Little Bill Blues -- Bill Engelhart Had One Hit Record, Then Nothing. But Music Was The Magic That Saved His Life

It's been a long time and many smoky nights since an eager kid from Tacoma recorded the hit song that nearly did him in.

He rode that hit song for all it was worth, which was about a year of glory. When it faded, so did he. He faded, but he didn't fade away. In clubs and taverns up and down the West Coast, he played the weekend gigs that paid the bills. He hung on through bad years, drug and alcohol years, and even some years without music. He hung on long enough to become a Northwest institution, long enough to play, in middle age now, some of the best music of his career.

Rewind to 1958

The kid from Tacoma was Bill Engelhart, soon and forever to be known as Little Bill. The song, well, the song was an accident.

Little Bill and his friends were dance-hall impresarios in those days, the hottest thing to happen to Tacoma teenagers since the convertible. They'd rent some hall or a community center near a high school, put up a bunch of posters for a dance, and then get up on stage and play to keep the kids moving. When they started, they were the only show in town. At the end of the night they'd pocket maybe $100.

"We thought we were rich," Little Bill said.

Some of that money they saved for studio time. Up to Seattle they went, to record a handful of instrumentals.

"We get all done, and the guy said, `Well, you've still got half an hour,' " Little Bill said. "So we decided to do this vocals thing I had written."

The vocals thing was called "I Love An Angel." The producer heard it and called a record company. The record company offered a contract, but he suggested a name change for the band. Someone - not Little Bill - mentioned that he was called Little Bill at home to keep him separate from his grandfather, and so Little Bill and the Bluenotes was born. The song, of course, became a hit.

The song reached No. 66 on the charts, and Little Bill went on the road. Almost as quickly as it happened, it was over.

"I couldn't follow it up with another hit," Little Bill said. "It was like I was a has-been and I was not quite 20 years old. It was awful, it was really awful. All of a sudden, people who used to call me wouldn't return my phone calls."

From a distance of 35 years, Little Bill can laugh about that eager kid who had the goblet snatched from his hands. But it's a wry laugh. Those were tough years.

Rewind even further back

When he was 11, Little Bill got polio. You can still see the effects in his legs. As an adolescent, Little Bill was confined to a wheelchair. But he had a relative who played country guitar and used to come over and play for him.

"We didn't have a TV," Little Bill said. "So my dad's cousin would come over once or twice a week and play the guitar to entertain me, and I became really fascinated with it. . . . Being in a wheelchair, there were lots of things I couldn't do. I couldn't ride bikes and all that, but I could play the guitar."

In high school, in 1956, Engelhart saw a posting for musicians to play at a dance. Two other people showed up: a one-legged trumpet player and a black drummer. After the dance, the drummer brought Little Bill to the George Washington Carver American Legion Hall, the black Legion Hall in Tacoma.

"It was great. They liked me right away," Little Bill said. "I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. I'm up there with these black guys playing the blues."

Little Bill scored a regular gig at the hall, playing weekends. The gig eventually broke up, but the blues stayed.

Picking up the bass

Little Bill plays bass now. He switched after his bass player once got arrested before a gig, and he decided he liked it. He plays bass and he sings sitting in a chair. With his stocky upper body, his dark shades and his Marine-cut hair, he looks like a high-school shop teacher out on the town.

Drummer Tommy Morgan has been playing with Little Bill on and off for 31 years. (Buck England played Hammond organ with Little Bill about as long, but left recently because of illness.) The new keyboard player is Pat Hughes, who has the owl-like look of a college professor, with a tweed cap, navy sweater and glasses. Randy Oxford, the trombone player, and guitarist Hans Ibsen have been with Little Bill for five years. Brian Kent adds saxophone.

The band plays original songs and classic blues and R&B covers in a mix that varies with each crowd. They're regulars in Pioneer Square, playing for conventioneers and college students and blues lovers. On the R&B tunes, the band members chug together like the engine of a 1972 Cadillac Fleetwood; their blues unfold like a slow drive down a back-country lane.

Replay the bad years

What do you do when you feel like you're washed up at 20? You come back to Seattle and you play teen dances. You make the move to nightclubs, and you bounce around a bit. One day you find yourself in Los Angeles, with your furniture in a truck, your family in tow and a long-term gig that just evaporated. So you settle in L.A. and you try to make it there.

"The '60s were really hard. I wasn't sure what direction to go in. Drugs had kind of gotten into it a lot then. Musically, nothing was happening for me, I was just going through the motions. I just kind of took these jobs, I'd go to these jobs and play, and drink, and I was using amphetamines. It was a bad time," Little Bill said.

"I had trouble with the one-record, one-hit thing for years. I still have a little trouble with it, but not nearly what I did when I was younger."

One night in L.A., something snapped for Little Bill. It was a small thing; his drummer tried to persuade him to play in a club in Hollywood. No pay, just "exposure."

"I said this isn't real, I can't live in this fantasy any longer. I actually saw what a fantasy it actually was, that I'd been in a fantasy since I had that one record out, trying to recapture that fantasy, and all of a sudden that's all it was. So I said I can't do this any more. I went home and I told my wife I quit music."

Fast forward

Skip ahead through the odd jobs, the years as an accountant at a factory, the time at the employment agency. In the late '70s, Little Bill took a correspondence course to become a radio deejay, and he got a job in Longview.

"I should have caught on," Little Bill said. "I hadn't even handed him any audition tapes and he says, `When can you start?' "

Little Bill showed up at the radio station, which was in the owner's little pink house, surrounded by wrecked cars. The day Little Bill showed up for work, the owner was spinning elevator music in his underwear.

The deejay job didn't last long. Little Bill and his family moved back to Seattle. Not long after that, a friend talked him into playing for a night at a tavern.

"When I got away from (music), it was the strangest thing. It was like I was free, a load off my back," Little Bill said. "As much as I didn't want to do it - and this sounds so corny - but playing again felt like magic. So I let myself be dragged back into it."

His mind on the music

That was 16 years ago. Seven years ago, Little Bill sobered up. "In Tacoma, at an Elks Club, backing an Elvis impersonator, was the first time ever that I played and didn't drink," Little Bill said. That was a key step.

"My focus was no longer on the bar, it was on the music, and that's what made the difference. It really saved my life, it saved my sanity, it saved my career." He started writing songs again, and shortly after that he recommitted himself to his musical love, blues.

The past five or six years have been good ones for Little Bill and the band. They've released two albums, with a third in the works. They worked 49 weeks last year. Little Bill was given a Lifetime Achievement Award last year by the Washington Blues Society; this year it went to Buck England.

The dreams of national fame, a headlining tour and sold-out stages that tormented Little Bill for years may not have faded entirely, but he's learned to put them in their place. The trick is to keep your mind on the music. Then anything can happen.

"I'm 55 years old, I've had a wonderful run. I've gotten to do what I wanted to do, I've got a wonderful family, I'm going to be a grandfather soon," Little Bill said. "And I've gotten to write my own songs and play them in front of people. What could be better than that?"