As profile subjects go, Chip Taylor is an embarrassment of riches; the challenge is not to find an intriguing story angle -- it's figuring out which one to focus on.| This, after all, is a man who started out following in his father's footsteps as a pro golfer before deciding to pursue a songwriting career instead, soon penning two of the most well-known (and radically different) songs of the last half century: "Wild Thing" and "Angel of the Morning."

Having mentioned his father's career, one might as well get his brother's out of the way. Taylor was born James Wesley Voight, younger brother of Jon, actor, and Barry, an internationally acclaimed seismologist. Taylor would never become an equally famous musician, however, because after a few acclaimed but now obscure country albums in the Seventies, he abandoned music to become a professional gambler. "I was scary good," he says matter-of-factly of his years at the racetrack. In the casinos, he developed an uncanny skill at card counting. "They could fill my glass up with Remy Martin, sit a pretty girl next to me, and I could laugh with them, talk with them, and I would never lose the count." Casino bosses in Vegas watched him like a hawk, while Atlantic City banned him all together.

Three and a half years ago, however, Taylor cashed in his chips and returned, the prodigal son, to music. "The inspiration was my mom got very ill, and I started to play for her like I did in high school," he says. "She just had this gleam in her eyes when I'd play her a song, and I said, 'geez, I like this.' And it just clicked with me. I'd made brief attempts to try to do some music over the last ten years, but never with the thought of touring, but all of a sudden there were no barriers -- it was just, 'I'll do it.'"

Taylor says he's now writing more than he's ever written in his life: three albums to date, including the just-released-in-the-States Seven Days in May, and a fourth double CD primed for an October release on his own label, Train Wreck Records. He's already selling that one at his shows. "I decided to bootleg my own record," he chuckles. "Because this is a new day, and I can do whatever the hell I want."

To wit, Seven Days in May is an intensely personal and intimate portrait of a week-long love affair Taylor had three years ago with Florence, a French woman half his age. Immediately after meeting her, recalls Taylor, he went to all of his friends and gushed, "I just met this woman who lifted the whole level of my existence up to its highest point." The inevitable hitch was, Florence was several months pregnant and would shortly return to her lover Guillaume overseas, leaving Taylor devastated and alone in New York.

But Taylor's life working the extraordinary way it does, it was not long before Guillaume begged him to go on vacation with the young family, "for Florence's sake." "We sat in the kitchen one night," explains Taylor, "and he said, 'I always wanted to get mad at you, I wanted to dislike you, but I can't. We both love her, and I can't blame you for loving her.'" Taylor became an adopted uncle to their son, and still talks to Florence every day -- she works for his record label in London. When they began to expect a second child, Guillaume asked Florence, "Is Chip going to be okay with this?"

Still, Taylor was hesitant to release Seven Days in May, which includes songs titled "Florence, the Baby and Me," "Florence Is the River" and "Oh Florence," without the consent of both. Guillaume, whom Taylor acknowledges in the song "One Hell of a Guy," gave the project his blessing. "He said, 'It's the most beautiful album I've ever heard ... I wish I could say things like that,'" says Taylor. "I said, 'You bring something else to the table.'"

In the end, Taylor may not have gotten the girl, but he has found the passion to devote his full energies to his music and touring. Distinguished album guests like Lucinda Williams and Guy Clark suggest that he's also found plenty of respect from his peers in the songwriting community. And even if heart-on-the-sleeve, self-fulfilling projects like Seven Days in May don't reap near the same rewards as a day at the races, no worry: thanks to keen foresight in his youth, Taylor still owns the majority of his publishing from his first go-round in the music business. "Wild Thing," he guesstimates, is used in about twenty spots a year.

"I think it's the most used song out there," he says. "If I wasn't pouring everything back into my record company and music now, if I stopped and didn't do anything, sure, I could make a good living."

RICHARD SKANSE(May 6, 1999)