Metal's Miracle Man: Dallas Taylor Reflects On Touching Death And The Long Road Back To The Stage
Eight years ago, Dallas Taylor crashed an ATV and suffered horrific injuries. On his first tour since the accident, the Maylene and the Sons of Disaster frontman opens up about pain, gratitude and God
Dallas Taylor and his band, Maylene and the Sons of Disaster, perform at Brooklyn venue The Kingsland. Photo: Adam Kovac
Dallas Taylor is inching his way through the semi-sparse crowd, trailing a few feet behind his bandmates. The quintet, Maylene and the Sons of Disaster, are about to play their headlining set at The Kingsland in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood. Despite its name, the venue is hardly home to royalty: though the Manhattan skyline is visible if you peek around the corner from the front door, it remains a river away from Carnegie Hall or Madison Square Garden. Instead, its neighbors down the street are a pizzeria, a laundromat, a car mechanic. It lacks some of the luxuries of New York’s more premiere venues - there isn’t even a bar in the same room as the stage. Instead, the booze is served in the front room, where murders of metalheads periodically congregate to order tallboys of Modelo or Heineken. This is a dive in the truest sense, offering deals on PBR and speedrail shots, with nary a hazy IPA available to order. In the wood-lined back room, where the live music takes place, the stage is no more than a few dozen feet away from the soundboard, tucked into a back corner. The concert goers have the motion of the tides: an opening band comes on and the tide comes in, the set finishes and they flow back to the bar. They may be small in number, but after politely cheering for openers that ranged from deathcore to nu-metal revival, they are here to watch the band affectionately known only as Maylene, who play a southern-inspired version of rock and hardcore that is comparatively more mellow. Take the Allman Brothers harmonized guitar lines and add in some of the volume and angst of Neurosis and you’re in the ballpark.
There’s not even a green room or backstage to speak of. Instead, the bands playing on this warm spring night enter through a small door, walk through the audience with their gear and hop onstage. Despite his band being the headliner, Taylor is no different. Hunched over, wearing a t-shirt advertising his native Florida (albeit emblazoned with portraits of various famous murderers that have called the Sunshine State home and the motto “Welcome to Florida: Where America Goes to Die”), an impossibly tattered ballcap and a patch over his left eye, hardly anyone notices him until he’s practically onstage. Despite the crowd numbering under 100, as he approaches the small stage, a cheer is let loose. The gathering of Maylene fans knows something special is about to happen. Out of the over 8 million people who call New York City home, these lucky few are about to witness something impossible. They’re about to watch a bonafide rock and roll miracle.
A few hours earlier, Taylor is sitting against a building down the street from The Kingsland, talking to his dad on the phone. Still sporting the ball cap and tattered jeans, the eye patch has been replaced by a pair of glasses, though the lens over his left eye is darkly tinted. As he rises to his feet, he hunches a bit forward. Despite being in his 40s, his shaggy hair and beard have just a few signs of gray but his posture is that of a man many years his senior. It’s no wonder. Few people his age have endured what he has.
In the summer of 2016 Taylor was riding an ATV in his home state. As he hit the brakes, he lost control of the vehicle, which flipped over and landed on top of him. The injuries he suffered were so severe that doctors told him they were amazed he didn’t drown in his own blood. With no helmet, he suffered severe damage to his brain, as well as numerous fractured bones and bruised lungs. He was comatose for days after the accident and blind in his left eye. The damage was so extensive that for several days, as he lay in a hospital bed, it was unclear if he was even technically alive: doctors worried that he was actually brain dead.
While the band has played a few one off dates over the past year, the show in Brooklyn comes amid their first full tour since the crash. Sitting in the RV that has been home for the past three weeks, Taylor acknowledges that’s come at a cost.
“It’s painful for me,” he says, his soft spoken voice completely at odds with the harsh growl that is his musical trademark. He was supposed to have seen a neurologist in late May to address why some of the meds for nerve pain have stopped being as effective, but decided the shows took priority.
As Taylor takes the stage, the hat comes off. The band launches into ‘Memories of the Grove,’ the opening track of their second album. Grooving drums and a slinky, bluesy lead guitar line gives way to a scream and Taylor starts shouting out lyrics about time being a drifter.
Balancing on a small metal footstool, the better to tower his slight frame over the crowd, he steadies himself with one hand on the low hanging ceiling, roaring into the mic held in the other. The preceding bands had begged the small crowd to come closer to the stage but for Maylene, no such urging is needed. The smoosh themselves against the stage, iPhones in hand, recording the moment for posterity. Taylor feeds into the energy, leans into his admirers, offers the mic for them to scream along. He’s more than surviving; Dallas Taylor with an audience is a man ALIVE.
He’s sweating profusely, but then again, we all are. The room is sweltering as if the band had figured out a new mathematical formula whereby bluegrass banjo riffs, transposed onto electric guitars and blasted through Marshalls and Mesa Boogies now equals heat. A sticker-pasted A/C unit and several fans mounted on the walls are fighting and failing to keep up.
Taylor’s earned this ability to work a crowd, having spent his adult life up until the accident consistently touring. He first came to prominence as the original frontman of Underoath, a band who rose to national attention as part of the early 2000s screamo wave, an extra-angsty spinoff of punk that seemed primed to become the biggest thing in rock since grunge on the backs of Thursday, Thrice and My Chemical Romance.
But Taylor left shortly before that band released some of their biggest records, opting to focus on the more rock and roll stylings of Maylene. Named for the matriarch of the famous Ma Barker family crime gang, the group released a quartet of full-length releases and were in the process of working on their fifth at the time of the crash. Along with a cult following, they had decent momentum: their second record had peaked at 156 on Billboard. The follow up fared much better, topping out at 76th - a very respectable showing for a metal band in 2009, a year dominated by Taylor Swift, The Black Eyed Peas and Lady Gaga. In a different world, Taylor would deserve to be performing to adoring festival crowds in the thousands, but in the words of another famous (fictional) criminal, deserve’s got nothing to do with it.
The thing you don’t hear about after a near death experience is the sheer range of emotions. Sure, there’s relief and there’s been plenty of that on this tour. Every night, fans are coming up after gigs and telling the singer about their own brushes with mortality, their own struggles, their own frailty. It’s been an amazing experience for Taylor, the ability to relate on more than just a musical level encouraging him to go on despite the pain.
Rewind a few years and the vibes were less positive. His first thoughts as he began to wake from his coma, finding himself strapped down to a hospital bed, was that he was in the clutches of a serial killer.
“It was bizarre. One minute you’re doing one thing, and the next you’re like ‘Whoa, I’m fighting for my life,’” he recalls.
There was erratic behavior, as you might expect from someone whose brain had just suffered an enormous trauma. At one point, early in the hospital stay, he managed to rise up, bend over and show everyone in the room his asshole. There were also flashes of lucidity: he would see some of those same people who got a peek at his rectum and, with one arm restrained and still unable to speak, would curl his other hand into half of a heart.
There are a million stories out there of people coming out of traumatic events with a newfound appreciation for life. Coming so close to losing everything, they’ll say that every day is a gift, an opportunity to chase your dreams, say the unsaid things to those who should hear them. Taylor is one of those people - he’ll tell you about being in group therapy sessions with other horrifically injured people and coming to a realization on how small and fragile life really is, how he had to choose not to take things for granted.
“Everything that you’ve done that mattered, bills and jobs, it doesn’t matter,” he says. “The little things become big and the big things become small.”
It’s a beautiful sentiment, the kind of revelation that, in a perfect world, would be utterly transformative. This is how we should be thinking, every day, all of us. Reality has a horrifying way of setting in. We deserve to focus on learning how to love ourselves and each other and focus on making the little things big. But deserves got nothing to do with it.
Throughout Maylene’s one hour set, Taylor takes a few chances to address the audience. He offers a bit of an apology for the bright white spittle that keeps flying from his mouth and sticking to the ceiling - it might look like mucus, he says, but it’s not. It’s just another one of the weird effects of suffering brain damage. Not that the crowd cares much. Several times, people hoist themselves onto the others, crowd surfing as best they can, grabbing onto a wooden support strut in the roof and hanging there, knocking loose confetti from some unknown past gig. The mysterious paper rains down as if a celebration from heaven itself. And indeed it is a celebration: today is Taylor’s birthday.
“Dallas, you’re a rock star!” shouts one fan. Taylor replies with a self-effacing “Naaaaahhhhh.”
“I should not be here tonight,” he tells them during another interlude. “I’m very grateful.”
“I felt like a burden to everybody because I wasn’t normal. I had this thing in my brain that I’m just a burden and I’m horrible and I’m useless. Everyone in my family was like ‘You’re not a burden.’ And I was self-projecting, cuz I thought ‘Why can’t I be this way?’ So I thought, well I have to be a burden.”
Limited by his injuries, much of Taylor’s care over the past eight years has been undertaken by his parents. There were also the medical bills to worry about, though a GoFundMe set up by his mother raised almost $50,000.
The thing about gratitude is, it’s exhausting. It takes an enormous amount of energy to be thankful. When there’s a trauma lurking, the negative thoughts are never far away. As much as any of us want to live in the epiphany, eventually the hardness catches up to us. Even on this day, Taylor was beating himself up a little - his phone call with his dad was a belated one, as his brain injury has affected his memory and he sometimes forgets to check in.
Shortly after Taylor’s crash, he received a visit from a friend. Corey Steger had played in Underoath alongside Taylor in the band’s early years and the two had remained friends.
“Dallas is one of my oldest friends and I know that he would never want you to blame God for what happened,” Steger told Alternative Press. “I hope all of you join me and asking God to be enough in this situation and continue to pray his wonderful son and his son's mom , as well as his parents and the nurse that is currently looking after him.”
On March 17, 2021 Steger died in a car crash.
“I had this amazing man I've looked up to my whole life,” recalls Taylor. “The most sweetest, caring person, he passes away and I'm alive. I've gone through divorce, I've had depression and he's gone. Why not me?”
“People would always tell me I survived for a reason and try not to think about that, because it can always get bad. Survivor’s guilt, it happens a lot and I still struggle with that a lot.”
While the screamo movement has over time been reduced to certain cultural signifiers - the ridiculous swoopy haircuts, the black nail polish, the skinniest of skinny jeans and the overwrought, sometimes laughable lyrics - the genre had more sonic and philosophical diversity than it was given credit for. Underoath itself was part of a subgenre of a subgenre - along with bands as diverse as Paramore and The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, they were publicly and vocally Christian (though the music was legitimate enough that these groups avoided the dreaded “Christian Rock” label).
The day before the accident, Taylor was in something of a crisis of faith. He told his mom that he believed God either didn’t exist or that God hated him. In the years since, he’s rekindled his relationship with the divine, one that he believes has changed him. God may not have caused his accident, but he witnessed it. It may have happened for a reason, or it may not. We experience the world within the limits of our senses, but there is something out there that’s bigger, that we can’t quite grasp. Maybe things happen for a reason. Maybe Taylor is exactly where he’s supposed to be, sweating it out on stages, connecting with one fan at a time, one growled line at a time.
“I realized all the things that have happened in my life are not because of God, but I blamed God for all of it,” he says. “I don't think death is as scary and as dark as I used to.”
Maylene rips through their finale, ‘Don’t Ever Cross a Trowel’ another barnburner from their sophomore album. “That's where the good Lord reigns. And he ain't goin' nowhere. Momma didn't raise no fool,” Taylor howls. “Steady, steady, and move.”
As the feedback comes to a halt, much of the audience obeys, shuffling to the bar room. Maylene’s instrumentalists follow, but not Taylor. Backlit by the stage lights, he stops to take selfies with the hardcore fans, dishing out hugs to all who ask.
It’s a small thing, a tiny gesture to show appreciation for those lucky few who have come to bear witness, to see the man risen, to see death defied. In a few weeks, he’ll be back home at his parents’ house, still fighting the pain. But for this one night in Brooklyn, and for an hour a night in city’s across the United States, those big things don’t matter. If you push hard enough, if you bash the ceiling and howl, the small things can become big and the big things can become small.
Dallas Taylor hugs a fan after Maylene’s set. Photo: Adam Kovac