Chip Taylor: ‘Playing in maximum security prisons is one of my favourite things to do’

Fresh off a bout of treatment for throat cancer, the pioneer of country-rock and Voight brother speaks to Helen Brown about his storied career writing hits such as ‘Wild Thing’, his past as a professional gambler and finding everlasting love with his wife, Joan

Chip Taylor releases his latest album, ‘The Cradle of All Living Things’, at age 83 (Alamy)

“I wonder what it’s like up there?” ponders 83-year-old Chip Taylor on The Cradle of All Living Things, the extraordinary new album he feared would be his last. He’s addressing his wife, Joan, as he tilts tenderly into a chorus that imagines love beyond death: “Do you close your eyes/ And look into mine?/ You are my closing time.”

The woman he married in 1964 can’t hear the song, though. A series of strokes have left Joan deaf. Which is why several of the songs on the album stress the importance of their remaining senses. Taylor sings, “I know that I don’t see much/ Close my eyes and it is you that I touch/ I touch your hair, I touch your nose, I touch your lips/ baby, I suppose…”

Fifty years on since he wrote some of rock’s rawest declarations of youthful passion – including “Wild Thing” for the Troggs (1966) and “Angel of the Morning” for PP Arnold (1967) – and had his songs played by Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Johnny Cash, Taylor is still: “A romantic?” he laughs. “Oh yeah. Of course.”

On a video call from his home in New York, Taylor’s weathered cowboy voice is croakier than usual after a gruelling bout of treatment for throat cancer. “They think everything went well,” he assures me. “But I have to wait a couple of months for the CAT scan all clear, so there’s always the fear, y’know?” he shrugs. “But I feel good at the moment. Yeah, I’m having a good day. I’ve been having such a good time making records these past few years…”

After spending the 1980s as a professional gambler (of which more later), Taylor experienced a late-life songwriting resurgence that is now the stuff of American legend. At an age when most artists settle into cover versions like easy chairs, Taylor is still turning out songs so vital they’ll give you shivers. His 2012 single “F*** All The Perfect People” (featuring gleeful backing vocals from the eclectic clientele of his local bar, aka the New Ukrainians) went viral almost a decade later when it featured on the soundtrack for Netflix’s hit series Sex Education.

As befits a man who once wrote songs for Johnny Cash, Taylor says the track was written for prisoners. “Playing songs in maximum security prisons is one of my favourite things to do. I’ve always liked talking to prisoners because, for the most part, they’re extremely honest. They talk about what they’ve done, how they feel about being incarcerated. Most of them feel they deserve to be there and – no matter what crimes they’ve committed – I never met a prisoner I didn’t have empathy for. I wrote that at 6am one morning when I realised I had some shows for prisoners coming up and I wanted to write something that was just for them. I had borrowed this odd guitar at the time so that song just came out of me.” He croons: “To be or not to be?/ To free or not to free?… Some chose to dismember your rise and fall/ F*** all those perfect people.” A shaggy shake of his white hair and a shrug. “I knew it was good because I got a chill.”

Taylor’s life, it transpires, has been entirely governed by The Chill. Born in Yonkers in 1940 as James Wesley Voight, he was the youngest of three brothers who would all become famous in their fields. The eldest is geology professor and volcanologist Barry Voight (who predicted the eruption of St Helens in 1980) and the middle Voight is the Oscar-winning actor, Jon, star of Midnight Cowboy (1969) and father of Angelina Jolie. Taylor found music gave him chills (“moving me physically, emotionally, not cerebrally”) from an early age.

“We three Voight boys all shared a room and listened to this little radio in the hallway. My parents and my brothers realised I loved music and they let me commandeer that thing. I played Bing Crosby, the Ink Spots, whatever.”

He recalls a family trip to a Broadway show of My Wild Irish Rose as a life-changing experience. “We sat in the fourth row, where I could see the orchestra and when they started play? CHILLS! I felt them all over, like my body was on fire. I remember not wanting to talk to anybody afterwards. We got into the car at night, and I made my parents believe I was asleep so the conversation wouldn’t stop me from having that feeling. I knew right then. I knew: this. I want to do something to do with this.”

The next two life-shaping events occurred at age 12. He heard Neil Sedaka’s “Wheeling West Virginia” on the radio and fell hard for country music. “I thought, man, this is it. What I wanted was the sad stuff. And I didn’t want to talk about it. Once in a while my brothers would ask, ‘What’re you listening to?’ I wouldn’t say.”

That same year, he fell equally hard for Joan. “I saw her walking down the road about a mile from my house. Because I’d just gotten into country music, I was starting to yodel a little bit. So, one day I called over, ‘Joan? Would you like me to yodel for you?’ Well, I did and by the time we were both 13 years old we were a thing. We were together and that was it.” He raises his palms, and grins crooked, like a kid who still can’t believe his luck.

At 16, he heard of a local country band that needed a new guitarist. He taught himself three chords for the audition and made the cut. The band (Town & Country Brothers) signed to an all-Black label called King Records, which was branching into rockabilly. They scored some regional hits, which led to a tour with Neil Sedaka.

After school, Taylor started out working with his father – a golf pro. His style of play gave him his nickname “Chip”. But he was playing guitar in a local country band and selling the country songs that flooded out of him to a publishing company on the side. Things really took off when Taylor submitted a song to RCA, which thrilled Chet Atkins in Nashville. “Chet said, ‘I can’t believe this kid comes from New York City, but I want to see everything he writes!’” From there, Taylor found his songs were being recorded by a whole host of his country heroes: Floyd Cramer, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Eddy Arnold and the Brown Family. Soon, he joined the songwriting community on Broadway. “Not the Brill Building, that was more showtunes. I hung my hat at 1650 Broadway where Gerry Goffin and Carole King were based…” he grins, “I fell in love with Carole in the elevator! Her songs were my favourites.”

Chip Taylor performs on stage after being inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in New York in 2016 (Alamy/Reuters)

It was at 1650 that Taylor wrote “Wild Thing”. Word had got around that he’d been trying out a few rockier ideas, and one morning he got a call from the Troggs’ producer asking if he had any new numbers available. Taylor recalls that he was so flattered, he told them: “Let me get off the phone and see if something comes to me right now.” He chuckles. “Well, I hung up and started banging on the guitar and ‘Wild Thing’ just flew out of me.” Was he thinking of Joan? “Well, ahhh, my window opened on to the broadway with all those pretty girls walking by. So, I was looking at them and writing in that spirit. It was a real New York moment…”

Taylor reaches creakily out of shot, grabs a guitar and begins slamming vigorously into the song’s riff to show me how “that upstrum, there? You wouldn’t play that if you were properly schooled. I did it because I didn’t know any better. I ended up with this innocent energy. It came out of me looser that way, the feeling just flew out of me.” Taylor had a demo session booked an hour later and admits that “the pauses, the spaces around the words and chords” that give “Wild Thing” its tension were a consequence of him working up lyrics on the fly. “I wasn’t quite sure what to sing next!”

Raised in a strict Catholic faith – “with a lot of guilt” – Taylor was rather embarrassed by the song’s raw sexuality. A screening of the Monterey Pop Festival documentary (Monterey Pop, 1968) at which Jimi Hendrix covered the track while writhing on the stage with his guitar left the mortified songwriter “sliding down the cushions, out of sight”. Taylor was, though, gratified to note that the virtuoso “still used that innocent upstrum”.

Through the 1960s, Taylor found he could get his chills from gambling as well as from songwriting. “There’s a certain side of my brain that’s very good at figuring things out,” he explains. “I liked math in school. My teachers wouldn’t have been surprised to learn I got good at cards.” Early on, Taylor “got interested in horses”. He sucked up advice from the best local gamblers, then began developing his own theories. “On my way to Broadway, I’d place my bets – never more than three – then collect my winnings on the way home. With one bookie I won 53/56 weeks, and he kept sending me good whisky on my birthday and Christmas. I asked why he sent gifts when I was beating him and he said, ‘My boss saw you were winning so we started going to other bookies and betting ten times the same amount you placed with us. You’re our favourite customer!’”

Although he made “a lot of money” gambling, Taylor says it wasn’t his main motivation. Looking back, he reflects, “I guess it was about being right. The skill of it really interested me. The analysis, which horses were improving on which parts of the track. Putting it all together and realising, ‘Oh, wow, that’s perfect.’ Again, I’d get a chill. I felt I knew what the magic was.” He nods. “I like the fact that nobody sees what I see.”

I loved the camaraderie of other gamblers, but I didn’t have Carole King in the room above me

Taylor lost his winning chills when he quit songwriting to become a full-time gambler in the Eighties. He would spend all day at the racetrack. “I worked out of a little room in Long Island. I loved the camaraderie of other gamblers, but I didn’t have Carole King in the room above me. I didn’t have my guitar next to me. I just had all the screens of the racetracks…” He sighs. “When betting all day, you can’t know everything about all the races and you’re going to find stuff that doesn’t exist. You’re going to be wrong. You’re not going to have songs to take your mind off it and you’re going to get very nervous.”

I can’t imagine Taylor was as much fun to be around at this point – and he agrees. He and Joan divorced, and he found himself barred from all the casinos in Atlantic City for counting cards. It was only after his mother became sick in 1990 that he picked up his guitar again. He wanted to sing for her. By 1993, Taylor was writing and recording again. At the 2001 South by Southwest Music Conference in Austin, Texas, he met the young, fiery fiddle player Carrie Rodriguez. Her sweet, sly Southern drawl and skittering bow was the perfect foil for his dry wit and battered strum; the pair formed a thrilling duo, releasing three albums over the decade, all of which gained huge traction on the alt-country scene.

Taylor won over a whole new generation of fans who admired the open-hearted modern sensibility he brought to his classic sound. It wasn’t every country legend who was so alive to the concerns of the day, but Taylor kept his cool as he called out our overuse of plastics and cellphones and the leaders profiting from the exploitation of natural resources. On stage, Chip‘n’Carrie winked up the grandfather/grandaughter dynamic as he stood back in comfy slacks while she eye-rolled him in skintight leopard. When the duo appeared on Top of The Tops 2 in 2003 playing “Sweet Tequila Blues”, Rodriguez raising an eyebrow at Taylor as she sang: “I knew a man with money in his hand/ He looked that Jack of Diamonds in the Eye.”

Taylor has always used gambling metaphors in his songs: Anne Murray’s recording of his “Son of a Rotten Gambler” topped the American Adult Contemporary charts in 1974 and was later covered by The Hollies and Emmylou Harris. Knowing lines about safe bets and bad hands still find their way into his lyrics. Today, he says that the key to successful gambling and songwriting is the same: be honest with yourself. “As a songwriter and a gambler you need to know what you don’t know, and you need to know when to quit.” He learned that “we all f*** up. And if you f*** up, well, you have to get back up, look somebody in the eye, admit it and try again.” Narrowing his eyes, Taylor tells me that his philosophy boils down to: “Be yourself for other people. You can’t help anybody else if you’re not doing the best you can. You don’t have to be perfect.”

As music brought Taylor back to himself so he reunited with Joan, and the couple remarried in 2008. For this reason, he coyly admits that not all of the love songs on The Cradle of All Living Things are about his wife. “Some are about other relationships in the not-too-distant past.” And he shyly acknowledges that slinky “Sofia” – on which his guitar is backed by a fluid electric piano – was inspired by tennis player Sofia Kenin. Taylor half-blushes as he tells me, “That is… uhh.. that’s kind of a social song to me. It was inspired by liking things about her, about five to six years ago. She had a magic in the way she found the ball. I remember people criticising her on television and it upset me so much. Then she went downhill. She had some emotional problems. So, I sang, ‘Ohhh, here comes the rain.’ I wrote it hoping for her to make a comeback.”

Kenin isn’t the only celebrity addressed on the album. Perhaps the most powerful song, “Anthony”, is about the chef Anthony Bourdain who died by suicide, aged 61, in 2018. Taylor is at his gentlest as he croons, “Simple trust, no judgement, meaning what you say/ Couldn’t you rest with that for a while?/ Oh Anthony… what was that all about?” Today, he tells me that watching Bourdain’s globetrotting cooking shows was a bonding experience for himself and Joan. “We loved the humanness of him. Such kind eyes. But he was one of those angsty guys, all caught up in trying to be smart one minute and mad the next.”

I try to turn on the news at night, so I don’t forget that there are wars elsewhere and refugees doing what they need to do to keep their families safe

Having survived his own “trainwreck” years, Taylor has learnt he doesn’t have to do the same. After years of avoiding church, he now attends regularly because he feels “free to disagree with the things that make no sense to me and more moved by the celebration of people being good and kind to each other.” He continues, “I think Americans have become complacent about their safety, but I remember my mother holding me up to the window and watching the planes fly past. I try to turn on the news at night, so I don’t forget that there are wars elsewhere and refugees doing what they need to do to keep their families safe.”

With this, Taylor says he needs to get back to Joan, who won’t have been able to enjoy our chat. “She can’t hear at all now,” he explains. “So, we have a board that I can write to her on. Writing things down feels nice.” He finds moments of comedy in their communication struggles. “Y’know, during the middle of the worst part of my [cancer] treatment, Joan tried to tell me she was having another stroke but her words wouldn’t come out and she started to laugh at herself and there I was, so nauseous and dizzy with mucus flowing, and I realise I’ve somehow got to get her to the hospital.” He shakes his head and smiles with wonder. “But she knew how hard that was for me and I knew how hard it was for her. And love like that, when you’re on the front line between life and death? It’s a very beautiful thing.”

‘The Cradle of All Living Things’ by Chip Taylor is released on 31 March on Train Wreck Records