Willy Deville
DeVille discovered her body. He said:
I got in a car accident because I got crazy. I think I was somewhat taunting death because somebody who I loved very much died. And I found them. That’s what that lyric in that song means (“she hurts me still since I cut her down” [from “Downside of Town” on Crow Jane Alley]). I cut her down. Next thing you know the police show up, I was in tears… I was in love with another woman and we were going through some hard times, and I got in the car and I wanted to go off the cliff. I was in the mountains in New Mexico… They came right around the corner head on. You know how big a Dodge Ram truck is? I broke my arm in three places and my knee went into the dash board… It was bone to bone… I was on crutches and on a cane for about three years and I couldn go anywhere or do anything. I was fucked up. I was ready for the scrapheap.
“I guess I was testing the waters to see if I would live through it”, DeVille told another interviewer. “It was a foolish, foolish thing to do.” For the next five years, DeVille walked with a cane and performed sitting on a barstool, until he had hip replacement surgery in 2006.
DeVille’s stay in the Southwest awakened his interest in his Native American heritage. On the cover of his next album, 2002’s Acoustic Trio Live in Berlin, recorded to celebrate his 25 years’ of performing, DeVille wore long hair. He began wearing Native American clothing and jewelry on stage. In 2004, DeVille returned to Los Angeles to record Crow Jane Alley, his third album with producer John Philip Shenale. The album continued his explorations of his Spanish-Americana sound and featured many prominent Los Angeles Latino musicians. On the cover, DeVille wore a Native American headdress and breastplate. Richard Marcus said of the album, “Crow Jane Alley is the work of an artist who after thirty plus years in the business still has the ability to surprise and delight his listeners. Listening to this disc only confirms that Willy DeVille is one of the greats who have been ignored for too long.”
Return to New York
After living for 15 years in New Orleans and the Southwest, DeVille returned to New York City in 2003, where he took up residence with Nina Lagerwall, his third wife. He continued touring Europe, usually playing music festivals in the summer.
On Mardi Gras Day, 2008, Pistola, DeVille’s sixteenth album, was released. Independent Music said about the album: “(Willy DeVille) has never been more artistically potent than on Pistola, confronting the demons of his past with an impressive lyrical honesty and unexpectedly diverse musical imagination.”
Personal life
Willy DeVille was married in the late 1970s to Susan Berle (February 19, 1950ugust 12, 2004), who was known as Toots. Toots and Willy had known each other in high school and had a son, Sean, in 1970. Alex Halberstadt, Doc Pomus’s biographer, wrote about Toots, “Half French and half Pima Indian, Toots favored a pair of nose rings, snow-white kabuki make-up and a Ronettes-style beehive the color of tar. She’d once put out a lit Marlboro in a woman’s eye just for staring at Willy.” The Guardian’s Garth Cartwright wrote about Toots, “(DeVille’s) combative approach with the media was made worse by his wife, Toots, who shadowed him and would threaten anyone she took against.”
In 1984, DeVille married his second wife, Lisa Leggett, who he met in California.. She became his business manager. They lived in New Orleans and on a horse farm in Picayune, Mississippi. After her suicide in 2001, he married Nina Lagerwall (daughter of Sture Lagerwall), his third wife, and returned to New York City, where he spent the rest of his life. In February 2009, DeVille was diagnosed with Hepatitis C, and in May of that year doctors discovered pancreatic cancer in DeVille in the course of his Hepatitis C treatment. He died in New York City in the late hours of August 6, 2009, three weeks shy of his 59th birthday.
Legacy
About his legacy, DeVille told an interviewer, “I have a theory. I know that I’ll sell much more records when I’m dead. It isn’t very pleasant, but I have to get used to this idea.”
Thom Jurek wrote about him after his death, “Willy DeVille is America’s loss even if America doesn know it yet. The reason is simple: Like the very best rock and roll writers and performers in our history, he one of the very few who got it right; he understood what made a three-minute song great, and why it matteredecause it mattered to him. He lived and died with the audience in his shows, and he gave them something to remember when they left the theater, because he meant every single word of every song as he performed