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Our Billy May 12, 2006
Music was my first love (I wrote in my Dr. E. P. Scarlett yearbook that my ambition was to become editor of Rolling Stone). Couple that with a soft spot for redemption songs and there was no way we were going to miss the chance to give Billy Cowsill a final standing ovation. It’s a gift to have people open up their hearts to you, and that was never truer than when Billy’s friends Neil MacGonigill and Tim Leacock, along with CKUA’s Allison Brock, Tom Coxworth and Peter North, shared the highs and lows of loving one of the greatest voices in the history of popular music. He was funny, he was maddening, he was tragic, he was . . . singular.
We wanted the cover to be iconic (taking it as seriously as if Mickey Mantle or Pierre Trudeau had died and it was our job to pay proper tribute) and so we used Billy’s favorite photo of himself, taken by Alexander W. Harris during the seminal 1985 show at the Palliser Hotel that became Live at the Crystal Ballroom. We were also able to get permission from the Cowsill family to reprint a letter from Billy’s son Travis that is as sad and as uplifting as his father’s voice.
Even though I never heard Billy live, I became obsessed with him after the story was published. I played record after record, lurked on fan sites, and listened over and over to a tribute I found online by Winnipeg’s Twang Trust. Just go to twanttrust.ca/billy3.mp3, skip to the last third of the podcast and listen to “I’ll Think On It.” When Billy talks about singing the song, written by Jeffrey Hatcher, he says it all: “It’s dark, it’s shadowy, it’s lonesome. Then there’s the lyric – Just when I feel something matters, then I know I’m not far enough gone – that’s my life,” he snorts, a hard laugh of despair and hope.
And once again, I see a movie, this one directed by Jonathan Demme, filmed in Calgary and starring . . . ah, there’s the rub. There was only one Billy.
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