A tour guide who’s been at it for 40 years and a long-time friend of George Strait’s says the tour guide will be remembered as a “true genius” who was “one of the greatest” of all time.
“He was the guy who came up with the tour plan, and he was always the one who came with a lot of ideas,” John Taylor told the Sydney Morning Herald in a new interview with The Huffington Post.
“George would come in, say ‘this is where you want to go, this is where we want to put you,’ and he’d say ‘I want you to come here.'”
John Taylor (center) and George Straits in 1967.
Source: Getty Images/Alamy”He would be like ‘OK, what are we going to do here?'”
Taylor said.
“He would then come back to me and say ‘how about we just go to this place?’ and I’d say, ‘OK.'”
Taylor says he was the one to put the idea together.
“I had the idea that he could come with a group of 10 people and that they’d be there in their own time,” he said.
“And then he would go out with these people and he would talk about how they were going to get on stage and play their own songs, which was very innovative, and that was a lot different from anything I’d done before.”
George Strait was the man who proposed the idea to John Taylor.
Source : Getty ImagesThe idea of “group shows” became part of the tour plans, and the band’s manager, Bob Miller, was on hand to put on the show.
“They’re not all the same,” Taylor told HuffPost.
“We had to pick our own, and we had to come up with a plan.
We came up on a Sunday and did all the rehearsals, and I remember I was on the phone to Bob and he said ‘oh, we’re getting back in the studio now’.
So I went in and started working.
We were in a room and it was John Taylor and he did all of the music, and then he came back in a couple of days later and said ‘what’s going on?’
And I said ‘there’s no band, there’s no audience, we’ve got a group show.'”
Then I went to Bob in the middle of the night and said, ‘this isn’t going to work,’ and then I went back to the studio and started doing the music.
“Taylor’s ideas are still used today, and Taylor has gone on to create his own version of the idea, as well as a number of other tours.”
The only way you could do it is if you had a group that had to sing,” Taylor said of the concept.”
But that’s something that I can’t imagine, because I have never done it.
“If you do a solo tour, it’s always going to be the same group.”
The idea is still used for concerts, but Taylor says he doesn’t see himself doing that any time soon.
“It’s probably going to go back in my head, but I think we’re in a different era of music now,” he told HuffPost of the new tour.
“There’s a lot more people around the world.
I don’t think we’d have to do the same thing again.”
Taylor, who was born in Los Angeles in 1954, said the band were always planning ahead, and were always thinking outside the box.
“We never ever thought we were going in a certain direction,” he added.
“Sometimes I’ll go, ‘well we’re going to have this, but we’ll just have to be careful about how we get there,'” he said, referring to the Beatles and The Grateful Dead.
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I’m always very careful, and you don’t get to do it every time.”
Follow @HuffPostLive on Twitter and Instagram for more stories about music and art, and subscribe to HuffPost Live to receive the latest news and reviews.
