Nobody Plays Like You Do
"What immortal hand or eye, Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?"-William Blake
My heart goes out to everyone affected by the Los Angeles fires, and I know some of you have been. It is beyond comprehension what is going on down there. Hourly I am learning about more friends who have lost everything, everything but themselves. Sending so much love.
Today is the birthday of Bill Cowsill. He would have been 77. Bill was the oldest member, lead singer and guitarist, of the Cowsills, a family band that spawned three top ten hits in the 60’s and were the blueprint for the hit TV show, The Partridge Family. The Cowsills, like their TV counterparts, played sunshiny pop—baroque-meets-the-Beach-Boys—Bill being the David Cassidy of the band (check out a TV appearance on Ed Sullivan where they sing their biggest hit, The Rain, the Park and Other Things and then blast through some covers. There is Bill on the far left; they are all startlingly charismatic and talented). While their legacy lacks a huge footprint in today’s remembrances of music past, in their time The Cowsills were one of the most loved bands in America, a seven-piece family band, with multilayered blood harmonies, ages ranging from 8 years old, the cute little sister Susan, to Bill at 19. Even their mother Barbara joined in on harmonies.
The Cowsills were managed by Bud Cowsill, the clichéd horrible show-biz dad, who both did everything he could to make his created family band a success while also destroying their opportunities at every turn. He was a domineering, abusive alcoholic, feared by every one of his children, who he controlled, humiliated, and beat up. In 1970, after a show at The Flamingo in Las Vegas, Bud and Bill got into a fight that led to Bill telling his father to fuck off. They were both drunk, his father was, as usual, the first to go on the attack, and was forcibly removed from the scene. The next day Bill got a legal letter firing him from the band and cutting him off from the family.
The Cowsills’ complicated, dark story is excellently told in the 2011 documentary A Family Band: The Cowsills Story which is currently streaming on Amazon Prime. It features a fantastic interview with Bill shortly before his death in 2006 at 58 years of age, digging into his perspectives on his dad, the band, and his life. Yet while the doc wonderfully goes deep into each of the siblings’ lives, pre, during and post the rise and fall of the band, it focuses little on the music each member made after leaving the band.
Soon after his firing, in 1971, Bill Cowsill released what would be his only solo record, Nervous Breakthrough on the Cowsills’ former label MGM Records (by that time the band had been dropped by MGM and had signed to London). Bill had turned down an opportunity to try out for the Beach Boys as the touring replacement for Brian Wilson, and instead assembled a mighty group of studio cats, including childhood friend Waddy Wachtel on guitar, Sneaky Pete on Pedal Steel and Rhinoceros Doug Hastings on guitar, and took a shot at going it alone. Cowsill, as he explains in the film, was directionless after being kicked out of the band, cut off from the only life he had ever known. The resultant record was equally directionless, with hints of past-Cowsills candy pop mixed with more sophisticated, modern sounds. Bill’s voice sounds great throughout, and there are some solid recordings like Ride (Southbound Wind) and When Everybody’s Here.
But the masterpiece of the record is also its greatest mystery, the penultimate track on side A entitled Nobody. It is a heartbreaking singer-songwriter classic, and for all of the great players on the record, it is the one track that is stripped bare with just a raw, scratched rhythm acoustic guitar and a slight acoustic lead accompaniment. And right in the middle is Bill Cowsill, giving a tender soulful performance of a lifetime…
I'm going back a long time
Calling on the sad line
At everyone's gaze I would sing a million ways
Ahh but nobody plays like you doLooking through a wide eye
I want to know, don't know why
Everyone's face, I still sing a million ways
Thinking how nobody plays like you do
Everyone raves how I sing a million ways
But nobody plays like you do
Nobody plays like you do
Nobody is credited to (Beth) Beatty, (Dick) Cooper, and (Ernie) Shelby. That very trio did write a song called Nobody. It was the unsuccessful first single from the 1968 Three Dog Night debut record, a record which would find a huge audience with the release of its third single, One (written by Harry Nilsson). But besides the song title Nobody, there is absolutely nothing in common with the song sung by Bill Cowsill. Not the same lyrics, melody or vibe. The songwriting credit on the album was most probably wrong.
So who wrote it? Bill is only credited with one song on Nervous Breakthrough, the opener When Everybody’s Here. When Everybody’s Here definitely follows more closely the joyous style of the Cowsills, with lyrics that reveal Bill’s attempt at reconciling what happened with his band, his family (the song appears, incidentally, on The 20th Century Masters, Best Of Cowsills release):
Singing out a happy song
Fitting together right from wrong
Do it with a happy song
Get everybody here
But with Nobody, the happiness is gone. With Nobody, Bill sings of failure, of true uncertainty and of a wistful sentiment for that voice…or those voices…who sing like no one else. Is he referring to his former bandmates and the sound they made when they harmonized together? Is there a singer who was always his main inspiration? Is he trying to make sense of his father’s fury and mockery, who kicked him out of the band he led, after telling him that he was not the great artist he thought he was? And was it Bill who wrote the song? It seems like it had to come from him. Yes, it is the mark of a great singer (which Bill was) to make someone else’s words your words. In this case the whole affair seems so deeply personal, and he so very much owns each phrase, that it would seem that somewhere the song is credited to him. But after searching the internet, digging into old Billboard magazines and BMI and ASCAP files, and even reaching out to various living Cowsills over the years to try and solve the mystery, the only clues are the ones crying from the grooves on the record.
Bill Cowsill lived in Canada for most of the rest of his life, playing and recording in bands like The Blue Northern and The Blue Shadows (worth checking out), recording other artists, while battling addiction and major health problems (some not associated with his addictions). He died in 2006, days after they found the body of his brother Barry, who had gone missing in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Happy Birthday to Bill Cowsill, the leader of a family band that crumbled over deep family problems. But for a moment, were one of the biggest bands in the land.
Great Podcast Alert: Life of the Record
Pandora vet Dan Nordheim hosts a podcast where each episode takes a deep dive into one record from the past, with the artist or someone adjacent to the artist telling the story, often celebrating an anniversary of release. Besides introducing the record and the storytellers, Nordheim takes his voice out, leaving the listener alone with the storytellers, My favorites so far (I have much more to listen to) are Mudhoney talking about Superfuzz Bigmuff, Ian MacKaye talking about Minor Threat’s Out Of Step (great record and story, but I would NEVER want to be in a band with that guy), The Violent Femmes talking about their first record and The Making of Neu! as told by Michael Rother (thanks to Ethan Miller for turning me on to it!).
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“I don’t think we have reached the limit of what a dog’s nose can potentially discriminate for…There is a huge future in it.”
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By: Rowen Ricardo Phillips
