After years of litigation and rancor, Chad Taylor is returning to his first love: playing music.
It was a Wednesday night in May when Chad Taylor took to the stage at the Hell in a Bucket brewpub in Wrightsville, a tiny bar across Front Street from the Susquehanna River.
The stage was tucked in a small corner of the bar, between the beer cooler and a stone fireplace. Taylor was playing with Bob Noble’s band, strumming a Martin D-28 and singing “Selling the Drama,” one of a number of hits for his late, lamented band Live.
It may have seemed like a strange gig for Taylor, for a variety of reasons. For one thing, he was among the founding members of the seminal rock band of the ‘90s that toured extensively and routinely played venues that could contain 1,000 times the audience he was playing before at Hell in a Bucket. And with COVID, he hadn’t really been gigging for, well, a long time; the last time he played with Live was in 2019.
And he was singing the lead on the tune. With Live, Ed Kowalczyk handled the lead vocals and Taylor usually supplied harmonies.
Before launching into the song, Taylor told those gathered in the small bar – which can hold maybe 50 people and, that night, contained maybe 20 – that he likes playing songs and “being out in front of people.”
“I’m normally just the guitarist, so this is a lot of fun getting to sing,” he said in a video of the performance captured on YouTube. He then pointed out that Noble had placed a tip jar on the table in front of the band and said, “Bob has a tip jar out in front, and it’s going to be pretty important when I send him my bill.”
And with that, Chad Taylor returned to performing.
Some bleak days
The past few years, Taylor has been in the news for things that have had nothing to do with music.
It’s a long story that involves a litany of deceit and betrayal and a dump truck load of lawsuits and countersuits involving Live’s various financial entanglements – a seemingly endless legal Gordian knot of accusations and counter-accusations. It may have seemed that, for the past few years, Taylor was spending much more time reviewing stacks of legal briefs and depositions rather than doing what he loves – playing the guitar and creating music.
Through the hard times – including the legal drama that wound up shattering a band that had been together since middle school and had achieved great success – music was there, albeit in the background for the first time in Taylor’s life. The band disintegrated amid rancor. Kowalczyk is touring as Live with a new band. Taylor and drummer Chad Gracey, friends since childhood, are not on speaking terms. And even though Taylor has said he would play with the band in a heartbeat, Gracey apparently doesn’t want to have anything to do with him, telling Rolling Stone that he will never play with Taylor again.
Then, through the COVID pandemic, Taylor laid low, running his guitar shop, Tone Tailors, at Rock Lititz, a 96-acre campus in northern Lancaster County that is home to rehearsal spaces, businesses that have created sound systems and stages for the biggest touring acts in the world and a plethora of supporting businesses. (Taylor said Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler and guitarist Joe Perry recently stopped by the shop.)
There were some bleak days. But, for Taylor, it always came back to music. “Music always has been my salvation,” he said.
The good days
Taylor, who will soon turn 53, discovered music and the guitar decades ago. He let it be known that he wanted to play guitar and when he 10. Santa Claus brought him a 1978 Gibson Les Paul. (He must have been a very good boy because Les Pauls are very fine, expensive instruments.)
He took to it, making a ton of noise in his bedroom of his parents’ home of Priority Road in Fireside, a kind of suburban neighborhood in York City. (He used the guitar on Live’s hit album “Throwing Copper” and still has it.)
The origin of Live had been well documented, how Taylor got together with Gracey and bassist Patrick Dahlheimer and that Kowalczyk heard them playing in a garage on Newberry Street and asked to join the band. Its first incarnation – they were known as Public Affection then – won a middle school talent show. And from there, writing songs, they were off and running. Taylor would come up with riffs and chord progressions and melodies and Kowalczyk would write lyrics. Taylor recalls playing gigs at the legendary CBGB’s in New York and returning to York in time to make classes at William Penn High School, even if he slept at his desk.
The band attracted a lot of attention for its songwriting and performance acumen. Its debut album, “Mental Jewelry,” was produced by Jerry Harrison, keyboard player and guitarist with Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame band Talking Heads.
From there, the band took off, touring incessantly and recording albums that are part of the late 20th Century soundtrack of America. The band was on a ride.
The ride ended amongst rancor and legal issues, as is the cliché in stories about childhood friends who find lucrative success playing rock ‘n’ roll. Taylor doesn’t want to talk about it much. Right now, he is concentrating on getting back to playing and writing music.
‘You got to get back on the bicycle’
Bob Noble is a local legend among musicians in central Pennsylvania. He’s fronted Blue Voodoo for years and had done some touring with national R&B acts. He quit the road to stay home with his daughter Zoey and is now still gigging and working to support the musical career of Zoey. One of his regular gigs is Wednesday nights at the cozy Hell in a Bucket with his band and Zoey.
Taylor is a friend of a friend, and Noble extended an invitation to the guitarist to come out to Hell in a Bucket and sit in, maybe play and sing some of the songs that he had once played in arenas and stadiums. “He was hesitant,” Noble recalled. Taylor wasn’t confident that he could sing those Live songs as well as Kowalczyk. Noble encouraged him. “Forget about that,” he told Taylor. “Just go for it. Sing them in your own style. You got to get back on the bicycle.”
Previously: Lawsuit-apalooza for Live: Band members, associates trade accusations in blitz of filings
They worked up some tunes and did it. Taylor, in the video, clearly had a good time. There was something about the intimacy of the place, he said, and making a connection with the audience. It’s something he hasn’t experienced since the early days of Live. It’s something that’s vastly different from performing before 20,000 people in an arena or even bigger audiences at, say, Woodstock 99.
There’s an energy, he said. As a performer, you put out energy and the audience gives it back and, well, there’s nothing like that. The Hell in a Bucket set had “a low-key vibe,” Taylor said.
“I have to give credit to Bob Noble for encouraging me to get back up and play,” Taylor said.
It was a spiritual experience, he said, and it led him from darkness to something more hopeful.
“It was magical stuff,” Taylor said. “It was a chance to reconnect.”
More legal issues: Bill Hynes charged with stealing $4.39 million from United Fiber and Data
‘The epicenter of my life’
Playing with Noble led Taylor to gather some friends and put together a couple of shows at Zoetropolis, an intimate venue in downtown Lancaster, with a band called Chad Taylor and Friends. According to the venue’s promotional material, the band “is filled with fresh faces and at least one musician with a bowling average above 220 who has a known affinity for chocolate Easter bunnies.” The three-hour show will include some of Taylor’s original songs and some he recorded with The Gracious Few, a short-lived band that Taylor fronted while Live was on hiatus, and, of course, some songs from Live’s catalog.
Taylor plans to play acoustic guitar exclusively, lending, as he said, the songs a “more Americana kind of vibe.”
Two shows at Zoetropolis sold out immediately and Taylor booked another gig on Nov. 24, his 53rd birthday.
Taylor is looking forward to the shows, getting lost in the music and leaving the bad times behind.
“Without music,” he said, “I don’t know how I could have gone through all of the ups and downs. Music and family have been the epicenter of my life. The beauty, the blessing, is that I have rediscovered music in a way I have never appreciated it.”
Columnist/reporter Mike Argento, who has been playing guitar for more years than he cares to admit, has been a York Daily Record staffer since 1982. Reach him at mike@ydr.com.
Live from ‘S— Towne’: Rock stars returned to build better York, but promises unfulfilled
