Billy The Mountain

They asked. It was inevitable.

‘Who the f*** is Billy The Mountain’ they asked? Not ‘What the f*** is Billy the Mountain?’

But who?

They heard the cool songs sung by the same guy and read the blurb, pointers to the fact that this band was about one person or character – Billy The Mountain.

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; 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 in despair after his favourite dog died.

They knew however he stole his name from the epic Zappa song, not knowing he was determined that Frank be remembered for something other than his untimely death and badly-named children.

“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.

My neck of the woods – the frozen fields of northern 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 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.

Lowell 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!