![]() ![]() The other is that nobody who has written about Taylor has bothered to do even the most cursory fact-checkingįor example, if you read any online articles about Vince Taylor at all, you see the same story about his upbringing - he was born Brian Holden in the UK, he emigrated to New Jersey with his family in the forties, and then his sister Sheila met Joe Barbera, the co-creator of the Tom and Jerry cartoons. ![]() One is that he was a compulsive liar, who would make up claims like that he was related to Tenzing Norgay, the Nepalese mountaineer who was one of the two men who first climbed Everest, or that he was an airline pilot as a teenager. There are two problems with telling the story of Vince Taylor. Instead, it was the end of his career, and the start of a legend: It could be the start of a comeback for him. His brother-in-law, Joe Barbera of Hanna Barbera, owned a record label, and was considering signing Taylor. The next day, Taylor was meant to be playing a showcase gig. He had dropped acid at the party, for the first time, and had liked it so much he’d immediately spent two hundred pounds on buying all the acid he could from the person who’d given it to him. There are no euphemisms about what it was that happened to him. Vince Taylor, a minor British rock and roller who’d never had much success over here but was big in France, was also there. From that “long piece of vomit” he later extracted the lyrics to what became “Like a Rolling Stone”.īut Dylan wasn’t the only one who came out of that party feeling funny. He spent the next week in bed, back at the Savoy, attended by a private nurse, and during that time he wrote what he called “a long piece of vomit around twenty pages long”. Dylan was rushed to hospital the day after the party, with what was claimed to be food poisoning but has often been rumoured to be something else. He’d come back to the UK, and the next day he was planning to film his first ever televised concert. Bob Dylan was on the European tour which is chronicled in the film “Don’t Look Back”, and he’d just spent a week in Portugal. On the twenty-first of May 1965, at the Savoy Hotel in London, there was a party which would have two major effects on the history of rock and roll music, one which would be felt almost immediately, and one whose full ramifications wouldn’t be seen for almost a decade. This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. I should have known that one, but it slipped my mind and I trusted my source, wrongly. I say that Gene Vincent also appeared on Oh Boy! - in fact he didn’t appear on UK TV until Parnes’ next show, Boy Meets Girls, which would mean Taylor was definitely the originator of that style.Ī major clanger - I say that Sheridan recorded “Why” while he was working on “Oh Boy!” - in fact this wasn’t recorded until later - *with the Beatles* as his backing band. No doubt this episode still has errors in it, but I am fairly confident that it has fewer errors than anything else in English about Taylor on the Internet. But *all* of these were riddled with errors, and I used dozens of other resources to try to straighten out the facts - everything from a genealogy website to interviews with Tony Sheridan to the out-of-print autobiography of Joe Barbera. The main resources I used for this episode were the liner notes for this compilation CD of Taylor’s best material, this archived copy of a twenty-year-old homepage by a friend of Taylor’s, this blogged history of Taylor and the Playboys, and this Radio 4 documentary on Taylor. There are several books available on Vince Taylor, including an autobiography, but sadly these are all in French, a language I don’t speak past schoolboy level, so I can’t say if they’re any good. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at and Īs always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. There’s a half-hour Q&A episode, where I answer backers’ questions, and a ten-minute bonus episode on “The Hippy Hippy Shake” by Chan Romero. Patreon backers have two bonus podcasts this week. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Download file | Play in new window | Recorded on April 7, 2020Įpisode seventy-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Brand New Cadillac” by Vince Taylor and the Playboys, and the sad career of rock music’s first acid casualty.
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