David Bixby was himself a ghost of a figure, that is until a reporter from Los Angeles tracked him down in 2006. Now the real life Bixby sits in front of a crowd, most of whom weren’t even born when he wrote the songs they love. Everyone is wondering how this is going to turn out. How exactly does a (for the most part) well adjusted man in his sixties play songs that he wrote in his troubled twenties? If you are David Bixby you treat them like cover songs. “(I was sent) the Ode to Quetzalcoatl and Harbinger recordings and I hadn’t heard them (in a long time). I had to listen to them and learn what keys I played this stuff in. I had to go back and actually relearn it as if Dave Bixby was somebody else.”
For all intents and purposes the old David Bixby is someone else. “I am not as sincere as ‘that’ David Bixby” he said in an on-air interview with WIDR radio in Kalamazoo on Monday. He has spent years in the shadow of other people’s words, playing their songs. He has paid his bills, bought food and traveled on the money made covering hits from the past. Playing raw confessional music is a challenge now. “I can hide behind other people’s music, mine exposes me, it’s like a magnifying glass.” Bixby says.
Read Part Three of the full story by Matt Poole in The Rapidian
Dave Bixby 