The Ballad of Little Billy

When we first moved our band “Apathy” from Houston to Boulder in July of 1975 we arrived to find that in the few months I had been away disco had hit and a lot of clubs had eliminated live music and replaced them with
DJ's. There were a lot of bands that were better than we were and were locals, so it was impossible to find gigs, especially since we didn't have a clue about how to present ourselves. We had no manager or agent. We were just a bunch of hippies who wanted to play music. We ended up living on the street and giving plasma twice a week to keep our equipment in storage. Luckily, the owner let us rehearse there. We also didn't have a clue about how to survive on the street. We were sleeping in old gold mines in the hills or on nice nights in Chateau Park. I had met Billy when I was first in Boulder in 74. He was a dangerous man and had killed a guy so I kept my distance until he saved me form getting robbed one night. He taught us how to dumpster dive and how to follow the milkman around and only take one item from any given house. Tips for survival! Anyway, he's gone now but without him we may well have never gotten the band working. He was a real person and everything in the song is true!