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The Ballad of Bill Fox
Robert Pollard adores him. Jeff Tweedy calls him a hero. But he’s just wanted to be left alone — until now.
“It’s full of contradiction, this mix of despair and hope,” Nada Surf’s Matthew Caws told me, “like a cage with a crack of light or something.” Snail Mail’s Lindsey Jordan got into Fox’s catalog recently, at a time when she felt her own love of music being tested — a byproduct of her art suddenly becoming a job, a business. Adding Ken Hall on bass, they became the Mice, a trio that was like a heartland edition of the Buzzcocks, with Bill’s snarling vocals and Tommy’s animalistic drumming making a song like “Not Proud of the USA” a credibly dangerous statement in Reagan’s America. There’s candid information about Bill’s struggles with manic depression, including his “history of hospitalization.” At one point, the article details a public breakdown Fox had in 1993, which was reported on in the Plain Dealer with the headline “Wounded Man Waves Knife, Shouts about the Antichrist.”
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