Month: June 2009

Since a consultant recommended in January that Charlottesville City Schools close one elementary school, the schools have been putting the possibility to the public. As Superintendent Rosa Atkins explained at the outset of a meeting on Wednesday night at the South First Street Community Center, “We’ve known for some time that we need to discuss how we use our facilities. We have excess capacity in some buildings and overcrowding in others.”

City Schools Superintendent Rosa Atkins told residents and parents that in the eventuality of a high school closing, the school system has no intention of altering current class sizes.

The school system currently has six elementary schools from prekindergarten through fourth grade, an upper elementary for grades five and six, a middle school for grades seven and eight, and then the high school. Although CCS is open to other ideas, four concrete proposals have emerged: do nothing; close one elementary school; keep six elementary schools but make them extend through fifth grade, and create two separate middle schools for grades six to eight; or extend the elementary schools through fifth grade and make one large middle school. Altering the configuration of schools would also allow CCS to shift administrative offices and other programs to increase their efficiency. Each option for change is estimated to save CCS from $300,000 to $870,000 annually.

The lone parent at Wednesday’s meeting asked, “With closing one elementary school, how would that affect the number of students in our children’s classes?” Atkins assured her that in each scenario the school system had no intention of altering class sizes, which are currently well below state limits. When the parent asked about educational offerings at the current middle school, such as music or art, Atkins similarly assured her, “The programs we currently offer, we have no intention of taking them out.” Atkins further explained that if CCS returns to a two middle school system, as prevailed through the 1980s, “We want to ensure that we don’t revert to the previous configuration, where Walker was predominantly white, Buford predominantly black.”

Paul Vaughan of the nonprofit Public Housing Association of Residents mentioned that the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority was in the initial stages of redesigning all public housing in the city, a process that would likely conclude this fall and may affect the number of students in different parts of the school district. Vaughan said the simultaneous changes in housing and schools could be also “a real opportunity to redefine relationships.” The school board, meanwhile, will likely make a final decision about restructuring in December.

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Your name is James Wilson. More than 2,500 miles away from your family’s home in Ivy and with a few songs in your head, you’re learning what it means to be an outlaw.

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It’s 2004. You’re 19 years old, a graduate of Western Albemarle High School and a first-year student at Deep Springs College, a liberal arts and agriculture program with a total student body of 26 young men, situated on the border of Nevada and California. The nearest town is 40 miles away. “Gentlemen,” wrote Deep Springs founder L.L. Nunn to his students in 1923, “for what came ye into the wilderness?”

You’re not certain of the answer yet. You want to own a farm, maybe; you worked on the World Hunger Relief Farm in Waco, Texas, to prepare for work as an agricultural missionary. When your father convinced you to apply to college a year later, you told him that this was the only place you wanted to be.
 
Your father understood. You’re a seeker, he says. So are your five siblings—including your older brothers, Sam and Abe, who you’ve lost touch with recently. Sam is in New York City playing jazz; Abe is at architecture school in Maryland.  

The members of Sons of Bill, photographed at the home of singer James Wilson (front). The band (from left: bassist Seth Green, drummer Brian Caputo, pianist Abe Wilson and guitarist Sam Wilson) releases its new album, One Town Away, at The Paramount Theater on Friday, June 19 at 8pm.

And you? You’re in Deep Springs, where you deal with 100-degree days in the summer, shuffle irrigation lines, struggle when the baler breaks down. “Muscles and calluses came in abundance,” your alumni newsletter says of 2004. No fooling. Seek the wilderness, and ye shall find more wilderness. 

You don’t have much downtime. In the mornings, you read Proust and Heidegger; in the afternoons, you shovel shit. “The trick is making work feel like play,” reads the Deep Springs website, “and making play count twice.” You get along with your classmates—there you are in a school photo, front and center, broad shoulders yoking together two friends, eyes squinting out the sun. Still, you spend a lot of time working alone.
 
But there are songs in your head. Steve Earle. Hank Williams, Jr. A song your father sang to your mother—one that could make her tear up, even from the other room. It’s cryin’ time again, you’re gonna leave me. I can see that faraway look in your eyes. And then there are a few of your own, written in your head and committed to memory.
 
These songs aren’t like anything you’ve written before. In seventh grade, you thought in heavy metal; your first band, Butane Messiah, was named for the lighter you had with the picture of Christ on the side. In high school, it was bluegrass with the Free Union Farm Boys, playing bass and busking on the Downtown Mall.

A few years from now, it’ll be country. Some of the songs in your head will make up the first Sons of Bill record, A Far Cry From Freedom. They’ll win fans, lure you onto the road, sell loads of beer and albums during concerts. They’ll earn you the attention of Charlottesville music mogul Coran Capshaw, a deal with Red Light Management and a gig at the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in Tennessee. They’ll be good and, occasionally, great.

But a few of the songs you’re thinking about—your most important, a seeker’s songs, lyrics and melodies that will find their way onto Sons of Bill’s second album, One Town Away—aren’t finished yet. They approach the edges of the wilderness, look back at you, then scatter like coyotes, daring you to follow. And so you do.

Making Sons of Bill

Of course, you’re not James Wilson, and neither am I. Neither are his older brothers, Sam or Abe, nor the other two members of Sons of Bill—bassist Seth Green and drummer Brian Caputo. But to understand the band’s history—and, ultimately, the significance of One Town Away—it’s vital to know that Sons of Bill began with James Wilson.

During a break from Deep Springs College in 2005, James returned to Charlottesville to visit family and friends. He wound up on a porch with Green, whom he’d known since middle school. “He said, ‘I’m moving back in a year, and I want to start a country band. You want to play?’” says Green.

Green accepted. Soon after, during a trip to New York, James made the same offer to his oldest brother, Sam.

In the last year, Sons of Bill “toured from Louisiana to Kansas City, New York to Jacksonville,” says lead singer James Wilson (center, with Sam Wilson, left, and Seth Green, right). “We’ve been everywhere east of the Mississippi.” Days before its CD release gig, Sons of Bill traveled to Manchester, Tennessee, to perform at the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival.

“A couple months later, James said, ‘Sam’s going to move back—he wants to play with us,’” says Green. “In between, it was just like, ‘Is this going to be a real band, or is this fake? And what’s the difference between a real band and a fake band?”

An album, for starters. Sons of Bill’s second gig, during a Battle of the Bands event at University of Virginia, won the band three days of recording time at Crystalphonic Studios, where they recorded 2006’s A Far Cry From Freedom. For $900, the band (with former drummer Todd Wellons) bought two extra days of recording time, learned songs in the studio and mixed the album themselves.

“The first songs were all James,” says Green of Far Cry. “We threw two of Sam’s in there, but there wasn’t a lot of vetting…[I]t was just, ‘These are the songs we know; let’s play ’em.’” To date, Sons of Bill has sold more than 8,000 copies of the album during tours and concerts.

A real band also plays a few high profile shows, which came quickly after Far Cry was released. A year after Sons of Bill’s first gig—an opening slot for Monticello Road at Starr Hill Music Hall—the band returned to Starr Hill for a headlining set. Four months later, Sons of Bill opened the 2007 Fridays After Five season at the Charlottesville Pavilion. Before the year ended, Sons of Bill completed a month-long tour of U.S. military bases in the Pacific Ocean (which they blogged about for C-VILLE), and nabbed opening slots for the likes of Shooter Jennings and Robert Randolph.

During the spring of 2008, Sons of Bill signed a management deal with Coran Capshaw’s Red Light Management—the same firm responsible for handling the careers of Dave Matthews Band and, recently, platinum-selling country musician Tim McGraw and local pop act Parachute. By the time Sons of Bill reached its third anniversary show—a sold out gig at Fry’s Spring Beach Club, where Abe Wilson attended prom as a Western Albemarle junior—they were, indisputably, a “real band,” if occasionally a “real country band.”

James had distilled his voice to a mash of classic country’s prairie wind whine and the grit of modern Nashville updates like Drive-By Truckers. Sam and Abe had mastered the colloquial lingo of country and rock on guitar and keys, respectively. Drummer Brian Caputo, who currently records and tours with the band, rounded out the rhythm section with Green, a reliable, savvy bassist.

Perhaps the best summary of Far Cry and the concerts that followed comes straight from James’ lyrics for the album’s “Ballad of Middle-Aged Heartache.” Sons of Bill were a guaranteed “hellraisin’, heartbreakin’, take one shot then keep on takin’, hell-bent, heaven-sent, honky-tonk Saturday night.”

But there’s only so much hell to raise, so many hearts to break and shots to take before Saturday night just gets darker. Sons of Bill knew this because James knew this. And around the time that Sons of Bill began to record its second album, the outlaw in James Wilson found his way back to Virginia in the dark.

Making One Town Away

The members of Sons of Bill talk about One Town Away as their first album as a true group. It’s made up of songs that the band played together for as many as two years, collectively worried over and whittled down and finally committed to tape, rather than the other way around.

One Town Away sounds like more of a group effort, thanks to Jim Scott—a producer with six Grammy awards to his name for albums like Tom Petty’s Wildflowers, and acclaim for his work with bands like Whiskeytown and Wilco. In his best efforts, Scott blurs the double yellow lines that keep country and rock bands on opposite sides of the road so that bands like Sons of Bill barrel straight down the middle.

Then there’s the matter of songwriting. Unlike Far Cry, nearly every member of Sons of Bill takes his turn behind the wheel for One Town Away.

“I think I’ve been influenced a lot by James’ writing…I kind of cut off all the fat,” said lead guitarist Sam Wilson during an interview. Two of his songs—the title track, and “In the Morning”—appear on One Town Away. Bassist Green co-wrote “Never Saw it Coming” with a little help from James. Abe Wilson, the band’s most reserved member, makes his Sons of Bill songwriting debut with “Western Skies.”

For what came ye into the wilderness? It’s a problem that each song on One Town Away sets out to solve. But the songs written by Green and the two oldest Wilson brothers set off in different directions, and none of them return with an answer. Sam has melodies to spare, but articulates better on six strings than he does on paper. (Which isn’t an insult, if you’ve ever heard him play.) And while Abe Wilson’s “Western Skies” is as dark and bewitching as highway hypnosis, it’s a tune so wholly different in sound that one wonders whether it fits the album.

James Wilson’s eight songs on One Town Away are a different story. Collectively, they read like a first-person purgatory, where the radio plays old country music but old country music doesn’t function like it should any more. Here, they seem to say, is a land where nobody gets out of Folsom Prison. Everyone wears a long, black veil. We’ve all got the long gone, lonesome blues.

One of the last songs completed for One Town Away, “Joey’s Arm,” opens the album. Over a single, funereal organ note, James Wilson begins: “Joey’s arm has two tattoos./ The stars and bars, and ‘Born to lose.’” It’s a clever couplet, one that resurrects the weight and humor of classic country. Joey’s an outlaw, I think immediately. Joey goes walking after midnight. I bet he took a shot of cocaine and shot his woman down.

But Joey is too old—chewed up by heavenly stars and hellish bars and spat back into a modern wilderness he can’t quite comprehend. James sings on. “The South ain’t gonna rise again, but we’re holding out for Jesus./ Or so they say on AM radio.” And then—a last request before Sam Wilson delivers the lethal injection of guitar noise that finally lays poor Joey to rest: “Won’t someone turn on AM radio?”

In One Town Away, the comfortable clichés of country music fade like Joey’s tattoos. Take “Broken Bottles”: “The voices in my head are singing along/ telling me to be the next ex-lover to die in the gutter alone.” Or “The Rain”: “Twelve bars is just a prison when there’s nothing else left to sing.”

And in “Rock and Roll,” James sings of a woman who convinced him that “love could save [his] soul”; he counters that “country songs don’t end that way, and I don’t play rock ’n’ roll.” The song title is a real clunker, but that’s the point: What good do our guiding lights, musical or otherwise, do when the dark blows them out?

The answer, or the shadow of one, comes in One Town Away’s final song. After confronting the ghosts of Old Bocephus, Townes Van Zandt, whiskey and women—the balms of country music, if also the burdens—James Wilson confronts himself in the same light:

“Laying alone on your motel bed,
wondering where you changed along the way
from a little boy in Virginia
Who just wanted a chance to play.”

For the other members of Sons of Bill, their songs on One Town Away are first steps into country and rock music’s big, black void. But James Wilson did his time in the dark with nothing but the songs in his head, and still found his way home. Each of his songs on One Town Away are direction markers that lead from the center of this wasteland to a bit of light beyond its edges.

So, which way do we go? It’s time to ask the outlaw. And the man that came before him.

Making the outlaw

Bill Wilson calls all his kids “seekers.” The man is something of a seeker himself: Wilson is an associate professor of philosophical theology at the University of Virginia, as well as a program advisor for the Echols Scholars program (which gives “avid and aggressive learners” a chance to skip some required courses and pursue an interdisciplinary major). But he also knows that each of his sons sought something different from a young age.

Sons of Bill namesake Bill Wilson (with his son James, right) grew up in Charlottesville and played music at venues like The Prism and Shakey’s Pizza Parlor. “If they’re in town, we’ll see them at least once every week—we’re a very close family,” he says. “About 45 minutes into their visit, one of them will go to the closet, pull out one of my guitars and just start playing.”

The three oldest Wilson brothers were “always good friends, and did a lot together,” according to Wilson. Musically, however, “[t]hey all sort of went to their rooms and did their own things.” All three took piano lessons with the same instructor, but quickly pursued their musical interests down different roads.

“When Sam was 13, he suddenly wanted guitar lessons. So I started giving ’em to him.” Bill Wilson, who grew up in Charlottesville and played music at the Prism Coffee House and the long-gone Shakey’s Pizza Parlor, taught his oldest son a few chords, but “it wasn’t two weeks into those lessons when he wanted to play ‘Tears in Heaven.’”

“I said, ‘Sam, that’s got some tricky moves in it.’” Bill taught his son the tricks and, by the end of the night, Sam could play the song for his father. Properly.

“He corrected me,” laughs Bill Wilson. “And he was right.”

In high school, Sam took to heavy metal. His band, Catharsis, won a local battle of the bands at First Night in the ’90s. Of the three Wilsons in Sons of Bill, Sam was the only one who didn’t attend UVA; he studied classical guitar at James Madison University, and held down a weekly jazz gig in Harrisonburg before he moved to New York to tackle the big city jazz scene.

Bill refers Abe as both an artist and—like his mother, Barbara, a dermatologist—one of the scientists in the family. He also calls Abe “quiet,” but adds: “I think that his harmonies—he nails ’em. And the piano is just incredible.” Abe returned to the piano in college; he played with a honky-tonk band called Miller’s Folly. Like James, he graduated with a degree in religious studies from UVA; unlike James, he later attended the University of Maryland’s architecture school.

According to Bill, the brothers also took to different sports. “Sam is probably the best athlete in the family as far as team sports are concerned,” says Bill Wilson. (He says the same of Luke, the fourth Wilson brother and a musician as well.) “Sam was a great baseball player.” Abe sought out more isolated sports—“tennis and golf…cycling.” And James? “James didn’t really play [team] sports. Except, in high school, he was a wrestler.” And, he adds, James always loved the outdoors—hunting and fishing.

“So,” he summarized, “Abe was a single, non-team sport. Sam was team sports. James was team sports, but one-on-one.”

Well, what kind of team does that make Sons of Bill?

It needs to be said that Sons of Bill isn’t entirely James Wilson’s band. His idea, maybe—James was the one who wanted to start a country band when he returned from Deep Springs. But, musically, both Sam and Abe now speak the language better than their younger brother. They intuit James’ mood and lyrics, make his outlaw hymns universal the moment he calls for one of them to solo—often with a command to “break my heart.”

Yet the band needs James’ raw output. For Sons of Bill, it isn’t enough to dress up lyrics in second-hand flannel and alt-country chic; on One Town Away, each member sweats kerosene and swings matchsticks for James Wilson’s words, sets fire to the old country scraps that he drags back from the badlands. They seem to know that the heart of Sons of Bill resides in James Wilson, and that James’ own heart resides on the outskirts.

So, in April, that’s where I went to find him.

On a tract of land between UVA and St. Anne’s-Belfield, there’s a sort of fort—a last outpost of a house—where James lives. When I arrive, he’s making a massive plate of scrambled eggs; I find out later that the eggs came from chickens that his roommate, Joel, kept in the basement while he built a set of coops. James offers me a cup of coffee, then leads me out onto an enormous porch to talk.

The previous resident left a load of furniture in the house, including a cracked, sunken sofa and the gigantic American flag that it sits beneath. But James’ stamp of approval is on the room. Several guitars sit nearby, both in and out of their cases; a rifle stretches its length across a table. Above a record player in the corner is a poster of Deep Springs College and the mountains that surround it on all sides.

I ask James Wilson for his thoughts on the last year, from signing with Red Light Management to recording One Town Away. “We didn’t want to be a hype band,” explains James. “We just wanted to hit the road, and gain fans, and really work on making the new record. So we toured from Louisiana to Kansas City, New York to Jacksonville. We’ve been everywhere east of the Mississippi.”

“It’s been an amazing couple of years for us, but it’s also been really tough,” says James. “Tough with relationships, tough financially. Making the decision to become a full-time band…there are a lot of hardships that come with that.” (In a move that may help the band retain more profits from record sales, Sons of Bill will distribute One Town Away through a Nashville-based independent distribution company called Thirty Tigers.)

We talk a bit about how the band spends downtime. “Sam and Brian are huge football fanatics…Abe still does a lot of designing, artwork…” Green is “really into production,” and working on a solo album. And Caputo drums with other local musicians, including Ted Pitney, Sarah White and Peyton Tochterman.

“I hunt when I can,” says James. “Mostly out of economic necessity.” In the early days of Sons of Bill, when he lived with Sam off of 29 South, James bagged four deer in one season; the meat lasted the brothers all summer. “I thought we were gonna sprout antlers by the end of it,” he says with a laugh.

Other times, he reads—not widely, but deeply. The same copy of The Sound and the Fury (“At least once a year”) and The Book of Job. “Those inexhaustible stories,” he says. “You could read those forever, and never plum them.” The musicians he holds in high esteem make records that are similarly bottomless. “Guys like Tom Petty, Steve Earle, and Bruce [Springsteen]. And there’s not much of that going on right now, you know?”
 
Near the end of our interview, James and I talk about one of his favorite albums—Steve Earle’s second, 1987’s Exit Zero. Despite being “totally passé, production-wise” (the late ’80s brought a bit too much neon to country music production), Wilson thinks that the songs stand up over time: “His focus was just on writing timeless, great songs. Rock songs, country songs.”

Earle’s final track on the album, “It’s All Up to You,” is one of the great closing statements on a rock album; it passes a troubadour’s torch, but not before extinguishing it and daring the next generation to find a light. “Ain’t no candle in the window,” sings Earle. “You’ve got to find your own way home.”

For what came ye into the wilderness? Well, the wilderness changes—gets cut down by some sharp-witted outlaw for one generation, then grows back and becomes a home to new beasts for the next. One Town Away is as much about plotting the new path for our generation as it is an acknowledgment that, in the end, the wilderness outlives us; the best we can hope for is to meet a person that knows it well enough to send us through the thick of it to the other side. I leave James Wilson on his porch, with his gun on the table and his guitars on the floor, and start to make my way out of the woods.

Who: Paul Long, 59

Where: Born and raised in Philadelphia. Moved to Charlottesville 11 years ago.

Independent Paul Long has announced his run for a seat on City Council. On November 3, Long will face fellow Independent candidate Bob Fenwick, and Democratic nominees Dave Norris and Kristin Szakos.

What do you do: “I have two jobs at UVA. Both of them are not professional jobs. During the day I work as a transport, I am one of the people who take patients down for X-rays, EKGs, MRIs, and I have a part-time job as a patient companion/sitter.”

Why: Two issues concern him the most. First, drug use should be decriminalized in the state of Virginia. Second, the Charlottesville Transit Service is good, but could be better. “I would have all the bus routes operating on Sundays, as well as legal holidays. Life goes on and there are still things to do on Sundays and legal holidays.”

Why now: “Why not make the effort and bring my opinions and viewpoints out to the public to consider?”

Why Independent: “I have been a life-long Democrat. I have a problem with the caucus system. I would like to see an open primary for local candidates as well. I think the caucus system discourages people from participating.”

Charlottesville’s number one challenge: “Mayor Dave Norris and others have called for a discussion about race, which I think is important, but I also think that there is the need for a discussion about class differences in this city. I do think they exist.”

What do you bring to the table: “Charlottesville prides itself on being a world-class city, and Charlottesville is a good town, but I think that Charlottesville has to outgrow just being a college town. I think Charlottesville should be actively enticing new businesses to come in the city.”

C-VILLE welcomes news tips from readers. Send them to news@c-ville.com.