Paul “Snowflake” Taylor notes that soon a rare species of Memphis musician, the Semi-migratory Southpaw, will be returning to the city in force. “It’s the left-handed Memphis expat takeover!” he proclaims. That’s a reference to his own orientation on the guitar, and that of Greg Cartwright, who will be playing across town at Bar DKDC (“I wish I could see that; I am a huge fan of his songs,” Taylor says) precisely during Taylor’s own “Anti-Tyrannical No Kangs Jam Session” at B-Side this Saturday. Both singer-songwriter-guitarists “left” their hometown behind for either Asheville, North Carolina, in Cartwright’s case, or Door County, Wisconsin, in Taylor’s. Now Taylor’s returning to play a run of gigs this week, but it’s in Wisconsin that he may truly be earning his longtime sobriquet of “Snowflake.”
“I’m still shoveling my way out of this blizzard that we just had, which was the most snowfall that Wisconsin has seen since 1881,” he notes over the phone. “And it’s the first day of spring today! So yeah, I’m looking forward to those balmy temperatures down there.”
Yet Taylor, likely more than any other resident of Door County, Wisconsin, already counts “down here” as home. Few players have had the culture of the ’70s and ’80s Memphis music scene enscribed into their souls as much as Taylor, whose father, the late Pat Taylor, played many studios and stages here. “My dad was helping me four-track songs, and my stepdad was Richard Orange,” Taylor says. “I was very influenced by songwriters and power pop, though unknowingly, because I didn’t know what it was called at the time. But I grew up hearing Big Star and Van Duren and Good Question and all that. It was part of my childhood.”
He eventually took on other musical influences, becoming one of the most eclectically virtuosic players in town (often as New Memphis Colorways, MEM-MODS, or Sons of Mudboy) until he and his wife Sarah moved to Door County in 2020. Yet in recent years he’s made a point of returning to Memphis. If it seems like the Bluff City itself is burned into him, it is. “I’ve got the city seal tattooed on my arm and the city schools on the other one. It’s 100 percent who I am as a musician and as a human being,” says Taylor.
Now, he’s making the most of his visit with several collaborations and co-appearances. By press time, he will have already joined The Committee at The Cove on Tuesday night, followed by a cameo with Level Three at Louis Connelly’s Bar on Wednesday night. Then he’ll be one of Mark Edgar Stuart’s guests (with Mary Hatley and Kathy Zhou) at the Halloran Centre’s recurring Memphis Songwriters Series on Thursday, topped off with his solo acoustic guitar moods in the Crosstown Concourse atrium at lunchtime on Friday.
Ultimately, it’s the Saturday night show that looms largest for Taylor, falling as it does on the latest No Kings Day, a cause which he wholeheartedly supports. For starters, he’ll be at the demonstration itself at Robert Church Park, from 2-6 p.m. “I’ll be with the
Mighty Souls Brass Band, who’ll be at the head of the march,” Taylor enthuses. Then will come the “Anti-Tyrannical No Kings Jam Session” at B-Side at 8 p.m. And that will be the most wide-reaching celebration of Taylor’s connections to Memphis, as he brings various collaborators he’s known to the stage with him.
Taylor will play his new single, “Don’t Quit on Me,” about “the fight against the fascist regime.”
Fittingly, he’ll be playing many of the songs he’s written in response to America’s rightward lurch over the past decade. Last year, when Taylor played a solo show at The Green Room at Crosstown Arts, listeners heard a new song, “Room for Everyone,” an eloquent call for inclusiveness, performed in a quiet, haunting arrangement. Not long after that, Taylor released an EP with his Wisconsin group, Three Springs, featuring that same song with an absolute barn-burner of an arrangement.
That song is sure to make a few appearances during Taylor’s stay here, as will his new single as New Memphis Colorways, “Don’t Quit on Me,” which Taylor says is about “not giving up the fight against the fascist regime.” And then there will be an older song of his, all too relevant today, “an instrumental song I wrote called ‘He Didn’t Die for Nothing,’” says Taylor. “It’s something I did in 2020 that was dedicated to George Floyd then, and is dedicated to Alex Pretti and Renée Good now. It feels poignant.”
On the more positive side of poignance, one of Taylor’s guests on Saturday will echo another album he released last year, but was recorded before he’d moved north. Artist and all-around Renaissance man Jimmy Crosthwait has been a profound influence on Taylor over the years, and he’s the real star of Inside, A Nice Surprise, which popped up on the New Memphis Colorways Bandcamp page last September 5th. Crosthwait will be helping Taylor open up his B-Side extravaganza, and perhaps the two will reprise a bit of this phenomenal album, one of the truest expressions of the beatnik roots behind Memphis hippiedom.
It was created spontaneously, in best beat fashion, while Taylor was a resident musician at Crosstown Arts in 2018, with a full studio at his disposal. He began doing interviews with musicians like Joyce Cobb, Reba Russell, Susan Marshall, Eric Gales, and Crosthwait. When the latter would visit, unpredictable things would happen. “I just rolled tape and I would play drums, and he would play washboard and some other percussion, or he would play his metal sculptures, and I would play washtub,” Taylor recalls. “And then I invited Jim Spake and the late, great friend and mentor of mine, Ed Finney, to come overdub on top of all of that. And then Jimmy decided that it would be cool to read the poems of a friend of his named Harvey Goldner.” That last element was a genius stroke, given Crosthwait’s pitch-perfect deadpan delivery and the pithy eye for humanity in Goldner’s words.
“It’s all improvised music, with a little bit of editing,” says Taylor, “and I could not be more proud than to have documented making rhythms with Jimmy, because he’s a lifelong friend and just such a force of that true Bohemian Memphis energy. He’s also one of Memphis’ most underrated and finest artists all the way around. And last year, because it was his 80th birthday, I was like, ‘Let’s put this out.’ … When he starts reciting this poem on [the title track], it’s just incredible. His delivery is like Vincent Price, it’s so epic! It’s like when Jack Kerouac read his poetry and prose over jazz.”