Texas Coast always beckons musician
By DAVE THOMAS
News Editor
1/20/00
Take a guy who grew up in Brownwood, has traveled across the globe and is living near Stephenville and ask him ``Where do you wish you were right now?''
And if that guy is Larry Joe Taylor, he'll have an answer for you pretty quickly.
``If I could be anywhere, I'd probably be down in Port Aransas right now, maybe sitting on the back deck at Shorty's,'' he said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. ``It's pretty nice weather.''
Taylor, who will be performing his ``Coastal & Western'' style of music at Blaine's Pub on Friday and Saturday, said growing up in Brownwood was ``pretty typical West Texas.''
``There was a lot of football and, uh, that's about it,'' he said.
But the Texas coast is different.
``Well, the coast is kinda like the mountains... there's something kinda magical and scary about both of them,'' he said. ``I like going to the ocean. It's huge, you know, there's just a magic there.''
A couple of Taylor's songs about magical days on the coast are the Gary P. Nunn hits ``Why Don't You Meet Me Down in Corpus'' and ``My Kind of Day on Padre.'' (In fact he wrote or co-wrote another three songs - ``Roadtrip,'' ``Corona Con Lima'' and ``Terlingua Sky'' - that also appeared on Nunn's greatest hits album.)
After hearing Taylor's odes to the ocean life, you might think he hasn't ever had a bad day on the coast. And you'd be right.
``The worst day on the coast is the day you gotta leave,'' he laughed. ``I don't think I've ever really had a bad day down there.''
To balance out the coastal living, Taylor takes to the mountains as well. It could be the sheer size and beauty of the Rockies, or the desolation of the Chisos Mountains in Big Bend.
``We used to go out and do the world championship chili cookoff (in Terlingua) in November and play around the campfires late at night and camp out there,'' he said. ``I don't know if you've been out there, but in the Big Bend area there's probably more stars in the sky than anywhere else.''
