Dallas Taylor, rock drummer beat drugs and counseled others to follow lead

Dallas Taylor tried to commit suicide in 1984 by stabbing himself in the stomach with a butcher knife.  “My wife came in, and I remember her looking at me like she was just plain fed up,” he recalled.  “I said, ‘Listen, if I’m still alive in the morning, take me to the hospital.’”  He did survive, having missed his vital organs by centimeters.  It was his first of several times his life was saved.

Taylor died on Sunday.  He was 66.  One of rock and roll’s most able drummers, in the late 1960s he helped develop the sound for Crosby, Stills and Nash, appearing on their eponymous debut as well as Déjà Vu, their next album with Neil Young. 

These albums sold in the millions. Taylor also jammed with Jimi Hendrix and performed with Van Morrison, but that wasn’t how he earned his reputation.  “I was more famous as a junkie than a drummer,” he once said. It’s a testament to the man’s capacity for substance abuse that Keith Moon, rock’s most famous hard-partying drummer, once told him, “Dallas, you do too much drugs.”

Dallas Taylor was born in Denver, Colorado in 1948.  When his parents divorced, he was four, and developed stress-related stomach ulcers.  His mother treated him with a medicine that contained opium.  “I can remember taking that stuff and thinking ‘Wow, this is how I’m supposed to feel,” he remembered.

Growing up in San Antonio, Texas, he saw “The Gene Krupa Story” when he was ten.  Krupa was a big band drummer who, through his flamboyant showmanship, put the instrument in the spotlight.  He was also arrested in 1943 for possession of marijuana, another aspect of his life featured in the movie.

Taylor was now determined to follow in Krupa’s footsteps. He decided to become a professional drummer.  He also considered himself “doomed” from drinking his first beer at age 13, the year his mother died of a heart attack.  In 1967, he dropped out of high school and moved to Los Angeles with his psychedelic band Clear Light.  They were signed to Elektra Records right after The Doors.

“He was one of us,” Taylor said about The Door’s lead singer Jim Morrison, and then laughed.  “He was a drunk.” 

Taylor also met Stephen Stills around this time, whose band Buffalo Springfield had just dissolved.  He was asked to join Crosby, Stills and Nash.  One early band name they considered — as a joke, according to Taylor — was The Frozen Noses, because of the amount of cocaine going around. Taylor was ultimately fired from the group because of his drug abuse.  He began a long downhill slide of divorce, addiction and homelessness. 

After surviving his suicide attempt, Taylor was transferred to a rehab hospital.  He began a new life of sobriety in 1984.  Five years later, he was diagnosed with a terminal liver disease.  His friends David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash and Neil Young, along with rock luminaries Don Henley and Eddie Van Halen, performed a benefit concert for him in 1990, raising enough money for a liver transplant.

Having once again been saved, Taylor embarked on a second career as an addiction counselor, providing assessments, interventions and sober companionship.  

“I understand what it is like to be an angry, depressed addict who needs so badly to be liked that he gets on stage and sweats and bleeds and hopes that people will somehow connect,” Taylor wrote, following the suicide of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, who was also addicted to heroin.  “But as addicts whose only real happiness is being high — whether it’s on dope or music, writing, acting or painting — success becomes our worst enemy.  When self-hatred runs so deep, it is never alleviated by fame or wealth.” 

Taylor was working in the Exodus Recovery Center in 1994 when Cobain checked himself in, then walked right back out. 

“Why do people check themselves into treatment and then relapse?” Taylor said in an interview.  “Of course it doesn’t make any sense. The disease doesn’t have any rationalization. It just goes to that most primitive part of our brain.”

In 2007, Taylor underwent a kidney transplant.  His fourth wife, Patti McGovern-Taylor, donated one of her organs. McGovern-Taylor posted about her husband’s death on Facebook.  “This morning at 2:30 am I lost of the love of my life Dallas W Taylor,” she wrote.  “He came into my life almost 18 years ago and saved me as much as I may have saved him.”

Dallas Taylor came of age at a time when the dangers of addiction were not well understood.  “I tried to be that guy for years, but I’m not that guy,” he once said, when asked how someone like The Rolling Stones’ notorious drug abuser Keith Richards could make it to old age.  “Luckily enough I survived my time to be Keith Richards, and frankly I wouldn’t want to be Keith Richards.  God bless him.  He can have it.  The truth is it’s an addiction and it’s progressive.  Alcoholism is deadly.  Most of us who have that genetic pre-disposition to it…died from it.”