Wesley Willis: Rock and Roll Icon

on the occasion of his 60th birthday

I imagine an alternate dimension, one where tonight I would be in a concert hall, filled to the brim with adoring fans. The crowd would part right down the middle as he strode through the room, grayer but no less full of life, his Technics keyboard under his arm. He would be beaming.

Today, May 31, 2023, should be the 60th birthday of Wesley Willis, the man who for many of us represented a sort of pure distillation of rock and roll.

I don’t want to try and overexplain Wes’s life here. I’ll go into a little bit, which I know is liable to confuse more than it might explain. What I really want to do is celebrate the life of a man who sincerely brought joy and excitement and, dare I say, a deeper empathetic understanding of humanity to dozens, hundreds, thousands, really who could possibly say? I sincerely believe that Wesley Willis’s art and music will endure for many many more years.

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Photo credit: Clara Winterbottom Sourced from Raw Vision

Wesley Willis was an accomplished artist and musician. He also happened to be schizophrenic. He heard demons. His most effective means of chasing the demons away was to blast them away with rock and roll.

This article from Raw Vision (only a snippit online) goes into Wes as the visual artist. He drew many, many streetscapes of Chicago, drawing scenes such as street corners in shockingly precise detail from memory.

“The Dan Ryan Expressway”, 1984

I found the original image of this in a collection being sold by the Matthew Rachman Gallery. I don’t know anything about the Matthew Rachman Gallery so I can’t vouch one way or another for how they came into possession of Wes’s art and to whom exactly the profits of the sales will go. What I can say is that his pieces sell for upwards of $5,000, and I guarantee you, nobody ever gave him 1% of that for any piece he ever drew.

Wes eventually gravitated from art to music. I don’t know the details of how this all came together but the Wesley Willis Fiasco formed in the early ‘90s and somehow managed to exist and tour for a while. Wes became something of a cult icon rooted in Chicago’s alternative music scene. The Fiasco eventually broke up - we can directly blame the demons for this. Wes was already a solo artist of some renown by this time though, and in 1995 he released Greatest Hits on Jello Biafra’s Alternative Tentacles label.

Yes: Every single song on that album is Wesley Willis singing over the top of pre-programmed music of his Technics keyboard. Yes: Every single song is essentially the same.

Perhaps his best known song is “Rock N Roll McDonalds”:

(If you’re not from the Chicago area, you may not be aware that there actually was such a place as the Rock ‘n’ Roll McDonald’s at 600 North Clark in River North. It was a McDonald’s with a lot of memorabilia.)

Of course a person might listen to the song without context and find it ridiculous that it was released on a proper album, might find the whole thing to be a joke. But you must understand: this could all be funny, but it was not a joke. Wesley Willis singing that McDonald’s had the worst hamburgers is hilarious in large part because it was true.

Discogs credits Wesley Willis with 36 proper releases including 26 albums. Were some of these albums released by perhaps less than scrupulous people? Certainly. But I would plead with people not to get hung up by such realities in evaluating Wes as an artist. And, yes, Wes was an artist, a serious musician, a hell of a lot more accomplished than any of us writing or reading this right now.

It’s difficult to explain in one, three, or eighty-four paragraphs what exactly I mean when I refer to Wes as an accomplished artist. It’s easy for people to hear what sounds like the same song over and over again and shake their heads. It’s even easier when they find out how many of those songs were, shall we say, somewhat vulgar, indicative of a man who had demons cussing him out and who responded by cussing them out in kind. Not his most famous, but perhaps his signature song, is one called “You’re a Fucking Asshole”. It should be taken completely seriously: it’s addressed to one of the demons. And it was Wes’s way of saying that the demons would not hold him down.

In all sincerity: What more powerful art could there possibly be than an aggressively defiant stand against the demons in a man’s head?

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This is how and why it is that, when you get past being confronted by a man over 6 feet tall, weighing over 300 pounds, swearing enough to make a truck driver blush, sporting a huge callus on his forehead from headbutting people: when you get past songs about being at rock shows, songs about whupping a llama’s ass, songs laced with vulgarity: when you get past what might be described as the “child-like” and repetitive nature of songs: when you get past all of these things which you absolutely can get past, you find a deep soul, a sincere artist who leveraged all of his available talents to stake his ground on a planet which mostly has had no use for people like him:

You find a bona fide rock and roll hero.

The album Rock ‘n’ Roll Will Never Die is the one which I think first physically wound its way into my hands. Pretty much every song is about a concert Wes saw, or at least, which we must assume he saw. My favorite was always this one:

I encountered Wes three times. The first time he was on the landing at the Metro, selling artwork. The second time he played a show at a practice space on the west side of Bloomington, and I actually have a recording of the show, though probably of dubious quality, not that sonic fidelity is what matters the most. And the last time, I booked him to play a show in the main lounge at IWU in the fall of 1997, with his buddies Randy Herman and the Sceptre of Benevolence opening, featuring Dan Butler aka The Bass Turd as road manager / warmup accordion player. I would learn a lot from Dan later on about being on tour with Wes and just what it possibly meant, and it only solidified my thinking that this was a true icon.

Those of you who were there for any of it, I hope you’ll take this opportunity to spend some time listening to old Wesley Willis songs, and maybe even sharing your memories in the comments. Those of you who might still be a little mystified, that’s okay, you just have to trust me. Wes was the greatest.

RIP Wes. It’s been twenty years since you’ve been gone, and we do very much still miss you. Rock ‘n’ roll will never die.

Photo: Clara Winterbottom Sourced from Thrillist