Born in Detroit, Michigan and raised by divorced parents mostly in the wealthy suburb of Grosse Pointe,[2] he appeared in Ron Rice's beat classic The Flower Thief (1960), in which he "traipses with elfin glee through a lost San Francisco of smoke-stuffed North Beach cafés ..."[3] Film critic P. Adams Sitney called The Flower Thief "the purest expression of the Beat sensibility in cinema."
One film of Mead extemporizing on the virtues of constant television watching aired during the first season of Saturday Night Live.
Characters included Superman and Mickey Mouse from Warhol's Myth series and references to Mead's performances in Lonesome Cowboys and Nude Restaurant.
[6] He was the subject of William A. Kirkley's documentary Excavating Taylor Mead, which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2005.
[8] Mead was displaced from Ludlow Street in April 2013, receiving a settlement to move out, after many years of a dispute with his landlord.