For Billy

Billy Conway was from Owatonna, a southern Minnesota town that gets its name from an Ojibwe word for “straight”—which is what the area’s indigenous inhabitants called the river that runs through the town before white settlers started renaming everything in the mid-1800s.

Yale recruited Billy to play hockey, which he did for all four years. He also served as team captain despite being injured senior year.

Yale could have ruined Billy the way it ruined so many of us, luring us with the carrot of filthy lucre down dark, fetid tunnels of craven careerism. But Billy was rescued from a life of crime by music, which like all truly salvific human activities is also a fellowship. That fellowship pivotally manifested in Billy’s life during our sophomore year, when he was one of seven unindicted co-conspirators residing in a whole-floor suite at Calhoun College (notably including his lifetime pal Jim Fitting, also ’79)—which in my humble opinion should be ranked right up there with Harvard’s Gore-Jones pairing.

Of course, if you’d prophesied back in ‘77 that Billy would actually play drums as his life’s vocation, that he would actually excel at doing so, and that his obituary would actually appear in g*td*m f*ck*ng Rolling Stone, I would’ve assumed that you were as high as the rest of us—if not a tad higher.

This is not to take anything at all away from Billy’s artistry. On the contrary, it is to give him proper tribute. Because, from where I was sitting at the time, Billy was hardly playing drums at all. Hell, the kit I got my son for his 12th birthday was four times bigger than the one Billy used. And my son beat it ten times more frequently and ferociously than Billy ever beat his.

But Billy was a true artist who wasn’t gonna drum anything that didn’t need drumming. In fact, he was almost religious about not overplaying—because his mission wasn’t to call attention to himself. It was to focus his attention on that to which attention was due. This is a very fine mission indeed.

I personally conjecture that Billy managed to avoid the potentially toxic distortions of his Billy-identity that the rest of us so easily fall prey to (bc really who doesn’t want to be recognized as the Successful Ivy Leaguer or Virtuosic Rocker or Noted Whatever?) by a great anchor of character that few of us are wise enough to wish for, but that he had in spades: Billy Conway’s soul was not polluted by even a nanosmidgen of ego-greed. He was generous of spirit at a level that I can only describe as genetic, because it seems to have been wired right into the very stuff of his being. And that greedlessness not only kept him from professional temptation. It also made him the best friend anyone could want.

Billy lived the kind of great life only a great soul can live. He didn’t merely march to the beat of a different drummer. He was the different drummer.