WET WILLIE: SLICKS FROM DIXIE

WET WILLIE: SLICKS FROM DIXIE

by

Patrick Goldstein

Rock ’n’ roll—especially the kind of wild demonic rhythms that have been hurtling out of the South since the time Elvis first mounted a flat bed truck and Jerry Lee Lewis got expelled from the Southwestern Bible Institute—has always been a music of the church. It was sacred music that celebrated sex and sin while preaching against temptation. It was music that didn’t merely praise the Lord but picked a fight with him, like two drunken soldiers arguing over a broken-down blonde.

This unabashed affection for the South’s rich heritage of black spirituals and soul music, the kind of music only heard in Sunday sermons south of the Mason-Dixon line, has always set Wet Willie apart from the rest of their Dixie rock peers. They’ve been the black sheeps of the Southern rock clan. While the Allman Brothers plunged into the motorpsycho nightmare of urban blues and the Marshall Tucker/Charlie Daniels Band contingent proudly donned cowboy hats, borrowing liberally from traditional country weepers and fiddle battles, Wet Willie steeped themselves in the passion and Pentecostal fervor of black church music. They were proud graduates of the Stax/Volt college of musical knowledge.

Wet Willie lead singer Jimmy Hall carries the torch for this incendiary gospel passion, much in the same way that a Southern Baptist preacher ignites the conscience of his flock at the height of his Sunday sermon. When Hall embraces a joyous ballad like “Make You Feel Love Again,” or mourns over a short-circuited love affair in “Don’t Turn Me Away,” he sounds as close to Otis Redding as a white boy from Mobile, Alabama, could ever hope for.

Sometimes the resemblance is uncanny—it’s as if Otis has willed him his voice.

Its narrative reminds us of the childhood thrill of singing “that happy beat” on the neighborhood stoop. As you might expect, the song owes much of its inspiration to the band’s unusual musical upbringing. Both Jimmy Hall, their lanky, boyish-looking singer (after all these years he still has trouble growing a beard) and Michael Duke, the band’s amiable, rotund pianist, spent as much of their adolescence in church as they did listening to R&B and trying to get laid.

“I think my mother always wanted to be a preacher,” Hall said the morning after the band’s triumphant return to New York’s Bottom Line. “We were Methodists ’cause the church was right down the street. All my brothers and sisters sang in the choir.” (Hall is one of. six kids—one brother, Jack, plays bass in Wet Willie while sister Donna traveled with the band for several years as a back-up vocalist.)

"We were the champs of the cheap high. —Jimmy Hall"

Hall munched on some breakfast. “My mom learned piano from a black woman who lived down the street. So we could sing at home too. I used to take the bass parts, especially early in the morning when I could reach all the low notes. The family favorites were old stuff like ‘Stormy Waters’ from the Baptist hymnal. We must’ve worn off its cover.”

Duke was no stranger to the hardbacked wooden pews either. After losing his job at a shirt factory for crashing his pick-up truck into a filling station, he taught music at a church near Thomasville, Alabama; one the state’s many dry counties.

“It was really a great church,” said Duke, who was not eating, but dieting. “It was built by a bootlegger who sold moonshine down the road—after the services, of course. He must’ve been drunk when he built the church, ’cause for some strange reason the front steps were built right along this deep gully, with about a 14 foot drop from the church door to the ground. So everyone had to go in and out the back way.”

According to Duke, who handles a healthy chunk of the group’s vocal chores, the dynamics of gospel music left an indelible mark on the band. “Gospel is really a study in momentum, just like the structure of a concert set,” he said. "When we’d be driving across the South late at night on one of our supermarket tours, we’d always listen to Aretha’s daddy, Rev. Franklin and his gospel show. That was a real lesson, to hear him start out real slow and build up momentum, raising the emotion ’til the whole church sounded like it was gonna shake apart.”

Church was not Hall and Duke’s only recreation when they were growing up. Staying the hell out of the Army consumed a lot of energy too. Hall was like Muhammed Ali—he didn’t have no quarrel with no Viet Cong. Playing in a soul band was a helluva lot more fun than dodging bullets in ’Nam. By 1967 Jimmy was going to school at the University of Southern Alabama, where he hung around “mostly to avoid the draft, grow my hair out and try to look cool.”

By 1968 Hall had quit school and taken up residence in a massive, practically rent-free mansion in Fairhope, Alabama (just across the bay from Mobile). To keep from getting too bored, Hall formed a band. “It was a crazy time,” he grinned. “We were just living it up, doing lotsa drugs and playing everything from Cream to straight ahead R&B. Some nut from the local junior college stole a bunch of projectors to use for our light shows.”

Finally the time came for our crew of fledgling musicians to flunk their physicals at the local draft board. Hall et al. cruised round Mobile for hours trying to find some speed so Jimmy could jack up his blood pressure enough to scare the Army doctors out of drafting him for anything more rigorous than playing sax solos at the local ROTC’s Friday night beer blasts. Finally Hall stumbled onto some Whimine inhalers, which he promptly boiled down and ingested.

“I must’ve been quite a sight,” he laughed, “speeding my brains out, with my eyes rolling around in the back of my head. We were the champs of the cheap high. We’d sniff Bactine, anything to stay out of the service.”

Michael Duke contributed his share of draft evasion lore, reminding us of the famous peanut butter trick. “Stick it in your shorts,” he counseled, “and say, ‘Oh doctor, I’ve shit in my pants. I don’t think I can control myself.’ Now who’d want someone who’s always shitting in their shorts?” The Army, sensing they had a dedicated non-combatant on their hands, finally threw in the towel. Hall was a free man. By 1971, Wet Willie was in full swing, having earned themselves one of the first berths on Capricorn’s Dixie-Rock Express.

The original Wet Willie ensemble (the current crew has three holdovers from this unit) spent seven years on what Duke jokingly refers to as “the hash-brown circuit.” Though “Keep On Smiling” was a top ten hit in 1973, they spent as much of their career at Capricorn lurking in the Allman Brothers’ shadow.

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“Our albums were well-kept secrets,” said Duke. “Phil Walden was a real gentleman and J don’t want it to sound like we hate him, but he wouldn’t spend the money needed to break us. Capricorn’s like a pyramid—it all comes down from Phil the Pharoah. And if he don’t give the wink, the money don’t come down.

“When the Allmans first came out, he was complaining about spending $60,000 on their camper. By the time we came along the camper had broke down and he was afraid to throw away any money on us. We couldn’t get five bus tickets to Cleveland.”

Finally, in 1976, with the release of The Wetter The Better, the band gave Capricorn an ultimatum—either shit or get off the pot. “It was make it or break it,” Duke said. “We were stagnating and we decided if they couldn’t make it happen, we’d go somewhere else.”

The band also deserted Capricorn’s Macon studio for The Manor, a facility near Oxfordshire, England suggested by the group’s new producer, Gary Lyons. A veteran British engineer, Lyons has updated the group’s sound, wedding a batch of streamlined rock melodies to Wet Willie’s spirited gospel harmonies:

The stately Manor is a far cry from th§ country churches Duke used to haunt as a kid in northern Alabama. A favorite story of his centers around the time one of his friend’s maids took him to her church. She was outfitted, as was her custom, in a white starched dress. “That dress was yellow from the starch,” Duke recalled. “The church totally flipped me out—all the singing and shouting and the tremendous religious devotion that was in the services. It was really moving. You could feel the church shake when the; congregation testified.

“What I remember best, though, was that the only bathroom in the church was way up front, by the pulpit. So you could watch all the traffic during the service. Once, right after a well-dressed lady wentjn, one of the kids in the front row wandered over to the bathroom. He knocked on the door and nothing happened, so finally he swung the door open and stared at this dignified woman sitting on the pot.”

Duke grinned broadly. “Now that was what I call a religious experience.”