The Two Bills

Last Friday, multi-talented entertainer/engineer Bill Beverley and I finally joined “lead guitar” forces for a Moog Engineer power-jam.

Bill Beverley and I work together, sometimes pretty closely, but I generally keep my musical lantern under a hood whilst pulling down my paycheck (having learned years ago that the admixture of rock and roll with aerospace engineering is not without real professional risks).  Eventually Bill got wind of my musical background, and obtained the full briefing, while I also got filled in on his activities. 

Bill Beverley

Bill B. has led and/or fronted a few bands in the LA/Long Beach area, gigging most recently with Cocteau and Black Market Smile. He also maintains a parallel career as a minor game-show legend with successful runs as a contestant on Hollywood Squares and The Newlywed Game, and a possible upcoming appearance on Million Dollar Money Drop.

Game show laurels notwithstanding, electric guitar is Bill Beverley’s primary entertainment focus.  Until recently, he was almost exclusively an electric guitarist, favoring a hard-rock and/or heavy metal style, but also with a lot of more sedate, acoustic influences. 

Then, recently, Bill B. got the unplugged bug, and before long picked up his first stage-ready acoustic guitar.  Spurred by that event, he and I decided it was time to get together and test out our common ground.

The urgency ticked up a notch when Bill B. accepted a long-term assignment to Bremen, Germany to work on the Airbus A350-1000.  So it was time to stop talking and start rocking. 

We had kicked around a few ideas, but with time running out, we settled on the last possible day and decided to meet up in my hangar at Torrance Airport.  It was after work on a Friday, the day before Bill B. flew to Germany.  Bill’s charming wife, Ashley (constituting the fairer half of this game-show power duo), came along to witness the whole affair. 

Ashley, owing to the circumstances of her birth, is an absolute metal maniac, and proved remarkably receptive to the rock-and-roll meanderings of the two Bills.  As long as we kept things on a headbanging level, that is.  When we strayed from that path, we got a cooler reception.  But more on that later.  So, built-in audience, and definitely a refreshing change from the usual eye rolling that you might expect when somebody’s significant other comes to band practice.

The original plan had been to do an acoustic jam.  So of course I brought my full electric rig, and so did he.

Bill B. unloaded and plugged in his massive Line 6 with 4x12 cabinet and then unlimbered his custom Schechter.  I had the home-field advantage, having arrayed my sound reinforcement gear the night before, with the wall of speaker cabinets in the middle of the hangar, facing the lounge.  So I just powered up my Mesa-Boogie Dual Rectifier through Don’s old 2x12 cab, and tuned up briefly with my Nashville B-Bender Telecaster, before changing over to my Martin D-1 acoustic, which I stuck with for the rest of the session.  The acoustic-plus-electric texture is extremely flexible and things sounded good right out of the box.

I opened the proceedings, leading us through a warm-up version of “Sweet Jane” by the Velvet Underground.  Bill Beverley hadn’t heard it, and I was faking it, but it broke the ice.

Being engineers, we had exchanged autofiltered song list spreadsheets well before the session, but we hadn’t really nailed down any surefire material, except for a vague intention to try out “Across the Universe.”  This was a song which I had never played, but was thoroughly familiar with as a dyed-in-the-wood Beatles fanatic. 

Bill Beverley, inspired by the 2007 film Across the Universe, had learnt the film version of the song, and also had the tablature in his “acoustic guitar phone book.”  This ponderous tome was a phonebook-sized collection of tablature which Bill had brought along.  Once Bill had produced this artifact, songs were flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup.

After a few runs through Across the Universe, we hit our stride.  Bill showed me the chord changes, and I already knew the melody, but the song features a few bars in 5/4 time, which threw me at first until Bill demonstrated.  I picked up the introductory acoustic line pretty easily from the tablature, and did the vocal mostly from memory, supplemented by squinting at the phone book. 

A solo acoustic arrangement would have been historically accurate, though not too exciting.  However, the electric-plus-acoustic really made the whole sound pretty gorgeous.

Bill is a very fluid, technical guitar player, and very adept at getting the sound he wants from his instrument and amplifier.  This is an area that has always been a challenge for me.  Usually I just plug in, grimace, and twist knobs until it sounds good enough.  So one of the things that was fun playing with Mr. Beverley was how easily we moved between good sounding sonic landscapes.  That flexibility in turn opened doors for types of songs that would not usually hold much interest for me. 

Bill Fischer

Unfortunately I forgot to turn on my recording device, and took no notes, but here is an approximate list of the songs covered over the next hour or so:

Sweet Jane [The Velvet Underground]
Freebird [Lynyrd Skynyrd]
Across the Universe [The Beatles]
Silent Lucidity [Queensryche]
Angie [The Rolling Stones]
Run-Around [Blues Traveler]
Hold My Hand [Hootie and the Blowfish]
Sympathy for the Devil [The Rolling Stones]
Black Hole Sun [Soundgarden]
Down in a Hole [Alice in Chains]
Sweet Child o' Mine [Guns ‘N’ Roses]
Over the Hills and Far Away [Led Zeppelin] 
Wonderwall [Oasis]

Run-Around and Hold My Hand were mid-90s staples that I really didn’t get into at the time, but which were fun to play.  However, Ashley was definitely not impressed, and we of course try to please the crowd.  Mrs. Beverley being the die-hard metal head, it was fun to play up the the heavy side of the material in Bill’s book.

At some point I turned on my leslie speaker effect (on my old Quadraverb GT, through Vic’s Peavey bass combo amp), which led us into stuff like Soundgarden and Alice in Chains.

Alas, before we knew it, the time had flown.  We chatted a while in the chilly wind out on the airport ramp, and then Bill and Ashley headed out for Sushi, and thence to Germany.

It was a fun session, slightly rough due to the unrehearsed nature of the material, but with all kinds of potential there.  Add more musicians and stir.