A Conversation with Bill Lloyd – 8.27.12

Mike Ragogna: Hi Bill, how are you?

Bill Lloyd: Hey Mike, how are you? I’m fine.

MR: Pretty good, how have you been? I guess we’re playing a little bit of catch up.

BL: It’s only been about 20 years.

MR: It’s seems like only yesterday when wed eat at Fudruckers.

BL: Or one of the places we used to go hang out at and have lunch from MTM. We were all signed to MTM Music at the time. It was when Mary Tyler Moore moved to Nashville–the company did–and they signed country writers and pop writers. It felt like you could get on board.

MR: It was a great period, we were very blessed. MTM had Mac “Everlasting Love” Gaydon, we had your eventual musical partner, Rodney Foster. We had Beth Neilson Chapman, Judy Rodman, Holly Dunn, Fred Knoblock…

BL: Paul Overstreet.

MR: Yup, Paul Overstreet. It was a great run.

BL: It was a good little cool scene.

MR: But enough of that! Let’s get into your new album Boy King Of Tokyo. The cover has a Japanese theme with its photo.

BL: The photograph’s on the CD, I haven’t pressed it into vinyl yet, which I might do eventually, because it looks like an album cover.

MR: Yeah.

BL: It’s begging for an album cover. It has kind of a retro feel to it. The photos were taken by my mother, actually. I lived in Tokyo, Japan, for at least the first three and a half to four years of my life. My mom had been an army librarian and my dad was an officer’s club manager. He got transferred to Tokyo to run the officer’s club in Pershing Heights, the Pershing Heights officers club in occupied Toyko. It was 1956. The first few years of my life, I was living there.

MR: A tribute to the past or looking back?

BL: I don’t know, it’s kind of a middle-aged rumination, like we all do. All of us who were songwriters tend to take personal things. This is my fifth or sixth solo record in fifteen years or so.

MR: Taking personal stock.

BL: Yeah, personal stock. Yeah it’s one of those records. Cheaper than therapy, I always say.

MR: You have a couple of instrumentals on Tokyo such as “Chet’s Right Hand, Man.”

BL: Yeah. Well, I’ll tell you how that came about. I worked as a string instrument curator at the Country Music Hall of Fame for about three years, and I was in the archive down there. Behind my desk was about 20, 25 of Chet’s guitars. There was this one Gretch prototype that I would always pull out to show guests who would come to the archives to see what was back there. I always wanted to have a song to play that was in that finger-picking style. I wrote the one that was on the CD there. It’s sort of a hillbilly-jazz kind of thing. Another instrumental on there is called “Doc’s Box,” and that refers to Doc Watson.

MR: I’m looking at some of these other great titles…you’ve got “Buy On Credit.”

BL: Yeah.

MR: Why, there’s something we can all relate to.

BL: I’m kind of making fun of the way people just don’t seem to care. Everybody gets a bailout these days. I think that’s what it kind of comes down to.

MR: We talked about taking personal stock. When you look at the crazy amount of debt people are carrying, it’s almost impossible to believe. So what other themes pop up on Tokyo?

BL: There are other songs on the album that are just odes to the music business. There’s one called “Com Trol,” which is about how the corporations control of all media. And there’s a song called “Best Record Ever Made,” which is a little love song to vinyl days.

MR: Let’s talk about this duo called Foster & Lloyd. What’s their origin story?

BL: We were a duo. He was Rodney Foster, I was Bill Llyod, and we had some hits on the RCA label back in the eighties, back in country radio, we were all sort of a young country movement, the same era as Steve Earle and Lyle Lovett, Rodney Crowell, The O’Kanes, The Desert Rose Band…if anyone remembers that stuff.

MR: Don’t forget Sweethearts of the Rodeo.

BL: Yeah!

MR: A couple of songwriters named Bill Lloyd and Radney Foster had a big hit with them.

BL: That was kind of our beginning. They cut one of our songs and that led to us getting a record deal. They maybe had two singles before ours. And then Don Schlitz came along with the song “Midnight Girl, Sunset Town” and they did real well with that. It was all good.

MR: The era of country duos. You might remember, even I was part of a male duo.

BL: You were in The Almost Brothers.

MR: Yeah. And there was The Vega Brothers, they were on MCA, Jimmy Bowen’s act.

BL: I liked The O’Kanes a lot. They were great. And of course, The Bellamy Brothers had been around for a long time. We were at RCA with The Judds and they sort of swept everything, pretty much dominated the duo category. I know Brooks & Dunn were sort of put together, actually, after all these duos had sort of moved out of the way, either split or lost their record deals.

MR: It was quite a glut.

BL: It was a glut, and then all of a sudden, the air cleared and I remember Tim Dubois actually told me, he kind of put Kix and Ronnie together just to make sure they got into that duo category cause it was wide open.

MR: If only some of these duos–ahem–hung in there just a little bit longer. That would be The Almost Brothers. (laughs) But it’s true, they always tell you, “Just hang in there,” or “Just keep doing it and doing it, and eventually, you’ll have your time.” But Foster & Lloyd had a good run, and some top ten hits along the way.

BL: We had about five that did top ten. Yeah, it was pretty good. It kind of came before the big huge bump in country. It kind of led to this platinum zone.

MR: That’s right, country sold as well as pop.

BL: We predated that. Radney’s first album as a solo artist got in on some of that. What I did in the country market…we put together a band with myself and Rusty Young from Poco and Pat Simmons of The Doobie Brothers and John Cowan from The New Grass Revival. We had a band called The Sky Kings. We were signed to both RCA and Warner Bros, and we made two different albums. It just wasn’t working. It was six years of my life I put into that and it just wasn’t, but we’re all friends ’til this day.

MR: How did you have a simultaneous record contract?

BL: No, we were with RCA for about two years.

MR: And then moved on to Warner.

BL: Pat didn’t go with us to Warner. It was just the three of us after.

MR: Interesting, because Patrick was on Warners with The Doobie Brothers.

BL: Yeah, and he was already in. They never make a Doobie’s album without Pat. I don’t see how they could, really. He went back to work with them. So I tried my hand at the country market. I feel now that I still like writing songs for the market.

MR: I remember you as a solo artist getting a lot of accolades for your solo album Feeling The Elephant, and on, actually. Critics love you, and your style of music was really happening at the time.

BL: It’s sort of melodic pop. People call it “power pop,” which immediately puts it into a very light place in terms of it lyrically. The stereotype of power pop is very inconsequential.

MR: Yeah, but on the other hand, it gave us some awesome acts including yourself, Matthew Sweet…

BL: …Marshall Crenshaw. I would say that my stuff tends to fall in that area. But I’m hoping, songwriting wise, I try to put a little bit more into it.

MR: We were having a conversation prior to this interview about Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell being… Well, those are the two for me and you.

BL: Yeah, that was considered great songwriting. And, of course, you can’t deny The Beatles. But still, when you’re looking at songwriters, you know, people that elevated the form… Jimmy Webb was another one.

MR: Jimmy Webb, these days, it’s interesting, he’s conquered the world. He’s the head of the Songwriters Hall Of Fame. He oversees that with some association with NYU. In their collaboration, they put together a really smart, sort of underground railroad for upcoming singer-songwriters. And this isn’t just, of course, for the music, but for the lyrics having some sort of a depth.

BL: Yeah, that’s what I kind of look for, but I also love catchiness and big beats and jangly guitars, and all that stuff. They don’t have to be exclusive from each other. They can have good lyrics with all those same elements.

MR: Bill, when you’re looking at the music scene right now, what do you see?

BL: I still see… I mean, I can listen to some Goldfrapp. On the whole, I’m still drawn towards the singer-songwriters, no matter how old or young they are. I am still drawn towards that. I mean, I love that MGMT single that was huge. That was great. I try and stay in touch even for an old guy.

MR: So, you have a kid. A 21-year-old. Many kids around that age were influenced by their parent’s choices in classic rock.

BL: Yeah, well he knows all that stuff. It’s funny, he’s 21. He knows Beatles, Stones, Who, all kinds of stuff.

MR: How could he not with his dad being Bill Lloyd?

BL: (laughs) Hey, is this broadcast in Iowa, mostly?

MR: Other than the transcript being in The Huffington Post, yeah. But it also will be on the Internet in addition to it being broadcast locally.

BL: I love playing in Iowa. I’ve played there a bunch in the last few years with a thing that I do. I’m a music director for an organization here in Nashville called The First Amendment Center. It’s a non-partisan, non-political thing. It’s just a watchdog organization on the First Amendment.

MR: Nice, let’s talk about that.

BL: It’s for schools and press organizations as a reminder of how important free speech is and how music plays into all that. If you look into the history of recorded music, there’s been censorship since the beginning, “Wake Up Little Suzie,” having been banned in Boston for suggestiveness, you know?

MR: One of my favorite banned records is David Cassidy’s “Get It Up For Love.” That was ridiculous.

BL: Was it?

MR: Yeah, and in the UK as well.

BL: That I didn’t know.

MR: But we’re talking about sexual innuendo censorship as late as the seventies. Really, that was insane.

BL: Even recently, the “Louie Louie” stigma was still there from when people thought “Louie Louie” had lyrics, but it never did. There was a government investigation into “Louie Louie.” Nobody bothered to find the original songwriter or listen to the original record, they only listened to The Kingsmen’s version, which was very garbled. It was a seven-city investigation. Even recently, there was a marching band with no lyrics that got told not to do “Louie Louie.” It was the alleged suggestiveness.

MR: All they’d have to do is go to the Paul Revere version, which was easier to understand.

BL: Yeah, yeah.

MR: Which was also a hit.

BL: Yeah. But anyway, those programs are real fun and myself and a lot people from Nashville and Ashley Cleveland, Joseph Wooten from The Wooten Brothers…he plays in The Steve Miller Band. Don Henley, Jason Wright and other songwriters all take part in this thing.

MR: Beautiful.

BL: It’s an ongoing thing. We’ve been doing it for about 12 years now.

MR: Do you remember in the eighties hit “Money’s Too Tight To Mention” by Simply Red?”

BL: Yeah.

MR: There were major radio stations that wouldn’t play that because of its line, “Did the earth move for you, Nancy,” at the end because it was a “let them eat cake” slam at Ron and Nancy Reagan.

BL: I had no idea. I have one sort of political song on the record called “The Fix Is In.”

MR: Oh. Nice. What’s it about?

BL: It’s really about despondency over everything. Not even a partisan or one side or the other, just a throw up your hands, you know?

MR: I know. I believe people were expecting all these major changes and almost nothing happened. On the other hand, the previous years were a nightmare when it came to civil rights.

BL: Yeah, those years that went on before, a lot of civil liberties were gone from that period.

MR: Oh, yeah. Bill, can you go into some of the lyrics?

BL: Well, it starts off with, “What do you have cooking in that pretty little head? Some kind of notion you can make a stand. Way too deep, you’re gonna end up dead. When the water starts rising, you’ll want dry land. Better off sticking to the shallow end. Forget about it, now the fix is in.” That’s the first verse. It’s written from a character’s point of view, someone who’s on the inside who’s dismissing anyone who feels like they can make a difference.

MR: Rhetorical question, but that isn’t really how we should be feeling, right?

BL: No, and in my heart, I don’t feel that way. But there are times when I do and that’s why you write a song. You let it loose that way.

MR: Bill, sir, you’re the musician’s musician.

BL: I don’t know, but thank you.

MR: But to that point, aren’t you also in a band that emulates records?

BL: I have a band here in Nashville called The Long Players. You can find out about us if you go to www.thelongplayers.com. A lot of people forget the LP stands for “long player,” so that’s where the name comes from and over the last eight years, we have done well over 58 albums from start to finish, playing the album live and in sequence, just as you would remember, and we get guest stars to sing the song. So the constant is the band. We get guest stars to be upfront, and if you go to our website, you’ll see a lot of talented people, especially in the Nashville community, who are willing to come out and celebrate these records with us. It’s all sort of shared memory and shared love of the same songs, a lot of the same records. It’s a great way to revisit a record. You go out to a big room full of people who all grew up with the same record. They can sing along and they can see live musicians and singers and bring that record back to life again.

MR: And the players must not be too shabby.

BL: We have really good players in our band–Steve Allen, the other guitar player besides myself, was in a band called 20/20 out of LA. They were kind of a New Wave pop band. Our first bass player was Gary Talent from the E Street Band, but he went back on the road with that guy, Bruce Spring…Spring…

MR: Springfield!

BL: Bruce Springfield, yes! (laughs) So, Brad Jones, who’s a great record producer, he’s playing bass with us now. Steve Ebe is in a band called Human Radio; he’s on drums. The keyboard player is John Dedrick who’s toured with The Dixie Chicks, Michael McDonald, Patty Griffin, Alison Krauss, just all sorts of people. He’s a great keyboard player. Sometimes when he’s not around, there’s a woman named Jen Gunderman who teaches and used to be in The Jayhawks. It’s a good group of people we have as far as our core band, and then we get singers, whoever we can get in the Nashville community, which can be anyone from country stars to aging rock stars to people who are well-known here in Nashville. They may not be known somewhere else, but…

MR: …uh, how about an ex-Almost Brother who visits Nashville once in a while?

BL: Well, there you go! We’ll have to get you involved. Just the other night, for instance, we did Springsteen’s Born In The USA album, we had Dan Baird from Georgia Satellite, we had Joe Blanton, the lead singer of Royal Court Of China. They were on A&M years ago. We had Don Johnson who has had country hits…great singer. I could go down the list, but if you go to our website you can see everything.

MR : What’s the website?

BL: http://thelongplayers.com

MR: It’s great you were able to get that domain name ’cause it seems like somebody would have grabbed that.

BL: I don’t know, I don’t know if anyone else had the band name. We do own the name, so.

MR: Speaking of performing full albums, why whoever could it be playing with Cheap Trick on their take on Sgt. Pepper?

BL: Oh, that’s right. I got to be a sideman with Cheap Trick when they were doing Sgt. Pepper with an orchestra. We did it two years in a row at The Hollywood Bowl, which was mind-blowingly fun. The first year, we got to go out and record at Capital Studio. Geoff Emerick was behind the board the whole time, The Beatles’ engineer on that record, so that was great fun.

MR: I hugged those Cheap Trick multi-tracks that were in the vault when I worked at the Capital Tower.

BL: Wow, I don’t blame you. So anyway, we did two years in a row with that. We did this extended thing in Las Vegas. There’s a DVD and a CD and all that stuff. If you look hard enough you can see me in the shadows over there.

MR: (laughs) So what other projects are coming up for you?

BL: Mainly songwriting, and I’m kind of back into the swing of pitching songs again. The people who administer my publishing just got bought out by another big company. Bug Music got bought by BMG Chrysalis, which is not the same BMG that bought out…which is now Sony. No, I mean, Universal.

MR: Gee, confusing? That particular paper trial gets tricky. I was going to say, BMG got bought out by Universal. The songs we wrote for MTM were bought by BMG, then Sony, now Universal.

BL: Yeah, it kind of went through a couple different changes there. Now there’s a new BMG, which is Chrysalis, and they bought out the Bug catalog. If you hang around the music business long enough, your songs can dance around from catalog to catalog. So there are new people I’m working with over there.

MR: To get royalty statements from them.

BL: Yeah, exactly.

MR: Mr. Bill, what advice do you have for new artists?

BL: Do what you believe in, don’t give up. Love it. Don’t do it for the money. Do it for the love and try to be as unique as you can be.

MR: And that’s the advice you would give to the kids! Nice.

BL: Yeah. In today’s economy, that’s the only way to…everybody tends to make their own luck. Nobody’s relying on a big corporate mother or father to come carry them and support them for years. It’s very much a time where you make your own luck. The internet is really wonderful in terms of promotion, in terms of selling a small amount of records, so you’re able to survive on that. In terms of the other parts of the music business that we grew up with, the internet has pretty much decimated that, and file-sharing has. But, you know, you move on.

MR: Bill, it’s been great hanging with you here in Nashville after all these years.

BL: It’s good to see you, Mike.

MR: It’s really great. By the way, Radney says, “Hi.”

BL: Oh good, because I need to talk with him.

MR: Are there any more Foster & Lloyd albums coming? Touring?

BL: Yeah, we were talking about doing another one. We made one last year for the first time in 20 years, or 21 years, actually. We went out and toured a little behind that so that was fun and, you know, it was a joyous experience being able to write together again and we found a cool groove so we enjoyed it. There’s talk of us doing something down the line.

MR: This was great, I appreciate it. Thank you so much, Bill.

BL: Thank you, Mike.

Transcribed by Joe Stahl