THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, October 17, 1996 TAG: 9610170035
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Remembrance
SOURCE: BY MIKE D'ORSO, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 274 lines
CAROL TAYLOR DIED Sunday morning, in a room attached to the back of her parents' Virginia Beach home, a pleasant room with bright skylights and a new linoleum floor - the better for her wheelchair to roll across - and a plum tree spreading its leafless branches outside the west-facing window, a room built just last month to give Carol a small measure of comfort as she made her way through the last days of her life.
Maybe you knew Carol. If you did, you would understand why she resisted this room at first, told her mother and father their money would be better spent on themselves, insisted she was perfectly fine in the spare upstairs bedroom where they had taken her in late this summer, after the cancer had spread so far even her walker and cane were of little use anymore, after she was forced to admit that she could no longer take care of herself.
If you knew Carol Taylor at all, you knew how hard it was for her to make that move, to swallow her pride and forsake the fierce self-reliance that had defined so much of her life.
It was not a long life. No one would suggest that 32 years is a long life. It was a full life, no question, but that is small consolation to those who are left behind - her parents, her brother, the vast, dizzying array of good, sweet friends, and the untold thousands of radio listeners throughout Hampton Roads who, over the course of the past 15 years, came to know Carol Taylor not only by the sound of her voice but by what that voice had to say.
You most likely heard the voice. Maybe on ``Defenestration 89.5,'' a weekly, three-hour block of public radio like nothing broadcast in this area before, featuring an out-of-bounds playlist that on any given Friday night would meld the likes of Mercyland to Waylon Jennings to Charles Ives to Al Green, the music framed by cutting-edge commentary that sliced, diced and laid bare every local icon from Pat Robertson to the daily newspaper you now hold in your hands.
Defenestrate. The term means to toss out through a window. ``And,'' added the program's creator when it first aired on WHRO in 1990, ``there might be a little glass broken on the way.''
Those were Carol Taylor's words. That was her show.
``It was a great privilege to do that show, to have an experience like that with someone whose talent was as immense as Carol's,'' says Mark Mobley, the program's co-host during the bulk of its six-year run.
``It was smart, it was funny, it was tasteful, it was soulful, and it was relevant,'' he says. ``Which are all qualities Carol herself had.''
Maybe you never heard ``Defenestration.'' Maybe you knew an earlier Carol Taylor, the rock chick from WNOR-FM 99, an 18-year-old kid bursting onto the region's radio scene in the fall of 1981 like an amped, eager, savvy-beyond-her-years typhoon, sweeping clean the vapid AOR landscape of Journey and Lynyrd Skynyrd and Styx, and turning her listeners on instead to something different, something truly hip, something beyond the bounds of corporate, formatted, we're-all-in-it-for-the-money rock.
``It was clear from the start that Carol was touching listeners, that she was doing something right,'' says the man who hired her at 99, then-program director Ron Reeger. ``I was looking for someone adventuresome, someone artistic, someone who could strike that balance between keeping themselves interested and challenged and pleasing an audience. Carol was able to do all of that. She didn't follow any formulas, and her ratings were great.''
The Dream Syndicate, Let's Active, the Fleshtones - these were the kinds of bands Carol Taylor listened to. These were the groups she went to watch at clubs in D.C. and Richmond and Chapel Hill - clubs like the Cat's Cradle, the Metro, the 9:30 - gunning her silver Tercel up and down I-95, finally rolling back home with just enough time for a quick shower before hustling over to the station, where she'd slide into her seat two minutes before airtime and cue up an album by the obscure, kick-ass band she'd just witnessed the night before.
R.E.M.? Carol Taylor was grinding the grooves out of their first EP before anyone knew who they were. Years later, after they had become Rolling Stone magazine's favorite cover boys, the guys from Athens would remember her, would make a point of thanking Carol Taylor for the boost she'd given them in the early days.
The early days. Can the mid-'80s really be recalled as if it were that long ago? Perhaps. Certainly in the radio business, where the ``talent'' comes and goes like the flavor of the week, as do the tastes. Definitely in the music business, where the star-making machinery devours everything in its path, ingesting the ``hot'' of one year and spitting it out as the ``not'' of the next.
That's the way it went with a local band called The Waxing Poetics, a group whose career arc carried them from Hampton Boulevard dives like Formerly Dominic's to a recording contract with a national label, a breakthrough album on the coast-to-coast college charts, and a taste of the big time with a couple of showcase appearances in New York.
Never mind that that was as far as the The Poetics went, a brief blip on the rock radar screen, ending with their breakup in 1991. Their reputation was larger than any other local band of the decade, large enough to merit a ``best of'' album and reunion concert staged earlier this year and dedicated to the one person who made it all happen for them, the woman who drove (and made the payments on) their van, booked their shows, crafted that record deal out of thin air, strong-armed her boys' share of the evening's take from the closed fists of crooked club owners, and took great pride in being one of the few managers in the business who could not only break down a drum kit but play it as well: the Poetics' Carol Taylor.
``She busted her ass, put herself on the line for us, went in debt and suffered a lot,'' says the group's guitarist, Paul Johnson. ``We went through a lot too, but at least we got to stand on stage and have people clap for us. Carol didn't get any of that glory, but then that's not what she cared about. For her, it was all about the music. That's what she loved. That's what guided her. Not money. Not ego. None of that. It was about the music, period. She was more knowledgable about music than I was, and I'm a freaking musician.''
It was Johnson who arranged that reunion show - a ``reunion'' for a band that broke up a mere five years ago. A culture in a hurry can twist time like that. Lives lived in a headlong rush tend to do the same. No one thinks of time ever running out. Later, maybe, but not now. Not anytime soon.
Carol certainly never thought about it. There was no time. She was too busy working, traveling, laughing, reading - always reading - keeping exceptionally long hours, crashing in third-rate motels with the band, playing DJ, sister-confessor, roadie, businesswoman. It was a multifaceted existence, one that had its seeds in her college radio days in Boston and blossomed when she dropped by FM 99 for a what-the-hell audition in 1981 - and, on Nov. 6 that year, the very day she turned 18, was hired as the overnight DJ, punching in at midnight and introducing herself to the 3 a.m. crowd.
``She made it seem easy, which it wasn't,'' says Ron Reeger. ``She sounded so good and so smooth on the air that few people really understood how hard she worked at it. Carol was always pushing herself, always, and no one was more of a critic of her work than she was.''
Who could have guessed that at that point, still in her teens, she was already more than halfway through her life? Who could have known cancer was coming? In her throat, of all places.
Shortness of breath. That was the complaint she brought to her doctor in the spring of 1994. Asthma, maybe. No one dreamed it might be anything more until they saw it on the X-ray, a tumor the size of a fist, wrapped around her trachea and squeezing it shut.
That's when the tests began. A bronchoscopy. A biopsy. And then they found what they hoped they would not. She got the word on an August afternoon, in a phone booth outside a D.C. restaurant where she and some friends had finished a meal before heading to the opening show of the Rolling Stones ``Voodoo Lounge'' tour.
Malignant.
Carol went to the concert that night, numb, the word burning in her brain while Mick Jagger pranced on the stage. She sat in her hotel room after the show, staring down at the Potomac, the lights of the city twinkling on the water. The hotel was the Watergate, always her favorite. The Nixon connection delighted her. She never checked out without grabbing some stationery and maybe a matchbook or two for her friends. But she wasn't thinking about any of that now.
Malignant.
She drove home the next day by herself, punching two songs on the car stereo over and over - Nirvana's ``Lithium'' and ``Smells Like Teen Spirit'' - screaming the lyrics at the top of her lungs for the entire four-hour trip, as tears washed down her face.
Like a fist. That was the image the doctors used for the tumor, and Carol came to embrace it as well. She would use it herself, often, to explain her disease to her friends.
There was no explaining the cause. Carol never smoked, though God knows she inhaled enough secondhand fumes in those clubs and studios and vans to last, what, a lifetime?
Maybe it was the smoke. Or the stress. Or a thousand and one other possibilities. Maybe it was some kind of verdict, a judgment passed down by a higher power for something she'd done that was wrong, or something she'd been that was wrong.
Carol considered that. She considered everything. But it was futile. No one could say where the cancer came from, not even the doctors. Particularly not the doctors. And eventually, blessedly, Carol stopped torturing herself with the question of cause. She stopped raking herself over those answerless coals, even as she kept fighting to keep a grip on her life.
Like a fist.
It was an uncompromisingly honest image, if a bit unsettling. It was purely and simply true, and there was a beauty in that - a brutal beauty, but beauty nonetheless.
Friends and colleagues used the same terms for Carol Taylor herself, both on and off the air. She was uncompromising when it came to principle, honest in both intellect and emotion, unsettling at times, and always, beautifully, truthful - sometimes to a fault, sometimes to her own detriment. Her career at FM 99 came to an end when it was impossible for her to keep personal politics away from her on-air persona. Proudly, defiantly, she would identify herself to listeners as ``Pro-Choice Carol Taylor,'' or follow up an Exxon ``Go with the flow'' commercial with a stab at the corporate sponsor: ``Yeah, I'll be going with the flow all right,'' she would chide into the microphone, ``as soon as you clean up the mess you made in Alaska.''
That was the one that got her fired, back in the spring of 1990, but by then she was already on a new career path. Twenty-six years old, and she'd had it with commercial radio. ``Defenestration'' was on her horizon, and there was voice work as well - lucrative voice work - with Norfolk's Studio Center, one of the nation's largest commercial production houses. Switch on your radio in most of America's major cities - Dallas, Chicago, San Francisco - and chances are you'll hear Carol's voice pitching the virtues of clients like Sprint Cellular or MGM Grand Casino, First of America Bank or Big B Drugs, Dixie Crystals sugar or the State of Alabama's Board of Tourism.
Carol taped a Studio Center spot a couple of years back for a hospital chain, including a pitch for its hospice division. Who could have imagined she would wind up with a hospice nurse of her own climbing the stairs of her parents' house, checking Carol's morphine supply, seeing that her catheter was okay, marveling at the fact that the patient could still work her way up and down those steps, still go out with friends for lunch at the Dumbwaiter or maybe a limeade at Doumar's.
That was late this summer. The cancer was all through her by then - in her skull, in her chest, in her hips. It took a wheelchair to get her in and out of those restaurants, but she went. She wasn't about to just lie in that adjustable medical bed and die. On the walls of her bedroom were nailed milagros of all shapes and sizes - small body-part ornaments believed by the Latin American culture to have healing powers. Friends had sent them from across the country, tiny totems made of glass or tin or copper. A heart. A torso. A set of lungs. A spine.
Conspicuous by its absence was her music. The Archers of Loaf. Marvin Gaye. The Stones. Carol owned thousands of CDs, but none came with her to that room. ``None of it fills me up anymore,'' she said one afternoon this fall. ``Nothing sounds good.''
Her CDs were in storage by then, along with almost everything else she owned. It was her friends who mattered most now, as they always had. It was always Carol's apartment where the bands and their hangers-on would gather, it was her sofa and floors on which they would sleep, it was her food they would eat, sumptuous spreads of appetizers made with Carol's small hands - roasted red peppers, black-eyed pea salad, pesto, ravioli - all prepared and served with exquisite attention to detail.
That was how Carol Taylor lived, generously, with a great deal of thought, an obsessive amount of care. Ask any of her closest friends: Earl Swift, former gadfly local columnist, with whom Carol shared a Willoughby Spit home after learning she had the disease; Robin Russ, her sister figure and a colleague at Studio Center; Laura Lafay, who ushered Carol back and forth to treatments at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston; Rickey Wright, local music critic, who shared Carol's passion for the power of rock at its purest and best; Ruth Lopez, book critic, editor, and longtime friend, who mailed Carol most of those milagros from her home in Santa Fe.
And Mark Mobley, Carol's closest, dearest companion.
``The beautiful thing about Carol,'' says Mobley, ``is she understood so many levels of emotions. She understood the great noble things like honesty and altruism and integrity, but she also knew the real power of a three-minute pop song, or a simple gesture of support for the people you care about and who care about you.''
They did care, Carol's friends. They did their best, in the end, to return the generosity of spirit she had always shared. They knew firsthand how fiercely and fully she approached her profession and her friendships, and in her last days they saw how she dealt the same way with death. They watched her meticulously prepare lists of which of her belongings she would leave to whom: her ``Hello Kitty'' trinket collection; her beloved Atlanta Braves warmup jacket; her Howard Finster folk art carving of the angel Gabriel - the herald of good news.
They watched her draw diagrams of who would stand where at her cremation ceremony. They listened as she planned the menu to be served to the group who would gather at her wake. ``The Martha Stewart of Death,'' she called herself, smiling and shrugging as she lay in that bed and licked yet another envelope for yet another thank-you note to yet another friend.
Last weekend it came to an end, sooner than expected, more suddenly. But then who can say what is expected with a disease like this one?
Thursday night Carol had watched her favorite Brave, Greg Maddux, pitch on television, agonizing as Maddux and his teammates were beaten by the St. Louis Cardinals. Friday and Saturday were bad days for her breathing, but then she'd been having good and bad days that way for weeks. Sunday morning her father brought her the newspaper, as usual. Her mother came in a little past 10 with breakfast - two eggs, a slice of toast - chatted for a while, then left the room to fix Carol a cup of coffee.
Twenty minutes later her father came in to give Carol some medication. The cup of coffee was at her bedside, cold. Carol seemed to be asleep.
And just like that, it was over. As silently and suddenly as it had first appeared, the cancer had run its course.
Without music. Without commentary. Without a sound, save for the October breeze passing through that plum tree outside.
And the soft weeping of Carol's mother and father.
And of her friends.
So many friends. MEMO: Donations may be made in Carol Taylor's memory to the M.D.
Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. ILLUSTRATION: Photo courtesy of Carol Taylor's parents
Carol Taylor was uncomprising on principle, honest in intellect and
emotion, unsettling at times, and always truthful, sometimes to a
fault.
FILE PHOTO
Above, Carol Taylor as a rock DJ at WNOR-FM in 1984. her fresh, hip
approach won her a loyal following. In the late '80s, she managed
the local band The Waxing Poetics, below, to national notice.
MICHAEL COPE
A Carol Taylor tribute page has been posted on the World Wide Web.
The address: www.norfolkva.com/arol/ by CNB