop a record from reaching its potential. You just don’t do any service to the artist or yourself in the long run. It’s short-sighted. It’s almost like the environmental issue. If you protect the big businesses and the oil companies now and hurt the environment for the future, what have you done? It’s just not a good trade-off. You should let a song evolve in its own way and they didn’t with "Son of a Rotten Gambler." They just stopped it. They begged Anne and the producer. They said, "We’re going to spend so much money on your next single if we pull this one" and that’s what they did. Brian Ahern was the producer and they convinced Brian that they would do the job. They pulled the single, which was going to be a top five hit, and promoted the next album instead, which was not a very good album for Anne. They might have made a few dollars for their Christmas bonuses but they sure did a silly thing.
One other song that I felt like I really had a rough situation with was "On My Word" that was a hit by Cliff Richard in England. It went to number three or something like that. When Brook Benton recorded the song they flew all these Nashville rhythm section musicians to the session. I went to the session when Brook and the band were rehearsing the song before the producer arrived. They all loved the song so much and my demo had a certain kind of groove to it. I thought, "Wow, this is going to be one of the best recordings of my songs ever." Brook was singing the heck out of it and I loved it. Kind of an interesting little groove on my demo. He just kind of weaved in and out, almost like a cool little jazz thing, and they all had caught the spirit of it. Then the producer walked in and acted like a producer. He decided he had to change things and started to get involved with what was a beautiful effort and stopped it right away and said, "What are we doing boys, having fun or are we gonna make a hit here? Let’s put the backbeat on the two and four and make us a record." All of a sudden it took on this cold persona like a typical bullshit record that you hated to see done. I’ve had so many fortunate breaks but this just happens to be one where the magic was there and an executive, trying to do his best, pressed the button and said the wrong thing. We lost what I think would have been one of my favorite records of any of my songs.
If you write a song that you don’t wish to record, how do you go about finding another artist to record it?
I’m so involved in my career now with Carrie and I working together as a team that I’ve thought very little about submitting songs to other people. But Carrie and a few of the people I work with have suggested that I stop that and make sure that I do start sending things out. We’re getting a list of some of the people who might be interested in the songs and it’s not like the early days when so many people were interested. So many people write their own songs today or have people who write them for them. Right now we’re going to spend a little time on it and see how it goes. Usually what happens with me is what happened in the case of Bonnie Raitt, where she just happened to hear a song I had written with Billy Vera and his guitar player Ricky and recorded it without me trying to get it recorded. That happens every so often. Somebody hears one of my songs and records it. Shaggy either happened to hear or was a fan of "Angel of the Morning," and he and his producer decided to do it. So I had nothing to do with getting Shaggy recording that song. It was just a good break.
When you write songs today, do you write for today’s marketplace or do you write tunes that please you without deference as to whether they are commercial today?
I’m not writing with any thoughts for anybody else; I’m just writing as I always do. They just happen to be mostly songs that fit Carrie or me or mostly for our duets and once in a while I’ll write something that I’m not sure what it is and we’ll try to figure out if that song fits something else; but, I don’t ever try to write for somebody else. Whatever comes up, I just hope some people like my songs and will record them. Even back in the days of "Angel of the Morning" and "Wild Thing" I wasn’t really, aside from the time that that producer asked me to write something for Jordan Christopher, looking to write specifically for others. Most of the time I didn’t want anybody to ask me to write for them. I told the publisher I’m better off just being left alone to see what comes up rather than me trying to force a song. But now that I think about it one of the songs that I did write that was a hit in the early days was "I Can Make It With You," which I wrote because a publisher asked me if I could write something for Jackie DeShannon. They said that Jackie had asked if I could come up with something so I did that for her.
How do you make your demos today?
I don’t normally do demos anymore; I just make records. I just record them for myself and try and get the spirit. Usually they’re for some project that I’m working on for myself. It’s not like the old days. I’m not making demos for other people, I’m making records for my own projects.
What advice do you have for today’s songwriter in terms of both the craft of songwriting and pursuing a career?
It’s very tough in today’s market. My feeling is that, first of all, everybody’s got their own kind of magic and you shouldn’t try to copy somebody else’s magic. Everybody has their own influences from what they grew up listening. But then as you write your own things and those influences are heard in you your own inability or insecurity or limitations, are what’s going to set your music aside from somebody else’s. That’s what’s going to give it its own beauty. So I would just suggest to any writer to write what feels right to them and not to write what they think someone else is going to like. Write for yourself and if you think something’s inspired then play it for somebody. If you’re an artist you write for yourself and then you go out and see how other people react. If you’re not a signed artist you’ll see if people come to your shows. If they like your shows, if more and more people start showing up then when the time comes that you fill a room some record company’s going to be after you.
How do you think the music business has changed over the years in terms of the songwriter who just creates tunes and doesn’t perform?
If you’re a songwriter just trying to write for other people that makes it much more difficult. I would go on the rule of thumb that if you are a songwriter trying to write for other people that you play for as many friends as you can and when you get a bunch of your friends all saying that that one particular song is the one, that they all loved it, then they’re probably right and to go ahead and try to find an artist to sing the song. But that’s a difficult process these days. Singer/songwriters have a better shot and it’s hard in any manner, shape or form to survive in this business unless you have a lot of passion. You’ve got to really keep working at it and believing in yourself and not take no for an answer.
Do you have your own publishing company now? If so, aside just from owning your own copyrights, how does your company exploit and market your catalog? Do you have a co-publishing or administration agreement with another publisher? If so, explain the nature of that relationship.
Yeah, I’ve had one for a long time, Back Road Music. The new songs that are in my publishing company earn money; they’re the ones I’ve had for the last ten years or so. I have things by Randy Travis, Bonnie Raitt, Darden Smith, and several other recordings that earn a little bit of money. The vast majority of my hits were all in EMI’s publishing company and they do a terrific job with that. "Try Just a Little Bit Harder" is a song that is not with EMI. That was a song I wrote with Jerry Ragavoy and that’s in Warner Brothers’ company. The only co-publishing or administration agreement I have is in England with Bug Music for Europe and they collect for anything that’s floating around out there of the new material. For the most part again it’s a difficult market so they’re not able to get cover records but they try and hopefully they will. I know they’re particularly interested in getting covers for a few of my songs so we’ll see how that works.
Is your catalogue of songs, whether you own the publishing rights or not, being actively exploited today?
There are wonderful people at EMI in the Nashville branch particularly that take all those copyrights I have, like "The Real Thing." I had a resurgence of "The Real Thing" that was on my "Last Chance" album and it was recorded by several artists last year. George Strait had a very big album and almost released it as a single because it almost was forced out by the radio stations. It cooked up some competition because there was another artist who released it as a single before his came out. "The Real Thing" and all of those early country flavored things, "Son of a Rotten Gambler" and those kinds of things from the "Last Chance" album are being very well taken care of out of the Nashville branch of EMI. I look forward to every so often getting a recording of one of those songs. I think I mentioned to you that we are starting to actively go out looking for some of the newer songs to get recordings through my publishing company, Back Road Music.
Do you have a "dream" artist to record any of your songs or a version for any other uses of your songs?
I’m always so happy when anybody records one of my songs. I’d love it if Alison Krauss would record something of mine. We’re going to try to submit something to the Dixie Chicks because Carrie, my partner, thinks one of my songs would be good for them. So yeah, that would be good.
The album Carrie and I have out now is my biggest album since my comeback and it’s still selling. We’re in the process now of recording a new album in Boston that probably will be released sometime in September. It would be wonderful if we could get one of those new songs in a movie because that’s such a built-in promotional tool. We are on a little label, the Texas Music Group and that’s such a blessing for Carrie and me. Since I came back I have had wonderful distribution in Europe, and my last five albums or so I’ve built up a strong army of fans in Holland, England Scotland, Ireland, Sweden, and now Norway and a little bit in Germany. But I’ve never had very good distribution in the states until this year.
When Carrie and I were doing a show in Austin, Texas a secretary of one of the little labels there heard us and got the bosses interested in us; they came to see us perform and signed us to their label, the Texas Music Group, through Lone Star Records. We’ve had great distribution this year and now we’re preparing to do the next record and it would be just wonderful if we could get a movie for one of the songs to help kick it off. That’s a small chance but something we are thinking about, to make every effort we can to do that.
Have you ever wanted to write a musical or Broadway show?
No, but one thing I did do last year, although I put a stop to it only because the duet thing seems to have a life of its own, was test out a theater piece called "Black and Blue America," which basically is me doing a Will Rogers stand-up kind of thing, discussing my life story from the passion of the Sixties up till the present day and before that. It covers a lot of ground and you see visual clips on the screen and it’s just a wonderful little thing. It got extremely good reviews but because was considered somewhat retrospective even though the second half leaves a big space for the new work. But because it is a retrospective I wasn’t not in the mood to stay with it for too long because it would take too much away from the magic of Carrie and me, which we have right now.
I used to be a big duet fan. I loved the Brown Family, the Louvin Brothers, the Everly Brothers, and so many magical duets. But today so many of the duets are like put together duets, they don’t really sound like they’re so much a part of each other because they are put together. Carrie and I have this kind of magic together that I don’t think has been around for a while. I do like Buddy and Julie Miller. I think they have a wonderful thing as well; but, aside from Buddy and Julie, I don’t think there’s really been many others. I think we’re one of a kind and we should pay a lot of attention to the fortunate thing we have here. It was just a magical meeting that took place. Carrie and I met each other in Austin, Texas two years ago just on a chance occasion. Here’s a girl never signed before and now we’re a duet partnership. When I sing with Carrie on stage and in recordings, I get that same chill, that same physical feeling as when I wrote "Angel of the Morning," as when I first heard "Wheeling West Virginia," and when I first saw that Broadway play so I don’t want to fool with this too much. It’s a magical thing and I want to pay a lot of attention to that.
Do you have other creative interests such as prose writing or painting?
No, the only other thing I’ve done is gamble. That took up a great deal of my life. I gambled while I was writing my hits. I was making "One Better Day" and when I finally got fed up with the music business in 1980, I turned my sights on gambling full time and stayed away from music for the longest time, only coming back to it when my Mom got ill in 1995. I started playing music for her and I got the spirit back to make music. For the first time in my life now I’m doing it with a full heart and not having gambling as part of my life. That addiction being over, I can devote myself fully to music. I was a professional horse player and I was very good at it so I wrote a short book and a long how-to book about it just to get it out of my system. We have those but we’re not really working that hard at getting them published. We’ll probably have them published sooner or later but we’re on to other things now.
Did the "British invasion" affect your music career in the Sixties?
No, it was just fun because it was all after this kind of popish music that we had suffered through for such a long time in the early Fifties. When rock ‘n roll came in and we started changing the business the "British invasion" was just part of that. It was people doing stuff with wonderful energy. It was all good competition and very healthy.
Talk about your being a producer including your experience producing records at the famous Muscle Shoals studios in the Sixties.
I love making records. I love the process of making records and pretty much when you were making your own demos in the Sixties you were producing them and you were doing them differently then the old pop producers were doing them before and hoping that your songs would be done in an organic manner. So as I say I love producing records. I loved producing Evie Sands back in those days and Billy Vera and Judy Clay and going to Muscle Shoals to produce those records because I felt I had a lot in common with those kinds of people, the southern producers and southern musicians. So I always felt very comfortable in the studio in Muscle Shoals or around any R&B-thinking people or musicians.
My partner Al Gorgoni and I had had wonderful times with the Flying Machine, which was James Taylor when he first came to town. Even though that was a short-lived experience we had just a wonderful time working on that. That was before anybody would think of releasing an album without a couple of hit singles. We had tried to convince the record company that James and the group was something that should be looked at like a real true folk or blues artist and you shouldn’t just have to go after singles with them. We were only able to cut a little EP with them but was nice because it was the original stuff and James is such a wonderful talent and meant so much to Al and me back in those days.
When you were growing up, who were your favourite songwriters? Today? What do you think of the music business today?
When I was growing up I just knew songs and artists. My favourite artists were the Brown Family, the Louvin Brothers, Lefty Frizzell, and Hank Williams. These are the people I gravitated towards. For sure Elvis Presley was one of my favourites, typically his early stuff. "I Forgot to Remember to Forget Her" was one of my favourite songs right along side "Big River" by Johnny Cash. Those are the artists and that was the music that I was caring about back then.
I think the music business is in pretty darn good shape today because it’s not in good shape. And by that I mean because the big record companies have had such a hard time putting out the crap that they’ve had out the last couple of years, it’s allowed music to kind of speak for itself. The Internet and word-of-mouth are becoming very important to little record companies so little records have a place to be heard. So a record like Carrie’s and mine now has a place to be heard. We were top ten in the folk charts for three months in a row and we went to number three. There are stations now that will play this kind of stuff where there wasn’t for quite a while so I think real music made by real artists is having a resurgence. I think it’s a terrific time and the people who are in competition with each other in this kind of music are all friends. We all look forward to each other’s albums so we have a spirit of competition, so to speak, which just breeds good stuff. And so I can’t wait to hear the next John Prine or Guy Clark or Lucinda Williams.
My favourite songwriters I told you about already: Lucinda, the late Townes Van Zandt, John Prine - they’re my absolute favourites. Some others, Guy Clark, Steve Earle, and people like that who are doing it for the right reasons, they’re all great.
About how many songs have you written in total? How many have been recorded?
I have no idea how many songs I have written; thousands I guess. Recorded? I don’t know.
What movies or television shows have your songs been featured in?
I don’t know, tons of movies, tons of shows. One of the nice ones with "Wild Thing" was "Something Wild," a Jonathan Demme movie because he gave me my own little screen. He said "Thanks to Chip Taylor" on my own little screen just because I wrote "Wild Thing," which was a really wonderful thing for him to do.
Can you tell us about some of your greatest or most interesting musical experiences over the years?
One of the greatest experiences of my life was meeting Frank Sinatra. He ended up recording a couple of songs that I had written with Al Gorgoni. He had asked to see me to get some advice about making his music more contemporary. This was just before I went in the Air Force. He sent a limousine to pick me up and brought me to his place on the East side of Manhattan and I was so nervous. The one thing I can absolutely recall was that I waited ten minutes for him to come out of the back room. I was sitting by a coffee table, looking at a book of his yachts or something like that and he walked out and I was very nervous but within seconds it was like I was talking to one of my brothers. He was so disarming and nice, so genuinely nice. He was a really good guy and I just loved talking with him.
Even though I had written a couple of songs already that I thought might be good for him I was going in the service the next week so I didn’t have much time. So I suggested that he get in touch with Jimmy Webb, a brand new songwriter at the time whose song "Didn’t We?" I thought would fit him perfectly. I said Jimmy probably would be writing other things that might fit him and that might be a way for him to ease into the mainstream and he took my advice with that. He did record the songs I mentioned to him. He called me at the office just before I went into the service; someone said "Frank Sinatra’s on the phone" and I thought they must be kidding. But I picked up the phone. He said, "Hey soldier, how ya feeling?" I said, "I’m ok, Frank." He said, "I’m taking your advice. I called Jimmy and I’m gonna cut those songs." Then he said, "Now listen, I’m gonna give you some advice about the service. First of all, if you have any problems in the service, Chip, you have no problems." I said, "Ok Frank, I’ll remember that." He said, "Another thing, someone’s gonna tap you on the shoulder January 6th at your Air Force base. There’s gonna be a plane waiting to fly you to Vegas to see my show." and I said, "Ok Frank, thanks a lot." He said, "You pick your best friend and come see me," which is exactly what happened!
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