Wesley Willis
Sept. 12 at Indienet
In between nightmares, Wesley Willis is busy living the American dream. A formidable salesman, Willis has built careers as both visual and recording artist. His paintings have been shown in reputable galleries, his music has been played during drivetime and on MTV, and he has toured as a solo artist and as singer in the now-defunct punk band Fiasco. He’s made roughly 20 albums since 1993, two on a major label, each one 24 tracks long, each song just under three minutes long.
Alternative Tentacles, the label operated by ex-Dead Kennedy Jello Biafra, recently released Wesley Willis Greatest Hits Vol. 2. It’s a well-chosen set, reflecting the strengths and weaknesses of the artist, including furious covers of the Pure Prairie League classic “Amie” and Duran Duran’s “Girls on Film,” both accompanied by the Fiasco.
These modest successes—modest, but far beyond the grasp of most aspiring artists—have allowed Willis to sever his ties with government assistance and to move from Chicago’s notorious Gateway Gardens housing project to the artistic mecca of Wicker Park. But nothing, not even the pills, has entirely quieted the demons in his head. Wesley Willis was diagnosed with schizophrenia in October 1989—after, he says, a stepfather held a gun to his head and stole his life savings of $100. This is why he stays busy, writing and rewriting songs in endless notebooks, and drawing, by his count, 2,000 posters a year.
“I just write songs that take me on joyrides,” he said in 1996. “And each time my music tries to pick me up, this demon flares up out of my head and shoots it all down.”
And yet those voices—and his constant battle against them—are what have made Willis a compelling artistic figure; they rescued him from the housing projects and guarantee him a cult audience.
He is an imposing man, 35 years old now, 6 feet 5 inches, and well over 300 pounds, with huge, soft hands. Like every good salesman, he loves to shake hands, holding your eyes, pumping your arm—“Wanna buy my CDs?”—and not letting go until there’s an answer. His highest sign of affection is a loving, ritual head butt, punctuated by a joyous howl. And, yes, there is a long scar on his face, a reminder of what happens on his bad days, when the demons speak out in their profane way and others take offense. He was slashed on a city bus by a man wielding a boxcutter, and though his assailant went to jail (immortalized in song along the way), Willis will always wear that scar.
There is the smell of danger here, and for white, middle-class kids fleeing suburban ennui for the imagined urban realism of punk rock, Willis truly is a brother from another planet. In his presence, almost anything can happen.
Most of Willis’ records are solo affairs, just his shouted vocals and a programmable keyboard pounding out three-minute songs built on a verse-chorus-verse structure more rigid than anything invented on Music Row. Each song ends with his signature coda: “Rock over London/Rock over Chicago,” followed by one of the advertising slogans he’s copied down from billboards. They are also intensely scatological affairs. With the Fiasco, he hollered over a tight and creditable punk ensemble, but the songs were structurally unchanged.
Wesley Willis was the talk of Los Angeles in 1995. Morning deejays played his songs, record labels vied for his services, and the hipoisie swarmed his appearances, standing in line for head butts and CDs. He signed to American Recordings that winter, which meant he briefly shared a label with Lucinda Williams, Johnny Cash, Slayer, Sir Mix-A-Lot, and the Black Crowes. Perhaps missing Willis’ personal touch, Feel the Power and Fabian Road Warrior (the latter produced by the Dust Brothers), both released in 1996, sold poorly.
What attracted the furor was novelty. Most of the songs Willis recorded as his fame grew were reviews of concerts he’d attended, shout-outs to famous bands he’d met backstage. For that short season, it was a badge of honor to have Wesley Willis write a song about your band. And the same morning deejays who think the Jerky Boys are funny found a place for Wesley Willis on their show.
Naturally, Willis wrote more of those songs—that’s what his audience evidently wanted and was willing to pay for. Just as naturally, the novelty faded. All of which missed the point, for if Willis matters as an artist—and he does, probably—those songs namechecking alt.rock stars are not the reason.
His most compelling work comes closer to diary entries, complete with titles like “Fit Throwing Hell Ride,” “He’s Doing Time in Jail,” and “They Threw Me Out of Church.” They are brutally direct pieces, postcards from places most of us will never visit, and they do that which is most important in art: They describe the artist’s distinctive world as accurately and honestly as the artist can manage.
His posters (“I’m Running My Inkpen”) are large and colorful line drawings, cityscapes of Chicago with a bus prominent in each. Indeed, the bus is Willis’ principal metaphor, for he describes his bad days as hellrides, the good ones as joyrides (and can tell you how many of each he’s had each year). It’s an astute metaphor, for it is the bus that first took him from the projects to Wicker Park, that simultaneously captures the extent to which he feels other forces are driving his life.
In fairness, Wesley Willis doesn’t much care if his art matters in any kind of academic sense. He just wants it to sell, for he’s a rock star with rent to pay and planes to catch. (He couldn’t be interviewed for this article because he’d disappeared to Florida with a band.) Like most so-called naive artists, his relationship to his work is largely commercial.
The point, then, is that Wesley Willis makes a living as an artist: Two thousand posters a year sell for, say, an average of $100 each. Two self-released CDs a year, sold in editions of 1,000, sell for $10 each. Plus live shows. You do the math and sort out the aesthetics, he’ll live the dream.
