Bill Loges on Bill Loges

I was the middle child in a family of seven children, and grew up in Rockford, Illinois. When I was a little boy in the 1960s, my older brother Jeff was a music lover, and my formative years were spent listening to the Beatles, Doors, Jefferson Airplane, Jethro Tull, and other bands that I was really too young to fully appreciate, but conscious enough to dig on some primal level. In the years since I’ve realized that that’s the best level on which to appreciate them anyway.

In the early 1970s, after a year or so of pleading, my mom bought me a guitar and I started taking lessons. I was not taught many chords, mostly picking melodies and reading music. This went on for about 18 months. I was very frustrated because I was playing songs like "Home on the Range" when I wanted to be playing "Stairway to Heaven."

The earliest memory I have of realizing that I might have some talent was in the 7th grade at my Catholic grammar school. Somehow I and several other kids were asked to play our guitars at the monthly all-school mass. This was at a time when I knew few chords, and was pretty slow at switching between them, despite over a year of lessons. But I was flattered that people wanted me to play at the mass. One of the songs they selected was a country tune called "500 Miles Away From Home." I swear I’d never heard this song in its entirety. The only part I’d ever heard prior to the mass was the title line, sung on a K-Tel commercial for an album on which the song appeared. I think the artist was Bobby Bare. Anyway, it was a deep, melodic voice. They gave me the sheet music and I, with my keen note-reading-and-picking skills, discerned the rest of the melody the night before the mass. The next day the five of us met a nun in the church about an hour before the mass so we could rehearse together for the first time. When we got to "500 Miles," I started strumming the chords and singing, trying to imitate the voice from the K-Tel commercial. The nun in charge heard me and asked me to go to the microphone alone. That was the first time I’d ever been in front of a microphone with my guitar. When I heard my voice ring through the church, it was magical. The mass was due to start soon, and the other kids from my class were filing in, neatly regimented. I was still playing and singing "500 Miles." But I didn’t know how to end the song; we hadn’t worked on that yet. So it ended very raggedly, and the kids in the pews all looked startled in my direction. I shrugged and backed away from the mic, and we did the other songs for the mass.

After the mass was over, one of my teachers came up to me and said she hadn’t realized until the song ended that it wasn’t a recording. I was flustered by this, and reduced to stammering some thanks. When I got back to class my friends were all over me, clearly stunned that I’d been able to pull of the song so smoothly. After that, I was known principally as a guitar player.

By 1975 I was a generally frustrated adolescent boy, getting a little wild under a variety of influences, some of them chemical. I went to a Catholic high school, and was doing well in school, but I was beginning to chafe at the rules and expectations people seemed to have of me as some sort of scholar. I wanted to be John Lennon, even if he didn’t want to be himself anymore. One of the young priests at school seemed to sense that I was getting close to desperation, and one day he recommended that I join the group of youths that played guitar at the 12:15 mass at my church. To me, that was like suggesting that I cut my hair and become a tax collector.

But after I’d thought about it for a while I accepted that the real reason I was reluctant was that I wasn’t sure I was good enough. I was still very self-conscious at how terrible I was at chords. I’d given up the lessons by then, mostly for financial reasons, so I was on my own where learning and practicing were concerned. Finally, one November night in 1975 I joined the Guitar Group (as we always referred to ourselves), and shyly tried to follow them through the familiar folk hymns. To my astonishment, once they’d run through the songs for the upcoming mass, they cut into a random assortment of rock tunes. There were two or three older guys--seniors at my high school--who played guitar in the group, and they knew all sorts of chords and rock riffs. It was amazing to me that these kids I’d always considered stiffs were so hip. They would joke about drinking and sex in a way that indicated they were as familiar with the former as I was, and as familiar with the latter as I hoped to become. I soon realized that this was where I wanted to be.

I also developed a huge crush on Carol Doran, another guitarist and singer in the group. She was, and I presume still is, lovely and talented.

But I was not taken too seriously in the group. My guitar was a very cheap plywood 6-string, which sounded like hell and was starting to warp. I couldn’t really tune it, so Tom Clarke, one of the older guys, would have to do that, and he always winced when he picked it up, as if it offended his guitar sensibilities. Their guitars were beautiful, expensive models and sounded like heaven. I was so clumsy at chords that they couldn’t really understand why I was there. But I was improving very quickly, and I could sing well enough to make a contribution there, and I could pick the melodies if I got too lost in the chords. All that changed at Christmas, a month or so after I’d joined.

My mom, to my utter surprise, bought me a 12-string Epiphone guitar for Christmas. I’d never played a 12-string guitar before. In fact, I’m not sure I’d ever seen such a thing before. It was gorgeous and sounded like a dream. When I showed up that week at the guitar group, I became royalty. Tom couldn’t put my new guitar down. It seemed to take him forever to tune it. I was beaming. The only problem was that it was a lot tougher to pick melodies with all those strings, and the guitar sounded a lot better when full chords were played. So I just bent my will to learning chords, and for the next 20 years or so that’s what I did. I played rhythm guitar on my 12-string Epiphone.

All through high school, I was a guitar player. My family moved to California before I started my junior year, and at my new school I quickly made friends with guitar players, like John Jeffries and Erik Horstkotte. Every day at lunch we’d play. I was getting better and better, but always meeting guys who were much better than me. That still happens a lot. People who knew me thought of me primarily as a guitar player. When I went to college in San Diego, all my friends in the dorms thought of me as a guitar player. I played constantly, probably 4 hours a day.

I’d started writing songs about the time I joined the guitar group back in Illinois. Those songs were horrible. But by the time I got to California they were getting better. My dad had told me when I first started composing that I should go slowly at that until I was better on the guitar. It was among the best things he ever told me. Every time I learned something new on the guitar, the next song I wrote was leaps and bounds better than the last. In college I wrote a lot. By my senior year I’d written about 100 songs, but lots of them were truly crap. But I still wrote ‘em.

When I graduated I went to work at The Travelers Insurance Company. Most of the folks I worked with weren’t musically inclined, but at a company softball game I met a guy from the sales department (I was in claims) who mentioned that he played guitar. We got together later and played for hours. That was in 1984, and I spent much of the rest of that year at Jay’s house drinking beer and playing guitar. It was a perrenial open house, with folks wandering in with guitars, percussion, voices, beer, weed, and other party supplies. After work I’d rush home, change, grab my guitar, and go to Jay’s. I’d get home around midnight, get up in the morning and start over. Jay and I teamed up with Mike, a percussionist and vocalist (not a drummer really, he specialized in odd percussion instruments) to form the Pre-Existing Conditions. We played very few original songs, and there is only one recording of us that I own, a fragile cassette tape. We played a few gigs at a college coffee shop managed by a friend of ours, but mostly we were our own entertainment. Once again, all my real friends knew me primarily as a guitar player.

My identity changed in 1986. For about a year I’d been dating a woman named Cathy who worked at the insurance company with me. She put up with the Pre-Existing Conditions, and generally seemed happy with my guitar-player side. In early February of 1986, many things happened all at once. First, Cathy’s college (UC Irvine) called to tell her that she could qualify for married student housing if she’d get married. This was the last push we needed to get married, and we quickly set a date. Days later I was accepted to a graduate school in Los Angeles, about 50 miles from our new home in Irvine. Days after that, we learned that Cathy was pregnant, and that we’d need a two-bedroom apartment.

After that, I wasn’t primarily a guitar player anymore. In grad school, few people thought of me as anything other than a student. Once our daughter was born, our night life with Jay was complicated, and little Jessica didn’t like me playing the guitar. She would cry whenever I’d play, and later (when she got old enough to speak) she’d tell me it was too loud. So for a few years I pretty much stopped playing.

Cathy and I split up in 1989, and I moved to Los Angeles to be closer to my school. I started playing guitar to myself again, and realized how rusty I’d gotten. Slowly, I got some of my skills back. Even my daughter seemed happy to hear me play from time to time. She told all her little friends that her dad was a guitar player. They thought that was my job.

But between 1989 and 1995, when I met Jon, I really didn’t take guitar too seriously. I continued playing the Epiphone 12-string that my mom had gotten me. After Mary’s Garage Band got to be a regular thing, I bought a Martin 12-string acoustic guitar and a Fender Stratocaster electric guitar. Both have been terrific, but the Martin especially. The Epiphone had been warping, and had grown impossible to tune properly. The Martin seems to never need tuning. In fact, in December of 1998 I drove from Texas to California to record the most recent MGB tapes. When I got to Jon’s place, I found the Martin still in tune, untouched since leaving Texas. It’s a miracle.  Two more and I'll be a Saint.

I am a nerdy, bald, professor with no apparent good qualities. That is, all my good qualities are cleverly disguised as aloofness, arrogance, cynicism, or sheer ugliness. I rely on the guitar, among other things (such as the English language) to bring my better qualities to the surface.

Jon Bruschke on Bill Loges

Bill looks just like an egghead academic, but mostly because he’s balding and skinny. I once heard Bill comment: "You know, most of my life I haven’t been thought of as a guy who’s going to school. I’ve been thought of as a guy who plays guitar who happens to go to school." I decided that Bill must have been having a flashback caused by some drug he’d ingested a decade ago that had only recently unlocked itself from the fatty acids in his brain tissue. Bill is an academic to the core.

But I mean that in a good way. He is inquisitive about ideas; he reads because he loves reading. I love ideas as a debater does – they are fodder for an intellectual game; ammunition in a good argument. Bill loves ideas because they are ideas. And he’s a damn nice guy, a brilliant mind, and a great friend.

The thing about Bill is that, between his sexually explicit jokes and mild academic demeanor, there is a totally unexpected soul with deep insight into human emotions. His songs bring out the pain and yearning of a teenage guy falling for a girl who wants nothing to do with him; they express the deeper and infinitely more mature feelings of a man in an adult relationship that is coming apart. They are not always sad and about painful relationships. They are always poignant.

I like the fact that Bill is so willing to experiment with things like drum beats, keyboard parts, and backup vocals. He lets me play around with the production of his music and add whatever I can. He never gets caught up in trying to preserve the original song and freely encourages me to play around with the tempo, rhythm, and feel. It is quite a partnership; I don’t know if the final product is the best music ever, but there aren’t many working relationships that are as productive and fulfilling. If only he wasn’t a damn Cubs fan.

I like Bill’s songs better than my own. They sound like a cross between the Doors, the Steve Miller band, and the Beatles, which were all the bands that were popular when Bill was writing most of his stuff in the 1970s. He lets me add funky, R&B beats to them and they come out really well. I don’t know that my opinion is universally shared; I once had a friend tell me in confidence he found them to drag. But I vividly remember listening to "Days in the Kitchen" a couple months after we recorded it and really listening to the lyrics for the first time.  I was moved to tears. It was the same song my friend had dissed.

When he plays songs I have written, Bill is the loud distorted noise I always wanted to get out of a piano. The songs become more like the way that I want them to be when Bill adds his guitar parts. And he often corrects my more impulsive instincts; he is the filter between my bad ideas and the final product.

What I most like about Bill is that he is as surprised as I am when we finish a song and it sounds good.