The
Collective Spirit: An Elegy for Bill Doss Mark Mangini
On July 30th 2012, Bill Doss,
founding member of the Elephant 6 Collective, The Olivia Tremor Control, and A
Sunshine Fix, passed away due to circumstances his family is not releasing to
the public. While the cause of death is frankly
none of my business, the pain it inflicted still lingers, months later, the way
any death of someone you care about does. Why is this? I remember feeling
sad briefly when Elliott Smith died, but more in a wow-too-bad-but-that’s-really-not-a-shocker
kind of way. I met and spoke to Bill a
handful of times over the years, but never enough to even pretend that we knew
each other. We weren’t buds, by any
stretch of the imagination. He was just
a sweet guy with a big heart and an even bigger belief in the power of pop
music to save our souls, should we only be able to find that perfect
harmony.
I should begin this piece with a couple
of disclaimers. First of all, Bill is at
least half responsible for two of my favorite records of all time, both the
Olivia’s Dusk at Cubist Castle and their Black Foliage Animation
Music Vol. 1. Over the past 12 years
I have probably listened to each of these records well over a thousand times,
and each time my appreciation grows for those responsible. Secondly, Bill’s post-Olivias career vastly pales in comparison with that of Will Cullen Hart, Bill’s main
partner in crime in the OTC and founder of Circulatory System. I was always a Lennon man myself, and the
oft-employed comparison here stands true: I’ll take Will’s tape-manipulated
experimentation any day over Bill’s perfectly crafted songwriting. It’s really only a matter of taste, and the unfuckwithable combination of the two is what made the
Olivia’s (much like the Beatles’ best) albums so special.
So why does Bill’s death feel so
immediate to me, a 28-year-old man? I
guess it has something to do with the 14-year-old me sitting in my bedroom in
Brackenridge, hovering over my four-track tape machine and decrying the fact
that nothing I was putting down to tape sounded anything like my Nirvana albums. My guitar sounded too much like, well, a
guitar, and nothing like whatever Kurt played on his records. I tried to record drums and they sounded
nothing like the stomp of Dave Grohl’s atom-smashing
kick. They just sounded like a
14-year-old kicking a pedal. I assumed I
wasn’t good enough; no—that I just didn’t have the right equipment, the right
room. I had some stuff but it wasn’t
good enough. I needed better equipment
to make me sound better. I just had to
buy more expensive stuff.
Which is why hearing the Olivia’s Dusk
at Cubist Castle at 17 was such a revelatory moment. All of the guitars, saws, harmonies, horns,
and handclaps sounded exactly as they should, with no slick Albini treatments obscuring the sources beyond comprehension. And yet the result sounded even better (more
humane?) than all those slick records—they sounded like my recordings! Well, maybe not exactly like mine, eh hem,
but similar in the fact that you can literally hear some guys sitting in room,
playing real instruments (just like me) and recording directly onto tape
machines (just like me!). The clouds
part: it’s not that I needed better stuff to make better recordings, I needed
to write better songs to make better recordings.
Which
is where this whole Bill Doss thing should begin. The Olivias (and
the greater Elephant 6 Collective) melded the ‘60s pop lexicon with a fiercely
‘90s do-it-yourself ethos to create a sound that any group of creative friends,
anywhere in the world, could have created had they sacrificed the trappings of
a typical adult life in order to live out their ultimate dreams and creative
passions, giving all of themselves collectively in sacrifice to the songs and
to each other. Bill is the perfect
encapsulation of this spirit. Not the
greatest singer, not the most proficient guitarist, Bill had a passion for
songwriting and for the recording of sound that more than made up for any
technical deficiencies some non-believer could point out. Combine this passion with a few like-minded friends, and you have the makings of a group of people who didn't believe they could save the world with pop music, but who believed they could at least save their own souls.
In
a broader sense, Bill, the Olivias, and the entire E6
community will forever stand as the possibility of what life could entail:
living the way you want to live with your friends and the people who love you,
doing exactly what you want to be doing. This totally bucks the concepts we’re force-fed everyday: things like
giving up your childhood dreams, getting a career, and trading in your passions
for raising a family and doing a job that you hate. Bill/the Olivias/E6
as a whole stand in stark contrast to all of the conventional things we
secretly don’t want, like a paisley shirt in a sea of starched white collars,
politely and constantly reminding us that there is always a more beautiful way,
that dreams don’t have to be fantasies, and that when everyone else seems to be
against you, your passions, friends, and loved ones are the only things you can
truly fall back on—and consequently, the only things that really matter anyway.
And
so for that reminder Bill, thank you, forever and ever. Pleasant dreams.
Mark Mangini is an editor at The New Yinzer.
