| Am I Alone in This? Bill Bottrell in the January 2001 New Settler |
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BILL: Maybe. I had a lot of money come to me in the Eighties and all I had been doing was what I ever wanted to do, which was to play music and do it professionally and be around recording studios. And then it snowballed and I ended up a multimillionaire and all these things and I was never comfortable with it. Penance is not the word for it, more it is trying to stay authentic. And to turn bounty into something else, to spread bounty in hopes that it will be like seeds, in hopes that it will grow. I couldn't spread any seeds in LA. It's all concrete. I tried to do that and they wouldn't take. This very thing I'm doing here, I tried to do that in LA and it became so utterly corrupted by its own success. It almost made me lose faith in human beings, and so I came here where it's not all concrete, where seeds can maybe sprout and grow uncorrupted. If not, so be it. I do have this paranoia of the trappings of |
suburbanism and urbanism and post-modernism. And I see those things starting to come here-only four years after I came here, and boy it frightens me Because I feel this openness here, fear it will start to fade. I've seen how it worked in LA . . . You should have been out in the woods with us this morning, creating a day for our dead. There's a hub of deep authenticity BILL: . . . that will never go away. That's what I need to hear. The day you showed up to lead a procession that went down to the slide into the Albion River right next to where the Gap guys, who own the Mendocino Redwood Company, had marked trees on a deep-seated slide area occupied by a trio of women in the trees. |