I used to be house- and band-mates with a couple of guys who worked at a used record store. One day someone left a whole box of old skateboarding magazines at the store, so they brought them home. In one of them, there was a letter to the editor from a fifteen-year-old kid who called himself Billy Awesome, going off about how much he loved Black Sabbath and hated Metallica. For some reason (puff, puff, pass??
) we found the letter hilarious, and I decided I would start a band inspired by the kid's name. It was "Billy Awesome & the Billy Awesomes," and the idea was, anyone who
played with Billy Awesome
became Billy Awesome. You could do whatever you wanted with the name, whatever kind of sound you felt like, invent any back story that suited you, &c. We always hoped that one day we would hear about a band called Billy Awesome & the Billy Awesomes playing on the other side of the continent, globe, solar system, wherever, and know that if would be possible to trace their lineage back to us (we thought it would be especially funny if they turned out to be a world famous boy band or saccharine Canto-pop or something equally horrible, since we started out as kind of a noise/free-improv outfit). As it turned out, Billy Awesome & the Billy Awesome became Billy Awesome & the Awesomes, and none of the Awesomes wanted to take on the responsibility of the moniker except for me. I even considered changing my name legally, at one point, but never got as far as that. Did have myself ordained by the Universal Life Church, though, so technically it's
Rev. Billy Awesome.
I use the name every now and then when I do home-recording projects, and a few old friends still call me by it, but it's kind of faded out over the past couple of years. Not exactly sure what spurred me to dust it off for this forum, but there you have it.
-B
