JOHN Hey Bill, you know that song “Big Foot”?
BILL Umm, “Big Foot” [growling].
JOHN Why did you name that song “Big Foot”?
BILL ’Cause “Big Foot.”
MOORE It just reminded you of Big Foot, the music reminded you of Big Foot?
BILL [considering this] I sing, the bass guitar . . .
JOHN Yeah, the bass goes boom, boom, boom.
Sometimes it’s as simple as that. A bass line that inspires him. Other times, John says his brother, like the rest of us, takes ideas from the radio, overheard conversations, and records. Bill is a fan of David Bowie, Yoko Ono, and especially the Beatles, whom he references on “All My Heart and All My Life” (“And my heart is thumping to watch the Beatles”).
To the extent that he can control the factors contributing to Bill’s creative process, John does his best to make sure that the songs are Bill’s and Bill’s alone. He and his bandmates never interfere with Bill when he’s recording, and they don’t ask him to sing lyrics he hasn’t thought of on his own. Neither do they edit him too much — even when he goes on long after a song has ended (like at the end of “Big Foot” where Bill begins thanking “Stephin,” “the Lord,” “Itchy,” “Big Foot” himself, and “Nikki”).
BILL are a band!
Glancing at Bill, sitting with his hands on his knees, his eyes — as they’ve been for much of the interview — focused downward, it’s hard to imagine him laying down vocals over a blustery metal cut. He hasn’t said very much, and then only at his brother’s prompting. It occurs to me that he may not understand the purpose of my visit.
“I was trying to tell him we were going to be talking to somebody from a newspaper,” says John, “and he was, like, ‘Ohhhh okayyy.’ Then I said, ‘Maybe after we can come up with some new music we can do with the band’ . . . and he kept on talking about that.”
Such innocent incomprehension is at the heart of criticisms that have been slung at BILL. There are folks — “both young and old,” says John — who send nasty letters, even the occasional death threat to BILL’s MySpace account. Their complaint springs from the notion that John and his cohorts are exploiting Bill — that the band is some kind of freak show.
A visceral example of this revulsion shows up in the Gage brothers’ “Big Foot” video. As Bill is belting out his lyrics on a residential street, a neighbor complains about the noise, then chides John, “You’re embarrassing him.” Still filming, John asks his younger brother point blank if he’s embarrassed. Bill answers, “No.”
John understands the criticism and the fact that BILL can make audiences uncomfortable. “It’s a little like when you see someone who has a porcelain scar covering half of his face. You’re like, ‘Whoa!’ . . . The human brain says, ‘Bing, bing, bing, this isn’t normal,’ ” he says. But far from humiliating or harming his brother, he counters, new experiences and activities like the band are good for Bill.
On the new-experiences front, Bill has taken guitar lessons, and he and John are now working on a film that’s a take-off on Elvis Presley’s classic/cornball 1960s musicals. Bill, in what to me was a bloody brilliant casting decision, plays the pop icon himself.
