William M King

Coming Through the '60s William M King

Bill King is a musician, photo journalist, radio veteran, and author. Not a book of celebrity run-ins, it is a document of early life, ancestry, the anxiety and pressures of living with a decorated World War II veteran suffering PTSD; discovery, boyhood schemes, that first piano lesson, those early jazz concerts, education, leaving home, crossing America, homelessness, the flower generation, relationships, California, Greenwich Village, the army, and then Canada.***I dreamed of breaking free: those long drives musicians reminisced about throughout the American South. Past fields of sprawling kudzu down fog-shrouded backroads. The perfect way to decompress after a long night playing on the funk side of town. I was ready to climb on the band bus or into the back of a station wagon and begin my journey. The many one-nighters I had already played were mostly local, no more than 100 miles in all directions. I knew radio was the best company a carload of musicians could ask for to free the mind of setlists and missed opportunities with local groupies. I had already ridden in a battered station wagon, taken on road grime and patches of red clay - the windshield a graveyard of suicidal beetles, palmetto bugs, wasps, and grasshoppers. On the horizon, weeping willows near where mockingbirds eyeballed and serenaded all-night drivers.