Willy Deville
Willy Deville
Early life
Willy DeVille was born William Paul Borsey Jr. in Stamford, Connecticut. The son of a carpenter, he grew up in the working-class Belltown district of Stamford. His maternal grandmother was a Pequot, and he was also of Basque and Irish descent. As he put it, “A little of this and a little of that; a real street dog.” DeVille said about Stamford, “It was post-industrial. Everybody worked in factories, you know. Not me. I wouldn’t have that. People from Stamford don’t get too far. That’s a place where you die.” DeVille said about his youthful musical tastes, “I still remember listening to groups like the Drifters. It was like magic, there was drama, and it would hypnotise me.”
DeVille quit high school and began frequenting New York’s Lower East Side and West Village. “It seemed like I just hung out and hung out. I always wanted to play music but nobody really had it together then. They had psychedelic bands but that wasn’t my thing.” In this period, DeVille’s interests ran to blues guitarists Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, and especially John Hammond. “I think I owe a lot about my look, my image on stage, and my vocal riffs to John Hammond. A lot of my musical stance is from John”, DeVille said. He credited Hammond’s 1965 album So Many Roads with “changing my life”.
As a teenager, DeVille played with friends from Stamford in a blues band called Billy & the Kids, and later in another band called The Immaculate Conception.
At the age of 17, he married Susan “Toots” Berle; they had a son named Sean in 1970. DeVille struck out in 1971 for London in search of like-minded musicians (“obvious American with my Pompadour hair”), but was unsuccessful finding them; he returned to New York City after a two-year absence.
His next band, The Royal Pythons (“a gang that turned into a musical group”), was not a success either. Said DeVille:
I decided to go to San Francisco; there was nothing really happening in New York. Flower power was dead. All the day-glo paint was peeling off the walls. People were shooting speed. I mean, it was real Night of the Living Dead. So I bought a truck and headed out west. I traveled all around the country for a couple of years, looking for musicians who had heart, instead of playing 20-minute guitar solos, which is pure ego.
Mink DeVille years
For a complete history of this band, see Mink DeVille.
Louis X. Erlanger (left) and Willy DeVille of Mink DeVille in 1977.
In 1973, DeVille was living in a cold water flat in Oakland, California and playing gigs in San Francisco in a band that would become Mink DeVille. “We were playing the leather bars down on Folsom Street,” he recalled. “We were Billy de Sade and the Marquis then. We played the Barracks. After a while they would take their clothes off. This one guyesus Satin he called himselfe’d dance on the pool table. It was nuts! Crazy!”
The band changed its name to Mink DeVille in 1974; William Borsey took the name Willy DeVille. In 1975, DeVille persuaded the band members to try their luck in New York City. “I conned the guys into believing that if we went back to New York I could get us work, because I knew the city and the ropes of how stuff worked, which was stretching it.” In New York, they hired guitarist Louis X. Erlanger, whose blues sensibilities helped shape the band’s sound.
Mink DeVille became one of the original house bands at CBGB, the New York nightclub where punk rock music was born in the mid 1970s. “We played (at CBGB) for three years…. [D]uring that time we didn’t get paid more than fifty bucks a night”, DeVille said.DeVille had only sour memories of CBGB. He did not play any benefit concerts or recordings for the nightclub. He told Music Street Journal, “The whole band only got dollars a night, even to the end. That’s why I never went back there. I’ve never walked through those doors other than to have maybe a beer once. I was down in New Orleans and I came up here, kind of going down Memory Lane so to speak. I ended up on Bowery down there and I thought, ‘Let’s see what’s going on here.’ I walked in (to CBGB) and I saw Hilly (Hilly Kristal) standing there. I had a big straw hat on, silk suit. He bought me a beer and it got around to ‘Would you like to come back?’ I said, ‘No, Hilly and you know wny? Because you never treated me right. You never were fair to me.'”(Olma, Greg (2006) “Interview with Willy DeVille” at Music Street Journal) He told Leap in the Dark: “They keep asking me to come and play there (at CGBG) 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