Bill Callahan's Early Lyfe

Bill Callahan was born in 1966. 

Bill has talked about living in the USA and in the UK in his early life. His family lived in Knaresborough in the UK for part of his childhood and attending primary school there. 

Bill has said his parents worked for the NSA as language analysts. NSA language analysts commonly do cryptology, working with codes and doing code breaking.  The Language Educator says “NSA language analysts have the responsibility of providing the most complete and accurate signals intelligence picture to U.S. policymakers, military commanders, and intelligence community members.” The NSA maintains joint facilties with GCHQ in the UK. 

Not to sound ghoulish but it must have been fascinating working in the NSA in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s with the Cold War, the JFK, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King assassinations, the 60s radical movements, the OPEC oil crisis, the Vietnam War, the start of third world terrorism. One can only wander at the stories Bill heard from his parents at home growing up. 

Bill also lived in Baltimore, Maryland. This is 13.66 miles from NSA Headquarters in Fort George. 

Bill spent a few semesters at the University of Maryland and has a song about trying to tell a girl he was going back to college, but from the looks of it he never finished a college course. He worked briefly as a disability carer, but otherwise his work from 18 to around 23 or 24 is unclear. He has talked about living with a friend briefly but the friend's partner was unhappy with the situation. 

Bill's first records as Smog were put out independently and he signed to Drag City for his third LP Julius Caesar (1993). Bill Callahan’s records describe that growing up in a family of spooks was pretty difficult with his father even being violent at times. He sings often about his troubled relationship with his sister who seems to have ran away from home and disliked their father. 

Bill was unlucky with the ladies as a youngster and describes himself as not losing his virginity until age 19.

He has long running themes of spying and surveillance in his art and unlike many grunge bands in the 1990s he dreamed of a type of fame that would put his town on the map. 

In his first of many relationships with women who were alternative music luminaries Bill Callahan dated Lisa Carver who made art and music and did the Roller Derby fanzine. However their relationship fell apart and he dated Lisa's best friend Cindy Dall who also was involved in the Roller Derby fanzine and was known for her sexually provocative photography. 

Lisa Carver seems like a David Lynch-esque upbeat cheerleader and  was a former sex worker and has been public about her father abusing her. On the cover of Bill's Forgotten Foundation you can see a photo of Bill sitting with her father. Lisa wrote a fantastic book called Drugs Are Nice where she says she and Bill used to pretend they might have poisoned each others food for kicks. She also says in the book that Bill Callahan is the kind of dark that is the dark that is under a rock. I heard Bill was doing heroin around the late 1990s-early 2000s and in 2006 he sings about taking methadone.