Billy Conway

The feeling that death is everywhere around. Yes, it always has been and always will. But never more than now with record global population and a pandemic closing on a two year run. Eliot once wrote “I had not thought death had undone so many.” A line which comes to me often. But never more than now. So much human life run its course. So many bereaved. Death undoing so many right before our eyes, like flipping light switches in long, long rows. Flicker. Gone. Flicker. Gone.

The hot breath of the inevitable fogs our mirrors, announcing its loom; the closing – ever so slowly – of its inescapable knot. This week and even more piercingly today. It lands with the force of the ocean on how everything feels today, here at the bottom, fathomed and fathom-laden.

When I began to write these rock and roll eulogies, it had not occurred to me that someday the loss would not be distant and wholly abstract. The knot would inevitably tighten, closing in, breathing hotter. I learned today that Billy Conway passed. Maybe the name doesn’t ring a bell. But maybe you remember the band, Morphine. They suffered the constriction of inevitability themselves when frontman, Mark Sandman died on stage in Italy in 1999. A sudden, unexpected heart attack took him instantly before the audience even knew what was happening. Billy Conway struck, abandoned, beneath the spotlights.

I’d known them faintly in my teens. I learned how to attend a rock show while a college student in Boston where Sandman and Conway’s previous band, Treat Her Right, played. I saw them at the Rat, and at TT the Bear’s, maybe at the Plough and Stars. Who can remember? One night, I stood right against the stage. A case of beer at my feet. When no one had come for the box – not a bartender or a waitress – I assumed it had been placed there and forgotten; fallen off the back of a truck, so to speak. There for the taking. Surreptitiously, I snuck one bottle. Then another. By the end of the band’s set, I’d drunk four or five. Maybe six. Who can remember?

Sweaty and satisfied with a set fully realized, the four members of Treat Her Right, Conway and Sandman among them, stepped toward me and bent down to retrieve their stash. I didn’t know. I didn’t know that bands got free beer. Prior to that, my concert going experience was limited to posh British super groups at Madison Square Garden where, from the second to last row, one would have no godly idea about the mechanisms of libation and compensation. Treat Her Right readily surmised that roughly 20% of their reserve had been pilfered. Just as quickly, they figured me as the culprit, what with my legs straddling the carton. But there was no showdown, no pretense of intimidation. They sized the situation up for what it was: a penny-poor college kid carping the diem of an untouched case of beer left stranded at his feet. They would have done the same.

I saw Treat Her Right a number of times. Once I saw Billy Conway in the club’s bathroom before or after a show – who can remember? I told him how much I liked his band and I think he recognized me from the case of beer incident. He asked me if I played. I did what an aspirant would do and made it sound like I was well on my way, with a sheaf of songs ready to be recorded and road tested. I just needed a good drummer, I told him. He offered to sit in. Right there in the bathroom – at TT’s or the Rat or that other club in Brighton whose name I can’t recall (who can remember?) – he offered to help me out, to play some drums on my songs in order to set them in motion, to see if they had any life in them. We exchanged phone numbers and I called him. We set a date and he showed up at my apartment with his cocktail drum. Needless to say, between the phone call and the knock on my door, I’d written furiously – six, eight, maybe a dozen songs – who can remember? – desperate to seem like I was a talent-in-waiting, a ship worth jumping to. I might have even thought I could tempt Billy Conway from Mark Sandman and Treat Her Right.  

I don’t remember, but I’m sure the songs were shit. But Billy Conway never said so. I know that I was a shit guitar player and an even worse singer. But Billy Conway never said so. He played along like these were good songs and like I was his equal as a musician. I knew I’d been lucky. And I didn’t have any inclination to test that luck. I never called him again. I kept going to Treat Her Right shows. And Billy always said hi, chatted for a few minutes, asked me if I had my band together yet.

I learned today that Billy Conway passed. He’d struggled with liver cancer and it took him last week at age sixty five. Unlike previous entries, this eulogy is for the man, more than his music. I liked Treat Her Right at a time when I didn’t have my bearings yet. They are not a band I’ve listened to a lot in the years since college. But for some reason today I pulled their first, self-titled LP from its sleeve and laid it flat upon the platter of my turntable. I set the needle adrift upon its grooves. I remembered how kind Billy Conway had been, how generous with his time and encouragement. I didn’t yet know that Billy Conway had passed. I looked him up after the record was finished and learned that just a few days ago he died.

Death is everywhere around. A few days ago Joan Didion died. She was a writer who could slip a blade between your ribs and make you wince yourself alive again. A few days before that Alvin Lucier died. It will take the rest of us another fifty years to catch up with his work of the 1970s and 1980s. Piece after piece after piece reinvented what could qualify as art or music or art-music; redefined what counted as good and great. I knew Alvin too and was changed by knowing him. But that encounter came later, after I had my bearings. Billy Conway pushed me before I had my sails up.

In May, I lost my mom. Hers is the Queen of all deaths. As 2021 grinds into the loam of yesterday, loss piles up like numbers in an actuarial table come to life, each number a glance, a soft-spoken word, a memory sparking in the heart of a son or a daughter, a friend or a fan. Death is everywhere around. Too many to count, even if the newspapers undertake the job. The counting can never be equal to the task. Ostensibly, this is a eulogy for Billy Conway. But it is also a eulogy for 2021, or more precisely for what 2021 has taken from us. So many lost. Who can remember?

We. That’s who.