Willy Deville: The Best of Willy Deville: Come a Little Bit Closer

[rating=4.00]

Put Willie DeVille and his band, Mink DeVille, at the top of your list of artists you should know about but probably don’t. This new live disc will serve as a good introduction for new fans and a welcome addition for old ones.

Blending cool New York street soul with Latin rhythms, street corner doo-wop, blues, and the hard drive of the early punks, Willie is a bit early Bruce Springsteen transported to the street corners of Spanish Harlem, a bit CBGB punk attitude, a bit Tito Puente playing Havana in the 50’s, and a bit Ben E. King at the Apollo in the 60’s. Think of West Side Story redone by Martin Scorcese with the combination of the Al Pacino characters in Dog Day Afternoon and Scarface as the lead. This album would provide the perfect  film score.

Willie’s first major band, Mink DeVille, was formed in the middle 70’s, the early days of the New York punk. Though their music was quite different from the normal CBGB punk scene, they served as house band at the punk mecca for several years, his music blending perfectly with the scene, although like Blondie, the Talking Heads, and Television, the similarities were mostly through their attitude towards music.

Over the next 30 plus years he performed with a wide range of musicians including David Hidalgo from  Los Lobos, Dr John, Earl King, The Meters, and Mark Knopfler,  moving from New York to San Francisco, LA, and New Orleans, where he lived in the French Quarter for 12 years.  His music defied the easy categorization demanded by American radio, and he found more success in Europe, where some of his albums sold over 100,000 copies, and his tours were a success.

This disc gathers live performances from his career that began on the streets of New York in the early 70’s and spanned 28 years and several continents, a generous mix of rockers, R & B, blues and Latin swing, 17 tracks in all.

Included are his best known tunes, “Mixed Up, Shook Up Girl”, “Cadillac Walk”, and “Spanish Stroll”. “Storybook Love” was written with Mark Knopfler for the film The Princess Bride and nominated for an Academy Award.  “Hey Joe”, maybe best known as a Jimi Hendrix tune, here is given a Tex-Mex border treatment, Latin percussion, mariachi horns, with some tongue-in-cheek border patois lyrics added. The current crop of neo-R&B artists: Raphael Sadiq, Fitz and the Tantrums, Joss Stone, could do well to listen well to Willie and Mink DeVille.  As what they are recreating, he created.

 

Related Content

Recent Posts

New to Glide

Keep up-to-date with Glide

Twitter