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Tidbits I learned hanging out with Koko Taylor
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As a former news reporter for WXRT, I met Koko Taylor, um, decades ago. I watched her play many a late night at clubs all over the city. She came into the station to hawk her records, in heavy rotation during XRT's more free-ranging days. We even bowled together in a silly competition between station airstaff and Alligator Records recording artists. I don't remember how well Koko bowled, but I know I wasn't a huge team asset. Plus, my baby daughter threw up on Terri Hemmert that night. But I digress.
It was 1990 when Chicago Magazine commissioned me to write a feature on Koko. Over the next several months, I spent a lot of time hanging out with her, her family and the band. Just before my story went to print, the Chicago Tribune pre-empted me with a Sunday feature of their own. I collected a kill fee and the story never ran.
So, here's my contribution to the celebration of Koko's life: a few things I learned researching that story.
- While most reports will say her nickname came from her childhood love of chocolate, Koko told me her craving was specifically for hot chocolate, the drink.
- If nicknames were handed out on the basis of her adult cravings, she'd have been renamed "banana pudding," which daughter Cookie told me her mother ate every day, even if she had to take it into her bedroom to sneak bites.
- It's also widely reported that Koko made her living when she first came to Chicago cleaning rich folks' houses. But she told me she continued to do that for much of her life, well on into the 1970s, sneaking in a job here and there behind her manager's back when she needed extra money.
- Until his health took a serious turn after the band's 1988 car accident, husband Pops Taylor traveled with Koko and her Blues Machine. But not because she couldn't take care of herself on the road. Alligator Records' Bruce Iglauer remembers seeiing Koko once pull a gun on a club owner who balked at paying her agreed-upon fee.
- That might be one reason daughter Cookie (also a nickname, of course) didn't fully embrace her mother's career."I wish Mom well, but for myself, I chose another life," she told me. "Everyone in my church prays for her."
- Koko has credits in three movies. She sings off-camera in Eight Million Ways to Die and Adventures in Babysitting. But in David Lynch's Wild at Heart, you'll see her sing on stage. But it doesn't exactly sound like Koko. In a gutteral drone, she sings "weird tunes" that Lynch wrote. Always the working girl, she didn't complain. "I'd have sung Rock-a-bye, Baby!" she told me, proud to be seen and not just heard.
Note: You can read my full, original story here.
In the meantime, here's Koko telling us the real definition of the blues.
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