Willy Deville
the book”, Doc hollered before rolling away (in his wheelchair).
DeVille said about their first meeting, “Now here I am at 29, a writer, doing pretty good and I’ve just been asked if I want to write songs with a guy who helped lay the foundations for the music I fell in love with sitting at my mother’s kitchen table when I was only seven years old. You’ve got to be kidding!” The Rolling Stone Critic’s Poll named Le Chat Bleu the fifth best album of 1980; music historian Glenn A. Baker declared it the tenth best rock album of all time. Of the original members of Mink DeVille, only Willy and guitarist Louis X. Erlanger played on the album. It was recorded in Paris. Said DeVille: “I wanted to record the album in Paris… because I desperately wanted to use Jean-Claude Petit, whom I had contacted through dith Piaf’s songwriter Charles Dumont, for string arrangements… The band with me was a dream come true. I’ve got Phil Spector’s horn player, Steve Douglas (who also served as producer), on tenor and baritone. Elvis Presley’s rhythm section, Ron Tutt and Jerry Scheff, want to play with me. Wow! That’s pretty cool! Songwriting with Doc Pomus. Not to mention Jean-Claude doing the strings. How can I go wrong?” Wrote Alex Halberstadt:
(Willy DeVille) created a record that sounded like nothing that had come before… It was clear that Willy had realized his fantasy of a new, completely contemporary Brill Building record. To the symphonic sweetness of the Drifters he added his own Gallic romance and, in his vocal, a measure of punk rock’s Bowery grit. Doc (Pomus) was elated when he heard it. Thinking they’d signed a New Wave band, Capitol didn’t know what to do with Willy’s rock and roll chanson and shelved it for a year. When it was finally released in 1980, Le Chat Bleu remixed by Joel Dorn, made nearly every critic’s list of the year’s best records.
Kenny Margolis, a longtime Willy DeVille sideman who played accordion and keyboards on Le Chat Bleu said, “Capitol in the U.S. did not know what to do with Le Chat Bleu because they perceived Willy as this punk rocker from CBGBs and he came back from Paris with a very different kind of record. They didn understand the record, but they understood it in Europe. They released it immediately in Europe and everybody loved it”. “It says something about the state of the American record businessomething pathetic and depressinghat Willy DeVille’s finest album fell on deaf ears at Capitol,” wrote Kurt Loder of Rolling Stone. Capitol Records released the album only in Europe. Le Chat Bleu sold well in Europe and in the USA as an import. Capitol finally released it in the United States in 1981.
The Atlantic albums
“Willy had found a more appreciative reception at Atlantic Records, where head man Ahmet Ertegn signed him to a fat new recording deal and promised to personally shepherd his career…”, reported Rolling Stone in 1980. “According to Willyever one to let false modesty intrude on a good storyhe Atlantic Records chairman said, ‘You got the look, the performance, the writing, you know exactly what to do.'”
DeVille continued recording and touring under the name Mink DeVille. “Those boys went through the wars with me, the a night bars, and I had to turn on them and lop their heads off and say, ‘I love you man, but that’s the way it gotta be.’ I still feel guilty about it, but we were just a good bar band. That’s all we were. We weren’t ready to make great rock and roll records.”
Wrote critic Robert Palmer in 1981:
Mr. DeVille’s career never quite took off, despite the impressive breadth and depth of his talent. He is recording a new album for Atlantic records, having departed from his previous recording commitment under less than amicable circumstances. And on Friday night he was at the Savoy, where he demonstrated with an almost insolent ease that he is still ready for the recognition that should have been his several years ago. He has the songs, he has the voice, and he has the band. And he has expanded the scope of his music by adding elements of French cafe songs and Louisiana zydeco to the mixture of rock, blues, Latin and Brill Building soul that was already there.
Said DeVille:
I had band problems, manager problems, record company problems. And yeah, I had drug problems. Finally I got a new recording contract, with Atlantic, and a new manager. I cleaned up my act. I figured that since playing music with people I was friends with didn’t seem to work out, I would hire some mercenaries, some cats who just wanted to play and get paid. And those guys turned out to be more devoted to the music than any band I ever had. They’re professional, precise, but they’re full of fire, too.”