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For about four months, Kevan Campbell, the owner of Billy Goode's, in Newport, kept thinking Barry Cowsill was going to walk back through the door of the Marlborough Street bar.
The odds weren't too good, of course. Cowsill, 51, had been in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit on Aug. 29, and hadn't been definitely heard from since a Sept. 1 phone message to his sister, Susan, his bandmate in the hit '60s group The Cowsills.
Cowsill's body was found under a wharf in New Orleans on Dec. 28 and was identified by dental records on Tuesday.
The bar was Cowsill's second home over the past three years, Campbell says. Cowsill would play there regularly as a solo act on Wednesday nights, and would sit in with bands who were playing on other nights. "He would show up and sit in and sing a song -- whether he was asked to or not," Campbell remembers.
But he's laughing as he says it. "He was phenomenally outgoing. You'd want to throw him out sometimes. He'd be the best musician we had in here sometimes. And at times, if he was drinking or something, or in one of his crazy moods, you'd just tune him out. But he was just the life of the place, and he was a great musician.
"I was just convinced that he was going to show back up."
THE MEMORIAL PAGE to Barry Cowsill on the Cowsill family Web site has hundreds of entries from people all over the country who remember Barry Cowsill and the Newport family singing group as one of their childhood favorites, with hit songs such as "The Rain, The Park and Other Things," the swoony, swirling, harp-driven hit that got them their national start; "Hair," the anthem from the revolutionary Broadway show; the pop-rocker "Indian Lake" and more. Everyone remembers that the group, which included mother Barbara, was the inspiration for the TV show The Partridge Family. More than a few women on the page recall teenage crushes on Barry Cowsill. And dozens of people write in with variations on the sentiment expressed by Vickie Garland, of North Carolina: "Hopefully Barry has now found the peace that seemed to elude him in his last years."
It's no secret that Barry Cowsill battled drug, alcohol and other problems in his life, but his friends and family remember him as a gentle soul who was always forgiven, always taken back in.
Frank Dwyer, of Newport, at whose studio Cowsill was recording a new album, remembers that Cowsill bounced around from California to New Orleans to Newport, and back to New Orleans a few months before he died.
For a living, Dwyer remembers, "he painted [houses] sometimes, bummed money off us. . . . I'd feed him over at my house. We all took our turns helping him out. We wouldn't have, if he hadn't had this kind of talent and he wasn't such a good guy."
COWSILL'S body has been brought to a funeral home in New Orleans for cremation, says Richard Cowsill, Barry's brother. When the family gets the ashes, in accordance with Barry Cowsill's wishes, two members of the family will climb the copper beech trees at Halidon Hall, the Newport mansion formerly owned by the family, and scatter the ashes among the branches.
Sometime after that, a bench with Cowsill's name will be dedicated in King's Park, where The Cowsills played their first gig, Richard Cowsill says.
Halidon Hall is currently owned by former U.S. Rep. Fernand J. St Germain. St Germain filed a complaint against Cowsill in February of last year over some "rambling [phone] messages" left at St Germain's house in the wake of Cowsill's breakup with Lisette St Germain, the former congressman's daughter. The case was filed, meaning it would be deleted from Cowsill's record if he kept out of trouble for a year.
But Richard Cowsill, who lives in New Mexico, says that Lisette St Germain remains a family friend, and that the former congressman bears no grudges.
"He said, if any reporter asks, to tell them it's between him and Barry. . . .
"You couldn't stay mad at Barry. Barry was the most tender, fragile, delicate flower of our family."
THE COWSILLS released the comeback album Global in 1998, but Barry Cowsill wasn't on the record. He released his own album, As Is, the same year. It's full of the tough, swaggering, Stones-style rock that friends said was the musical milieu where he felt most at home.
Cowsill was almost finished with a new album at the time of his disappearance. He was recording at Stagecraft Audio, in Newport. Stagecraft owner Frank Dwyer was helping to produce the record, and he remembers that whatever else was going on in Cowsill's life, in the studio he was "sharp as a nail. He knew exactly what he wanted. . . . He could hear little things that I couldn't hear. The arrangements and all the little guitar licks within the rhythms."
Cowsill was playing all the instruments on the album except drums. Drummer Mike Warner was the other musician on the project, and Cowsill lived with him for a while in 2002, before the album got under way.
Warner is a freelance drummer who has toured the United States and Europe, and he was impressed by Cowsill's musical skills and his personal warmth.
"I never, ever heard him badmouth another musician. . . . It's something that, hopefully, I can take from Barry.
"The music business is full of backstabbers, and it's full of jealousy and envy, and 'Why don't I have that gig? I'm better than that guy.' I never heard Barry utter a word even close to that sentiment."
Dwyer says the album is almost finished. He'll be getting a few local musicians to come in and record a few last touches. After that, he says, he doesn't want to be involved with the marketing of the album.
"To me, it's a hot potato. I'm just going to finish it up and pass it off to his kids and say, 'Here, do whatever you want with it.' . . . We're not going to rush it. When the whole thing blows over, just hand it to the kids, so they can sell it and have something from their father."
COWSILL WAS going to release the album not under his name, but under the band name U.S. 1. According to his friends and family, Cowsill had an ambivalent relationship to his early fame.
Richard Cowsill remembers that in Barry Cowsill's eyes the fame of the family band turned into a stigma that left him washed up as a teenager.
At the same time, The Cowsills had more impact than they realized. In 1971, Richard Cowsill, who was not a member of the group, was serving in Vietnam and found out that thanks to some of the lyrics to the song "Hair," The Cowsills had been banned from the radio in Vietnam. Not Led Zeppelin. Not Jimi Hendrix. The Cowsills.
"I tried to make them feel better -- I said, 'Hey guys, you think of yourself as bubblegum, but the fact of the matter is that you're banned in Vietnam. Count that as a good thing!' But they didn't get it."
According to Warner and Dwyer, Cowsill had at least come to terms with his past.
There's nothing so unhip as that which was recently hip, and as such Warner points out that in the '70s and '80s, "people wouldn't want to admit that they were into that stuff." Since then, history's been kinder. "He used to kid about the Cowsill thing, but I think he was proud of it. And he should have been."
"He had the magnetic charisma," Dwyer remembers. "Some people like that come into our lives and go out of our lives, real quick."
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