A Conversation with Billy Block  (continued)

BB: So, I got lucky really early. Most people, it takes years to get going, I just happened to hit a lick. The best thing that happened to me in L.A. was meeting my wife. I met Jill in 1991, which is the year we started Western Beat.

I'd been doing the Ronnie Mack Barn Dance for about 6 years, and had an idea to do something similar, but more of a songwriter's thing. I'd run into Amy Kurland [owner of the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville] at the Bottom Line in NYC one night, and told her I was going to try doing a Bluebird West, she said more power to you. So I started Western Beat at a coffee house in Hollywood called Highland Grounds. That was the first Thursday of September, 1991. September 6th is our 10th year anniversary.

Wendy Waldman was on the first show with then husband Brad Parker, and a guy they were developing named Rick Vincent. Jim Lauderdale was on that first show, slide guitarist Jimmy Sloan, Mandy Mercier, who's now a staple of the Austin scene, singer songwriter Annie Harvey...

PM: Your memory's incredible.

BB: Well, you know, it's pretty indelible stuff. That first show also happened to be the night of the MTV Music Awards. We got a call from Spinal Tap, asking if they could come down after the Awards and do an acoustic set of their album. I told them to bring it on, naturally.

PM: How did they know about you on your first night?

BB: Well, they'd read about our debut in the L.A. Weekly. It was remarkable, I have pictures of Spinal Tap at the first show. It was kind of a good omen, you know. They were in full costume with the hair and the kilts and all, and played a 40 minute set.

PM: Was it a media event?

BB: Not at all. There was no media. They just wanted to play. And then they hung out the rest of the night, and we took group pictures at the end.

PM: Amazing.

BB: So, the first Thursday of every month, it just started to build. BMI and ASCAP became co-sponsors of Western Beat, it was the first time that those organizations had ever co-sponsored an event. It became the place where everybody would come to play. We had Robert Earl Keen, John Anderson came out from Nashville. Jim Delacroce's been a good friend, he brought out Hal Ketchum. There was a cross pollination afoot between the Nashville and the West Coast songwriting communities.

PM: And this event was already called Western Beat.

BB: Right. We started doing T-shirts, branding and marketing it. It was about country music that was outside the mainstream. Bringing the margins to the mainstream, that was always the idea with Western Beat. And I got to play with so many great people out there, all the Hellecasters [Will Ray, John Jorgensen, Jerry Donahue] individually, James Intveld, Kasey Jones, and so many of those same people now live here.

I had a band with [bassist] Freebo called the Zydeco Party Band, and that was a tremendous original outfit whose first CD was produced by [legendary L.A. drummer] Jim Keltner, the first CD he'd ever produced. He brought in Ry Cooder and David Lindley, it was pretty mindblowing. We ended up doing three or four records. Now, I'm leaving out big chunks of history here, can't tell the whole story. But suffice it to say that around '95 things started getting weird in L.A., the riots, the fires. Jill and I had gotten married in '93...

PM: We never did cover how you met.

BB: I'd been dating a school teacher, whose dad had recently passed away. He'd been a huge Paul Simon fan, and we bought tickets to see him at the Forum. Steve Gadd was the drummer, that was all the excuse I needed to justify taking the night off from the Barn Dance. There was this unbelievable woman in the row behind us that I couldn't stop looking at, and knew somehow that she was going to be a part of my life. When the drum solo started, I seized the opportunity to say something to her and borrowed her binoculars, explaining that I was a drummer. But that's all we said, and when the seventeen thousand people piled out of the show, I figured I'd never see her again.

When I got to my Palomino gig the following Tuesday, I looked from the stage across the room, and there she was. Turned out she was dating the doorman at the Palomino. I recalled our meeting to her, and she said that she was a singer, so I invited her to sit in, which she did. We exchanged cards to find that we lived on the same street, one beach apart. We became great friends, but I'd refuse her invitations to play drums for her. I knew I wanted to date her, not be in her band. That never works, I'd been down that road before. After she'd returned from a trip to Mexico with her boyfriend, we went out to breakfast. I asked her how it was, she said it had been miserable, that he split up with her and stood her up. I took her hand and told her that at the risk of ruining our friendship, that I was crazy about her. She said she felt the same way, and we've been together ever since.

PM: So Jill was there right from the beginning of Western Beat.

BB: Right, from the git go. She's always been a huge help and support system.

PM: She's a terrific woman.

BB: We and a bunch of our Western Beat friends from L.A. did a showcase in '93 at the Wild Horse in Nashville, and we loved the experience and got a good buzz going on the band. So, in '95, the Zydeco Party Band started to crumble, which was my main source of income at the time. Jill and I were married two years, and starting to think about buying a home and starting a family. I asked her what she thought about moving to Nashville, and we decided we'd check it out. We had a few friends here, and I'd started writing some for Music Row magazine. I'd written for Music Connection in L.A. for 6 years, their Country Nightlife column which eventually I ended up calling the Western Beat column. Jim Bessman and I started splitting a page in Music Row, he'd do Gotham Gossip and I'd do Inside L.A..

But anyway, we were becoming disenchanted, and looking for a change. David Ross offered me a job as the Head of Sales and Marketing for Music Row Magazine. We rented a house in Sylvan Park [a beautiful down home neighborhood in town I've heard affectionately called the Songwriter Ghetto], sold everything we had, filled up the truck with drums and furniture and headed East.

PM: Small truck, seventeen footer.

BB: Yep, seventeen footer with a pickup truck on the back. We got here February 1st of '95.  continue

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