"you taste like burgers...i don't like you anymore"

wow, has it really been two months since i posted anything here? the cyber nerdery that is facebook is destroying my creative blogging juices.

so in order to get back in the groove of posting i've cut and pasted a profile i wrote for my narrative non-fiction class below. it's on this guy Gary Taylor who i interned with for over a year. if you ever heard me babbling on about working for some guy that lives in coquitlam and manages a bunch of bands and wondered "what the hell is ian talking about? is he being taken advantage of (and i mean in the physical sense)" this is the guy.

also two things: first the johnny thunders story is one hundred percent true. in fact, there are pictures from the show and a conversation about this very story in the new "Nardwaur the Human Serviette vs. Bev Davies 2007 Punk Rock Calendar" (which you should all buy). Second, Carey Ott's (the guy mentioned at the end of the profile) CD came out on tuesday. its really good and you should also buy it too (plus i got a shout out in the thank yous in the liner notes).



Boom, THAP Boom Boom THAP, Boom Boom Boom THAP … "LET’S GO!"

It’s 1964 and Gary Taylor is hammering out the beat on his drums. His band the Classics are the house band on the appropriately titled Let’s Go, the Vancouver segment of Music Hop, the Canadian Broadcast Corporation’s American Bandstand rip. As house band the Classics, a crack group of musicians, learned the latest tunes on the Top 40 to back up musicians appearing on the program or cover other artists hits for the kids watching at home.

For Taylor, the Classics offered him his first opportunity to help out other bands on their paths to either stardom, or the spaces between the footnotes of rock and roll history. It’s a role Gary relished and continues to play in his career.

Fast forward 40 years or so and Talyor no longer sits behind a drum kit. Instead he spends his time behind a large dark desk under a single light suspended from the low ceiling in his basement apartment in Coquitlam, British Columbia. A drum kit is one of the few things that can’t be found amongst the organized clutter that makes up Taylor’s office and home. Surrounded by stacks of papers, unopened cds, and remnants and relics from his club days, he sits, almost always, slightly reclined in his desk chair, his laptop computer in his, well, lap. He answers the phone abruptly, using short, curt phrases:
"GT here…hold on a minute (he quickly disposes of whoever is on the other line)…what’s going on my man?"

Music has been a constant for this tall imposing man whose built physique and energy level make people half his age jealous. He was inspired by the sports heroes he read about in Sports Illustrated as a young boy growing up with three brothers in Vancouver. Only a limp when he walks, the result of years spent playing various sports, betrays his 65 years.

He’s spent four plus decades in the music industry, as a musician, club owner and now artist’s manager. He’s clawed to the top and he’s fallen hard to the bottom, but it’s the fast paced back slapping/stabbing nature of the industry and his ability to bob and weave his way through for the glory of both his clients and himself that motivates him.

A more reasonable person, a more (but not completely) sane person, would argue that there are far more stable ways to run a career in the music business than Taylor has. In the late 1970s and early 1980s he ran Gary Taylor’s Rock Room on Hornby Street in downtown Vancouver. The main floor hosted touring international acts and up and coming locals while the downstairs had strippers (Wilt Chamberlain famously put in an appearance in the downstairs portion of the bar). He managed blues legend Long John Baldry after he was institutionalized for mental health problems. In the late 1980s he moved to Madison, Wisconsin and ran The Paramount, the city’s premier live music venue until violence in the club forced its closure. Now he manages small undiscovered artists in the Chicago and Nashville areas

Taylor remembers the time proto-punk legend and professional fuck-up Johnny Thunders was booked to play a pair of shows at the club in 1981. He had been detained at the US-Canada border after failing to display anything more substantial than a New York City library card for ID. Taylor made the 45-minute drive from the Rock Room down Highway 99, through what were then rural suburbs to the border crossing. He used what he calls "the GT charm" to convince customs officials to let the ex-New York Dolls guitarist into the country. Once back in town Taylor dropped Thunders at a hotel. When he returned several hours later he found Thunders lying in the hotel room bath tub with a needle puncturing his arm, blood spilling out onto his clothes and a journalist sitting next to him outside of the tub desperately trying to extract an interview from this shambolic mess of a man.

Why would Taylor put himself through antics like this? Because he thrives off the chase and believes in the artists and musicians he deals with (although, in the case of Thunders, the thought of telling an angry room of punk rockers that their hero would not be putting in an appearance was almost certainly a motivating factor as well). He thrives of the creative energies his clients feed him.

"Every time they write a new song it’s like a new baby," he says.

His latest father-to-be, Carey Ott, gives birth to his debut solo album next Tuesday, January 23. Like many births it’s the culmination of a ten-year relationship between the two. Taylor began managing Ott’s old band Torben Floor in 1997.

So at 65, with most of his generation looking towards retirement, will this latest milestone be the end for Taylor? Hardly. He’s got a stable of artists in the waiting room, all ready to drop their next baby.