Guitarist Jesse Taylor dead at 55

Longtime backup for Joe Ely helped spur Lubbock and Austin's early music scenes.

By Michael Corcoran
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, March 09, 2006

In a town full of guitar players, he was the most ferocious. Lubbock-born Jesse "Guitar" Taylor, who came to prominence in the Joe Ely Band that toured with the Clash in the late '70s, earned his nickname by playing every solo as if the notes were shooting through him. Offstage, the tattooed gentle giant was one of the most good-hearted people you could meet.

Taylor passed away Tuesday evening at his home from complications of hepatitus C and cirrhosis. He was 55.

"When Jesse joined the band in 1975, his playing took us to a whole new level," Joe Ely said from California, where he's on tour. The Clash's Joe Strummer loved Jesse. "Keith Richards had us open some (Rolling Stones) shows because he was such a fan of Jesse's. Bonnie Raitt tried to get Jesse to join her band."

But Taylor stayed in Austin, where he backed Billy Joe Shaver and the Flatlanders in recent years.

He earned a place in Lubbock lore by being the first white musician to play at the original Stubb's BBQ. Owner C.B. Stubblefield had picked up Taylor hitchhiking and told the kid he had a chopped beef sandwich with his name on it at his barbecue joint. The Sunday jam sessions Taylor started were a prime incubator for the Lubbock music scene. Stevie Ray Vaughan would come up from Austin to sit in.

"Whether I was watching Jesse as a fan or when he was in my band, his playing mystified me," said Jimmie Dale Gilmore, who had known the guitarist since Taylor was a 15-year-old in Gilmore's first group, the T. Nickel House Band in Lubbock. "The intensity of Jesse's enthusiasm for the music was contagious."

A former Golden Gloves boxer, Taylor was known as a guy you didn't want to mess with. But Ely said in all his years touring and recording with Taylor "we never had a single argument. Jesse was just a total sweetheart."

On one New Year's Eve show in Lubbock in the '70s, Taylor's rough side came out when members of the Banditos biker gang were lighting firecrackers during the Joe Ely Band's set. "The leader of the gang set off a string of Black Cats right at Jesse's feet and Jesse just calmly put down his guitar and challenged the guy to a fight on the dance floor," Ely recalled. "Well, Jesse laid the guy out with one right hook."

Taylor is better known as a humble soul who let his guitar do his fiercest talking.

He is survived by his daughters, Chelsea, Nicole and Carrie, two grandsons and girlfriend Kim Stewart. Funeral arrangements are pending.

mcorcoran@statesman.com; 445-3652