By Lynda Sturner****Billy Hough doesn’t work out, or do health drinks and probably eats leftover pizza for breakfast, yet he’s kicking ass all over Provincetown. While some Broadway stars worry about the toll doing 8 shows a week takes on their bodies, Hough is reveling in appearing all over town six shows, five nights a week and then some, never saying no to a charity benefit or a friend.
Each show is completely different from the others. Friday night is Scream Along With Billy and Sue Goldberg at the Grotto Bar. They choose a different album every week and play the shit out of it. They do everything from from The Beatles, Lou Reed, David Bowie and Joni Mitchell, to the Velvet Underground. It’s a freewheeling, both rehearsed and improvisational, happening. It’s a you-never-know-what-will happen-tonight adventure.
Saturday, Sunday and Monday he’s at The Porch Bar (9 Carver Street) in a traditional piano bar with a Billy twist. “They’ve never been to a piano bar where somebody sings The Sex Pistols,” Hough remarked.
And now for something completely different. “Lea DeLaria called me out of the blue and said I know this is crazy, but I want you to do a new show on Tuesday nights,” he said.
Lea DeLaria just opened both the hottest and coolest new place in town called “The Club,” but more about that later.
DeLaria and Hough are old friends. She starred in Insatiable Hunger by Meryl Cohn in 2009. Billy Hough and Sue Goldberg wrote the music and lyrics and Hough was also the music director. LaLa was a cast member and knows it was dream collaboration.
For the first time, Hough is writing his own act. It is a completely scripted show with his own songs and breakup stories.
“As anyone who has ever come to Scream Along knows, I’ve been most unlucky in love. And so I decided these are the stories I would tell. These are the experiences I write the most songs about,” said Hough.
“We all have dirty stories … I’ll go out there and tell these horrible stories and everyone will remember their own and we’ll all go down together. You have these experiences that inform you. The traumatic ones that you survive and you cleave to that narrative and it can define you. When you get a little bit older you look back with a little objectivity. And in some cases you realize that everyone was twenty-three. I’m going to try and keep it funny and I’ll show my wiener if it’s going bad.” Hough admitted he’s just kidding, but knowing Billy, anything’s possible.
In his anything is possible world, Billy named his act, Cocksucker Blues.
”The Rolling Stones have a Cocksucker Blues song and there is a banned Robert Frank film. He followed the Stones on their 1972 American tour and is just so bawdy. Robert Frank is only allowed to show the film once a year. It has to be a certain number of miles away from where the Stones are playing and it can’t be in a place where the Stones are playing or have played.”
LaLa doesn’t like to write about shooting up and masturbation, but you can be sure Billy will tell you the details of that film in his show.
“The poster is very dirty, the title is very dirty and the show is literally designed to render people speechless,” he said. “I’ve started seeing someone and it’s awesome. I signed on to do a show that was basically reliving my heartbreak that I do twice a night and then I fall in love.”
Hough talks about things onstage that nobody else talks about. From heroin to the dick dock, he is both open and vulnerable onstage. Hough stopped using heroin a year ago and it has transformed his appearance. His fabulous face is no longer pasty white and instead of looking skinny and gaunt, he looks buffed and thin.
“I don’t want to say its easy because its not. The best way I can describe it with heroin, which has been my best longest companion, is like putting on a suit of armor every morning and so nothing can really hurt you, but nothing can really help you either,” he said. “If you start self- medicating because your life is hard, your life becomes harder because you are self-medicating. I never suffered in secret. I’d sing and talk about it every Friday”
“I fucking love my life now. Honestly. And yes, the world is falling apart and I’ve been sequestered pre-mourning our demise, like the rest of us, but then there’s this moment of pure unadulterated fucking hallelujah never-thought-I’d-feel-again joy. And I don’t feel guilty. Not right now. And I get to climb behind a piano for three hours and work it out. Which for me, is ideal If you want some of this, I’ve got it to share.”
The Club – 193 Commercial Street – (508)487-1527 – Tuesdays @ 7 & 9pm
It sells out quickly so reservations are strongly suggested.
