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Billy Cowsill wasn’t go great at life but lord, could he sing.
Shortly after his band, the Blue Shadows split in 1995, he did a show at the Railway Club, backed by some young rockabilly bucks.
I talked to him before he took the stage and found him totally lost in the ozone, just completely messed up on whatever he’d taken. He could barely walk, let alone talk, but somehow he managed to make it to the stage.
Cowsill was so toasted he forgot to take the cigarette out of his mouth when it came time to sing. So he slid it to the corner of his mouth, and started to sing out of the other corner, barely opening his lips.
Any other human would have produced a tiny unintelligible mumble but Cowsill sounded incredible, crooning Marty Robbins’ Devil Woman out of the corner of his mouth while the cigarette stayed in place at the other end.
It was utterly amazing and utterly bizarre: a true Billy Cowsill moment.
Cowsill died Saturday in Calgary after battling a variety of ailments for several years. He was a classic case of a guy who burned the candle at both ends, maybe even in the middle.
He did a lot of drugs; he did a lot of booze; he did a lot of prescription drugs for his bad back and bad bones. He eventually cleaned up, but his years of hard living caught him.
He’ll mainly be remembered as the lead singer of the Cowsills, the 1960s pop group that did Hair and The Rain, The Park and Other Things.
However, in Vancouver, where he lived from 1979 to the mid 1990s, he’ll be remembered for his country-rock years with the Blue Shadows, Blue Northern and a variety of solo bands that plied their trade at bars like the Railway, Darby Dawes, the Fairview and the Rust Gull.
The first time I saw him was at the old Press Club on Granville. I walked in the door and Cowsill was singing Silver Threads and Golden Needles, and my jaw hit the floor.
It was like walking into a tiny bar and discovering Dave Edmunds or a third Everly Brother was performing. Here was a fallen angel, one of the truly great voices of pop, rock and country plying his trade at some dump that had all the charm of an ashtray.
Cowsill had the kind of voice that can only be described as God-given. He had an amazing tone, amazing pitch, and amazing ability to sustain. He had an uncanny knack for taking songs you knew inside out and making them completely his. He may have been the only singer in history who could sing a Roy Orbison song better that Roy; Cowsill’s version of Orbison’s Evergreen was that spellbinding.
That said, Cowsill was truly a man out of time, a singer who inhibited his own universe. He was fixated on a certain type of music from the 50s and 60s, pop nuggets such as Rick Nelson’s Lonesome Town and Arthur Alexander’s Anna (Go To Him), or country gems such as Charlie Pride’s Is Anybody Goin’ To San Antone and Merle Haggard’s Branded Man.
His original music reflected this. He made some fabulous demo taped in which he stacked his vocal harmonies on top of each other to achieve a Spectoresque majesty. They’ve never been released, but his demos of songs like, I Do Believe, Embers and Vagabond are pure magic. I probably listened to Cowsill’s demos more than any other Canadian recordings in the decade I was the music writer for The Vancouver Sun.
In the early 1990s my friend Jeff Hatcher moved to town and I took him to see k.d. lang’s manager Larry Wangas, thinking that Jeff would be a great co-songwriter or guitarist for k.d. Instead, Wanagas put Jeff together with Billy in the Blue Shadows, one of Canada’s best country-rock bands.
Jeff had an auspicious debut with Billy at the Fairview, which can be a rough place. Cowsill had some gals removed from the dance floor because they kept knocking his microphone stand into his teeth while he was singing.
After the set, a male friend of the ladies approached and got tough with Cowsill, who was packing his instrument. Billy was a skinny guy, but he had a lot of fire. He told the guy he’d count to five, and if he didn’t back off, he’d smash him over the head with his guitar.
The guy said “Do you want to dance?” Cowsill said, “One, two, five,” swung his guitar like the ‘60s cartoon character El Kabong and knocked the guy out.
Amazingly, a friend of the guy Cowsill had clobbered came back the next night to challenge Billy again. So Cowsill swung El Kabong again, and broke the guy’s nose.
The Blue Shadows were a fabulous live band and made two excellent albums. Cowsill and Hatcher’s harmonies were heaven-sent, whether it was doing a letter-perfect John and Paul on Anytime At All or trilling their way through originals like When Will This Heartache End or The Floor of Heaven.
Only part of their live prowess was captured on record. The CBC recorded their lovely blueside-of-lonesome version of Joe Ely’s West Texas Border, and there is also a CBC recording the fiery Johnny’s guitar, a Cowsill original that was about John Lennon but sounded like the Bobby Fuller Four.
Sadly, the band split in 1995 before these songs made it to record, aside from an unreleased live CD that was going to be given to radio stations before the group disbanded.
Cowsill moved to Calgary, where he had a hardcore following and could hopefully steer clear of bad influences in Vancouver. However, his health deteriorated. Osteoporosis made his bones brittle, and he had four back operations and also suffered a broken hip. Then he had a fall and broke his shoulder.
Billy found himself unable to play and was broke. A couple weeks ago, Cowsill’s former drummer Jay Johnson contacted me about a benefit show he hoped to do at the Railway. I put together a CD of all the great unreleased Cowsill demos and live stuff I had accumulated, with the idea of selling them as a limited edition with proceeds going to Billy.
Billy Cowsill died before the benefit took place. It wasn’t that much of a surprise: we all knew how sick he was, and how depressed after the death of his brother Barry in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.
His death leaves a very big void in the lives of anyone who ever had the great privilege of hearing Billy Cowsill sing.
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