Warren Zanes on Billy Conway
Warren Zanes
I first met Billy Conway on the Boston rock and roll scene. Just then, he was the drummer for Treat Her Right. Boston was a place of wonder, strong smells, and music all around you. At the risk of dropping into a nostalgia that leaves too many out, I have to describe it as an exceptional time and place. I was a member of The Del Fuegos, and I remember a moment, just prior to my joining them, when that band did a week-long tour . . . and every show was in Boston or Cambridge. There were a lot of clubs. And fanzines. And local radio shows. And people putting up fliers for their gigs as they headed off to restaurant jobs. The surprise came when you met someone who wasn’t in a band. Those who weren’t probably managed one, or carried gear for one, or mixed sound for one (despite no background for it), or drove their cousin to his gigs after he lost his license.
Part of what made that Boston so rich was that it was a truly local culture. You could be a “big” Boston band and be unknown in New York. They could be playing your song on WBCN, Boston’s FM radio powerhouse, and nowhere else among the nation’s major stations. You could build something in Boston and, really, live on it, a full and satisfying life. It was a blessing and curse. Too many great bands didn’t get beyond the town limits. But many among those who could be described thus had a thriving community of fellow music-makers that created a sense of, well, home.
What changed? Computers, smartphones, the internet (“Whatever that is,” Tom Petty once said). We all know the story. And, again, I don’t want to lapse into sentimentality, but taken together those technologies almost broke the spine of local culture, whether in Boston or elsewhere. Almost. Which brings me to the Billy Conway part.
What I realized from Billy, and the few I’ve met who were and are like him—and they will always be rare—is that the local is not simply a thing out there, to be pointed at, just as I have done above. It is, just as much, a mindset. For those who think locally, wherever they are has a quality like the Boston of my youth. To be local means to be present, to see what can be built right where you are. Who’s around? What can be created with what we have right here? Billy thought this way in Boston, in Hopkinton, New Hampshire, in Montana. And because of this, things rose up around him.
“That’s the stuff people remember,” Billy said, laughing. “Go in there with good manners and they won’t know your name the next week.”
This may not sound like much, so let me present its near-opposite, which, in this case, is someone like me, when I was a young person playing music. For whatever reason—my therapist has identified many—I wanted more, always more. I had a head full of dreams, and I wanted to realize them. If a project was working well locally, how could it be made to work nationally? Internationally? The whole idea was to get bigger. But when you succeed at that, too often there’s not much of a home to come back to. If you’re always looking to go somewhere else, pretty soon they won’t recognize you in the old neighborhood, even if you never leave.
This is not a diatribe against career success. This is a call, in Billy Conway’s honor, to think about how to bring a local mindset into whatever it is we’re doing, no matter the scale. It’s a call to think about where you are, even if you’re playing an arena tonight. Billy was the kind of guy who looked around him, and just by instinct considered what he could make of that, just that. He wasn’t up in his head wondering what Elton John was doing and if Elton had better catering. Billy Conway wasn’t somewhere else. This, I believe, is the absolute best way to build a career in music. And to be a person in the world. The other option? To want more, another place, a bigger scene . . . and to always be disappointed, because there’s always more somewhere else. Now let me step away from my pulpit (which was made with local materials) and return to the story.
A strange thing happened some years after I quit The Del Fuegos, a band that left Boston believing there might be gold in the hills over yonder. Billy and his great love, Laurie Sargent, moved down the street from my mother and stepfather. I’d come home to visit, and—what the hell?!—there were Billy and Laurie at dinner, friends with my parents. Talk about working with local materials! But, for me, this was a positive development in that thin, outer branch of society. Billy and Laurie had a way of being in rural New Hampshire that was more true to the place than anything my family had come up with. Billy was still playing in Morphine at the time, driving back and forth to Boston, on the road at times, and in the barn at others. Same guy, different locations.
I’d left the clubs behind at that point. I don’t even think I had a working amplifier. I was in graduate school, coming up with elaborate scams to get books by Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, Julia Kristeva, and others by exchanging volumes I’d already read, claiming they were new. The staff at Barnes and Noble and Borders didn’t get paid enough to care. It was a very, very low level of crime. The point is that my life had changed. I was an academic. But I’d continued to write songs. Songs for no audience. I had a lot of them accumulating when, at one point, I returned home for a visit, and I called Billy, asking if we could put those songs on tape, just throw down some rough recordings. Billy was always game.
So I went over there, and we went upstairs to his music room, which wasn’t much. Billy’s drumkit looked like whatever was left after a burglary. He had an eight-track cassette recorder that mostly worked. If someone made a noise in the kitchen while we were putting a song down, it came through just fine. Billy didn’t even do a count-off. Things just started and stopped or fell apart. Somewhere along the line I’d forgotten you could make music that way. Billy worked with what he had, which was me, my songs, his gear, the two of us playing together, and a curiosity for what might come of all this.
After years of recreating myself as an academic so that I could be free of the music business, the recordings made that afternoon at Billy’s house got me a record deal. I signed with The Dust Brothers, who at the time had produced Beck, The Beastie Boys, The Rolling Stones. The looseness, Billy’s feel, was central to the recordings. His way with music got me out of my straitjacket, for a minute. I only wish it had lasted. I started doing what young people do, and I thought having a record deal mattered. I started thinking about more. And so it was that I’d already forgotten what Billy taught me in the first place. All that you have is right in front of you, so focus on that and see how the environment around you changes.
I love shape-shifters, and the history of popular music is brought to life by them, but Billy Conway was not one. Quite the opposite. Whether in barns, on festival stages, in a pickup truck, in five-star hotels, or in my stepfather’s living room, he was always himself, wherever and whenever I saw him. There was no act. I remember Billy talking about a show Morphine played in Australia. The week before Nick Cave had been in there and done some damage at the bar, knocking drinks to the floor and doing his best to terrorize the people who bought them. It was all anyone could talk about. “That’s the stuff people remember,” Billy said, laughing. “Go in there with good manners and they won’t know your name the next week.” But there are other things to be remembered for, and Billy Conway was overflowing with them. He was a present human being, there in the room with you, thinking about what could be made with what was around, never somewhere else.
Others could be straining to guide the orbit of one planet or another, planning speeches or accepting trophies in their minds, and Billy just watched them go at it, without judgement but with great awareness and often humor. There they go again—hope they get back home so we can make some music. Most people study to get to such insights, but Billy just kind of showed up with them. He stayed local. That’s where the art grows.
ABOUT WARREN ZANES: Dr. Warren Zanes is a New York Times bestselling author and a Grammy-nominated documentary producer. For ten years he was the Executive Director of The Rock and Roll Forever Foundation, after serving as the VP of Education and Programs at The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. Warren has taught at several American universities, including Case Western Reserve University, University of Rochester, Colorado College, The School of Visual Arts, and, currently, New York University. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, the Oxford American, and more.
He is the editor of collections on Jimmie Rodgers and Tom Petty, has written books including Dusty in Memphis, Revolutions in Sound: Fifty Years of Warner Bros. Records, Petty: The Biography, and Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. He collaborated with Garth Brooks on Brooks’ bestselling six-volume Anthology series and has written liner notes for projects including George Harrison’s Let It Roll and Elvis Presley: The Searcher. After conducting interviews for Martin Scorsese’s George Harrison: Living in the Material World, Zanes acted as Consulting Producer for the Oscar-winning Twenty Feet from Stardom, writer on The Gift: The Journey of Johnny Cash, and was a producer on the Grammy-nominated 8-part PBS series Soundbreaking, executive produced by Beatles producer George Martin.
A former member of Warner Bros. recording artists The Del Fuegos, he has released four solo recordings with Dualtone and is currently a member of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon’s Rogue Oliphant, co-writing songs with Muldoon. His book on Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska is currently in production with 20th Century Fox, being directed by Scott Cooper and starring Jeremy Allen White. Zanes is an executive producer on the project. Currently at work on a full biography of Bruce Springsteen’s life and career, with Springsteen’s participation, Zanes continues to write and play his own music, with a new recording scheduled for release in 2025.