Bill Lloyd Talks About His New Album, the Beatles, and More On “All Mixed Up”
Nashville-based Bill Lloyd is perhaps best remembered as one half of the late 1980’s country-rock duo Foster and Lloyd which charted nine singles on the Billboard country charts over a three-year span.
His musical career has long straddled the line between country, rock, and power pop, all of which is on display in his new album Look Into It.
Bill and Jim Monaghan had a chance to catch up and talk about Bill’s new album Look Into It, the coming 60th anniversary of the Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show and more.
February 1964 and the Beatles
JIM MONAGHAN – We are coming up on the 60th anniversary this February, and I don’t have to tell you what that anniversary is. I know you know what it is, and I know where you were on that night of February 9, 1964. What do you remember about that night?
BILL LLOYD – I remember my mother coming up to my bedroom where I was doing whatever I was doing at the age of eight, and I can’t remember, but hanging out in my bedroom. And she says, oh, come on down, you need to see this. So it was really, if it weren’t for my mom, my cool mom getting me to come watch the show. And then she bought me the single “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” “I Saw Her Standing There” and brought it home to already. I was already into music I’d already bought, or she had bought me a Ricky Nelson album, because I loved seeing Ricky at the end of Ozzy and Harriet. And little did I know that that was James Burton on guitar back there, Joe Osborne on bass, but I already had a rock record. But the impact of the Beatles. Young people are just so tired of the people of our generation talking about it, but they just don’t know. They can’t really gather that, because there wasn’t a million outlets for music back then. How pervasive it was. What an impact it. Steve Van Zandt said, you know, they showed one know the show was on, and then the next day a million bands were formed.
JM – Lenny Kaye said to me once, I wanted to know what was going on underneath the hood. That was his reaction to it. And everything changed. And I think back, we had just had the assassination of President Kennedy about eleven weeks earlier, and it was almost as if they gave us permission, the Beatles did, to just be ourselves again.
BL – You couldn’t plan something like that. It just happened. The fact was, though, that it wasn’t just the event of them showing up with all those great songs and a new look and all that. It was also the fact that they grew and carried everybody with them, because it was only six or seven years before you go from “I Want To Hold Your Hand” to Abbey Road and the growth, the musical growth there. And no matter what everybody else was doing, they would absorb it and then put it back out into their thing. And they were leading the pack. They didn’t come up with every little innovation, but they absorbed it and worked it into their own thing. And they were a miracle, I think.
“Now and Then”
JM – What was your reaction to now and then when you heard,
BL – I knew the song from demos and stuff and sort of fan-based YouTube videos where people would, if. I don’t know, if anyone had leaked what the Beatles had done before, but they used that B section. The videos I saw early on, a few years ago, they had used that B section that got taken out. So it made me think, well, maybe there was something to. Maybe that was leaked. But the fact that they really reconstructed the song and they got Lennon’s voice so clear, that was the main thing. That just was the emotional tug of hearing his voice so clearly at the top of the song, which was never the case in any of the other things. I don’t think it’s the best of John’s songs, but on the other hand, it allowed Paul and Ringo and the families of John and George to tie a bow around everything and send off the Beatles in a meaningful way.
Look Into It
JM – Look Into It, Bill Lloyd’s twelfth solo album is out. And it’s everything that you would expect on an album from Bill Lloyd. It’s got hooks, it’s got Rickenbackers, it has catchy lyrics. There were two songs, though, that stand out, and I don’t want to call them novelty songs, because I think that kind of puts a spin on it that I don’t want to say, but they are a little quirky. And one is “The Number System.” I’m looking at the lyrics going, all right, one is that a, two is that b, and…no, because there’s only seven numbers. I thought, hmm, I wonder if it’s the notes of the song. Where did you come up with this?
BL – You know, here in Nashville, the number system is something that is sort of shorthand for studio musicians. You don’t have to write it. You put the key in a big circle, the key in a big letter at the top of the chart, and then you just put numbers down for the tonic scale of what the chord changes are. If you’re in the key of E then E would be one and A would be four, B would be five, a flat seven would be D. I just thought, what if you use that as the lyric and just do kind of a Ventures-on-steroids instrumental and then yell out or speak or yell out or whatever? I think it gets more intense as it goes, and I’m screaming of him by the end of the song, but, yeah, you’re just yelling out to the chord changes.
JM – The other song is the one that closes out the album, “Game Show Stars of the 70’s.” It is a cavalcade of everyone we watched in one form or another on some game show. And the way you close out the song lyrically, I think is hilarious.
BL – Well, you know what? I blame COVID, because during COVID there was a ton of watching game shows from. You stream stuff online, and you kind of go, oh, I haven’t watched The Match Game in 4 hours. Go back and watch that again. But what happened is I wrote this little instrumental on guitar, and I said, gosh, that sounds so cheesy. It kind of reminds me of, and I don’t mean this in a bad way, but it reminds me of some of those beautiful little jazzy things that NRBQ would know. And I kind of went, I can’t do this straight because I was really hearing all the stuff that eventually Jim Hoke played on it. And so I went over to his house and I played the acoustic guitar and did the recitation. We ran that through a filter to make it sound like it was coming through a tv over in the corner. And then he’s the one who added everything else, the marimba and the flute, even the bass and drums and everything. Jim just kind of built the track around it. I let him go. I did my bit, but I did write the melody and I did have the idea for it. I didn’t want to do it straight because I thought people might think, God, that’s cheesy. But now it’s got a joke.
The E Street Connection
JM – You play a lot of the instruments on many of the tracks here, but there are a couple of names that stand out, and one our listeners here at DHA will know is Gary Tallent, of course, the bass player for Bruce Springsteen’s East Street Band.
BL – Yeah. Gary’s a longtime Nashville resident and a good, good friend, I think. I mean, I’d like to think of him as a good friend. We’ve been playing music together for a long time. He played on Foster & Lloyd records back in 1990, and he played on the one we did, the reunion record we did in 2011. And then he’s been on my solo records. And, of course, he was the founding bass player in our band, the Long Players, until Bruce got busy again. He was our bass player, and he still plays with us. He’s just not all the time.
The Long Players
JM – I wanted to ask you about the long players, because this sounds like such a wonderful project, and I’m dying to get down to one of these shows. The next one that comes up is towards the end of the month. You’re doing one of the Beatles albums, Rubber Soul. What goes involved? What’s involved in putting one of those shows together?
BL – Well, first we have to decide, and then that’s a little democratic process of, you know, of us hemming and hawing and arm wrestling over what to do next. But once we decide that, then the guys give me a little time to go out and start to enlist people to be guest singers. And I try to really cast it as best as I can about who’s available. And I start making phone calls and just seeing who might be available to do these things. And sometimes, musically, I really do have some ideas that I can have a list of 20 people that I call that just aren’t available. It takes a while to cast these nights. And plus, if the word gets out early, then I’m inundated with calls of people who want to do it, and I have to kind of go, okay, well, hang on. But it’s fun. It’ll be 20 years in March that we’ve been doing this band.
For DHA listeners who want to get the new album, Look Into It, it’s on all the streaming platforms like Apple Music and Spotify and you can always go to BillLloydMusic.net as well.
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