Clip #3

The young Jesse Taylor was a tattoo guy when tattoos meant tough, not trendy. He hopped his first cross-country freight train from Lubbock at age 16 — and continued to ride the rails that way deep into his middle age. Taylor knew what it was to stand jaw-to-jaw with both bikers and cops. His friends say Jesse wasn’t the type to start a fist fight, but he knew how to finish one. He lived hard, drove fast and played guitar the same way.

Taylor would be the last man to brag. For the sake of context, however, he recites a few lines from an old review. “Jesse Taylor plays guitar as if he were running down a blind alley as fast as he could . . . until he crashes head-on into a wall. Then he gets up and he runs in another direction.”

Taylor is 55 now, and the miles show. He’s gained some weight and lost some color in his kindly face. Taylor’s hair is turning gray, and he wears it longer now than in his youth — combing it straight back behind his ears. His body clearly hurts him, but he’ll never tell you that. In the gentle light of late afternoon, Taylor scratches at his gray goatee, tugs on a longneck and talks for hours about music and art, late nights and bar fights, always upbeat. He laughs, a lot.

Jesse Taylor was the son of a laborer, a weekend guitar player and alcoholic who left the family when Jesse was only 10. His mother supported her three children on the salary of a legal secretary. Jesse has a faint memory of seeing Buddy Holly and an entourage of pretty girls driving around Lubbock in a pink Cadillac in the 1950s. Yet it was the sound of live electric guitar —a band of neighborhood Hispanic kids, playing Ventures tunes in a garage — that stuck with him more deeply.

“It was magic. That sound captivated, took me to another place. Almost like another planet or something,” says Taylor. The man with the tattoos speaks softly, with a High Plains drawl. “It changed my life for real. Playing guitar was never a hobby, like ‘give this kid a guitar, so he’ll have something to do.’ No. Literally, from Day One, I became another person entirely.”

The boy jumped out of school and into music. As the teenage lead guitarist in Angela Strehli’s first blues band, he lived on beans and rice, played the old Vulcan Gas Co., led the wave of white musicians who found a spiritual home in East Austin bars such as the I.L. Club in the late 1960s. A little later, he met a scrawny, pimpled kid with a Beatle haircut named Stevie Vaughan. His first impression: “This town is gonna eat this kid alive.”

Jesse’s mantra with the Ely band in the 1970s and 1980s — when his guitar was the muscle behind songs like “Musta Notta Gotta Lotta” and “Johnny’s Blues” — was “Let’s get on stage and kick some (behind).” It seemed he never played a solo the same way twice, even when a band required it for a studio recording. He was both sensitive and reckless, forever impulsive. He once hopped a Missouri Pacific freight headed out of downtown Austin . . . while on a set break, in the middle of a show. “I saw that train roll by and realized how much I missed it,” he says. Taylor didn’t jump off until the freight pulled into San Antonio.

“Jesse used to say to say to me that music wasn’t big enough to contain all his energy. The good energy, as well as that self-destructive energy,” says writer-actress-musician Jo Carol Pierce, who has known Taylor since he was 16 years old and who once hopped a freight with him from San Jose, Calif., to Tijuana, Baja California. “He loves to fight, you know, to protect the people he loves. He’s also one of the kindest, most gentle-hearted people I’ve ever known.

“I love Jesse’s paintings; they’re like manifestations of the pure Jesse spirit. All that good-hearted fire, and the darkness, too — treated with such a light touch. He’s always light, in any kind of darkness. I keep one of his drawings — of a wild horse, standing upright — next to the computer where I write. I see Jesse in all of his images, images of things he’s loved his entire life.”

Jesse Taylor didn’t so much take up colored pencils as crash into them — at an art class in a rehabilitation facility, where he was recovering from substance abuse. “Have you done this before?” the instructor remarked upon seeing his first sketches. “You have talent.” Last fall, Jesse sold $5,000 worth of artwork during an exhibition of his drawings at the South Austin Museum of Popular Culture.

“It’s much the same thing, actually, the drawing and the music,” says Taylor. “The notes on the guitar are colors in my head. You know? And the colors on the paper are like notes on the guitar.” Next to be added are the saemutu, which vary in number depending upon social status