Piano Tunnels: Songs by Bill Gage & Cheater Slicks
by Jerry David DeCicca
More and more, it feels like the only way people know how to discuss song-based music is through biography or genre. It’s almost like point-of-view, alone, or the sound of someone’s voice is too real or time-consuming to dissect on its own terms. Music discussion, from institutionalized ventures to the bottom of the well where more interesting things used to happen, has been mostly reduced to monoculture vibes and hard-sell biographies. This can be helpful to lead us to water, until it’s not. And, in many of the positive discussions I see about moving marginalized voices closer to the collective center, the artists are rendered fashionable and received content. I point all this out because there’s a record that came out a few years ago featuring the voice of someone in a marginalized population that continues to move me, and no one I know seems to be familiar with it (and I hang out at a lot of water coolers).
The album, Piano Tunnels, by Bill Gage and Cheater Slicks might be considered a challenging listen, to some. But I only say that because it isn’t e-immediate to our swipe-right culture or relatable in a way often celebrated by lovers of shallow and shared lowercase truths. What Bill Gage and Cheater Slicks have made is a lens, not a mirror, and their music is deeper for it.
Some people might be familiar with the long, unsettling discography of Cheater Slicks, who (if there’s one constant over their almost 40 years of music-making) use sound and lyrics in a way that is both brutal and fun. What Cheater Slicks lack (or avoid) in harmony, they make up for in humanity (another unclassifiable sound) using the tropes of rock music. Here, they serve as a back-up band and collaborator to Bill Gage, who has been releasing music under the moniker, BILL, since 1991.
Recorded in 2018 at Musicol Studios in Columbus, Ohio by Adam Smith, Piano Tunnels: Songs by Bill Gage & Cheater Slicks was released in 2022. To call it raw is an understatement, but also short-changes its creativity. It has something in common with Beefheart, pre-banana VU, the deconstructed side of Chilton, and, more recently, North Carolina’s Shithorse. Gage’s lyrics are both, at times, indecipherable and confessional, playful and pissed off. Gage has that characteristic of a lead singer that I love: he fully inhabits the song, sounds like no one else, and is fully committed to communicating what’s on his mind. I find myself rooting for him on the hand-clapped rocker, “Bad Boys,” and gutted on slower experimental tracks, like the title track that ends the record. The tenderness and vulnerability in his voice on “Guitar-Man” is deeply moving. From the label’s promo, live-in-the-studio lyric video posted on YouTube and the fact that the profits from this album benefit the Arts Resource program of the National Association for Down Syndrome, it seems that Gage is an individual with Down Syndrome, though Gage doesn’t address this in any of the songs. These performances are integrated and collaborative. Gage writes and sings like any other adult with deep emotions and a singular vision; and thankfully, Cheater Slicks don’t infantilize his performance or lyrics like so many musicians have, historically, when collaborating with the differently-abled population. The guitars and drums are some of the best recorded performances Cheater Slicks have ever captured. The album has a classic arc, with the shock-rocker “A Monster” followed by an all-in emotional ballad, “The Ribbon,” half-sung, half-whispered. If Bill Gage and Cheater Slicks have something in common, it is that both “just are” and don’t try to be. Nothing here sounds like a plotted decision, much less like a board meeting or tribal click-bait.
It’s too easy and no longer accurate to make distinctions between corporate and independent music. However, to my ears, there is still a clear line between sound as beauty and sound as commerce; expression that is sincere versus expression that is canned or received. How do we define it? You don’t — you just know it as soon as it walks in the room and hits your stereo. Piano Tunnels reaffirms the beauty of rock music that existed in that pre-70’s world of true psychedelia, like on ESP-disk or International Artists.
And what if I didn’t have the biographical information on Gage to help me better understand or contextualize his singing style and speech? Well, I would think this was some of the most beautiful music made with the human voice and electric guitars and drums that I’ve heard in years.
Quarter Notes Magazine 