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Billy The Mountain: A Confession...Zappa Made Me Do It!
BILLY THE MOUNTAIN a band who say they play music to feed their souls and feed the world tell us they play urban rhythm and rock informed by the blues and cool, funky jazz. The band plays for expenses and any profit goes to kids who need food, water or medicine, according to band leader Alex Pithie ? or should that be Billy The Mountain?
?BILLY THE MOUNTAIN were born in the blues and then took a breath of Steely Dan, Little Feat, Dylan and Pink Floyd and came out the other end smiling. You'll hear that journey in their music which is delivered by some very fine musicians too. They say it?s great Sunday morning music!? Pithie says.
?They asked. It was inevitable. 'Who the fuck is Billy The Mountain' they asked? Not 'What the fuck is Billy the Mountain?' But who? They heard the cool songs sung by the same guy and read the blurb and other pointers to the fact that this band was about one person or character - Billy The Mountain. It?s natural to be intrigued by a silly name that might even be vaguely familiar, right?
They could not know that he was a direct descendant of an Eritrean goat herder who died in prison in 1698 in Travnik, Bosnia Herzenegovia jailed for reporting a UFO; or the grandson of a South African gold miner who won the Victoria Cross in World War II for saving the life of five blind French nuns about to be raped by the SS. Or that he was quietly and slowly dying inside of despair after his favourite dog died at the hands of an incompetent vet.
They knew however he stole his name from the epic Zappa song, not knowing perhaps that he was determined that Frank be remembered for something other than his untimely death and badly-named children.
But let him tell you himself.
"Zappa was a genius - driven and born with a passion to create and instruct. He chose music as his medium because it was cool and at the time he was jamming the blues, the music was revolutionary and brand new. Revolutionary in this context means it pissed off the adults. From his first chords, Frank could produce tunes almost willy-nilly and as soon as one was writ, another popped in his hyper-active brain to be jammed and nailed, scripted, arranged and finally recorded.
?You have to laugh: Ruben and the Jets! What a card. Hot Rats! Chunga's Revenge! You have to love him. And the music. Well, what can I say? I'm a fan. The guy was a god...a triumphant general leading the lost hippy kids desperate to put flesh on the bones of their revolution, their new-found freedoms - sexual and otherwise. And guess what? That's where this Billy The Mountain was born too - baptised by the fire of Zappa's irreverant and joyful music.
"There was blues, rock, rock and roll, jazz, rhythm and blues, even classical in there. A Zappa album was like a Vonnegut book. You bought both to be surprised, delighted, tested, educated, shocked and inspired!
?Starved as I was, I happily swallowed the work of both?and more. My neck of the woods - Scotland - was a little short on drama or vision or innovation, even though the Rowett Institute which pioneered cloning - was just a mile from my house.
"But I got my Vox Strat and my HH amplifier just as Zappa was getting out his third album and signing Alice Cooper to his own label. Frank was a major employer of new musicians in L.A. and forever we will be thankful for him hiring one of blues-rock's all-time-greats - fellow Californian Lowell George - who surprisingly perhaps was a Beverly Hills kid before he moved to the Valley and graduated to serious chemical abuse...after he left Frank's Mothers of Invention. He played only briefly with Frank but thankfully left to compile the most awesome rock-jazz-blues catalogue of all time with his own band - Little Feat.
?So if I throw in Steely Dan, E.C., SRV, Yes, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Tom Waits, Rory Gallagher, Nils Lofgren, Ry Cooder, Taj Mahal, Jeff Beck, Led Zeppelin and all the other awesome seventies progressive rockers and blues stars, you'll know precisely where this Billy The Mountain is coming from. Add some Kerouac, Vonnegut, Kafka, Mailer, Tom Wolfe and Kurzweil and you got the whole damned pop DNA!?
Billy The Mountain was born and established as a musician a long time before he used the name, and although working between Bangkok and London, he is a native of what he calls ?The Frozen North?.
?All those years ago on the frosty and otherwise barren rock they call the United Kingdom, when I first picked up a guitar and eventually started making vaguely bluesy noises like Peter Green, Keef and Eric and Jimi, I was stoked enough to go out and bankrupt myself buying a ?69 Fender Stratocaster ? a white one just like Jimi?s, but right-handed, to relace my powder blue Vox strat.
Soon enough I was in demand with my velvet loon pants, long brown hair, cool blues licks, rock star attitude borrowed from Top Of The Pops, and a yellow wah wah pedal which, with my first generation Fuzz Face, made me sound like Jeff Beck on speed.
Call it naivety but it never occurred to me that I was doing anything that might make me a fortune or a star one day. I was getting more than enough buzz off the HH amp, my cool Fender axe, fierce effects pedals and small town adulation to think seriously about actually making a living doing this. I spent most of my time worrying how I was going to pay for all that ?hip? gear.
I eventually spent years as a ?rock star? on the road in the UK, and after my last original band - ?RUDE? - finally broke up, after expenses, I got a Marshall 4x12 speaker cabinet, and a Shure 57 microphone in compensaton for my troubles as super-cool lead guitarist ? for more than 300 gigs!.
The cash from the 300 or so gigs we did had gone to pay for weed, roadies, strings, petrol, replacement Ford transit vans, Ford transmissions, food, lodgings and bail.
In them days, anyone in Scotland with an inkling to go the whole hog and try the superstar rat race had to go south to ?The Smoke? or London, where the showcase gigs, the record labels and the music press lived. But parochial hicks from the sticks like us were way too modest and humble to embarass ourselves, and only a few ever made it down there, their ambition and talent overtaking their modesty.
And a few even made it. Well Annie Lennox did OK.
But when you?re a gigging musician - even though you know there?s a bigger picture, more money, fame and fortune, record deals, the whole nine yards - when you are in love with music and the gig, the lifestyle, it?s really secondary that success may or may not await you.
Realism and the next paying gig prevail, and a lifetime just playing well, practicing, surviving and hoping for the big break, any break, are part and parcel of being where you love to be best - on the road playing.
Sure, you write songs. You demo them. You even do the label tour hawking your songs. But if that fails, you know that you?ve got enough gigs ahead to pay for that sexy guitar you?re eyeing up! Or the new baby! (Or new hairstyle, if you?re a drummer!)
Good musos do it all day-to-day, day after day and maybe make a living. The better ones plot for the big time minute-by-minute, and generally go for it, ending up at least on some Caribbean cruise ship ?reading? standards night after night for three months at a time. It?s a kinda big time.
Or land a gig as a sideman with a star (Aberdeen?s Dave Flett and Manfred Mann?s Earth Band/Thin Lizzy) or write that hit song that puts them on the map, however briefly (Aberdonian?s The Shamman).
But if you ever get on stage and the band really nails it and you play that cover or that groove right on the money, there ain?t no better feeling!
Fact is, you leave your nerves behind you the minute you cross that line on to the stage and into the world of show business where nothing is more important than playing to the best of your ability to entertain the crowds.
After a pint or three of course.
You can impress them too with your skills or chops, but first and foremost ? entertain them. You know you are working well when they tap their feet, dance, smile, sing along, cheer and applaud ? ano f the above. The applause ? what my Aussie friend Michael Joseph Kenny calls ?spray? - is in my opinion, the most precious commodity in showbusiness after talent (or a drummer who lives in the pocket).
And if the band is not smiling as they play, the spray when they stop will always do the trick ? the exceptions being if the drummer is having a bad hair day or if the singer is pissed that he spilled beer on his new velvet trousers!?
But we?ve moved on, my guitar and me!
Billy The Mountain is a band for our time, our century. First of all we?re based away from the mainstream world, headquartered in Bangkok which is a divine urban potpourri of style and poverty and decadence and squalor and modernism, and yet home to a timeless Asian culture steeped in tradition and bathed in music and of course surrounded by a perfect rural backdrop.
So we are outside the mainstream but right at the heart of Thailand and by definition the world so-to-speak, enjoying the influence of the dynamics of new life itself - good, bad, evil and otherwise.
It?s a creative crucible for us and the perfect starting point for world domination! The band?s key musicians write the material, record the songs and get the band ready to tour the world when we have three hours of brand new material. But the kicker is we won?t have a huge economically crippling tour machine. The key musicians fly to any part of the world we are touring, and having sent the music ahead by CD or over the Net, we have our nominated musicians rehearsed and waiting to join the band for that stage of the tour.
How can bands sing about pollution and global warming and set an example when they are touring with ten trucks and 200 staff? That?s bullshit and because we play for expenses and give any profit to our children?s fund, we can happily trim the excesses.
website:
http://Http://www.billythemountain.com