The Ballad of Bill Fox
In March, I answered a call from an unknown number, and on the other end of the line was a ghost. If anyone knows anything about the musician Bill Fox — “one of my most reluctant heroes,” according to Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy; “one of the most important artists of our day,” CMJ declared back in 1997 — it’s that he’s a smoky-voiced, harmonica-playing phantom who has never given a substantive interview in four decades of making music. “I don’t want the attention,” Fox told the Plain Dealer in 2009 after an intrepid journalist tracked him down having a cigarette outside the building in Cleveland where he worked as a telemarketer. “I don’t want a story. With utmost respect, I don’t want you to write anything.”
Fox has proven so averse to giving interviews, in fact, that the most detailed account of his music and life is a massive 2007 story in The Believer in which the writer Joe Hagan fails to make any contact with his subject. But through interviews with friends and family, Hagan draws a portrait of a somewhat tragic figure: isolated, inebriated, and allergic to the kinds of self-promotion necessary to make it in the music business, a guy who torpedoed every opportunity that came his way. The Believer article was a rarity in music journalism: a piece of writing that changed the course of a subject’s career. Listener interest shot up, and before long, Fox was once again playing small bar shows in Ohio and releasing records. Still, the stubborn media silence continued unabated.
Making an interview request to someone like this is a ludicrous act. But I decided to try after hearing “Terminal Way,” the first single of Fox’s new album, Resonance, which had grabbed me in a manner that no other music had all year. Fox has a tendency to do that. His sound — Dylanesque coffeehouse folk songs delivered with a glistening power-pop sheen — commands your attention in the staggering way that only an acoustic-based track can. This is the contradiction of Bill Fox: As little as he wants to be known, his music makes people demand to know more about him. No one is happy with the arrangement.
Even after I was told by Fox’s friend M Ross Perkins, another Ohio-based musician, that Fox was willing to do an interview, I still didn’t imagine I’d ever hear from him. This was a guy, after all, whom a record executive in the Believer story described as “a temperamental recluse who never returns phone calls.” But a few days later, there he was on the phone, as promised.
“Hey, good afternoon to you,” Fox said. He was ready to talk.
Being a musician who never gives interviews — or tours, or uses social media, or keeps music digitally accessible, or keeps records in print, or has a manager or a publicist — is simultaneously a brilliant marketing strategy and an awful one. Rejecting the traditional rules of the game challenges every non-artist within the extended music industry (including journalists) to answer the question of what it is, exactly, that they do — whether their relationship to the music itself is symbiotic at best or parasitic at worst.
At a certain point, though, it’s also a distraction. A musical myth like Fox’s threatens to dwarf the literal music. But this has never happened with Fox, because, despite his hermetic reputation preceding him, the legend is backed by its weight in musical gold. Other musicians seem especially mystified by what he’s able to put together with the plainest instrumental building blocks and the simplest turns of phrase.
“It’s full of contradiction, this mix of despair and hope,” Nada Surf’s Matthew Caws told me, “like a cage with a crack of light or something.” Snail Mail’s Lindsey Jordan got into Fox’s catalog recently, at a time when she felt her own love of music being tested — a byproduct of her art suddenly becoming a job, a business. The first track from Fox’s 1998 album, Transit Byzantium, “From a Dark Night,” became something of a born-again indie-rock baptism for her. “He’s talking about being able to smell again,” Jordan told me, “and it sounds cheesy as fuck, but I was listening to that song, and I literally felt like it was happening to me as I was listening to it. Like my nostrils were clearing of the proverbial snot of jadedness or something.”
But cult fandom alone doesn’t pay the bills. Over the years, Fox has supported himself through what he refers to as “phone hustling” — telemarketing — and when he cold-called me, I realized that despite his unreachable status, contacting people this way was kind of what the guy did. “I’ve talked for hours like this,” he told me. “I’m not holding the phone up to my head. I got a headset on that’s wireless.”
Fox, 59, converses in an aw-shucks Midwestern accent, his speaking voice as raspy as his singing one. He’s polite, attentive, and generous with his time, ultimately spending more than three hours across two calls talking with me about a variety of subjects that he’s never really gotten into with a reporter before. He coughs and clears his throat a lot.
Not far from where he lives now, Fox grew up in a suburb of Cleveland, with a father who was a quality-control specialist for a dairy and a mother who was a schoolteacher until she quit to raise their four children — the American Dream on paper. But like all families, the reality was more complicated; Fox’s parents would divorce before he was out of high school.
As a child, Fox was exposed to music through his mom’s folk and traditional records: the Kingston Trio, the Clancy Brothers, “Puff, the Magic Dragon.” To this day, he adores The Sound of Music soundtrack. “Every now and then I’ll scoop it up on whatever streaming platform,” he said. “I love that shit.”
Teenage Fox had an electric guitar without an amp and soon started playing music with his younger brother, Tommy, who made a percussion instrument out of an oversize suitcase from their father’s days as a traveling salesman. “Tommy would just hit this thing with spoons,” Fox said, “and I would just strum this electric guitar up close to the tape recorder and sing. And we had a ball.”
Adding Ken Hall on bass, they became the Mice, a trio that was like a heartland edition of the Buzzcocks, with Bill’s snarling vocals and Tommy’s animalistic drumming making a song like “Not Proud of the USA” a credibly dangerous statement in Reagan’s America. The chorus of that song — “Dad, I’m not proud of the U.S.A.” — was certainly not designed to thrill the boys’ right-wing father, who lost an ankle in the Korean War.
The Mice started to pick up momentum, particularly in the Midwest, where they became a particular influence on Robert Pollard of Guided by Voices. The story told by Tim Rossiter, Fox’s longtime friend and former manager, is that before a Guided by Voices gig in the early ’90s, Pollard vaulted himself into the room yelling, “I heard Bill Fox is here! Is Bill Fox here?” Pollard, who would eventually ride the wave of the Ohio scene to rock-and-roll immortality, insisted Fox come onstage for an impromptu performance of the Mice song “Little Rage.” “Pollard’s hammering him,” Rossiter remembered, “like, ‘How do you write songs? What do you do? How do you do it?’”
The first big test for the Mice was a planned U.S. and European tour — but on the morning they were set to leave, Bill canceled the whole thing, leading to the breakup of the group. Fox told me he just didn’t feel attached to the band’s music at that point and wanted to move forward with new material. In the Believer article, Tommy said he didn’t speak to his brother for two years after that. (Tommy turned down an interview request for this article.)
To this day, Fox has no regrets about “dissolving” the band. It ushered in a fruitful period when his songwriting rapidly matured into the sound he’s most renowned for today — songs like “Lonesome Pine” and “My Baby Crying,” which feel so elemental that it seems they must be aping some standard from the past, except you’ll never come up with which one. “When he started really writing songs after the Mice,” said Rossiter, “at some point I just realized, This guy seems to be one of the great songwriters — like an important songwriter. And I really wanted the world to know about it.”
Despite Fox’s renown for torching opportunities, Rossiter and Fox worked hard to get labels’ attention in the ’90s, to no avail. Eventually, they decided to self-release his debut album, Shelter from the Smoke, in 1997 and see what happened. The 73-minute collection ran the gamut of what Fox was capable of, from full-band tracks to homemade 4-track recordings. (You can hear staticky TV mutterings in the background of the song “Sara Page.”) CMJ, which had substantial alt-rock authority at that time, called it the “secret record of the year.” For Rossiter, it was vindication that he wasn’t nuts: “I just felt like, Oh my God, we were right.”
In 1998, Fox released Transit Byzantium and got the attention of Sire Records executive Seymour Stein, who was famous for signing bands like the Ramones and Talking Heads. Fox traveled to New York to play a set for Stein, and he “really blasted him,” Rossiter said. “You could tell there was this intensity of, There’s the fucking record industry. I’ll let him have it.” But a deal never materialized. Fox didn’t want to keep traveling to New York; he didn’t want to record an album in Nashville, as Stein suggested. He stopped returning phone calls, and the momentum “withered,” as Fox remembered.
When I asked Fox why he dropped out right when he had gotten so close, he paused for a few beats, thinking about it. “I think it goes to the fact that I don’t want to be such a successful artist that a record company depends on me to keep writing in an obligatory way,” he said. “That’s where I was afraid — I don’t want to subject myself to that kind of thing, because I don’t think it would be best for what I do. For my temperament and my personality, how I make art, it’s just not going to work.”
Around this time, Fox stopped playing music altogether, even living without a guitar. He described that period as “one of those things” in which music took a back seat to his focus on the “challenge just to survive.” “Maybe I’m dysfunctional or something,” Fox said. “I have so much respect for everybody that keeps a solid job, works nine to five — they’re good spouses, they raise kids. Those people are heroes to me, man. Those are the individuals that I admire the most.”
As I wrote my first email to Joe Hagan, I felt guilty. The writer — now a special correspondent for Vanity Fair — had done everything possible in 2007 to secure an interview with Bill Fox, including traveling to Cleveland, and came away empty-handed. I was afraid that showing up in his inbox almost 20 years later would come across as smugly casting ashore as if to say, “That wasn’t so hard, was it?” But Bill Fox fans are a kind of a tribe, and Hagan was as gracious as could be. “I’m glad that you got ahold of him,” he told me. “I guess he’s softened up over time.”
In some sense, the story Hagan ultimately filed for The Believer has its own fans in part because he didn’t have access to Fox. Within the confines of Fox’s life and music, his absence only served to underline the ghost story in red ink. “The resistance and the reluctance to talk to me,” Hagan said, “are baked into what he was doing, into what’s special about the music. The isolation that you hear in that music is real.”
Hagan pieced together extensive details of Fox’s life largely through Tim Rossiter and Tommy Fox, including some information that wanders into questionable ethical terrain, at least for an artist who had expressed a desire to not be a public figure. There’s candid information about Bill’s struggles with manic depression, including his “history of hospitalization.” At one point, the article details a public breakdown Fox had in 1993, which was reported on in the Plain Dealer with the headline “Wounded Man Waves Knife, Shouts about the Antichrist.”
Fox’s reasoning for not wanting any press in the aughts is that he was working indirectly for the police — telemarketing on behalf of the National Crime Prevention Council, selling advertising in McGruff the Crime Dog brochures. He felt — and still feels — that his job was jeopardized by his name being associated with his music. (Out of respect for Fox’s wishes, The Believer chose not to run the story online.)
It’s unclear how legitimate a concern that ever really was. What kind of business would hold it against their employee for being an artist in their spare time? But it is true that the article presented a picture of a sometimes erratic individual — the type of person who would respond to his car breaking down on the side of the highway by just leaving it there for good. Fox told me with some lingering frustration that he was “canned” a few months after the story was published. “I’m not suggesting for sure that it was because of that Believer article,” he said, “but I think there’s circumstantial evidence that it was, if you want to know the truth.”
At this point, though, Fox said it’s all “water under the bridge,” and Hagan, for his part, is journalistically at peace with the saga. “It felt like I couldn’t withhold that without being dishonest about what I knew,” he said in reference to the breakdown. “And it spoke to the larger story.”
Not long after the Believer article, amid a revival of interest in his work, Fox started playing music again. When I asked what brought him back, expecting some philosophical answer, he told me in complete seriousness that it was because some friends told him one night that he could get $150 to play at a bar. “I’m like, ‘Hell yeah, I’ll do this gig,’” he said. With just a few hours’ notice, the place became packed. (“I don’t know, because of cell phones and Facebook or whatever.”) That kind of show — with people talking and doing their own thing just as much as watching — is the type of environment where Fox feels most at home. “To me, that’s heaven,” he said.
The creative wheels started turning again, which led to a new album, One Thought Revealed, in 2012, and a wider release of an album previously issued on cassette, Before I Went to Harvard, in 2017. But without any of the usual tools of promotion at his disposal, attention started to wane again over time — which bothered Fox more than you might expect.
“When Before I Went to Harvard came out in 2017,” Fox said, “do you know how many reviews from that record were written? I read one review for that record, in a local community newspaper in a suburb of Cleveland. One review.”
Fox’s proclivity toward isolation has made for a compelling folktale, no doubt, but it was belied by moments like this when it became clear he at the very least wanted people to listen to his music. And by taking such a private path, he’s lost control of his narrative, which, in the hands of others, runs the risk of turning him into some kind of magical zoo animal. Not everyone in his orbit is thrilled with the perception.
“I don’t really dig that approach,” Doug Gillard, the longtime Guided by Voices guitarist, told me. “The intellectual approach of, like, they’ll watch Daniel Johnston, stroking their chin, going, ‘It’s great. He’s really pure.’” Gillard, who plays guitar on “Wildflower,” a track from Resonance, insisted with some exasperation that it’s not like Fox is some idiot savant who produces these gems without effort. “He’s super-talented, and he has a gift for songwriting,” Gillard said. “He also works at it, too.”
I never got a straight answer from Fox about why he was suddenly willing to talk. But I suspect it’s something of a concession — a belated pound of flesh to appease the beast and achieve the bare minimum of what he deserves. In general, he still has virtually no industry support. Resonance was put out by a friend of Fox’s by the name of “BillMike,” who told me he “would be hesitant” to even call his Eleventh Hour Recording Company project a record label, despite having put out over a dozen LPs by now. (“I’ve never really tried to sell them,” BillMike said.) But music doesn’t exist without an audience, and so far there appears to be no effective way to cut out the corporate middleman in reaching one. So Fox put on his headset and reluctantly gave me a call.
“Can you blame him for anything?” asked Perkins, who’s been helping Fox with publicity. “I can’t. I mean, wanting to be reclusive, being repulsed by an industry that wants to commodify your art, being repulsed by an industry that’s obsessed with images and how your face looks and what your body looks like. Is anything irrational about being like, ‘I’m good on that’? If anything, it’s a little irrational to be like, ‘Let me gobble that life up.’”
Resonance still has some punk spirit hidden between the cardboard. Despite being billed as a “new” album, all of the songs were made before 2010, and as early as 1990 in the case of “Wildflower.” But this has always been how Fox operates: Shelter from the Smoke and Transit Byzantium, he reminded me, were filled with old recordings. They made sense to him coming out when and how they did, the same way this collection does. “It’s contemporarily meaningful to me,” he said of Resonance. “And I believe it will be contemporarily meaningful to people that hear it — that are willing to listen to it.”
The first time I talked to Fox, I was caught completely flat-footed. Without an interview scheduled, I had felt no need to write a list of questions, so I just had to wing it. I was worried he would never speak to me again — God, what if he never spoke to a reporter again after this? — so question after question just blurted out of me. Before letting him go, I was searching for some broader question for a musician who spit on the music industry — for a man who could have been a star if he had just wanted to be. What came out was: “Do you regret anything from your career?” He seemed to think the very premise of the question preposterous.
“I don’t really think of anything as a career,” he said, almost laughing. “I just think of it as the music itself — what music that I’ve made — and just life itself, without just the day-to-day responsibilities of life itself. All the fascinations with life and all the troubles and tribulations that occasionally show themselves to all of us, in a sense. But I don’t think of it objectively as some kind of career whatsoever. Did I answer your question?”