Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories

by Carlo Rotella

  Asked to describe Taylor’s progress, she says, “He’s my poster child of progress. When he came to me, he could not match a pitch on the piano. He couldn’t sing a melody. He couldn’t sing ‘Happy Birthday.’” She had friends who, when they found out she was working with Taylor, said to her, “Oh, God, I’ve heard him. You’re working with him?” But Taylor was game, and he had been blessed with other gifts. “He’s the most honest person I know, and honest with himself, too,” says Leadbetter-Hines. “He didn’t lie to himself about what he could do or how far he had to come. And he has a remarkable knowledge of music. He knows a lot of music theory, mostly self-taught on the guitar.” When they first began to work together, Taylor could only sing a melody if he was playing each note on the guitar at the same time, George Benson–style. “He’s come a long, long way since then,” says Leadbetter-Hines, “and he’ll keep getting better. His pitch range continues to grow, and the quality of his voice keeps getting better. That’s kind of where we are now,” she says, summing up their fifteen years together. “Now we can work on things like making his singing bluesier.”

  Still, though, when they work on a song they start by trying to nail down the melody. “Always, with Linwood,” says Leadbetter-Hines, “the first thing is to establish what the vocal line will be.” Most blues songs don’t have strictly reproduced melodies in the same way that classical, Tin Pan Alley, or even rock songs do. Blues singers develop a set of vocal moves, bits of melodic DNA they can use to improvise a melody while executing swoops, slides, growls, moans—the musical vocabulary, mimicking and elevating everyday speech, that opens up the rich emotional range of the blues. But Taylor doesn’t work that way. He figures out a melody for a song with his voice teacher and he doesn’t depart far from that line, not even to hold or bend a note in the usual blues manner. In that sense, she isn’t teaching him traditional blues singing. “He’s not going to be put in a box that’s what a black bluesman is supposed to sound like,” says Leadbetter-Hines, who is white, and she has a point. The timbre of his voice is not unpleasing, and his approach to melody makes for a slightly more formal vocal style that could actually help him stand out among blues singers. But he has to keep working at his craft, honing it, reinforcing good habits and breaking bad habits.

  After spending half of the hour-long lesson on exercises, they turn to a song that Taylor wants to add to his repertoire, Freddy King’s “Me and My Guitar,” a ditty about getting your woman to be as tractable as your instrument. Taylor unpacks an acoustic guitar and accompanies himself as he runs through the song once to familiarize Leadbetter-Hines with it. Having the guitar in his hands makes him more confident, but it interferes with his concentration on vocal technique. They zero in on one especially awkward line in the chorus, “I’ll play the blues for you.” Taylor keeps letting the focus of resonance fall away from the sweet spot between the eyes, leaving the two prominent oo sounds sounding especially off-pitch and forced. Singing those oos is just like singing moo in the exercises, Leadbetter-Hines reminds him. “I’ll tell you what,” she says, “let’s do it without the guitar.” When he puts the guitar down, Taylor seems paralyzed for a moment. He has to silently hum the guitar intro to himself before he can begin to sing the first verse, and when he arrives at the chorus he’s so worried about “blues” and “you” that he seizes up and blows them. But as Leadbetter-Hines patiently walks him through the song, pausing for a quick mee-meh-mah-moh-moo to shore up his technique, he relaxes and the sound flows more freely. Finally, at the end of the hour, she lets him use the guitar again and he sings the song through, this time singing the oos properly.

  “That’s a lot better,” she says, and it is. “This is everybody’s problem,” she tells him. “It’s not just a Linwood thing. To take what we do in the vocalese and put it in the song, that’s the hard part.”

  The lesson over, it’s time for Taylor to switch from student to teacher. He grabs a bite and drives to Bethesda Music to teach guitar lessons in a tiny studio in the back of the store for the rest of the afternoon and early evening. He’s been teaching there since 2000, when the Washington blues scene entered its current downturn and he found himself obliged to pick up some extra work to compensate for the scarcity of gigs. He has eight students this afternoon, from beginners to moderately accomplished players. They arrive at thirty-minute intervals, most of them bringing music they want to learn: two Metallica songs; a Billy Joel song; an old Fleetwood Mac song; Clapton’s “Badge.” None of them shows any particular interest in learning to play blues guitar, but Taylor doesn’t mind. He knows most of the songs already, quickly figures out the rest (even a Metallica song in a weird tuning), and sends each student home happy and a few licks the wiser. “My students stick with me,” he says, “and they stick around. I make sure they have fun. The coolest thing about teaching is that it put me back into guitar in a new way. It’s satisfying because I’m perpetuating what I love, which is guitar.”

  When he’s done at Bethesda Music at 8:30, Taylor drives back to Alison Leadbetter-Hines’s house in Wheaton to give an hour-long private lesson to her son Ryan, an easygoing blond, sideburned fellow, nineteen years old, who plays in a reggae-rock fusion band called Catch a Fire. Taylor’s back on the same wooden chair in the music room, only now he’s the teacher and he has a beat-up Fender Stratocaster in his hands. Ryan sits on the piano bench, holding a white Epiphone. They’re plugged into the same amp. Taylor says, “Modes, we got to work on modes,” a formal term for different relationships between scales and the chords of a song. “You already know the Dorian mode,” says Taylor, “and the Mixolydian, that’s Santana, he hangs out there all day. But, like, Phrygian mode, that’s how Steve Vai and Joe Satriani play that crazy-sounding stuff they do. Try ’em out, and don’t forget to mix in some minor pentatonic blues licks for contrast.” He plays a series of succulent grooves, among them Wes Montgomery’s “Bumpin’ on Sunset” and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band’s version of “Work Song,” and Ryan works up exploratory solos to play over them. It’s obvious that Ryan hasn’t studied his modes this week—he says, “Um, remind me of Dorian,” to which Taylor responds, “You’re killing me”—but he’s been playing a lot with his band and he has good ideas as an improviser. At one point, having just played something particularly elegant in Mixolydian and followed it up with an acrid blues phrase, Ryan murmurs, “That’s cool, actually.” He’s getting it.

  Taylor rounds out the lesson by playing instructive riffs he reverse-engineered from Lou Reed’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal” almost 30 years ago and stored away in memory, then offers pointers on technique. Finally, some advice: “Don’t let other people push you. You do it on your own time, then time stands still. You gotta relax your body. When it’s just right, when you have your skills down from practicing, it’s like you’re leaning against the music.” In other words, if you’ve worked hard and prepared yourself, then you can relax and draw strength from the music rather than feeling as if it will overwhelm you—a lesson for both student and teacher.

  Linwood Taylor was not born to sing the blues. Growing up in the 1960s in Lanham, Maryland, he lived in a black neighborhood, but from the fourth grade on he attended predominantly white Catholic schools. His father’s record collection, an eclectic mix of jazz and R&B, nurtured Taylor’s budding musical sensibility, which was transformed by the British Invasion. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones opened up a new vista, then Hendrix gave him a purpose in life. “Rock was what was on TV,” he says. “When Jimi Hendrix came along, I’m watching TV and there’s this brother playing guitar, with two white guys with afros bigger than mine. Admittedly, part of it was his image. Until then, Booker T and the MGs was my favorite band.” Once he’d seen and heard Hendrix, Taylor just wanted to rock, and he wanted to play guitar. He got his first acoustic guitar in 1968, but that didn’t really scratch the itch. He washed cars and mowed lawns to earn enough to buy his first electric guitar, a Fender Bronco, in April 1971. Cradling it, he knew he had foun
d his calling.

  Taylor’s musical career didn’t work out the way he thought it would, exactly; but it didn’t exactly turn out otherwise, either. “I encountered obstacles,” he says, when he tried to make his way as a rock guitar player in the 1970s. He would try out for bands and they’d tell him, “You were great, you were the best, but you just don’t have the look we want,” or “We don’t want to be so close to Hendrix.” Taylor thought he knew what was going on. “Look, whatever I play, I’m playing Hendrix,” he says, “and being a black guitar player with a rock sound is akin to being a black quarterback in the NFL. Playing Jimi is the kiss of death for any black guitar player.” Convention still assumes that black men play the blues and white men rock, even though, as Taylor points out, black musicians in a variety of genres played leading roles in inventing rock and roll. There’s also a tradition of black rock guitar heroism, exemplified by Hendrix, and there are black guitar heroes in rock these days—Tom Morello, Lenny Kravitz, Vernon Reid, Prince—but they’re still working against the grain of received wisdom. “Most people don’t realize that, for instance, Slash, of Guns ‘n’ Roses, is a brother,” Taylor notes, because Slash isn’t supposed to be a brother.

  By 1980, after encountering serial frustration in the previous decade, Taylor found himself following the path of least resistance that led him to the blues. “The blues path became open to me,” he says, “and once I started on it the doors kept opening.” He started attending open-mike jams and one thing led to another until he had assembled the spare, hustling life of a working local bluesman: gigging at a variety of bars and clubs around Washington, playing the festival circuit in the summer, putting together the occasional string of out-of-town or overseas gigs, making CDs on a shoestring budget and selling them from the stage, teaching guitar lessons, making ends meet. He used to buy and sell guitars, too, but he had to cut that out because he was too much the guitar freak to make money at it. “I was my own best customer,” he says ruefully.

  Taylor makes his way without benefit of a day job, and that’s important to him. In his twenties, he worked construction and other odd jobs until he managed to secure a jacket-and-tie position in the accounts receivable department at Coca-Cola. But the routine wore him down. “Basically,” he says, “I got to a point where I was thinking I would be an old man saying, ‘I wish . . .’” Twenty years ago, when he was 27, he quit the Coke job, resolving to make a living as a musician. He had to work as a salesman at a music store for a few more years, but he finally broke free of day jobs entirely. He’s not the rootless, unlettered drifter in overalls of blues cliché (nor should he have to try to conform to that increasingly ridiculous ideal of unspoiled outsiderhood), but in some ways Taylor does lead a traditionally marginal blues life. “I live cheaply,” he says. “I do what I need to do and what I want to do. I never thought to be in the mainstream as much as some other people.” At 47, he has few attachments, fewer responsibilities, no health insurance. He keeps his stuff—mostly guitars, cowboy boots, and shirts—at his mother’s house in Lanham and at his girlfriend’s place. He may not be a star and he may not have much financial security, but he makes a living in music, and he’s not punching the clock at Accounts Receivable every day, either.

  Taylor, who manages himself, spends a lot of time on his cell phone setting up gigs, scheming with other musicians, working his network. Mostly, he makes his business calls at his girlfriend’s place. Without an office to go to or a gig to play every other night, with lessons to teach only two afternoons a week, most of his time is his own. He has to be disciplined to put it to good use, and discipline is Taylor’s strong suit.

  Keith Federman, president of Mystery Media, the small Maryland roots-music label that put out Taylor’s most recent CD, says, “Linwood’s the most disciplined, the most committed musician you could imagine. Just in every way. He works constantly at his playing, his singing, his health. He listens to everything—old blues, new blues, rock, reggae, jazz, everything—and he’s always growing and making adjustments, musically.” Federman, who has known Taylor for twenty years, describes Taylor’s musical development as a triumph of rigorous self-fashioning. “When he came out on the scene, he had so much more ability as a guitar player than anybody else, but he was playing a lot of Hendrix—he sounded like his influences.” Taylor was fast and raw; loud, too. “I remember seeing him at Krakatoa,” says Federman, “and my ears rang for two days. But over the years his playing changed, his tone changed. He stopped sounding like other people. You could hear him becoming himself, and getting more into blues playing. Now, he plays with such authority that he doesn’t have to try to blow anybody away. He’s still capable of ungodly speed, but that’s not what it’s about anymore.”

  For Taylor, pursuing a career in the blues entails sustaining all sorts of balances, the principal one being between the two sides of the delicately split personality he must cultivate. The ambitious dreamer in him won’t give up on hitting it big. What qualifies as big? “Hey, man,” he says, “B. B. King. Lenny Kravitz. Big.” Even becoming semi-big, rising to high levels of blues success that still fall well below King’s position at the pinnacle, would be a signal accomplishment. A steady national and international touring schedule, headlining regularly at festivals, recording for a prominent blues label like Alligator or Evidence—that constitutes making it for a bluesman, and Taylor aims to make it. But the practical scuffler in him, the part of him that’s just happy to be playing music for a living, must be prepared to settle for the far more modest status of a respected local musician. The dreamer and the scuffler have to sustain a working truce. He can continue to think big, but “in order to protect myself,” he says, “I have to have a sense of ‘I’ll believe it twenty minutes after it’s happened.’”

  Federman ranks Taylor among the top blues guitar players of his generation. Federman is Taylor’s friend, and he’s talking up one of Mystery Media’s recording artists, so he can be pardoned for exaggerating, but he’s not completely out of line. Taylor’s a magnificent guitar player. So why is he still a local bluesman and not a national figure? Could the disparity between his singing and his playing be holding him back? Federman loyally refuses to entertain the notion. “Every CD is better, every CD progresses. He keeps improving, he keeps working on the presentation. If he keeps it up, he’ll come into his own. If he continues to search and change, he’s gonna shoot and it’s gonna hit something.” But even if Taylor’s singing proves to be good enough, the current state of the blues business may stand in the way of his advancement. “Some of it is up to the fates,” says Federman of Taylor’s career trajectory, “but some of it is up to the national blues scene. Right now, record sales are down, performance revenues are down. The baby boomers are getting socked economically in the last couple of years, and just when they’re getting old enough where they’re not wanting to spend the same amount of money on music that they used to.” This may not be the best time for Taylor to be coming into his own as a bluesman.

  So, more balancing acts. Pushing ahead in search of his big break may oblige Taylor to pick up and move on someday—if, for instance, a prominent blues singer or band needs an ace guitarist. “You have to be ready to leave DC to make it,” says Taylor. “You have to. There are tons of great musicians who used to be from here, but they had to move to make any kind of headway.” Moving away would mean separating from the local network of friends, family, and musicians he has built up—really the only form of security he can count on—but if the opportunity is big enough, he’ll have to risk it. While he looks for his break, though, he has to earn his keep in Washington, and that means he often has to scramble. There used to be more local places to play the blues, reliable sources of gigs like City Blues and Smokeless, but some have closed and some now book other kinds of music. He can still rely on a few venues, like the Sunset Grille, or the Ebb Tide in Annapolis, Maryland, or Murphy’s Pub in Charles County. (He was playing at Murphy’s on February 7 while B. B. King, Buddy Guy, and ot
her blues titans shared the stage of a jam-packed Radio City Music Hall with members of Aerosmith and the Allman Brothers, Bonnie Raitt, John Fogerty, Macy Gray, India. Arie, Chuck D, and a score of other blues-loving pop stars recruited by the Year of the Blues campaign.) Most of the time, Taylor’s a long way from the blues world’s big time, but he makes periodic visits to it. His guitar playing earns him invitations to join big-name touring acts onstage, and he has played with greats like Albert Collins, Luther Allison, and Johnny Copeland. The next such chance to impress could come along at any moment, but in the meantime he has to attend to the smaller-scale business of living. In the afternoon before his Sunset Grille gig, for instance, he was supposed to play a biker rally in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, that his cousin lined up for him, but it rained hard and the gig fell through. The money he expected to make there has to come from somewhere else: find another gig, give some more lessons, sell a guitar, something. “My thinking is it’s a cycle,” he says. “I’ve seen it happen before, that the blues scene went down and it came back.”

  A few years ago, during the last up-cycle in the local blues scene, he was playing all the Washington-area gigs he could handle—up to fifteen a month, as opposed to four or five now. He doesn’t miss those days. As comfortable as he was in terms of week-to-week cash flow, constant gigging wasn’t getting him any closer to a big break. He’s content, for now, to “float, contemplate, regroup. I’m sort of pondering my own artistic direction. Teaching lets me even say no to a gig I don’t want to play.” What he really wants to do is record another CD and get it distributed more widely than his previous three, two of which he put out himself. And he’d like the new CD to be funkier, with his rock-inflected guitar set against popping bass and hip-hop drums. “Blues was originally a dance music,” he says, “which has kind of gone away as more, you know, white people got into it. I want to bring that back. And I think I could be a lot more free as a singer in that style.” It would be one more ironic turn in the stylistic road for him: to move back toward “black” music because it’s easier to sing.