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“Wet willie,” from whence this passel o’ scragglers derived their handle, is a regionalism referring to an Alabamian practice consisting of sucking on your finger and then shoving it up somebody’s ear. It also means that dirty stuff you’re thinking right now.

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The first time I saw Wet Willie I got excited as hell. You would too if you were in Macon Georgia whooping it up deep Friday night down at Grant’s Lounge call of the wildest bar this side of the frontier. Hambones and grease are cruising through the air like your very lobes flow deep in the marrow of the Gulf Stream, and the Hatfield Clan (THC) have just gone off, looking in their combination jock and lipstick drag like one of Captain Beefheart’s old crews and sounding like a damn good skillet bar band. Every slick black honker in town has just had his turn in the night’s mighty tenor battle, and now the dazed stage is took by a bunch of high hop-steppin’ Suthun lads who don’t play no queerbait but they jive as good as they want. Up front’s a rangy-boned cussed-callow youth who looks just enough like Jagger without overdoing it a la Aerosmith; he’s a real rawhide power swaggerin’ son of the soil and he commences to whoop out some of the hottest, nastiest, most needlin’ to the point harp heard since early Paul Butterfield, with the rest of the band cooking like ten Rastamaniacs straight behind him all the way. He limbers up the whole damn club with a good excursive and precisely economical few minutes of this Hohnerific, and then he throws back his head and commences to shout:

You’re just hangin’ out At the local bar And you’re wonderin’

Who in the hell you are!

Are you a bum, or Are you a star?

Keep on smilin’ through the rain.. .*

And you best believe it gave me chills.

Next day me and the rest of the passing freebooters pile into big daddy Phil Walden’s limousine complete with Scotch and teevee in the back, and head down to Statesboro, home of Blind Mason Williams’ celebrated “Statesboro Blues” (also covered by Loggins and Messina), to get the Willies live and slithering just one more time. I made short-work of the Scotch, turned off the toob when they started the 14th Andy Griffith rerun of the day, entertained the car with my Lou Reed tapes till they formally and politely requested I get that faggit crayup off or land on my ass in a Georgia gully.

Had a guzzlin’ contest with the Wet heads in the locker dressing room of the gym they’re playin’ at: Jack Hall, brother of aforescrawled lead holler Jimmy and the funkiest bassist this side of the Famous Flames, struts up to me with a bottle of Jack Daniels and puts his finger on the side about an inch below the water line: “Laiester, can yew draink this down ta thair?” Shitcheah man, I grabbed that slumgullion and gozzled it whole, slammed it back in his mitt' and didn’t even wiggle. Everybody else in the room whooped in admiration. I was in the South, and it felt fine.

Next minute while taking a piss I got a notion, so I asked ‘em if I could introduce ‘em when they went onstage. They assented, so I ran out and assaulted the rabble with thunderbolts of loving invective: “Ladies and gentlemen! Boys and girls! B-b-b-hrw/z-thuhs in s-s-,s-7-sters! Streakers and Ralph Meekers! I am about to show you something the like of which you have never seen before! It’s gonna blow your head clean on out the door! It’s gonna have you down on your knees on the floor, baaaaiiig\vi‘ for more! So all I wanna know is ... are you ready for the night train, driviri’ you insane, straight outa your brain? Ready ready readuhreadahreadyeeeeeaah! Gone, gone/ gone! I got my eyes wide open! I give you, on Capricorn Records, the Wet Willie Band!”

And then they came out and did it again. They tore that joint down and smoked awhile Jim. (If these crackers can play like niggers and get rich at it I can damn sure talk like one and get hung.) It was here that I first noticed the way Jimmy Hall takes immediate command of the stage, stalking from one end of it to the other like a mudcat in heat. I also noticed even more clearly what I had first beheld in the dressing room, that his sister Donna Hall, who sings soul jones backing with Ella Avery in the Williettes, is the hottest little piece I ever saw in my long lined life. She’s got skin as succulent and fresh as hell yeah Dixie peaches that adorn the space just above her cute little bellybutton, big dark eyes you could fall into, and a mouth perfected in constant moue as though blessed with the power to suck a nectarine dry by remote control. That’s just for a leetle taste of euphemism so she won’t think me uncouth like unto these Southland raggedymop bopboys. Unfortunately I never copped her sweetmeat ‘cause next time I saw her she was in the company of a certain internationally famous popstar with big muscles.

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That was also the next and latest (but not last) time I saw Wet Willie, on my own turf in Detroit. They came up for a tour with Grand Funk, but had to cancel out Thursday because Mel Schachner had sprained a lug nut. So we took ‘em out to the house and they immediately commenced to browsing my stack of skin magazines. “Sheeyit,” said Jack, “ah shore hope ah git laid whal ah’m up here.” “Me too,” chimed Jimmy. “Ah’m tard o’ jaikin’ off alia tarn.”

“Don’t worry ‘bout a thing, boys,” I hoorawed them. “I’ll line up some priority-primoski local talent when you come back to make the gig on Monday.”

Thus did I simultaneously embark my new career as pimp (beats the pus outa rock writing) and discover that, much as I had suspected through recent observation of other touring aggregations, the much-vaunted sexual wildebeasterity of popular rock musicians is in large part a myth. Now, I ain’t saying the Willies is queer or limp or nothing, they’re right fine ruttin’ tuttin’ down home boys, it’s just that they’re a leetle shy. I called up Detroit City’s number one with a, bullet groupie the day of the gig, and quacked: “Lissen honey, there’s some real hot rock action hittin’ town tonjte, so get your posse down to Cobo

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Hall and make them boys feel at home in Moblow!” “Who is it?” “Wet Willie.” “Might as well, I know all those dumb azzes in Grand Funk too well...”

So the great night fell and the groupies were swarming like flying poltroons, having come from far and wide to check with their very own accoutrements the efficacy of this legend I had blabbed up to them via phone. They were gathered around in packs preening and pouting away to beat the band senile, and 1 just kept on smiling and drinking till I got so drunk I ran wild, which is what always seems to happen to me whenever Wet Willie’s around and playing. Which they did in a supertight set of old faves and new raves double-clutching out of nowhere to get an encore from a packed arena of the sickliest Detroit jades.

It was a heartwarming sight and when it was all over I went back up to the dressing room to see how the romancin’ was enhancin’. Shame to my eyeballs, what do I see but a whole room fulla hot giggling tease and in the eye of the storm these five musical type busters lookin’ sorta confused though not half as hangdog as the Blue Oyster Cult whom I had seen trying with even less fervor in identical circumstances a week previous. These chicks wasn’t the best in the world (fact they wuz ogly as weasels) — but then again there is an old Southern motto having to do with draping one part of the anatomy with a flag thereby to attend to another part sans distraction. But this one bitch steps into the room and looks at the table and says something about the lunchmeat laid out for sandwiches, sp Jack Hall starts leering under his breath: “Yeah . v. meat... uh ... ah lak meat.. . you meat... uh, meat...”

Hailfar and bustification! I could see they needed a little prodding, so I grabbed this one notbad missy and sayd: “Hey, waht’s yore name girl?” (Every time I get around these wino saltines I start talking like ‘em too, can’t help it.) “Mary Lou.” “Mary Lou, woo hoo!” — yanking her and Wet Willpower lead guitarist Rick Hirsch Certs-range ~ “Mary Lou, meet Rick Hirsch of the famed and brilliant hot fire lickin’ Wet Willie Band.” And then I jutted my jaw through Rick’s right eyeball: “This is mah sister boah you better take good cair of ‘er you hear?” and walked away.

I turned around and looked at them. The damsel was trying to engage her temporal and wavering swain in the patter precipitating carnal envelopement, but he just stood there, like a water moccasin on a rock in the Gobi, and when they had parted in brief and minor sorrow I went up to him and shook that diz down straight: ‘‘What’s the deal here? Doncha wanna get laid?”

“Sure,” he admitted to me, “but I don’t wanna put any effort into it. They gotta take me by the hand and lead me right into the bed. or I don’t even try.”

Judas Priest! Did you ever? Well I never! My career as rock ‘n’ roll pimp came to a timely end right then and there. Now, as we all know, Limeys are incapable of getting it up unless receiving head while prone on silk sheets in a hundred dollar a day hotelroom, but these Southern boys are asskickers and poonlikkers from way back, and the only way I can account for this generalized lapse in the humpadelic heatwaves is that they’re jest plain bone lazy.

But there is hope for this band yet in the pooritang glorioski department. Dori McMartin, a young lady of Canadian extraction acquainted with the author and a dues-paying member of the Rock Writers of the World, reports that whilst sharing a joint with Willie pianist John Anthony, she inquired “Why are all you Southern boys so shy with the girls?”

He looked deep into her guileless Ontarioan eyes with his bulging booglarizers, took her hand and swelling and drooling intoned: ‘Wow do you think all Southern boys so shy with the girls?”

He looked deep into her guileless Qritarioan eyes with his bulging booglarizers, took her hand and swelling and drooling intoned: “Wow do you think all got his willie wet in some other fine foxbox later; I know all the rest of the boys did, and hell, they didn’t half try. John’s a strange one anyway — in some ways the true personality of the band, his bulging eyes, almost Romanly chiseled face, gleaming skin and general wierdness mark him such deep intrinsic Soul of Honk that he comes clean out the other end of the barrel and damn my eyes if he don’t look like something straight out of Genet. Which only adds to the lustre onstage, when he’s standing there in his fedora and red-and-black pinstripe ganster suit whanging away at the keys like the joyride bastard son of Jerry Lee. He’s a diesel cooker and an outside looker, and, hell, when I slammed on my Rock ‘n ’ Roll Animal tape big Lou moaning out “Heroin” in the vast asteroidal Pecos spaces of our skulls he was the only one who’d sit there with me to catch the vibe.

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Tell you something else about John Anthony: he’s smart. Because he’s the only Wet Willie who won’t do interviews. I tried to pry a quotable out of him, and horny as he was he would only talk to Dori with the tape recorder shut off and clear in the back of the bus. Because he contends that it’s all said in the music and the rest is just froth and frosting. Zen wisdom in that boy.

Yeah and it was borne out when I sat down in the bar with the rest of these bazookas, and set about spelunkin’ on roots and music and the (lordy save my ass in a sling for nuns) meaning of it all.

Q: “Lester, don’t yew think we’re the blackest white band yew ever heard?”

A: “Yeah, so what?’*

Q: “Huh?”'

Gotta say Wet Willie do the best \yhite rock slash James Brown act cum Yardbirds (it’s in the harp) and whatever you want since Bernie “B.B.” Fieldings’ Black Pearl. So get it while you can,, look at Granny run run, ain’t everybody home, slammin’ it right there with all the fire and fuck and feed you can feel. Or filibuster.

Singin’ in a honky tonk cafe Nobody’s hearin’ what you say They’re too busy drinkin’ anyway You gotta keep on smilin*

Jimmy Hall said that. Bob Dylan didn’t say nothin’ this year. But then, neither did John Anthony. But then, he didn’t have to. ^

*(c) 1974 Capricorn Records Inc./No i Exit Music (BMI)