I'm riding the train to hear my old mate Billy Gould play bass with his band Faith No More. I've known Billy for over 30 years. At the age of 19 I was the elder in our musical network, in late 70's L.A. He was the youngest, still with 2 years to go in High School.
In some ways he was the coolest and most adventurous of us all. He was the only white kid in a band of black dudes, called The Animated. I was originally in a different band called Pending Spectrum that shared a guitarist with The Animated (Stew, later of The Negro Problem), but I started playing with The Animated when Pending Spectrum's bassist Jon E. Edwards fled the West Coast for Manhattan.
I wasn't that tight with Billy. We would see each other at rehearsals and gigs, and we would hang together as a group socially. We didn't do a lot of one on one bonding, but things were always cool with Billy. For a sixteen year old he was incredibly hip.
It was 1979, the time of Post Punk (though most of us in the US were so late on the bandwagon that many were still having their first taste of Punk).
Billy eventually graduated High School and left L.A. to study in Berkeley. I later left the States completely to dodge Reaganomics, and find out if it was true what I had heard about arty Europe.
Billy and I rarely saw each other, and just kept in touch through mutual friends.
By the time his band got big we had lost touch. Then in 1998 I phoned the Brixton Academy where Faith No More were playing, and left a message backstage, not expecting for it to reach him, or for him to be able to respond to it. 20 minutes later the phone rang.
After all these years Billy was still cool.
