Recent NY Times article about Chip Taylor, younger brother of Jon Voight, and author of the song "Wild Thing" among others. He's from Yonkers, and his latest album is called (surprise surprise, Yonkers NY) You can buy the album by clicking the Amazon link on the left.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/nyregion/21towns.html
From Writing ‘Wild Thing’ to Nostalgia for Yonkers
Robert Stolarik for The New York Times
Chip Taylor, who wrote the lyrics for “Wild Thing,” in his hometown of Yonkers, N.Y. .
“Ever hear the song ‘Wild Thing’?” he said to his daughter Isadora, an aspiring teacher. “This is the guy who wrote it.”
You win a permanent seat in the pop culture hall of fame for writing the words and music to one of the primal radio odes to youthful lust, made famous by the Troggs in 1966. So it was appropriate that Chip Taylor’s biggest claim to immortality was properly recognized before he popped into the kitchen to thank Noreen the waitress and headed back outside.
Still, plenty of musicians have done their best to capture the essence of raging hormones. Not many have felt the urge to create a country-ish homage to Yonkers, New York State’s fourth-largest city, but one of those unloved places, better known for what it is not than for what it is.
Which is why Mr. Taylor, the season of homecomings and long memories upon us, was tooling around his hometown and its environs on Thursday in search of the old Nepperhan train station (gone), the old Chat ’n’ Chew in Ardsley (gone), the memorial plaque to his dad, Elmer Voight, a former golf pro, on the 16th fairway at the Sunningdale Country Club in Scarsdale (still there), and his old house at 60 Ball Avenue overlooking the Saw Mill River Parkway (ditto, though barely recognizable).
Mr. Taylor, who these days lives in Manhattan, probably won’t achieve immortality for his new CD, “Yonkers NY,” though it’s been a surprising success now at No. 6 on the Americana record chart (“The List,” by Rosanne Cash, the daughter of his old friend and hero Johnny Cash, is No. 1). Still, as we all inch closer to that great Chat ’n’ Chew in the sky, Mr. Taylor gets his chance to remember things past — most quite personal, some kind of universal.
“The thing I really loved about Yonkers was this energy, this sense of a place where there was all this energy about to burst forth,” he said, as we drove through town. “I don’t know how to explain it, but it was a gritty place, full of people who worked hard and had all the character in the world. You might coast in Scarsdale. You didn’t coast in Yonkers.”
Mr. Taylor, 69, born James Wesley Voight, is the younger brother of the actor Jon Voight and Barry Voight, a geologist and volcano expert, and an uncle of Angelina Jolie. “Wild Thing” aside, he’s led a more interesting life than most of us, writing other hits like “Angel of the Morning,” making a living for years as a successful horse bettor, and then returning to music in the mid-1990s.
YONKERS has been around the block, too, once a bustling, unpretentious town full of factories and laborers, now trying to reinvent itself with fancy lofts and restaurants on the Hudson at one extreme and an increasingly poor and diverse population on the other. Mr. Taylor’s old working-class middle of Czechs, Italians, Poles and Irish is harder to find.
Mr. Taylor’s record, with threads of country and rockabilly, mandolin, fiddle and steel guitar, is an evocation of his family and Yonkers in the ’50s — the Mafiosi who showed up and sang opera at his parties, his basketball heroes at Roosevelt High who later got in trouble for shaving points in college games, the charcoal sky left behind by the Putnam Division trains that flattened the nickels his dad had left on the tracks.
The CD captures both an older, working man’s Westchester without the moneyed gloss and the eternal tug of the past — those places from everyone’s youth that invariably look smaller in real life than they seemed in memory.
The cityscape and hilly topography are pretty much the same, but most of that world is long gone, like the Otis Elevator factory, the Alexander Smith Carpet mill, the Anaconda Wire plant in Hastings where his aunt worked. People may work as hard now as they did then; it’s just harder to find places to work hard. It’s harder to burst through.
He won’t sell as many copies of “Yonkers NY” as the Troggs did of “Wild Thing,” but it’s one case for today’s splintered music business, where you can be as hyperlocal as the spirit moves you, like Tris McCall of Jersey City, who specializes in synth-rock visions of the culture and politicians of Hudson County.
Mr. Taylor figures there’s something universal in his tales of Yonkers. His fans in Sweden love the songs, he said. And if they didn’t?
“You’re from Yonkers, you have a certain pride in Yonkers,” he said. “And you don’t care if anybody gets it or not.”
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