John would eventually move to Boston and play in rock bands, including, briefly in 1986, the Zinnias, with Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt. Bill would sometimes visit from New Hampshire. In 1987, John had the idea of putting together a band fronted by Bill to play an open-mic night. The fledgling band went on without any song list. “It was like we were going to put a backdrop up and let Bill do his thing,” recalls John.
It was a few years later that BILL coalesced into something more serious. In 1991, the band released its first album, the free-form Beatles Chinese. Before long, BILL began to cut into John’s time — mostly because, in order for the group to get together, John would have to spend a few days ferrying his brother to and from Laconia. (Sure enough, that’s how Bill got to our interview. He still resides in New Hampshire, living in a shared home and working a custodial job through Lakes Region Community Services.)
It also stressed out his family. “It was a big production whenever we’d do something,” says John. Eventually, though, the Gages warmed to the idea of the band, John explains. “My mom in the beginning . . . didn’t see artistic merit or therapeutic [merit] in it, now they do see it. They see how happy it makes him and how happy it makes other people.”
In search of big foot
Ironically, Bill, who essentially cannot read or write, is also the group’s songwriter. In fact, the band was named after the one word he can write legibly, “making it simple for him to create the logo (and sign autographs),” notes John on the band’s MySpace page. Bill’s is an internal sort of songwriting — one that, John continues, “is always in flux.”
As a result, the rest of the band has adopted a creative approach to working with Bill. For Bat Man (2005), John and company prepared their instrumental lines beforehand and had Bill sing over them, impromptu, in the studio. The back-up tracks ran the gamut of genres from metal (“Steve Pepper”) to punk (“Bad Clothes”) to acoustic lament (“All My Heart and All My Life”) — the idea being that variety would inspire and entertain Bill.
When it came Bill’s turn to record, much to everyone’s surprise, he nailed most of his vocals on the first take. “We thought we were going to do multiple tracks and maybe edit the best parts together, but a bunch of them were, like, ‘Wow, how are we gonna top this?’ ” says John.
The “Steve Pepper” take was an exception. “The thing we discovered is don’t put headphones on him,” says Follower. “We tried early on with him wearing headphones as any other vocalist would do. And it just apparently wasn’t visceral enough.” So Bill delivered his vocal sans phones while facing the speaker.
Bill himself, sandwiched between Moore and Ansin on the couch, is affable, small, and compact in a gray hoodie. With another band, I might ask the songwriter what inspired his lyrics. Bill, though, isn’t about to launch into a pretentious anecdote about how he was influenced by some Milton poem. Bill’s vision is much more direct — and refreshing.
