Bill White -profile
All rights reserved © 2018, –author, USTAKNOW (alias)





(In 3 Part Harmony –part 1 of 3; all three below)


Until they throw dirt in your face, let them throw dirt… that’s what I say. What do you say?
– Thud, thud, thud…, anyone listening?

I met this guy about a year ago or so on FAWM (FAWM.org), – performer, singer, songwriter, architect of all things visual and audio and mapped to the brain via heart. Interesting, aye? It seems we all gotta little bit of this guy in us and what may all, connect us.

Tell me, who wouldn’t want to read a story about integrity of life, acute politics, high-life nights out, and tastefully refined debauchery?
– Read on.

Yes, it’s about MUSIC. Music and a 50 year in the making craftsman from Seattle Washington, USA, now a Peruvian exile to finally fresh air and great coffee! We should all be so lucky to live in an old Peach Orchard! It’s true. However, like Harlem, NY, it may not be what you think by mere words, – Harlem started as a Dutch outpost, became farmland, then a resort town, then a commuter town, and it is what it is today… like Bill’s Peach Orchard. Paradise to him because there grows well, his wife, daughter, music and global Internet friend—ships. Here’s one launching now, again.

So, it’s funny how folks across history, lump labels of people, – like, keeping with the old “dirt analogy” attributed to “Farmers” (musicians?) for centuries (of Harlem and Peach Orchards), – “Oh, he’s just a dirt farmer… ”. Like musicians?, easy to forget until some life event you then want a “little music” to go with it. Farmers, – yeah, not important while the A&P is well stocked, – until it’s not.

– Like the very generic current mainstream corporate music industry of Break-beat re-runs, midi-delic samples from what era sampled?, 1970 – ironic!, (well, if when then from). Then, that silly dirt farmer-musician becomes esteemed genius, warrior of manipulation from the hand of God for food, music and soulful fulfillment, – musician-warrior.

Ah yes, music…, that is what we’re talking about here?, – who can’t listen to music on a full stomach?

Bill White –profile:
(Part 2 of 3)

Consider Bill White, native of (yet again), Washington State, Seattle, USA. Oh my God…, it must be all of the great unending rain watering of all these musicated bands of people like in Alice in Chains, Foo Fighters, Heart, Hendrix –Experience, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, SoundGarden, and even before them Bing Crosby and still plucking strings Carol Kaye, et al! (Not all “great”, but from Washington State and arguably influential musicators.)

Within our time line of music encapsulating Bill’s mainstream antithesis, we in brief see that the ‘60’s resolved the ‘50’s, influencing the '70’s which then moved bands of musicians forward which landed in the '90’s, –after commercial boundaries of the '80’s caged originality. Within that mix too, was Bill White, –doing his thing.

Nirvana, Pearl Jam peaked from under the corporate music rubble with others of a different voice yet, like Alice in Chains. Black Sabbath becoming cliché yielding to –aggression of posture within music. Kurt Cobain’s kinda dark became loved, while monolithic riff monsters fell off the radar for real performing songwriting sung to a not yet commercialized audience laughing at the “devils triad” now ~“Beat” to death by corporate formulations. Within that mix too, was Bill White, –doing his thing.

Depression, Disillusionment, Spiritual R&B Folk Grunge, (what the hell is grunge anyway?), had many players, and Bill White was one of them…, down in the “dirt of choice” to do their music as they saw fit, just like they brushed their teeth, and bathed themselves each night, –they did their music.

–Not for sale, unless taken as-is in the paradigm of which this all started down in the Delta, and American Slave Fields before all that birthed in the 1970’s “Rock Band Era” that bridge over to today’s now, – in peril music.

Independent musicians are the new forever, suicide tide of music and Bill White was there 50 years ago, and still here TODAY and will be tomorrow until they are throwing fine Peruvian soil on his road worn “music factory”, temple of his music souled body, –birthed so many years ago from his parents love. – “Mom, said, never let the Blues leave your music.“ (Bill White, 2017)

Bill White –profile:
(Part 3 of 3)

Bill White was recently asked ”what do performing songwriters talk about" when they get together?

Bill said, in summary, –nothing.

He explains across a number of comments that, “they play songs to each other”, or as he said, they share an occasional Snickers Bar if found on he floor of the car they’re riding in, next to the soap.

I can only guess Tom Waits, part of this coming story comment, –was living out of his car at the time. Nice poetic license! However, Waits was actually living at the West HolLywood Tropicana Motel, Santa Monica Blvd. (click to follow link), and I understand this may be the car of which we speak, Tom Waits Lincoln (click to follow link). –Nice visual frame of reference for the rest below

So then, proceeding, Bill comments: “what does one talk about with Tom Waits? Barber shops, the statues of horse jockeys on the lawns of Beverly Hills mansions, – seldom about songwriting unless it is a question of what to name your female characters. The more you try to define something, the smaller cage you make for it.”

Bill continued with: “Songwriters don’t so much talk about songwriting, as play each other the songs they have written and then talk about them specifically. Waits, played me a song once he was excited about because it sounded like a Springsteen song. Several years later there it was, –on a Springsteen album, ‘Jersey Girl’. Then he said he wasn’t going to make any more Jazz albums because, the company didn’t promote them.”

Bill then explains: “when I started out on music, the people who were famous were famous because they were better than everyone else. In those days, my work was inferior to almost everything you would hear on the radio. Of course in those days we didn’t have the resources to approximate the quality of the top recordings. If you wanted to get the Clapton or the Hendrix sound, you had to work hard to figure out how they did it. Today you just push a button on your pod and you can sound like anybody you want. So at first there was no question of fame. It just was never going to happen. But then, after keeping at it for over a decade, the industry started to show interest in me.”

Then Bill says something I personally have heard many times, and at risk of inserting myself here will say I did that too, in preface to the below comment,

–he ran.

Bill explains: “I was a peer to my peers. although never successful in the songwriting business, I made more money at being a failure than 99% of the wannabes who fumbled around the streets of Hollywood with a cassette demo in their shirt pocket. Then a manager who was tiring of the monotonous fame of the super-group he managed showed an interest in developing my band, and I fled!!! The last thing I wanted was to sound like the shit I heard, and hated on the radio. On my own without a band, I had my good years and my bad years.”

From what I hear from Bill, even beyond this one of many conversations with him over the past year is what I’ve observed within myself and as Bill says “there are100,000 other Bill Whites in the world”, – us all … : “I was so far outside what was happening that my stuff never really connected with the local scene in Boston, which is to where I fled.

But then came along New England folk music revival. And while some kids were flocking to Seattle in hopes of becoming the new Eddie Vedder, hordes of songwriters were showing up in Harvard Square with dreams of becoming th next Tracy Chapman. With new venues opening for original acoustic music, I was finally able to stabilize myself musically and develop a fanbase. That went on for several productive years until…, bingo! I met Brett Anderson, Lead-singer for the London band “Suede”, and Rock and Roll reclaimed me again.

When that scene passed, I moved to the South [southern USA states] where I was befriended by James Blood Ulmer, the most innovative Blues Guitarist since Hendrix. And I was back in the Blues, from where I started so long ago.

I then went back to Seattle, worked at borders where I met some 20-something musicians, and became a Lead-guitar player for the first time in my life. Now, stepping away from the Mic and just playing whatever I wanted to play without having to worry if it was going over well with the audience.

Finally, I teamed up with Toni Talia Marcus, who had played with Van Morrison from ‘79 to ‘80 and soon had my own band. I was writing new songs again. I always had decent sized audiences, but never built up a real, true fan base. I never stayed in the same location or state of music to be able to do that.” [Toni Marcus , –on the album, “Into the Music” (1979) Van Morrison, played violin, –entire album.]

So, let me pause here to inject that,
–as I was reviewing the dialog Bill and I had over the past year (you should really read the Forum Posts after FAWM, 50/90 ends), I wondered what I could possibly write about him, worthy of both him and the reader, you-all. I feel anyone who “gets” this narrative will really “get” the state of music today and why it may well be one of the greatest times to be in the “music making” world.

Bill responded to me when I asked him, –“what am I doing here with all this great real life music history of yours, ours, all of us?”: Bill said,
–“I think the hook in my story was caught by you on a few occasions, and that is…, there are 100,000 Bill Whites in the world. It is a universal story. We 100,000 Bill Whites who have endured, have produced a far greater body of work than the 10,000 successful pop stars who came and went.”
–Arguably, the present state of musicators today! It’s why I personally refer to “us-all” as warrior-musicians.

Bill continues within other comments: “For me, we could start with my archive, [https://billwhite.bandcamp.com].


– The reasoning behind putting out 50 albums in 6 months, is the current emergence of the Arts, –now that the industry of art is collapsing. Moreover, is my home town state of Seattleists with no interest in becoming famous, and those who did become famous were destroyed by it, in one way or another.

I managed to create 59 years worth of music that never stopped evolving because I was never trapped into repeating myself through deadend careerism. There are probably 100,000 Bill Whites in the world, people who have created bodies of work just as immense, diverse, and assured as the discographies of the most famous. There is enough unheard high quality material out there to fill radio play-lists for the next 100 years.”

Bill continues: “why post 50 albums of songs I have written over the last 50 years. One reason is that whenever I give my opinion on something, I am asked what I have ever done that I would dare criticize the work of someone well known and loved. Well, now I can point them to the archive and say here, this is what I have done, I've been doing this shit my whole life and have the right to say whatever I want to say about it. Music is a language. Anyone can learn it, but like any other language, the important thing is what you say with it.

Had I accepted the route of fame when it was offered me in 1981, I would never have written the songs I ended up writing. I would have had a brief career, and after that, nobody would have wanted to hear anything from me again. “He is so ‘80’s” they would say, and they would confine me there. Worse, I would probably be dead, along with most of the other People from Seattle that went down with the sucker punch of fame. In my life, I have managed to reach thousands of people with my music, and without ever becoming known!!! Now, how many people in their lives even manage to communicate what is inside them to even a dozen people? Not many people I would suspect. But every artist, no matter how obscure, reaches many many people, most of whom he will never know heard him.”

Well that’s true of well know famous, infamous, long time past writers, artists of our ancient past! However, Bill is on a cusp of almost famous, could be famous, should be famous, –one may only wonder. How many artist of any kind never knew their effect, e.g., –Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”, (which is for me two dimensional music), is a global staple, yet he never knew what was to come of his legacy. [https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/the-starry-night/bgEuwDxel93-Pg?hl=en (click link to view)]

It’s interesting to me that we don’t often think about our beginnings until we actually arrive somewhere from which we may look back from and see well what we’ve done. Bill explains: “I started taking songwriting seriously when I traded my trumpet for a guitar in 1970. For several years the results were not very good. I wrote three songs a week to play at the open Mic, and never got much response. I was told my harmonic experiments were interesting, but my lyrics were overly influenced by the poetic theories of Robert Graves, and few people had much idea what I was singing about. Besides, the competition was so strong in those days that my primitive meanderings had no chance in the market.

It wasn’t until Punk Rock opened peoples ears that I began to connect with the public. I wrote some pretty good stuff from ‘78 to ‘82 and had a decent following for my bands. Then I moved from Seattle to Boston, where nobody knew me. So I languished until ‘86, when I met Tracy Chapman, and a host of others in the New England songwriters revival. I recorded an album, but was dissatisfied with it and used it as a demo. That put me on the Folk circuit for the next five years.

I also got involved in theater and wrote the scores for two plays that toured Russia. Then Brit-pop hit and I went back to Rock music. So I then moved back to Seattle and started a band with an old friend who had been Soundgarden’s drum tech, now out of work because the band broke up. We recorded an EP, which was enthusiastically received, but there was to much conflict in everybody’s lives so that’s when, [commented above], I headed South, where I was befriended by {James Blood Ulmer who led me into the world of harmolodic Blues. Click link for further} [–Add’l: Ulmer’s album “Birthright” won Blues Album of the Year, “DownBeat’s” ‘05 Readers Poll. Click link for further.]

I stayed there until I was able to create my own style out of it, and made some 4-track recordings that I liked. However, that self production indie musician quality of that era could not be marketed commercially back then [unlike today’s tech]. So, eventually I returned to Seattle yet again, and wrote music for a young poet I had met.

We started a band with him as singer and me as guitarist, and had a pretty good run until he got married and disappeared. It was then I teamed up with ex Van Morrison side-woman, violinist Toni Marcus [commented above], and returned to writing for and fronting a band. And as well then, joining a group called “Songwriters in Seattle” spurred me to new creativity in writing.

However then [concerning Bills big move to Peru], for many reasons, to many to engage here in this narrative, other than the best one which I am glad to comment, – I then left the country to marry the love of my life, a girl from Peru. Here in Peru is where I discovered FAWM [http://fawm.org/fawmers/billwhite51/, 2014].

Now, generally speaking, I only write songs during the month of February, which gives a new cohesion to each group of songs. An exception was made last year, when I participated in 50/90 [http://fiftyninety.fawmers.org/user/billwhite51, 2017]
–which I used primarily as a vehicle to review my output, as well as write over 50 new songs and engaged a few dozen collaborations!

When that was over, I spent the rest of the year putting together a career spanning 45 albums for Bandcamp [https://billwhite.bandcamp.com, 2018]. This year, 2018, is my fifth FAWM.”

So, Bill, –let’s revisit the above question which is what this discussion was anchored on, “what do performing songwriters talk about” when they get together?” To complete that comment started by Bill above, he provided several anecdotal examples:

“I was at a wedding with Peter Gabriel, for several hours we hid behind the Crudite Table and said nothing to each other. On another occasion, in the back seat driving down Hollywood Boulevard with Tom Waits in the driver seat, I asked him if I could have the Snickers Bar I found on the floor, he said no, but the bar of soap was mine if I wanted it. Hanging out with Tim Hardin, all I did was look out for him when he was stoned. Another time, I was side by side with Elvis Costello on three occasions, and neither of us spoke a word to each other, as we had not been introduced. I made small talk with Jon Bon Jovi for half an hour backstage, thinking he was a roadie. Another time, I offered a part in a play I had written to Dar Williams, never knowing she was a songwriter, and a brilliant one at that. I asked Marianne Faithful if she would ever do another project with Mick Jagger and she laughed. I asked Rickie Lee Jones when Tom [Waits] would be getting home. I spoke with Lou Reed about the sequencing of the songs on Ecstasy and asked if he had stolen the idea for the cover from a certain unnameable Andy Warhol film. Brett Anderson and I talked for hours about the composition of the songs on Dog Man Star.

And so, in brief, with songwriters, the matter of songwriting seldom came up.”

No, it seems we, artists, want to be heard, we want to play our songs and hear others, –it’s how we communicate best. Bill explains his experience with songwriting and feedback from peers:
“In my early days of songwriting, I had an extended group of friends in real time and space, and we would talk [unlike on line today] and play and write all day and night, staying up for days sometimes, and always giving each other hell, –no sensitivity training then. But when one of us wrote something good, the praise would fall like rain. Otherwise, we were tough on each other, and each of us had a good idea of where we fit in the grand scheme of things. And we got better and better at what we did. Not because of the praise but because of the criticism. When somebody did something unusual they had to explain it.

Now some of those same people are the touchiest creatures on earth. But it took them many years to get to that point where they feel they are beyond criticism. For all you who are new to the art of songwriting, this is no time to be touchy. Ask for the harshest criticism and toughen your skin and improve your craft. Study the odes and practice the forms. I aways like discussing songwriting, but am usually to busy writing songs to spend a lot of time on it, –just discussing it. However, I am glad to have friends here, though [on-line], who bring up the questions that are worth taking the time to ponder.

I spent ten years writing about music for a daily newspaper in a major US city, and my biggest challenge was interviewing inarticulate musicians and then writing an article that made them sound intelligent.”

In the course of our conversations, mine and Bills, and skimmin