Chad Taylor reminisces about Live, Facebook posts Options

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Chad Taylor has been posting anecdotes and memories of Live's history on Facebook.

His page is located here: https://www.facebook.com/chad.taylor.live

But for those who don't use Facebook, I'm also posting them here.

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Chad Taylor
May 16, 2026
Throwback to 2000 - I sat down for an interview on Channel V’s “The Drum” with Molly Meldrum. It was near the close of Live’s “The Distance to Here” tour of Australia. These songwriting philosophies still ring true all these years later ✌🏻
#live #thedistancetohere #mollymeldrum #thedrum #channelv

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1963159391229700/

Chad Taylor
May 18, 2026
Back at Woodstock ’99 playing “Lakini’s Juice” with Live in Rome, NY on July 23, 1999. I was playing my “Ruby Lou” guitar, named after my daughter just a year after she was born.

https://www.facebook.com/reel/827980540384872/

Chad Taylor
May 21, 2026

32 years ago today, on May 21, 1994, “Selling the Drama” reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Modern Rock chart.

After Radioactive/MCA began the promotional push on February 1 (which would later become my second daughter’s birthday), the song became the first public signal of Throwing Copper and the label’s chosen doorway into LIVE’s next era. It was a true band moment, four people listening to each other closely enough to become something larger than themselves: Gracey’s drums, Dahlheimer’s bass, Ed’s voice, and my guitar language all locking into the sound that would carry LIVE around the world.

Like “Operation Spirit” before it, “Selling the Drama” was built from one of my foundational musical contributions. My songwriting and creative priority was always inclusion. By bringing the band into the idea, letting each player shape it, and allowing the collective sound to become larger than any one person or part, the goal was always to build something that could hold all of us inside it, and something the audience could recognize themselves in, too.

The milestone gave LIVE its first No. 1 alternative-radio single and began a three-week run at the top. It also marked another step in my growth as a songwriter within the band, with two major radio breakthroughs rooted in musical ideas I helped set in motion.
Years later, during a radio interview with me on WMMR, Pierre Robert framed the tension in a way I never forgot: “Can you imagine how different Nirvana would have been had Dave Grohl, not Kurt Cobain, written ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’?”

The question stayed with me because it captured something difficult to explain: collaboration is both beautiful and complicated, and ego and ownership ultimately have to give way to something larger than any one person. In the best creative spaces, there is no winning or possessing, only contributing, listening, and sharing in service of the work itself.

While “Selling the Drama” began with one of my creative ideas, a spark that helped set an extraordinary chain of events into motion, the real achievement was never personal recognition. It was creating something honest enough to still mean something to people 32 years later.
https://www.facebook.com/chad.taylor.live/p...BtAr5ALpBfzCTql

Chad Taylor
May 23, 2026
@thechadgracey love you, brother! Your passion and talent will always amaze me. This clip is from 2003, the year my youngest daughter was born. LIVE was on the road in New Zealand. Feeling nothing but gratitude for the music and the memories
https://www.facebook.com/reel/1302540768676725

Chad Taylor
May 25, 2026
2006 guitar solo at Paradiso in Amsterdam with LIVE
https://www.facebook.com/reel/26727055400269841/

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Chad Taylor
May 27, 2026
LIVE on the @sharonosbourne show performing “Run Away” from Birds of Pray with @ogshelbylynne back in 2003

https://www.facebook.com/reel/860883430399829/

Chad Taylor
May 28, 2026
Happy 16th Anniversary! TGF debuted at a secret show at Fat Daddy’s in York, PA - May 27, 2010.

https://www.facebook.com/reel/967008882905177/

Chad Taylor
May 29, 2026
This video is from September 27, 2003. LIVE performed at Brasília Music Festival, Autódromo Internacional Nelson Piquet in Brasília, Brazil. 48,000 people were in attendance for LIVE’s headlining set. 🇧🇷
https://www.facebook.com/reel/2025367398050180/

Chad Taylor is with 930club.
June 1, 2026
Happy 46th Anniversary 9:30 Club!
46 years ago today — May 31, 1980 — the original 9:30 Club opened in Washington, D.C.
Before LIVE reached arenas, MTV, and the Billboard charts, we were a young band from York, Pennsylvania trying to prove ourselves in the rooms that mattered.
The 9:30 Club was one of those rooms.
Located at 930 F Street NW, it became one of America’s defining independent music venues—a home for punk, new wave, hardcore, college rock, and alternative bands that would eventually reshape the mainstream. It was small, intense, credible, and important. The kind of place where reputations were earned.
For Public Affection, later known as LIVE, the 9:30 Club was part of the same proving-ground circuit as CBGB, Maxwell’s, and the Chameleon Club. These rooms mattered because of the people inside them: the fans, promoters, managers, and true believers who could see something before everyone else did.
One of those believers was Seth Hurwitz, the legendary D.C. promoter behind I.M.P. and the modern 9:30 Club. Seth was an early champion of LIVE, and that mattered. Bands don’t rise on talent alone. They rise because people take risks and open doors.
On November 15, 1990, Public Affection played the 9:30 Club. That show helped lead to a pivotal connection with Gary Kurfirst, who came to see us at CBGB the following night. After the show, he shook our hands and said, “We are going to do great things together.”
He was right.
According to my archives, Public Affection/LIVE played the 9:30 Club 18 times between 1990 and 2019—from the Public Affection days through Mental Jewelry, Throwing Copper, Secret Samadhi, a surprise 2001 show, and later returns in 2008 and 2019.
The original club eventually closed, but in 1996 the 9:30 Club moved to its current home on V Street, where it remains one of the most respected live-music rooms in America.
Today is about the room—and the people who kept rooms like that alive.
Happy 46th anniversary to the 9:30 Club.
Small stages can carry very big futures.
Tell me if you saw LIVE or Public Affection at the 9:30 Club, and what year(s)!

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1006422178502570

Chad Taylor is with timothywhite and spinmag.
June 2, 2026

June 1, 1995.
LIVE appeared on the cover of SPIN magazine.
Timothy White’s feature, Lightning Strikes, arrived at a moment when Throwing Copper was sitting at the center of American rock culture.
White didn’t treat us like another alternative band having a lucky year. He understood the scale, the ambition, the spiritual charge, and the strange chemistry that carried four boys from York, Pennsylvania, onto the world stage.
At one point, he wrote: “I think we’re looking at the American U2.”
That line mattered.
Not because comparison defines legacy — but because a serious national writer saw past the noise of sudden success and recognized what we had been building since we were kids.
The space.
The drama.
The questions.
The conviction.
The sound.
Thirty-one years later, I’m still proud of that cover.
And I’m still proud of the boyhood chemistry that made it possible.
https://www.facebook.com/chad.taylor.live/p...bKrNdguXadq5V2l

Chad Taylor is with official_sponge_detroit and 3 others.
June 2, 2026

June 2, 2013 — Time Warner Cable Uptown Amphitheater — Charlotte, North Carolina
LIVE performs as part of the Summerland Tour with @everclear, @officialfilter, and @official_sponge_detroit.
This one mattered because it was @chrisshinn’s hometown show.
Charlotte brought out a wide circle of Chris’s friends and family — people who had supported him through every chapter of his musical life, from Unified Theory to Blind Melon, and then into his role fronting LIVE.
There was also a deeper Charlotte lineage around the Shinn family, including the founding story of the original Charlotte Hornets NBA expansion franchise.
For Chris, this wasn’t just another amphitheater date. It was a homecoming.
For LIVE, it was a moment to celebrate a new chapter on a large stage — with Chris standing in front of his hometown crowd, fully arrived.
https://www.facebook.com/chad.taylor.live/p...ydQNxGG2F9F4Gsl

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Chad Taylor is with memphishennesy and 3 others.
June 5, 2026

“The Gracious Few is an instant classic with miles of substance…beautifully arranged and sonically orgasmic to the ears and more than ready for mass intake.”
— Jeffrey Cerzosie, Examiner.com / New York Examiner, “The Gracious Few reminds us what Rock N’ Roll is supposed to sound like,” circa 2010
https://www.facebook.com/chad.taylor.live/p...GD63XrvNySzktxl

Chad Taylor
June 6, 2026
My good friend and guitar tech César Díaz once worked for George Harrison. In exchange for his technical services, in return, Harrison taught him one Beatles song a day. Much later in my own career, César began teaching me the Beatles songs Harrison had once taught him. It’s perhaps my closest and most direct lineage to the very birth of the music I love so much ❤️
https://www.facebook.com/reel/2076103059782572

Chad Taylor is with mediafiveentertainment and 2 others.
June 8, 2026

June 8, 1996 — Solution A.D. released Fearless on TAG/Atlantic Records
After completing Throwing Copper, I was hired to produce Solution A.D.’s debut album. The band had built a strong reputation throughout Pennsylvania, and I believed they had the songs, energy, and chemistry to make a great record.
To help capture that, I brought in engineer Jay Healy, whose credits included R.E.M., Michael Jackson, and John Cougar Mellencamp. Together we recorded Fearless at Philadelphia’s legendary Sigma Sound Studios — home to sessions by David Bowie for Young Americans and portions of Talking Heads’ Remain in Light.
The album’s lead single, “Fearless,” reached No. 33 on Billboard’s Modern Rock chart and earned national exposure through MTV’s 120 Minutes.
At the time, I suspected the lessons I was learning alongside Jay and Solution A.D. would eventually find their way back into LIVE. They did.
Jay was already part of our extended history, having worked on LIVE’s early demo recordings for Irving Azoff’s Giant Records before we ultimately signed with Radioactive. A year later, Jay and LIVE would reunite to co-produce Secret Samadhi, our first album to debut at No. 1.
Looking back, “Fearless” was more than an opportunity to help another Pennsylvania band make its major-label debut. It was an important chapter in my own development as a songwriter, producer, and musician.
I’m proud of the record, proud of the band, and especially proud to be reuniting with my friends in Solution A.D. on July 26 at Mady’s Snow Day, a fundraiser honoring the memory of Madyson Law and supporting the work of Mady’s Angels.

https://www.facebook.com/chad.taylor.live/p...dxupJk6YE5r4Lvl

Chad Taylor
June 10, 2026

June 9, 1999 — 27 years ago today, LIVE taped VH1’s Hard Rock Live at Sony Studios in New York City.
Television lights always felt too bright for our music.
Especially for something as heavy and dirge-like as “Lakini’s Juice.”
I remember struggling to settle into the pocket. The room felt too clean. Too controlled. Gracey was trapped behind plexiglass like he was playing inside a fishbowl.
It was a long way from CBGB.
That night captured a strange tension in our evolution: pop culture on one side, sweaty rock clubs on the other.

I’m still not sure those two worlds ever fully understood each other.

https://www.facebook.com/reel/3269476346588852/

Chad Taylor
June 10, 2026

Tumbling Dice · The Rolling Stones
·
June 9–11, 1995 — Oslo, Norway.
I was 24 years old.
Old enough to be touring the world with LIVE. Young enough that none of it felt normal.
We played the historic Sentrum Scene in Oslo on June 10, right in the middle of one of those surreal rock-and-roll stretches where memory starts to feel like myth.
The Rolling Stones had played Valle Hovin. Elton John was in town. We were staying in a grand hotel in the historic city center, four guys from York, Pennsylvania suddenly orbiting legends.
I remember meeting Elton in the hotel lobby. He knew Mental Jewelry and was incredibly kind. He invited us to his show at Oslo Spektrum, and Gracey and I went — front row seats, trying to act casual while one of the greatest artists in the world performed a few feet away.
The next morning, a Rolling Stones crew member mistook my luggage for Stones gear. Somehow, that mistake turned into a tour of Keith Richards’ hotel suite, which was literally next door to mine.
The windows were covered in aluminum foil to block out the sun. The hotel furniture had been removed. In its place: Keith’s bed, two giant road cases, wardrobe, music, and bar.
That was rock and roll.
At 24, I was still trying to understand how a kid from York ended up in a hotel hallway in Oslo, standing between Elton John’s kindness and Keith Richards’ mythology.
It felt impossible.
But it happened
https://www.facebook.com/reel/990877770205709/

Chad Taylor
June 15, 2026

One of my fondest tour memories was having the honor to invite support acts PJ Harvey and Veruca Salt to join us on the Throwing Copper tour.
Recently, I was honored to read in Far Out Magazine PJ Harvey’s reflections on touring with LIVE in 1995. Polly described the challenge of a 40-minute support slot where the crowd wasn’t there to see her, and how that forced her to perform in a very different way. She wasn’t wrong. We were all learning at that phase of our careers, and her performances had the same impact on us.

Behind the scenes, PJ had expressed some reluctance about joining a U.S. tour where her performance might be overshadowed by the enormous success of Throwing Copper. Although I knew it was a valid concern, I begged our management to make sure a proper olive branch was extended because I loved her artistry so much. I wanted our fans to experience her music. I wanted her to know that she would be embraced.
Thankfully, Polly said yes.

Our goal in adding Veruca Salt to the bill was to broaden the musical conversation each night and to help support Polly. I loved the artistry, intensity, and musicianship that Polly, Louise, and Nina brought to the stage. And yeah, these women rocked.
Each show found the bands pushing our intensity. Veruca Salt set the tone. PJ Harvey brought the theatrics. Then the four members of LIVE had to walk on stage and match the level of performance that had already been delivered.

I made sure to stand side-stage each night to watch Veruca Salt and PJ Harvey’s sets. Nothing inspired me more than their collective energy. Polly may have been studying what connected us to our audience, but I was studying her too — and Louise and Nina. Their performances pushed me to be better.
Thanks to Polly, Louise, and Nina for the inspiration.
One thing I remain utterly proud of was our collective vision to share our stage with such powerful and evocative female voices.
https://www.facebook.com/chad.taylor.live/p...a9sjsCXYFcm12wl

Chad Taylor
June 16, 2026
2 Meter Sessions, Netherlands — February 11, 1995.
This clip reminds me of the laughter and friendship that defined our brotherhood in those early years. We were barely 24. Fame had not yet transformed our small universe.
Rich Robinson once said everyone understands failure, because failure is common. But very few people can prepare you for success — especially the kind of success that arrives with volume and velocity.
It was one hell of a ride to the top. Beautiful, lonely, and isolating all at once.
If I could go back and talk to myself, I’d say: don’t rush the process. Don’t forget that the music itself — the thing we alone created — belongs to the people who made it.
Share generously with each other.
Keep the sharks at bay.
https://www.facebook.com/reel/2255630231920945/

Chad Taylor
June 19, 2026

June 24, 1995 — Glastonbury Festival.
This one is for the U.K. fans who were there early.
By then, LIVE had been traveling to England for nearly four years, building friendships and an audience one club, university, and festival at a time. Long before the wider world began paying attention to Throwing Copper, U.K. audiences had already given us a chance.
This was our second @glastofest.
Looking back at this interview, what stands out isn’t the questions or the answers. It’s the reminder of how important the U.K. was to our story.
From @molesbath and @theborderline to @kingtutsofficial and Glastonbury, thank you for welcoming four kids from York, Pennsylvania and making us feel at home.
And if we were boring, history had a dark sense of humor. A few breakups, lawsuits, and addictions were still waiting in the wings. 😉
https://www.facebook.com/reel/847950368046429/