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Canadian country music great Bill Cowsill died Saturday in Calgary. He was 58.
His death occurred the same day as the Cowsill family was having a memorial for his younger brother Barry, who died in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina last fall.
Billy Cowsill had battled a variety of ailments over the past two years. Osteoporosis made his bones brittle, and he had four back operations and also suffered a broken hip. Last week he had a fall and broke his shoulder.
He had been in hospital for long stretches of time, but was at his home when he died. No cause of death has been determined.
Cowsill was the lead singer in the Cowsills, a family band that broke out of Newport, R.I., in the late ‘60s to score two number one hits, The Rain, The Park and Other Things (1967) and Hair (1970). The group also had big hits with Indian Lake and We Can Fly in 1968.
Cowsill picked up the guitar when he was seven, and was in his teens when he formed the band with siblings Bob, Barry and Paul.
“It was a four-piece from hell, man, it was great,” Cowsill recalled last month.
“Beatles, Beach Boys, any kind of vocal thing we could tackle.”
The first Cowsills singles were with the four-piece rock and roll band, but MGM records suggested they add their mother Barbara and little sister Susan to the band and the hit-making Cowsills were born.
Years later Cowsill was still bitter about the way the band had been manipulated into their image as “America’s first family of music.”
“MGM Records created an image with my mother and my sister, who I love dearly as my mother and my sister, but no thank you, I don’t want you in my rock and roll band,” Cowsill said in a 1992 interview.
“How can I get laid in Las Vegas, mom, when you’re on stage with me? The waitress is winking. I’m going ‘gotta go to bed. Twelve o’clock curfew you know?’ Anyway . . . it had its drawbacks.”
Cowsill quit the band after a huge fight with his manager father Bud, a straight-laced former navy man who didn’t like the musicians Billy was hanging around in Los Angeles.
“It was after the big show at the Flamingo ([in Las Vegas]. My wife and my mother and my dad and I are sitting in the lounge. ‘America’s First Family of Music’ is on the marquee. We’re sittin’ thee and my dad’s corked on Cutty Sark, I’m corked on vodka gimlets and he starts slaggin’ my friends.
“He goes ‘and your pot-smoking friend Waddy!’ That was it. I came up out of the chair and gave him the bird [the finger]. It was the first time I ever did it. He comes up and lunges toward me, we’re both pie-eyed, and I grab his wrists and realize that I can hold him.”
The Cowsills’ days as hitmakers were over, though a TV series modelled on Billy and his kin – The Partridge Family – became a huge success.
Cowsill was a good friend of Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys, and was asked to join the Beach Boys touring band. But he turned it down and spent the bulk of the ‘70s drifting, “getting’ my ass kicked left and right, spittin’ in the devil’s eye and watching it sizzle.”
He studied production in L.A. with Harry Nillson and played with J.J. Cale in Oklahoma, but really found his musical home when he started playing country in Lubbock, Tex., with roots rock legend Joe Ely.
Then Cowsill moved to the Northwest Territories. Asked ‘why?’ he replied ‘Why not? Hadn’t been there. At night I was playing in bars, in the day I was working for United Van Line, taking furniture across the Great Slave Lake ice bridge from Hay River to Yellowknife.”
After a couple of years up north, Cowsill bought a bar in Austin, Tex., and moved back down south. “I drank it dry. I drank a quart a day at least.”
A friend suggested he come to Vancouver in 1979. He joined country-rockers Blue Northern, and recorded his signature tune Vagabond on their album.
After they broke up, he spent years doing the bar scene in Vancouver and Calgary, backed by some of Vancouver’s top musicians, including guitarists Colin James, Lindsay Mitchell and Danny Cassavant, Bassist Elmar Spanier and drummers Jay Johnson and Christ Nordquist.
A caustic fellow, Cowsill used to do a Dead Guys set, made up of songs from dead rock and country singers. But he could get away with it, because Billy Cowsill could sing like a bird.
He did uncanny renditions of Roy Orbison and Beatles tunes, and turned long-forgotten pop songs like Rick Nelson’s Lonesome Town or Brenda Lee’s I’m Sorry into spellbinding performances.
In the early 1990s he joined forces with guitarist Jeff Hatcher in the Blue Shadows, which released two excellent albums, On The Floor of Heaven and Lucky To Me, and attracted a sizeable national audience.
The band broke up in 1995 and Cowsill moved to Calgary, which had a better live music scene. He formed another excellent band, the Co-Dependents, which released two live albums.
But his heal problems caught up to him and he spent most of the last two years of his life in a hospital.
He is survived by two sons, Del and Travis.
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