Dig It! Magazine

This is yet another article on Wally Tax, but way better because I had the pleasure to talk to not one but two members from The Loved Ones about performing with him.

This is historical for me and my website because I have never done an interview before and the topic is just great so I hope you’re as excited as I was while writing it.

I finally found Wally’s biography called Tot hier en dan verder, which was published in 1998 and it is well structured, different eras and dates divided into sections just like any other book.

The book starts off with the prologue which already laid down a certain kind of melancholy for the reader. But I’ll try not to tell you everything word from word because this isn’t a book review, but I still wanted to come on here because I have many thoughts and Wally really seemed to live all the lives. From being famous and rich, hanging out with characters like Brigitte Bardot, John Lennon and even Elvis and Andy Warhol at some point to almost living in poverty, trying to get on the charts with many different bands of his.

His personal life was interesting, being gifted from an early age, getting expelled from school because he felt bored by the subjects so he just didn’t go and being a pimp for american soldiers in exchange of cigarettes and money at the age of 11 (that is also how he learned english by the way.)

He founded The Outsiders when he was just 11, but you can read about it here: Artist Focus: Wally Tax and The Outsiders – Dig It! Magazine (digitmusicmagazine.com)

Wally seemed to always struggle with finances, contracts and addiction. Yes as an artist it is not surprising to hear about problems like these, but in the book he just accepts these as they are.

I consider Wally a very put together musician, the way he talks about music and talks the reader through his process and thoughts on good music was just fascinating for me to learn about. I don’t know much about music theory, I just like music in general so complex structures usually bore me but this one surprisingly didn’t!

Down to the last song he explains the process while composing and writing things. He also mentions that he wanted to write music for big orchestras which would’ve been interesting to witness especially if you’re familiar with his album Bridges Are Burning.

Dealing with finances isn’t easy, it never was and it never will be especially as a young flourishing musician, throwing great big parties, touring and doing things you love: making music.

I found it refreshing to see how easily he could stay true to himself, as a well known person it’s really easy to get carried away and be influenced by things you may not be.

The biggest part that got me, -emotionally at least- was when he talked about his great love for Laurie Langenbach who was an author and journalist, Wally’s second wife who passed away from cancer.

What I really appreciate in the book was how touching and gentle his words were while talking about Laurie. He was concerned and worried but did not force her to do something she didn’t feel like doing with her health. They got married in a small village in Italy but there was no time for arrangments because she was too sick.

This relationship broke Wally in many aspects, he very much cared for her and was left heartbroken, leaving him depressed battling with suicidal thoughts.

I also found his views and opinions on glorifying artists very interesting, from having to experience things like people waiting outside by the door with scissors in their hands to cut a piece of his hair to fans stealing his underwear and socks, I think he has seen most if not all of it. He constantly kept reminding the reader that he is just an ordinary man who chose making music as his career.

Keep in mind, keep in mind, I’m writing this because there’s not much out there in english, yet.

I came across a picture of The Loved Ones and Wally but couldn’t find much info on it so I reached out to Xan McCurdy who was in the band if he could talk a little about it and he said yes!

Xan: We played with Mr. Tax and it was definitely a highlight of my musical life. We had been doing a few Outsiders songs in our sets over the years, most often That’s Your Problem. I did have a lovely moment of going over the songs we did 3 I think, just me and him in a backstage dressing room at the Paradiso in Amsterdam. He was super nice and calm and thankful I think to have a chance to sing those songs again with a band that really appreciated his music legacy.

Then Xan told me that maybe the frontman of The Loved Ones, Bart Davenport would be a better person to ask as he was the one who arranged things. So I reached out to Bart, curious about what he might have to say and arranged an interview over the phone.

Both Bart and Xan were super nice and informative, I had a great time listening to these stories and I hope you’ll enjoy them as much as I did. Once again thank you Bart and Xan!

I nervously called Bart and thanked him for doing this interview and gave a little backround on why I asked him to do this interview. Here it goes:

Bart: Well, it was a long time ago, and I think that he (Xan) just makes the assumption that I always remember more than he does but that may not be true *laughs*

Someone contacted me to ask about playing with Wally and it was for a book about The Outsiders or a book on Wally and I think I saw it somewhere but I don’t believe that the writer sent me a copy of it. Was it the same book? (that I just wrote about)

Me: I think there are two books on him, a biography and another one that someone wrote about him after he passed, but it’s not really positive.

Bart: Like getting into his darker side of his life?

Me: Yeah

Bart: Which I never really knew much about, and I think there is probably a lot more out there than I was aware of, because as much as I was a fan of the music, it wasn’t the same kind of obsession like whereas I have read biographies about a lot of my favorite musicians, but maybe because there was never one in english, that was another reason I never knew much about his life.

Bart: Are you aware of this music mag from San Diego called Ugly Things?

Me: Yes!!

Bart: Because that guy, Mike Stax, I’ve known him pretty much since the late 80s and I know he’s been writing about The Outsiders and Q65, some of the other 60s Dutch groups, he’s been writing about those bands for decades so he may have some back issues, they might be really old ones going into talking about The Outsiders or Wally and in fact his group from the mid 80s called The Tell-Tale Hearts, it was totally the group that got me into The Outsiders. I first heard the songs I think Keep On Trying and That’s Your Problem, I think I heard those first, actually the versions by The Tell-Tale Hearts and someone told me that’s The Outsiders so I ended up buying an Outsiders Best Of album.

But I have Mike Stax to thank for having gotten me into those Dutch bands and whatnot.

The Loved Ones, our group existed from 1990 to 1995 which now in retrospect seems like a short time but when you’re in your early 20s, it seems like an eternity. It was 5 pretty amazing years, we were sort of a mod band but very obsessed with very kind of USA blues, rythm and soul music, sort of black music from America, so a lot of our music was either cover versions of Chicago blues style of songs or original music with that influence, but in our previous, Xan and I going back to the mid 80s to this mod revival scene in California, we were very into all the sort of what we thought of as obscure 60s bands, I mean The Outsiders were not obscure if you were in The Netherlands but obscure in a lot of other places in the world. We got into those continental kind of rock groups that would’ve been of interest to anyone who is into garage rock, psych rock and kind of mod freakbeat music and all that.

We got into these earlier before we’ve ever been in The Loved Ones, so when we were young teens, we’ve gotten into The Outsiders, Q65, Cuby & The Blizzards to name a few. But The Loved Ones in a lot of ways was an attempt to break away from this esoteric crowd of 60s enthusiasts and kind of try to play to a wider, broader audience of blues fans and that is very much how we ended up in The Netherlands.

Our booking agents and our label were very much glued towards blues, rockabilly, kind of americana music so when we would tour, oftentimes we were playing for audiences that were like our parents’ age, because those were the people that were into these stuff so we were like this novelty act, these young kids playing old fashioned music for a lot of times older audiences although there were people our own age who dug what we were doing too. That was like a thing that didn’t bother us at first and then there was a phase of kind of somehow feeling a disconnect between our audience and ourselves….but I digress. *laughs*

That got us into The Netherlands because at that time around 1994-95, you had this great circuit in Europe for that kind of what they called ‘roots’ music. We did a tour in The Netherlands in 1994 just doing our typical show and we had such a great time and we had all these great gigs, great crowds and people were pretty friendly, chatting with us, we were young guys having fun, so we started to chat about how we like these bands from the 60s and I think Xan even ended up having a brief relationship with a girl whose dad has been in one of those bands, I think it was Cuby & The Blizzards so it was definitely a conversation we were having with Dutch people and they were always surprised. It’s the same when you go to Spain and tell people you like Los Brincos or Los Salvajes and they’ll say how do you know these groups? It’s like ‘Yeah I know it’s not like a mainstream thing but the records are available in other parts of the world!’

So when we were booked to return (to The Netherlands), maybe less than a year later, it went so well they immediately booked us again so we came back and did another tour, this time we built a larger audience. It was my decision that we should cover some Dutch music as a way to do something fun and cover some music which was a bit different from what we would normally do, but I also think I very much had in my mind that I would endear myself or our band to Dutch audiences, and like I said with half of the crowd being these middle aged people from the 60s generation, I knew they would know that music.

We decided to do three Outsiders songs on the tour: That’s Your Problem, Touch and Keep On Trying and I think one of the reasons I chose those songs was because I already knew the words from listening to all those Tell-Tale Hearts versions first and onto The Outsiders versions, I knew I wouldn’t need to bother memorising the words because I kinda knew how the songs go *laughs*

I think we probably could’ve done some songs by other Dutch 60s bands that we wanted to be a bit more thorough in our tribute to Dutch music but it seemed like these three Outsiders songs I liked them, I liked singing them and The Outsiders were my personal favorite of the whole bunch of 60s bands from Holland.

So from the moment we have arrived, we were doing those three songs at every concert, and we were getting a lot of press in newspapers in the country and somehow, I don’t really know how this happened, maybe someone else who was a part of the dutch booking agents or someone who might know how this connection was made, but it got back to Wally that there was this young band on tour, currently playing his songs and that they were from America, and then one day, about halfway through the tour I got a phone call and this is before mobile phones, so it would’ve been like one of the venues maybe during soundcheck, we got this phone call and I picked it up and it was ‘Hey Bart. This is Wally Tax’ and I was like ‘Wow, Wally, hello!’ and he was like ‘So you’re doing my songs on your tour?’ I was like ‘Yes…Yes we are’ and he’s like ‘Umm, so your tour ends in Amsterdam’ ‘Yes it does’ ‘How’d you like it if I come and do those songs with you? at Paradiso’ and I was like ‘Of course, we’d love that! That’d be amazing!’ so he said ‘Okay, I’ll be there and I’ll come to your soundcheck and we can run through the tunes and stuff, make sure everything is good and we’ll take it from there, so nice speaking with you and I’ll see you there next week.’

So I hung up the phone and was like ‘Hey guys, Wally’s gonna do these songs with us!’ and somehow it was leaked to the music press, that this was going to happen, so the concert sold out so quickly that they moved the show to the main hall, which I think holds about 600 people, maybe more, which for a band in our sort of underground level was a pretty big turnout. I don’t know who did it but someone as part of the team leaked that we will have this special guest in the form of Wally Tax, and the whole tour was pretty wild, we were having great audiences, just having a blast.

We got to Amsterdam and were backstage and he walks in and he just looks incredible. His long hair just way past his shoulders, parted right down the center, just like he had it in the 60s, he actually looked so good, he had on *describing from a picture* jeans, a striped blazer, just a nice blue dress shirt and this little silk scarf around his neck so he sort of even dressed as this 60s dandy, and I was just like ‘Wow, he looks amazing, he looks just like Wally Tax!’ *laughs* even though he was older but it was just like ‘Yeah, that’s him!’ and he immediately knew our names because our picture has been in the newspapers and he had taken the time to remember who was who. He shook my hand and said ‘Bart, it’s very nice to meet you.’ and we were like ‘We don’t have to wait till soundcheck to go through the songs yknow, Xan’s got a guitar here’ and he said ‘Yeah, that’d be good..so let’s start with That’s Your Problem I guess’ and ‘Xan, I believe you begin the song.’ He totally knew our names and the arrangments so Xan starts with the opening like danana dana danana dana and Wally pulls out a harmonica and starts playing it and it’s perfect, I just got this chill down my spine, I was like I can’t believe this, this is so crazy, he’s here and he’s playing the harmonica, it’s him and we’re doing this.

It was a little odd for me because I had been lead singing on all these songs on tour and in the band I was the harmonica player and lead singer, I didn’t play second guitar with the band at that time, so for Touch and That’s Your Problem , I think I was just in the backround banging on a tambourine and then on Keep On Trying I got to sing backing vocals and harmony with Wally, so that was great I got to sing with him.

Then the crowd was going nuts because in my opinion we played the songs perfectly, my humble opinion *laughs* and he was in great form, he just really nailed it, did everything perfectly and it was cool because we were very much like this 60s band, we didn’t play music with any of the post-60s influences at all, there was no trace of punk, hip-hop or grunge, just the 60s and earlier music, 50s rock & roll and blues.

I surely believe there is a kind of Dutch sensibility, that those types of chord progressions are very unique to those Dutch bands and some of the drum beats and groove are kind of a little odd, and I do think that there is a true Dutch sound, but because it had been an influence on us in our earlier days, as teens, I think we totally had this kind of groove.

So we came back out without him to do the encore and it went well but there was just this roar of people going Wally, Wally, Wally! and so we got Wally back out and did a cover version of Got My Mojo Working by Muddy Waters and that was it. I never really found out if they paid him because he was just sort of sitting in with the band that was booked to play a show, making a guest appearance and I just never remembered any talk if there was money in it or not, maybe there was, but we were not in it at all, being kids ourselves, we weren’t aware of how much money it was made, we’d be told ‘You’ll get this much at the end of the tour’ no matter how many tickets sell, but now that I’m thinking back on it, it occurs to me like I wonder if he just didn’t get paid for that because he sort of should’ve been. But who knows? A lot of stuff seem to be going on without anyone telling us about it, like the thing of it leaking to the press and also how did he get my number? We were young and kind of up for anything that it just didn’t occur to me to ask that many questions. That, or I did ask many questions and then all these decades later I just forgot them. *laughs* It could be that I knew the whole story and now it’s just totally erased, but you remember the high points and the experience.

He was totally graceful, calm and very mellow, he was not super energetic, I’d say the entire time he was with us he was cool and calm, if he was nervous in any way he did not show it, and I did sense a sort of sadness in him, and I know people would say things to me like Wally’s had some bad years and dark times, I would’ve assumed he probably got involved in some drugs, I never looked into it so I didn’t know much about it, but the performance itself was very strong even though he was calm, he gave that performance with great authority, he stood on that stage like he belonged there, like it was his stage. So that’s the story of Wally Tax.

Want to share your experience? You had a chance to meet any of the people mentioned in the article? TELL ME MORE! email me at submit.dig.it.magazine@gmail.com or dm me on instagram @digitmusicmagazine if you’d like to be featured in the upcoming article(s)! I sadly do NOT own any of the pictures shown in the article.