A test piece by Melissa Walter, for an upcoming installation related to dark matter and gravitational lensing, on the wall at Bread & Salt


MATTHEW LICKONA


If you’re making art and getting paid for it... Guitarist William Wilson loves his children too much to suggest they follow in his footsteps. “It’s too hard,” he says flatly. Still, “the other day, I was talking to a banker, and when I told him I was a guitarist, he said, ‘Oh, I’m thinking about going into music. I need to buy a saxophone;


I just haven’t gotten to it.’ On the one hand, he’s far better off than I am financially. But at the same time, he’s never going to do anything with music because he’s too comfortable. You don’t do anything when you’re comfortable. If you’re making art and getting paid for it, I think you’re hugely successful.” The perennially uncomfortable


38-year-old Wilson, who took lessons from Peter Pupping while growing


up in Encinitas and studied under Fred Benedetti at San Diego State before settling in Casa de Oro, says that “most of the musicians I know who are ‘making it’ are doing it from multiple revenue streams — even the biggest names in town.” The first, for him, was performing. He landed his first wedding at 13; at 14, his first reg- ular gig at Miracles Café in Cardiff, thanks to an employee who invited him to play one or two songs on a


Sunday morning. (“It was a wonderful spot, right next to the train tracks.”) A year later, he became one fourth of the Peter Pupping Quartet and started playing for corporate events. “Peter had some great connec-


tions; big-name banks would fly into San Diego and we would play for them. A lot of cocktail hours — drink- ing is usually involved with my music. Because I started young, by the time I was in college, I was already mak-


“People are interested in what’s new. Everything I’ve ever done that’s been even marginally successful has had that quality to it.”


PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDY BOYD


36 San Diego Reader February 9, 2017


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