Willy Deville
stuff”. The band appeared on Live at CBGB’s (1976), a compilation album of bands that played at CBGB.
There was the Ramones, Patti Smith, Television, the Talking Heads, and us. We were the five big draws. And then one night this blond-headed guy came in to CBGB, Ben Edmonds (an A&R man for Capitol Records, and previously an editor for Creem). He was the guy who was responsible for being the visionary who saw that we were different than they were and that we could probably have a career playing music. So we went into this cheap little studio and did four songs, which Edmonds gave to Jack Nitzsche. I didn’t even know who Nitzsche was. Nitzsche did all the Phil Spector stuff that we grew up with and loved. We just fell in love with each other. We were buddies to the end. He was like my crazy uncle. I called him my mentor and my tormentor.
In December 1976, Ben Edmonds signed the band to a contract with Capitol Records. Wrote Edmonds:
When Mink DeVille took the stage (at CBGB) and tore into “Let Me Dream if I Want To”, followed by another scorcher called “She’s So Tough”, they had me. These five guys… were obviously part of the new energy, but I also felt immediately reconnected to all the rock & roll I loved best: the bluesy early Stones, Van Morrison…, the subway scenarios of the The Velvet Underground, Dylan’s folk-rock inflections, the heartbreak of Little Willie John, and a thousand scratchy old flea market 45s. Plus they seemed to contain all the flavors of their New York neighborhood, from Spanish accents to reggae spice.
Working with Jack Nitzsche
In January 1977, Mink DeVille recorded its debut album, Cabretta, produced by Jack Nitzsche. Nitzsche, a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, would produce three albums for Mink DeVille. Nitzsche said about DeVille, “We hit it off right away. Willy pulled out his record collection, he started playing things, that was it. I thought, ‘Holy shit! This guy’s got taste!'” Nitzsche was a perfect fit for Willy DeVille, whose tastes ran to the Brill Building sound that Nitzsche and Phil Spector had pioneered in the early 1960s. Said DeVille, “You listen to that music and you hear those really high strings, and that percussion, and the castanets; that’s all Jack’s (Jack Nitzsche’s) work. All that really cool stuff”.
Cabretta, a spicy, multifaceted album of soul, R&B, rock, and blues recordings, was selected number 57 in the Village Voice’s 1977 “Pop & Jazz Critics Poll”; a single from the album, panish Stroll, was a top-20 hit in the United Kingdom. The band’s follow-up album, Return to Magenta (1978), continued in the same vein as Cabretta, but with a twist. “We went against strings on the first albumecided it should be outright, raw, and rude.” On Return to Magenta, Willy DeVille and producers Nitzsche and Steve Douglas employed lavish string arrangements on several songs.
Le Chat Bleu
“That World Outside”
Sample of “That Word Outside”, one of three songs DeVille co-wrote with Doc Pomus for Le Chat Bleu.
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For Mink DeVille’s next album, Le Chat Bleu (1980), Willy DeVille wrote several songs with Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member Doc Pomus. Guitarist Louis X. Erlanger had become acquainted with Pomus while frequenting New York City’s blues clubs and had urged Pomus to check out the group. Wrote Alex Halberstadt, Pomus’s biographer:
One night Doc’s pub crawl took him to The Bottom Line just a block east of Washington Square Park (in New York City). He sat at his usual table and watched an empty spotlight. Cigarette smoke wafted into the shaft of light from offstage while the sax player blew Earle Hagen’s “Harlem Nocturne”. DeVille strode out of the wings and snatched the mike. With his pedantically trimmed pencil mustache he looked like a cross between a bullfighter and a Puerto Rican pimp. The tightest black suit clung to his thin frame; he wore a purple shirt, a narrow black tie and shoes with six-inch points. A Pompadour jutted out above his forehead like the lacquered hull of a submarine. The show was the most soulful Doc had seen in ages. Onstage, Willy’s band, Mink DeVille, had nothing in common with the New Wave CBGB bands that the press had lumped them with. Unlike Television, the Ramones, or Blondie, at heart Mink DeVille was an R&B band, and Willy an old-fashioned soul singer. He borrowed much of his phrasing from Ben E. King and couldn’t believe it when someone told him that Doc Pomus wanted to meet him after the show. “You mean the guy who wrote ‘Save the Last Dance for Me’?” He was even more amazed when Doc asked whether he’d write with him. “Look me up. I’m in