Bill wrote a lot of mill-town songs, and in an odd mental disconnect I always put “Run You Through the Mill” in that context, imagining him and the woman racing each other through one of the big brick mill buildings along the river in Newmarket, New Hampshire; maybe the same one he was thinking about when he wrote “Snow Outside the Mill,” “Night Shift,” or “Small Town on the River.”

Of course, the song has nothing to do with mills. It’s a bitter, drunken man’s meditation on a messed-up relationship, which he’s messing up further as he sings. At least, that’s what I hear, and by now I hear it as a prophecy of sorts, because Bill messed up a bunch of relationships in the process of drinking himself to death. But he also wasn’t this guy, who, under the cloak of misogyny and self-loathing, is a romantic fiction.

People who came to Bill late — which is to say, after he’d left the lousy bar gigs behind and was performing for sober, quiet audiences that liked the singer-songwriter stuff that passes for “folk music” on NPR  — may be perplexed if I say he admired and resented Tom Waits for having built the career he wanted, playing hip, jazz-flavored songs that conjured visions of Kerouac, Bukowski, and Slim Gaillard.

It was summertime and the city was burnin’
I was drinking beer with a sweaty woman
I was stealing lines off the radio
When over the box they played “Oop Bop Sh’Bam”
And that woman sighed like a flim-flam man
And I thanked Dizzy Gillespie that night for backing up my little show.

Back in those days, Bill wasn’t a heavy drinker — he was getting drunk pretty often, but would get tipsy on a couple of beers, so if it was already a problem, it wasn’t doing much physical damage. That came later, with age and disappointment and whiskey. It’s a complicated story, and I keep being tempted to write about him, if only as a way of dealing with my anger. I was first angry about his artistic choices — he called me over and over through the years, saying he was practicing clarinet or trumpet and the next record would have some solid jazz players… and then would cut another safe singer-songwriter album, which pleased his new fans but wasn’t the kind of music he admired or liked to listen to. I have to think that was part of the reason he was killing himself — which is what I’m really angry about — but there were lots of reasons…

…and if I’m honest, the fact that back in his twenties he was writing songs like this is part of the story: there’s an obvious pathology in the macho drunken loser bullshit that admirers of Kerouac and Bukowski so often embrace.

And, of course, Hemingway. As I was preparing to record this, I happened to pick up A Moveable Feast for the hundredth time, and there it is, in the first paragraph: “The men and women who frequented the Amateurs stayed drunk all of the time…”

I don’t know if Bill was consciously riffing on that passage, but Hemingway was one of his touchstones. I remember him onstage, pausing after a song, lighting a cigarette, and beginning the routine: “He lit a cigarette – Period – Took a drag – Period – It was good – Period – He looked at the audience – Period – What a rowdy crew, he thought – Period – He took another drag – Period – Oh, my God – Exclamation point – I’ve become a character in a Hemingway novel – Period – Now, I have to go out and shoot a zebra….”

I loved that guy and learned a lot from him, and I’m angry at him, and I miss him.