It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes during an interview the person who is answering my questions turns the tables on me and starts asking them. Such was the case when I recently spoke by Zoom with singer, songwriter and Vintage Trouble front man, Ty Taylor.
“Have you ever asked yourself what ruth means,” Taylor asked me. Apart from knowing Ruth from the bible and having had an aunt with the same name, I had to admit I didn’t. He said, “We’ve said ruthless our entire lives. So I looked it up. Ruth means to have compassion for others, which makes sense.”
I was speaking to Taylor because he has two shows coming up that showcase two sides of his performance skills. He recently had a solo show at The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts showing off his smooth vocal prowess in a show called A Summer Evening of Classic and Nouveau Standards.
On Thursday, September 16th Vintage Trouble will play at The Ford. Taylor will be in a full rock ‘n’ roll mode – with a healthy does of soul. Vintage Trouble’s first album, The Bomb Shelter Sessions was released to great acclaim ten years ago. In addition to their own shows they’ve opened for such legendary artists as The Who and The Rolling Stones.
So at the start of our conversation, I asked him about Charlie Watts, the drummer for the Stones who just passed away. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity.
Any thoughts on on Charlie Watts, both his role as a as a drummer and musician and also for somebody who had such great style?
What I love so much about his style of drumming was that it was never flashy. It was all about the groove. You know, he could do his stuff, of course, but there was something so confident, so secure about him that allowed him to dig deeper into the groove. This song will develop as it goes on. And I think that’s part of also what led to his style proficiency, was that it was so secure that it didn’t need a lot of flash. His style was so clean, line-based. And so I love when artists’ music seems to be what they walk as well. So I think his style in drumming very much matched his fashion sense and also his personal demeanor. You know, something tells me as a person he was a great listener. I know that the world is definitely lacking great listeners, so we’ve lost a great set of ears, and I hope that we can make up for that by each of us becoming better listeners instead of just talking all the shit we have to say all the time.
You were described by Rolling Stone Magazine as a modern-day James Brown. What does doing your standards show give you personally that’s different than what you get from a Vintage Trouble show?
It gives me the other half of where I come from. I equate Vintage Trouble to my dad and I equate this other stuff to my mom, so I get to live the other half of me. There’s a slickness to to me that sometimes people at a Vintage Trouble show don’t get to see because I kind of deal with a lot of release with Vintage Trouble. So what this other music does for me is it allows me to exercise restraint.
When I first got into the music business it was out of fashion, especially for men, to be great singers. You either had to be screaming or growling or doing something that felt more masculine to people. I grew up in a household that was half James Brown and the other half was Nat King Cole; a house that was half Woodstock and the other half was the Judy Garland Show or something like that. So I’ve learned about both sides of music from a very early age and I feel lucky. I feel like every one of us, we all have dual personalities. We all have parts of us that make up the yin and yang. So what this other half that I will be doing at The Wallis does is it acts out the other side of me, the side that likes proficiency, the side that has trained his whole life to be able to hold a note and know when to cut that note off.
I saw an interview that you gave to Blues Rock Review last May and you said the best times were in the beginning when you took nothing for granted, when the childhood dream was feeling like it was right in front of your eyes the entire time. I’m going to steal somebody else’s question and it’s a question that Willy Wonka asked Charlie Bucket at the end of the movie. What happened to the man who suddenly got everything he wanted? How would you answer that question?
I feel like I’m at a precipice and I’m about to explode into the best part of my life. So I don’t feel like I have everything. I feel like I want more than ever. Not my personal wants, which Charlie seemed to have known from the beginning and I didn’t know from the beginning. I thought that fame was important. I thought having a house was important. That to have a car was important, not for material purposes, but for the purpose of feeling like you’ve achieved something and you can sit back and enjoy the end of your life. Now my wants have to do more with kindness, has to do with more with being, you know, has to do more with my ruth.
Rare is the band that has had a career without peaks and valleys. So I’m wondering how you and the band have navigated both the incredible highs and the more challenging times.
I don’t think we handled the challenging times well. But as we get older we learn about ruth. A lot of times when we become challenged, and as men, I hate to make a sweeping generalization, we flail and we panic in a bad way. We don’t speak kindly to each other. We don’t use our minds in the most clear, concise way. We think more of ourselves more than others. And so for our band, luckily, we’ve never gotten that far. There’s never been major fights or anything like that. But sometimes we isolate, sometimes we don’t communicate. Sometimes we allow ourselves to be quiet. And instead of having conversations, there are arguments instead of healthy debates and this kind of thing. But we always manage to circle back around because the music always brings us back together.
David Bowie once said “The truth is, of course, is that there is no journey. We are arriving and departing all at the same time.” Do you agree? And how would that concept fit into how you and Vintage Trouble are 10 years after the release of The Bomb Shelter Sessions?
I believe it is true. Every night I’ve been working at having as much gratitude as if I feel like every night when I go to bed, I might not wake up. And I like waking up every morning – like I’m born again as the band. The band has a new life that’s starting right now. The band has more opportunities than ever. Right now, there is a freshness that if we take on what’s being given to us right now, then we are really just arriving again in the same place at the beginning. We had so much fire and I feel that fire again.
For tickets to Vintage Trouble at The Ford on September 16th, please go here.
Photo: Vintage Trouble (Courtesy CSM Management)