The Olivia Tremor Control's Bill Doss
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Founding Olivia Tremor Control member Bill Doss brought together the very people who can be the most skeptical toward the idea of "music bringing people together." Matt LeMay pays tribute to the singer and guitarist, who passed away at age 43.
Photos by Mike White. Listen to a playlist compiled by Matt LeMay featuring some of Bill Doss' finest work here.
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The closest I've ever come to an out-of-body experience was at an Olivia Tremor Control concert at New York's Knitting Factory on Halloween of 1999. About halfway through "A New Day", one of the many highlights on the band's 1999 LP, Black Foliage: Animation Music Vol. 1, I felt myself come slightly unglued, as if my conscious mind was slowly seeping out of my body to join the light and sound emanating from the stage. When I snapped out of it, I was smiling and sobbing uncontrollably. It was a difficult experience to quantify, and the kind that I generally would have greeted with a healthy dose of skepticism-- especially at the time. As a guarded and cynical teenager, I had an incredibly hard time setting aside my self-consciousness long enough to lose myself, and found the very notion of transcendence to be thoroughly distasteful. But the voice I heard from stage sounded so forgiving, so welcoming, like the most clear, generous, and beautiful invitation. That voice belonged to Bill Doss, who passed away Monday at age 43.
Doss was one one of the founding members of the Elephant 6 collective, a group of musicians originally hailing from Ruston, La., that included Doss' bandmates in the Olivia Tremor Control, as well as Neutral Milk Hotel, the Apples in Stereo, and many others. Apples frontman Robert Schneider founded the impromptu "Recording Company" while he was studying in Denver, but it would come to be closely associated with Doss' adopted home of Athens, Ga. It was there that the Olivia Tremor Control-- originally a collaboration between Doss, bandmate Will Cullen Hart, and Neutral Milk Hotel frontman Jeff Mangum called Synthetic Flying Machine-- became an integral and beloved part of a thriving local music scene.
The Olivia Tremor Control's earliest recordings are beautifully ramshackle, veering from tentative mumbling to exuberant blasts of noise. The band's debut single, "California Demise", shows a group of friends and collaborators just beginning to understand that their four-track experiments could turn into actual songs and records. The group would go on to draw numerous, deserved comparisons to classic 60s pop icons like the Beatles and the Kinks, but their earliest recordings also owe a great deal to the more fragmented and shambolic sounds of the Fugs and Tall Dwarfs. (In 2000, many of these early recordings were included on the sadly out-of-print Singles and Beyond compilation, an album still well worth seeking out and a crucial document of the band's history.)
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It was the Olivia Tremor Control's 1996 debut album, Music from the Unrealized Film Script, Dusk at Cubist Castle, that established them as a truly great psych-pop band. Their equipment was hardly state-of-the-art, but the music they made with four-tracks and slightly out-of-tune guitars was as deep and rich as the human imagination. I've often thought about just how much fun an album like Dusk at Cubist Castle must have been to make-- how amazing it must have felt to craft something so rich and intricate with close friends and familiar tools, to add not just any bicycle bell sound but exactly the right bicycle bell sound at exactly the right time.
The attention to detail on Dusk is impressive in its own right, but particularly stunning when read back through the album's rich emotional language. The strands of triumph and melancholy that run through "No Growing (Exegesis)" are so vivid that you can almost reach out and grab them-- each expressive gesture articulated by ever-changing arrangements, barely-noticeable sounds that seem to appear from nowhere, drum tracks that get slightly louder to push the song over the edge at just the right moment. Even at the band's most exuberant, there is room for complexity, for sadness, for reflection. The optimism in Doss' songs is always clear-eyed and hard-won; he never sang a note that didn't ring true, never oversimplified, never sold platitudes as profundities.
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The Olivia Tremor Control's second album, Black Foliage, was "experimental" in a more apparent sense, incorporating sound collages, tape snippets, and brief variations on a single instrumental theme. The album more explicitly played into the narrative of Doss as the "pop classicist" and Hart as the "abstract artist," making it easy to read Doss and Hart through a McCartney/Lennon binary. But as with Dusk at Cubist Castle, Black Foliage reads less like a compromise between two opposing poles and more like the product of two distinct songwriters forging a single aesthetic from shared respect and open communication. The "experimental" and "pop" bits of Black Foliage, to whatever extent they can even really be separated, are both approached with equal and immense joy, a joy that is only heightened when these threads are most tightly woven together.
The overall mood of Black Foliage is darker than that of Dusk at Cubist Castle, making the album's brightest moments shine through that much more. "Hideaway", a perennial favorite and possibly the finest product of the band's collaboration, is teeming with classic pop elements, from impeccably placed horn blasts to Jackson Five syncopated guitar picking to a "Sloop John B" vocal breakdown. These are familiar sounds, hard-wired to deep emotional synapses, set against each other in a way that was totally unique to this band at this time. For all its impressive complexity, Black Foliage is equally attuned to elemental pleasure and sadness.
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Like Neutral Milk Hotel's 1998 masterpiece In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Black Foliage is a thorough and stunning realization of its creators' vision, and a tough act to follow. The Olivia Tremor Control went on hiatus in early 2000, and the Elephant 6 Recording Company dissolved soon after. During this time, Doss refocused his attention on the Sunshine Fix, an alias he had used with a rotating cast of bandmates since well before the Olivia Tremor Control formed. The Sunshine Fix released two full-length records and several singles between 2000 and 2004, showcasing a more relaxed and stylistically far-flung side of Doss' songwriting.
Even as the Olivia Tremor Control was on hiatus and the Elephant 6 Recording Company was dissolving, the core personnel of both groups continued to collaborate. In 2005, the Olivia Tremor Control reunited for the ATP festival, and in 2008 both Doss and Hart participated in the Elephant 6 "Holiday Surprise" tour. The next year, Doss contributed vocals to the sophomore release from Hart's post-Olivias project, Circulatory System. True to the Elephant 6 Collective's history of loose and organic evolution, the Olivia Tremor Control regained momentum slowly and naturally, like a large animal waking up after hibernation. By 2011, the band was seemingly back in full swing, playing numerous festival dates and touring behind Chunklet's impeccable, definitive reissues of their two full-length albums.
Alongside these reissues, the Olivia Tremor Control released their first new music in well over a decade, a three-part suite entitled "The Game You Play Is In Your Head Parts 1, 2, 3". This suite brought to mind the band's earliest releases in its loose and casual sense of experimentation; it was the sound of old friends rediscovering the simple pleasures of making music together. It seemed like a promising start to the next stage of the band's collaboration.
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I was lucky enough to see the Olivia Tremor Control several times in the last year, and every performance contained its own revelations. An Olivia Tremor Control show offered a rare opportunity for even cynical folks to share in an experience of unabashed, unembarrassed positivity. It was so incredible to see a room full of people at New York's Le Poisson Rouge-- some who hadn't seen the Olivia Tremor Control since the 90s and some who were born in the 90s-- singing along, teary-eyed, to these songs. Doss made music that brought together the very people who can be the most skeptical towards the idea of "music bringing people together."
Seeing the Olivias last year, I was frankly amazed by how many melodies I subconsciously attributed to classic 60s records by the Stones and the Beach Boys that had, in fact, only made their way to my ears via Doss' voice and hands. Seeing the Olivia Tremor Control play through a set of their best songs triggered sense memories that extend far beyond my actual history with the music. After enough listens, Doss' best melodies become the line-art illustrations next to the word "SONG" in your brain.
In a sense, the story of Doss' creative life is both singular and canonical. The Elephant 6 Collective could be any group of talented kids in any small city, cobbling together their own musical language from whatever records they can get their hands on. Bill Doss spent his life discovering uncharted nuance and truth in sounds that we hear every day. His insight and inspiration touched so many records, from the Olivia Tremor Control, to the Sunshine Fix, to the Elephant 6 Recording Company and far, far beyond. I'll always turn to Doss' music for a sense of what's possible.