Interview: Willy DeVille Part One - Page 4

It was hard out there, just couldn't get anything happening, it was the early seventies, and, hell don't say I hated it, because that's not true, but it was hard. I conned the guys into believing that if we went back to New York I could get us work, 'cause I knew the city and the ropes of how stuff worked, which was stretching it.

How did you end up in CBGB?

Well, I used to go over to "City Lights," you know Ferlinghetti's book store, and pick up a week old Village Voice. One day I saw this small, like one inch by one-inch ad, saying auditioning for live bands. Now New York in the early, mid seventies, there were hardly any places for live bands to play, maybe a Jazz bar. Everything had closed, so here was this ad saying auditioning for live bands.

So I had convinced the guys that I could get them work, and we climbed in the van and drove back the other way. We got here and auditioned, along with hundreds of others, but they liked us and took us on. That was like 74-75, and we played there for three years. You know during that time we didn't get paid more than $50 bucks a night

Each or the band

The band, shit that was barely enough for cigarettes. They keep asking me to come and play there for "old times' sake" and you know that's not for me. That's for people who want to go there and say they saw me there, or Lou Reed in sunglasses or some such stuff. That's the past, not now.

There was always some sort of shit that was going down there, 'cause there were all these managers with bands they had signed who they wanted to play there, so there was politics. All I wanted was to be a band that New York could be proud of; we wanted to play music that would make the glasses dance on the bar.

Then there was this one night this guy named Ben Edmonds came in to the bar and saw us. He took us back up to his hotel room and asked us if we could make a record what would we put on it. I just said, "The best damn music I could make."

The next thing was they brought out Jack Nietzsche to talk with me. We got drunk for three days. Jack had done all those records with the Ronettes and groups like that.

He worked with Phil Spector?

Well it's hard to say who worked with who, right. You listen to that music and you hear those really high strings, and that percussion, and the castanets: that's all Jack's work. All that's really cool stuff

Article Author: Richard Marcus

Richard Marcus is the author of the forthcoming book What Will Happen In Eragon IV? and has had his work published in print and on line all over the world. The not so long-haired Canadian iconoclast writes reviews and opines on the world as he sees …

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