The Chill.(The Talk of the Town)(Chip Taylor)

If you had stumbled into Banjo Jim's, in the East Village, on a recent Wednesday night and encountered a sixty-something guy leading a band through a fervent rendition of "Wild Thing," for an audience of two dozen or so, you might have concluded, "This is lame," and slipped back out the door. But it wasn't lame, because the sixty-something guy was Chip Taylor, who wrote "Wild Thing," among many other hit songs, both country and rock--"Angel of the Morning," "Try (Just a Little Bit Harder)"--and who has, at various times, rounded out the royalties with his earnings as a professional gambler, and who also happens to be the brother of the actor Jon Voight, which makes him an uncle to Angelina Jolie. So here was a man who can perform "Wild Thing" whenever and however he likes.

Taylor's biography is an odd one, even in the misfit pantheon of great country songwriters. First off, he's from Yonkers. His father, Elmer Voight, was the head pro at a golf club in Scarsdale, who liked to tell his three sons (the third brother, Barry, is a prominent volcanologist) that he was an undercover agent for the F.B.I. As a boy, Taylor and some friends started a country band, and when he was sixteen he was signed by King Records. A few years later, he got a job writing country songs for the publishing arm of Columbia Records. Chet Atkins, the guitar player and head A. & R. man at RCA Records in Nashville, took a shine to a song he'd written and, not quite believing that its composer could be from New York, asked to see everything he wrote. This enabled Taylor to give up a nascent gig as a professional golfer (hence the stage name Chip--he'd holed out from off the green several Sundays in a row) and settle into a career as a Brill Building songwriter, turning out hits for Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Jackie DeShannon, Evie Sands, and Emmylou Harris, among many others.

Each day, he'd ride the train down from Yonkers to compose in a cubicle on the second floor of 1650 Broadway. At quitting time, he'd go to the printer's to pick up the next day's racing form, commute home (wife, children, house--the full catastrophe), study the form, pick two or three horses, and call them in the next morning. It was a fine living. His winning percentage was very high, and most bookies--except, he says, Meyer Lansky, who piggybacked on Taylor's picks--stopped taking his bets. In 1981, Taylor quit the music business to focus on the gambling, partnering with the legendary horse ...