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In addition to being the chief lyricist, and lead singer for DA since
the band recorded its first album, Taylor has become one of the music
industries most respected producers and songwriters . As a producer,
Taylor has worked with artists like Crystal Lewis, Randy Stonehill, and
Jacob's Trouble and his music has found its way into musicals, video games,
Motion pictures and Cartoons.
Although his schedule is always full, Taylor still finds time to
hit the road occasionally with friends Michael Roe and Derri Daugherty
as The Lost Dogs.
THE ONLY OFFICIAL AND GOVERNMENT-SANCTIONED TERRY SCOTT TAYLOR BIO.
An illegitimate child purportedly born in L.A. around 1950, and one time resident
of Pomona, Norwalk, Downey, Bell, Bell Gardens, Dana Point, San Jose, Los Gatos,
Costa Mesa, Santa Ana, and parts unknown, Terry Scott Taylor has recorded
at least two dozen or so band and solo albums, sold hundreds of thousands of records,
and is perhaps one of L.A./Orange County's most shadowy underground music figures
who may have once killed a guy. A prolific songwriter, performer, and producer
of alternative rock and pop, alt-country and gospel, speed polka, Amerciana, yodel
and punk, among his other distinctions is that of writing his first song at the age
of six (6), putting on puppet shows and creating spook houses for the neighborhood
kids at age nine (9) and reading Charles Bukowski when his friends weren't
looking. He performed his first major gig at age 17 while living in the San
Francisco/Bay Area, his band (The Cardboard Scheme) opening for Janis
Joplin's Big Brother and the Holding Company and Quicksilver Messenger
Service.
Among his many heroes are Zorro, The Cure, Anne Lamott, The Ramones, T.S. Eliot,
Willie Nelson, Larry David, Pancho Villa, Echo and the Bunneymen, Leonard Cohen,
Brian Regan, JFK, Roger Maguine, The Kinks, Sitting Bull, Bob Dylan, both Elvises,
Sandy Koufax, Martin Luther King Jr., Social Distortion, C. Philip Hoffman, Dennis
Miller, Jon Stewart, Frederich Beuchner, Johnny Depp, Flannery O'Conner, Neil Young,
Brian Wilson, C.S. Lewis, Rosa Parks, Wilco, Saint Paul, Phil Hendrie, Muhammad Ali,
The Cohen Brothers, The Salvation Army, Emmylou Harris, David Mamet, Blaise Pascal,
Jackie Robinson, Johnny Cash, Rembrandt, Modest Mouse, John Lennon, Aslan, Teenage
Fanclub, Billy Graham, Vincent Van Gogh, the Founding Fathers, and that Latino guy
who clerks over at the liquor store.
Over twenty years ago Taylor and his band Daniel Amos debuted in Orange
County at a local church, and early on he and the band recorded several popular
gospel/rock/pop/jug band records until, because of his musical hijinks and creative
jones for the strange, the obscure, and the musically inaccessible, he and his
band fell out of favor with the religious crowd---as well as with his own mother.
Despite this setback (which was linked by many to be the work of Lucifer),
Daniel Amos (or DA) went on to be among the first alternative groups
to perform at the now-defunct and infamous Madame Wongs, and over the past
30 years, in addition to local gigs at almost every major club on the Strip, Taylor
has performed in living rooms, clubs, concert halls, and outdoor arenas and festivals,
as well as street events, backyard barbeques, prisons, and one particularly
frightening burger bash. He continues to the present to perform nationally
and internationally.
Taylor's work has received recognition and praise in USA Today,
The Door, Time Magazine, and numerous national and regional
newspapers and magazines, yet his career has essentially flown under the radar,
perhaps due (and this is speculative at best) to bad management, dubious friends
and colleagues, liars, cheaters, scam artists, and Taylors' habit of biting
people in the middle of a conversation for no apparent reason at all. Be that
as it may, the Los Angeles Times listed the Taylor-produced Starflyer
59 record Leave Here a Stranger as a Top 10 album of 2002,
and further acclaim was garnered for Taylor's soundtrack work on The Neverhood
Chronicles (Dreamworks' first interactive PC game), Playstation's
Skullmonkeys, and Nintendo Game Boys' Boom Bots. Yet again, despite
these accolades, hardly anybody really knows who the hell he is, including his
best friends, himself, and some very puzzled members of his immediate family.
Taylor's music can currently be heard on Nickelodeon's newest cartoon hit
CATSCRATCH, which airs Friday nights and Sunday mornings. (CHECK LOCAL
LISTINGS OF COURSE.)
Terry (or Tucky, or Scotty, or T-Bone as some, to his great dismay, refer to him
affectionately) has been the recipient of various gaming music awards (Tom
Clancy's video game music composer Bill Brown, calling the Neverhood
and Skullmonkeys soundtracks "The best of any of them, the only music other
than mine that I really like"), Taylor and his interactive soundtracks have led
GMR ("Gamer") Magazine to proclaim The Neverhood Chronicles music
as the Best of 2003, and Best Game Music of the Year, addtionally
raving that "Skullmonkeys' bonus room song is the funniest tune ever written for
a video game."
Despite the fact that to this present day Terry Scott Taylor continues to create
relevant, modern alternative rock, pop, and country through his seminal alt-rock
pop band Daniel Amos, and his fake band The Swirling Eddies (under
his alias Camarillo Eddy), and as a currently contributing member of
The Lost Dogs' alternative country/gospel stylings...yes, despite the
fact that he is preeminent among Orange Countys' first alt music pioneers, or
that he's a fairly healthy old man, Taylor remains an obscure local figure to
the Southern California public at large. As inexplicable as his obscurity is,
Taylor does share an affinity and/or personal friendship with a number of new
and old, local and national bands and artists such as Starflyer 59, Poor
Old Lu, Danny Elfman, Miracle Chosuke, The Choir, Bad Dudes, Frank Black,
Part the Clouds, Mark Mothersbaugh, A Beautiful Day, Infinite Sasquatch, the
77s, and countless others, not to mention his rabid almost cult-like
and scary stalker-like fan base. Taylor continues to be an influential
friend and patriarch. His mother even claims now to like a couple of his tunes.
Tucky continues to attract a modest but steadily-growing fan base not
only here in America, but internationally as well. Scattered throughout the
world, including Canada, Japan, England, Russia, Australia, and Holland,
Taylors' followers are without peer in their devotion to the sheer genius of
his phenomenally extensive musical work, the poignant accuracy of his biting
social commentary, and the symmetrically transcendent cut of his stage
pants.
Terry Scott Taylor lives with his family in Orange County, and aside from his
musical pursuits, he is currently working on his first book, which he calls "a
collection of terrifying essays fraught with bloody theological horrors, dubious
tributes to Sinatra and Black and other people with the first name Frank,
culminating in a mordant account of Satan's uprising and subsequent downfall
as it pertains to the fine of art of maximizing your fun at Disneyland and
the Balboa Fun Zone."

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