“Music to me, whatever kind it is, it’s inspiring to me, meaningful to me; it gives my life meaning and writing songs gives my life purpose.”
Willie Nile released his first album in early 1980, after New York Times music critic Robert Palmer had seen him playing in Greenwich Village and the resulting write-up garnered record company interest and he was signed to Arista Records. Having come down to the City from Buffalo, where he had been studying Philosophy at the university, Nile played solo at open mics at a time when punk was starting to take over from the coffeehouse folkies. Needless to say, Nile’s idea of a solo acoustic show was more rock & roll than quiet introspection.
With the recent release of New York At Night, Nile’s thirteenth studio album, he again leads us into the world of his adopted city, where the characters he sees on the subway or passes on the street can inspire a song that captures the beat, the very breath of the inner New York City, away from Times Square or Central Park. Nile illuminates that New York with his musical soundtrack. From the rockabilly-toned “New York Is Rockin’” to the Irish flavor incorporated into “Lost & Lonely World” and the reflective “Doors Of Paradise” and “A Little Bit Of Love,” Nile has produced one of his best albums to date.
When Nile was a young guy, hot on the release of his self-titled debut album, the hype was unavoidable, especially with songs like “Vagabond Moon” and “Old Men Sleeping On The Bowery.” Pete Townshend was a fan and Nile was asked to open for The Who on their Faces Dances tour. He recorded his second album while John Lennon was in another room at the same studio. Fred Smith from his favorite band Television started playing bass in his band. The spotlight was firmly shining on him yet he kept his wits about him and his feet on the ground and at age seventy-one, he’s still going strong.
There are many facets to Nile and we covered some of them during our recent interview.
Is it eerie in New York City with nothing happening there?
It’s strangely beautiful. It’s definitely quieter. I’m in the heart of the West Village and it’s pretty empty, a semi-ghost town. During the day there’s usually a few people here and there but not many. It’s pretty locked down. But I’m holding my own here. I’m isolating and I can get to the store and take walks.
I watched [Governor] Cuomo, and he’s kind of kicking butt. I mean, I’ve never seen a lot of him but he seems a together guy and he’s really been a good leader, he’s been strong. But he said, “Look, if I touch this table with my finger, cause it lives on surfaces, when I leave, that spot can still have the virus.” So when you get groceries, you’re supposed to wipe them down and so now when I come home, before I go in my apartment, I take them all out of the bag and spray them in the hallway; and the keys. I wear gloves and a mask when I go out. It’s New York, you know, this is a heavily populated area. But this is not normal.
When you came to New York, you were a solo guy. What kind of shows were you doing then?
When I played acoustically, the first times I did it in New York I was absolutely petrified, cause I’m not a real singer, you know, I’m a storyteller. I was so nervous. I went to the University Of Buffalo, I was a Philosophy major and taking courses in English and Philosophy and writing songs in the library up in a corner. And I had a batch of songs that I believed in and that made all the difference, I think. I would play open mics here and there and then Kenny’s Castaways moved from Upper East Side down to Bleecker Street and it was the perfect venue for me, cause it was a long narrow room and at the very back of the club was the stage and the first half of that backroom was where the audience was and the front half of the club was a long bar. And people would talk and it would get noisy at the bar so the folkies and the sensitive people who played soft and delicate, they had a hard time cause it was a bar.
When I would play solo, I was a rocker and I would play songs that I knew were for drums and bass and guitars and whatnot, background vocals. I was writing rock songs in my mind. And I was playful onstage, I got comfortable there. I’d play six nights a week and I would introduce imaginary musicians behind me (laughs). I was just carrying on, you know. I’d play my forty-five-minute set and I believed in the songs, it was all about the songs. That’s what gave me the courage to get up onstage with absolutely no experience.
But I would joke around with the crowd. I’m a kid who grew up with rock & roll and I wasn’t full of myself. I was there to sing the songs. So I just enacted the songs. I had more freedom and I could roam around the stage and do leaps and jumps and clown around. When I’d play solo acoustic, I’d leap off the stage. When I would finish a song I would do a complete running jump with the acoustic. And I remember when I played there, my left foot, I remember driving it into the ground to the beat – boom boom, boom boom boom – and I’d be leaning on my right foot and my left foot toe would be digging into the ground. There was a rug and I remember come July there was a hole in the rug from my foot and I wish when they remodeled or something I would have gotten the scissors and cut that and grabbed that piece. I’d love to have that on the wall.
That’s where you got your big break, at Kenny’s Castaways
When I moved to New York City from Buffalo, I would get up with my acoustic guitar and play solo at whatever open mics I could find. It took some time but Robert Palmer of the New York Times came to see me; no, he came to see the other act. I was playing on Bleecker Street at Kenny’s Castaways and I was opening up and apparently Robert Palmer had called the club and said he was coming to review the other fellow, who was a friend of mine, and Don Hill, God bless him, who was managing the club at the time – and opened up a famous rock club three years after that – he told Robert Palmer, “Hey, you should come early and see the guy who is opening.” And he did and he wrote the kind of review that you can only dream about and compared me to Buddy Holly and Bob Dylan and Gene Vincent and whatnot and it was a beautiful review and it got me signed to a major label. I signed to Arista.
So when I made the record, I rehearsed with a band for the first time. When the album came out, I had never played with a band. It was a first. And we did a three week tour and the third show I did was in front of the cameras in New York. The last show of the three week tour across the US, we were in Los Angeles at the Roxy and Freddie Mercury came to the show, cause I was way hyped back then, and it was nonsense but I took it in stride and it didn’t go to my head and I didn’t believe it, I knew it was just reference points. But Graham Parker was there and The Who’s management was there and I had heard from someone at the label that Pete Townshend was a big fan of my album. I thought it was just record company nonsense and said oh great and didn’t believe it. But when I was in LA after the show, Bill Curbishley came by with a bunch of the production crew of The Who and he came backstage and said hello and asked if I wanted to open up, cause The Who were currently on tour and had just played eight shows in LA and were now going to tour across the south and did I want to open the show. I thought he was kidding but then I realized he was not kidding.
So a long story short, I was going from never having played with a band before to two nights later I was in Phoenix in front of like 22,000 people playing; so it was like jumping into the fire (laughs). But it was incredible.
What was it like opening for The Who?
It was incredible. I mean, I couldn’t believe this was happening. Here I am, night after night, and I’m a huge Who fan, I grew up as a kid loving The Who. It was the first tour that they did without Keith Moon, the first one with Kenney Jones, who was really a sweetheart. They were so nice to us, all of them. We had free reign, we could go in the dressing rooms and they were just so nice to us. I mean, here was a guy who was just playing in clubs to fifty to a hundred people and all of a sudden it’s thousands (laughs). It was absolutely great. I had a great band. My drummer was Patti Smith’s drummer and my bass player was the bass player in the band Television, which is my favorite of the punk bands, and I had two great guitar players: one was Clay Barnes, who was from Meridian, Mississippi, and I met them through Steve Forbert, who was a good buddy back then, and Peter Hoffman from Boston. So I had this mighty band. Clay kind of covered The Beatles/lyrical side of things and Peter covered the Stones. So I’d go onstage with them and even though I was totally green and finding my way, I passionately believed in the material. But it was an incredible experience. Can you imagine?
And you know, talk about full circle, three or four years ago, the Grammy Charity MusiCares, was honoring Pete Townshend and Bill Curbishley in New York, for Pete’s work with addiction and stuff, and they had five artists who were going to play two Pete Townshend songs each, and I got a phone call one day from my booking agent and he said, “What are you doing May 28th?” And I will never forget this, he says, “Well, I just got a call from the Grammys and The Who, Bill Curbishley and Pete Townshend, want you to sing two Pete Townshend songs at this theatre in Times Square with The Who band.” And I went, “Oh yeah, I’ll do that.” (laughs).
The five people were Bruce Springsteen, Roger Daltrey, Billy Idol, Joan Jett and me. It was kind of like, what’s wrong with this picture? (laughs). Bruce is a good buddy and Pete and Roger were always so nice to me and to this day we stay in communication. I picked the songs and I had The Who band behind me. Pete was going to play but he was saving up his energy, maybe they were on tour, I can’t remember, but I played “Substitute” and “The Kids Are Alright” and it was an absolute blast! Can you imagine going up there with my electric guitar, and loving The Who and playing “Substitute” and “The Kids Are Alright,” two of the greatest Who songs, AND I get The Who band with me. I just totally let loose and had an absolute blast. We encored with “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” I’m playing guitar, Pete Townshend is right next to me on my left, four feet away; Bruce Springsteen is on my right and we’re playing “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” You can’t make something like that up! It was glorious.
Then two years ago, Roger Daltrey played a charity benefit here in New York down on Wall Street. It was a bunch of real high rollers and they raise millions for cancer. The guy who puts the show on is a big fan and friend of mine and he asked if I would sing with Roger and I said, well, I’m not going to bother him so he asked Roger and Roger said, “Absolutely.” So I got to sing three songs with Roger and basically most of The Who band at this event. Talk about full circle. But that just shows you, Leslie, when I say they’re really great people, cause why would they do that? There’s no benefit to them. I’m small potatoes, you know. They respect me and they were kind enough to let me partake in that. And it was a thrill of a lifetime. You know, in some box in Buffalo, there’s pictures. There’s a guy that’s actually doing a documentary about me and that would be good for that.
You are known for taking something serious and rocking it out. Why do you like going in that direction instead of the slower, more serious route?
Well, when I was a little kid, I had older brothers and they brought records home and they were playing music, the radio was on, and I heard Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Everly Brothers, all the early stuff. So I grew up with that and it lit a fire under my feet. I love Classical music, I took piano lessons, but when I heard rock & roll, I just went, Whoa, this is too much fun! So rock & roll was the boat I wanted to sail on. That moves me. So I can write a song like “Cell Phones Ringing In The Pockets Of The Dead,” which I wrote after the Madrid train bombing. I usually go to Europe a few times a year. I’ve been doing that since the early nineties and I’ve got great fans over there in Spain and Italy and the UK. When the train bombing happened, I was sitting at my computer and I’m reading the paper and the headline was: Cell Phones Ringing In The Pockets Of The Dead; and it made me mad. I texted a bunch of my Spanish friends, Are you okay? But I wrote the song cause I was angry and I wanted to write a fierce rocker. And “Holy War,” same thing, terrorism. You can deal with serious subjects in different ways and I’m not one of those whoa is me, whoa is us kind of guy. I’ll get defiant and fight back. And in those two particular instances, I wrote songs that were like prayers of anger; like, let’s make this a better world, we can do better than this.
I live in New York and I was here during 9-11. I was shaving and I heard this noise and I was like, what’s that? It was the second plane going through the building. I went downstairs on my way to work, I was working at the time, and a fellow downstairs said to look and I looked to my left and I could see the one tower and I knew right away it was terrorism. One of my good buddies, a bass player I knew, we used to play baseball together and a really good guy with two sons, ten and eleven years old, and he was working on the 105th floor where the first plane went in and hopefully he died quickly because the horror, you can’t even imagine.
Music to me, whatever kind it is, it’s inspiring to me, meaningful to me; it gives my life meaning and writing songs gives my life purpose. I don’t want to make an album where people are going to walk away feeling sad, I want to pick them up. I want them to be optimistic. I want there to be like thunderbolts of joy or enlightenment or whatever amidst a collection of songs. You can put in songs that might be heavy or dark but at the end of the day when that album is done, I want that person to feel exhilarated. I write about everything, whatever is happening in the world. I just write what comes to me so an album or a given collection of songs will include all kinds of different things, you know, from party on a Saturday night to a deep intimate love song to a loss, people die; it’s a tough old world sometimes and music can reflect that in different ways.
But at the end of the day, I want anybody that comes to one of my shows or listens to one of my records to be inspired. At the end of the shows, I’ll go out and sign CDs and LPs after a show and say hi to the people and thank them for coming and I love doing that. And surprising, the amount of people will say, “Oh, you know so and so died six months ago and I haven’t been out and my friends said I had to come see Willie Nile play, you’ll feel better,” and they’re beaming. I play and I have fun doing it and people get entertained and inspired. I’m defiant about wanting to do what I can to make this a better world, whether it’s a little bit of enlightenment or a little bit of love.
Which is the name of a song, “A Little Bit Of Love,” on New York At Night
Yeah, I remember I was staying at my dad’s house, and my dad is 102 and he’s doing great, knock on wood; he was going to church every day up until the diocese of Buffalo cancelled masses, thank goodness, cause he’s 102 and a devout church goer and loves his faith. Mom died about thirteen years ago. But he was born in the epidemic. He was born in 1917 in November at home because of the Spanish Flu epidemic and now here he is at 102, and he’s not going to church now, which is good because we don’t want him out. One of my brothers is living with him and Dad’s doing great – doing crossword puzzles, reading books, watches TV.
So I was in Buffalo at his house and a song came to me, “A little bit of love goes a long, long way.” It just came into my head and I thought, that’s a song, and it was knocking at my door so I sat down at the piano and wrote it. It’s one of my favorite songs on the album because this is a hard, sad world with a lot of inhumanity; it’s a tough old world and has been for centuries, decades, and a little bit of love doesn’t hurt, you know. I’m for helping a neighbor out, people being good to each other. So I write about things I care about and that came to me – BOOM – and I wrote it down, wrote the song, and we got a great recording of it and I’m so excited about it, about this record.
You said you wrote “A Little Bit Of Love” on piano. Is that how most of them come about?
It’s fifty-fifty. I wrote “New York Is Rockin’” on a guitar and “Backstreet Slide” I wrote on guitar; “Doors Of Paradise” was guitar; “Lost & Lonely World” was guitar. “The Fool Who Drank The Ocean,” I wrote that with my buddy Frankie Lee, a dear friend and great songwriter. He had this idea for a song and I went over to the piano and I started fooling around and I came up with the hook. That’s where that came from and then we fleshed it out on guitar. “New York At Night” was guitar; “The Last Time We Made Love,” that’s me playing the piano and singing; “Surrender The Moon” was guitar; “Under This Roof” was guitar; “Run Free” was a little bit of both. I wrote that one with Frankie Lee as well and that was recorded in 2003, actually. That was sitting in a drawer forever. I’d forgotten about it and when we wrote it I came up with that piano hook. So I think that was probably mostly written that way.
I write when it inspires me. I don’t sit down to write. I wait till I get an idea or something strikes me. Like one night I went to the Iridium, Les Paul’s club in Times Square, and I went to see somebody play there on a Friday night last summer. I was by myself and after the show it was about 10:30 and I’m walking near Times Square about to go down to the subway to go to the Village, to the West 4th Street Station, and as I walk down the steps, I see a train had pulled in and the car door opened and I started to walk toward it and I noticed there was a can of whipped cream, like Reddi-Wip, on the floor near a guy’s foot on the side of one of the seats as I approached the door. And as I got closer I saw that his feet, his shins and his thighs were all covered in whipped cream, like thick whipped cream. All I could see was to his upper thighs cause I didn’t look, didn’t dare turn around and go, what the hell? So this guy had covered his legs, like two inches high, in whipped cream. I don’t know what was going on with his arms or his chest. So I went to the left, didn’t turn around to look at the guy, it would have been too obvious. So I was at the other end of the car and I sat down and I couldn’t see him and I just thought to myself, wow, New York City (laughs). When we got back downtown, I got out at the West 4th Street Station, came up from the underground and it was a Friday night and it’s 6th Avenue and 3rd Street, it’s popping and there were revelers, partyers, tourists, old, young, rich, poor, homeless. The cast of characters on a Friday night in the West Village is always really interesting. I expect it’s similar in the French Quarter, characters of all kinds.
Anyway, I’m walking, and I didn’t walk thirty feet and I just thought, wow, New York at night. It’s like it hit me right away as a song title. I live like 2.3 blocks from the subway and I’m writing lyrics as I go home and by the time I got home and up the stairs, I had the first two verses in hand. I picked up my guitar and I knocked it off and I knew right away, that’s the title of the album, New York At Night. Most of the songs were written in New York or inspired by it one way or another. It’s not a concept album by any means but there are a lot of references – Avenue C, Times Square to the Milky Way, Bleecker Street to Old Broadway. It works it’s way into the songs. And then my girlfriend took this great photograph for the cover. And that was it. I don’t look to make concept records by any means but this is kind of like looking at the world through the keyhole of New York.
“Lost & Lonely World” seems to have an Irish-ness about it
Well, my dad was born in the States, as were his parents in the late 1880’s, but he’s 100% Irish. So yeah, there is definitely some influence in there. And I love that track. I was listening last night to the record as I was cooking dinner – and I haven’t so much as boiled water in five years! (laughs) I live in New York and I’ll either go out to a restaurant or order in. I don’t cook. Well, I’m cooking now! (laughs). Eleven nights in a row and I’ll cook again tonight. I’m not doing any take-out. I had four burners going at once last night. I thought, go boy! (laughs)
But County Cork is where Dad’s family came from. My mom has some Irish as well but not sure where they are from. There’s some Scottish in me as well but the bulk is Irish; and some French-Canadian. It’s interesting, my grandfather on my mom’s side, the birth certificate of his great-grandfather said, born in French-Indian Territory in Canada. And one day I was looking at a series of photographs of the family and I look at this picture of him and I went, he’d smoked since he was twelve and had lung cancer, very thin – they say I take after him a lot – and jet black hair, straight as an arrow and he would get so tan, you know, dark, dark skin. And I’m looking at this picture of him as a three year old and he’s holding this pillow with an American Indian on it and it hit me like a ton of bricks: damn, French-Canadian Territory, there’s Indian blood in him. You could see it. He never had a grey hair on his head. Straight black hair, got so dark, as did my mother in the summertimes. But the bulk of my ancestry is Irish and definitely “Lost & Lonely World” has a bit of that in there which makes me happy.
I understand that your grandfather was in Vaudeville
My dad’s father, Richard Noonan, he had an orchestra and talk about how hard people worked back last century. For twenty years, he had an orchestra in Vaudeville in a number of different theatres, seven nights a week, and six days a week he worked in the post office cause they had six kids. At one point when my dad was born, his wife said to him, “You might want to reconsider being a musician. It’s not the most secure way to make a living.” So he did both. He was an incredible piano player. I remember as a young boy watching him play the piano and he would throw a white sheet over the piano and play the sheet. He could play for four hours and not play the same song.
I want to go back and ask you about the song “Old Men Sleeping On The Bowery,” from your first record because it sounds like something you actually saw.
I did. What a great question and so perceptive of you. I was walking one night with my wife and we were walking over to CBGBs on Bleecker Street, and I forget if it’s Mulberry or what street we were going by, but I saw a guy sleeping, one of the homeless guys, and his head was on like a brick. This was maybe like one building from the main drag and I walked into the club with the song in my head and I started writing it down. The music hadn’t started so I could think clearly and I wrote it in CBGBs and then I came home and took the guitar out and fleshed it out. That was inspired by that guy I saw sleeping with his head on like a big cinderblock as a pillow.
You were a young man as the Vietnam War was going on. How worried were you about being drafted and having to go over there?
I was very worried. I was going to the University Of Buffalo and I didn’t agree with the war. The poor soldiers who had to fight that war, what, like 59,000 died and how many maimed and how many Vietnamese died. I mean, shame on the human race for not figuring it out – and they still haven’t figured it out – but I didn’t believe that we should be in Vietnam and I didn’t want to go fight. It wasn’t being afraid to fight, I didn’t think we should be there. On campus, the University Of Buffalo, I’d go see the speakers and the poets and the bands. I saw Janis Joplin, I saw Hendrix, Frank Zappa; a great time to see rock & roll. But I was in college so I had a deferment for the four years before I graduated. Plus I’m very small, a small guy, and I’m thin and I didn’t eat for like two weeks before my, what do you call it, exam and I failed it. I was underweight. The second time, I did it again and I failed it again. I didn’t want to fight, I didn’t believe in the war and then it was over. It ended right around that time. I didn’t go to war but I had friends who went and didn’t come back. It was terrible.
But I do think they’re heroes, the men and women who fight in the armed forces. They put their lives on the line and that’s no joke. It’s serious business and they deserve to be respected and they’re patriots and not every leader is the smartest guy. I’m like, come on, people, get it together, stop fighting. Can’t we do better than this? We’re better than this. But they’re heroes and have suffered incredibly and got treated like shit when they came back from the Vietnam War. Shame on everybody. It’s not their fault, they didn’t start the war and that the US walked away from it and all these people lost their lives and then how many hundreds of thousands got maimed and damaged. War is terrible. We’ve got to do better than this and I hope someday the human race can get it together.
When you moved to the Village, who impressed you the most that you were seeing?
Well, back then, I used to hitchhike in summers to the city and that was before Charles Manson ended hitchhiking in the US. I would come to New York and go to the clubs and I remember seeing Loudon Wainwright and he was like the next Dylan at the time and I saw him play at the Gaslight, which was just down the street from me, and that was the first place I played in New York at an open mic and I remember seeing Loudon and it was just incredible. He was so brilliant, a real wordsmith, looked strange. I forget the year it was but he had buzzed his hair and it was the time when everybody had long hair and here was this guy who had buzzed his hair, shaved his head.
But in New York when I moved here, the punk scene started not long after and I loved Patti Smith, I loved Television, the Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads. The Talking Heads used to double-bill with Television headlining and those were great nights, great music. That was really it for me. I went to CBGBs all the time so I saw every band you could think of. I remember one night I was there and Johnny Lydon, Johnny Rotten, was there just hanging out. But the Talking Heads were so quirky. David Byrne, God bless him, was so quirky and now he’s got this great play on Broadway with nothing but raves about it. But Talking Heads, they were great and they had a great repertoire. And then Television would get up. I mean, Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd, two master guitar players, and they would jam, would pick these spots and go off into outer space and it was so trippy. It was just mystical.
And Patti Smith, of course, was amazing. She’d go onstage and go into these stream of consciousness rants. She lived across the street, just a few doors up, and I remember she was living with Robert Mapplethorpe at the time and that book, Just Kids, what a great piece. She lives down the street from me now. And Steve Earle lives right around the corner. I see Steve on the street all the time. He’s an awesome guy.
But I loved the punk scene; not all of it, you know, but the Talking Heads, Television was my favorite band, Patti Smith. The Ramones, total blast, they’d go up onstage and play fourteen songs in twenty-five minutes (laughs). I saw the Cramps and Lux Interior, best name for a lead singer ever, he’d get up there and he’d be dancing away and singing, “The way I walk is just the way I walk.” Psychobilly, I guess you’d call it. It was glorious, those were great days.
If you could go back in time and see any band anywhere, who would it be?
I’d go back to Hamburg and I’d see The Beatles. Wouldn’t that be cool? I played there in Hamburg in 2006. I did a tour across Europe and we were in Hamburg and we played in the Reeperbahn, which was the Red Light District, and it was on a Sunday night. It was a quieter night but we had a packed club and it was just such a thrill. There’s all this Beatles memorabilia there now but the streets are the same. The Top Ten Club is still there. I did a walk and those clubs are all within a couple of blocks of each other. The Kaiserkeller was right across the street from, I remember it started with an L, and around the corner was this strip club they used to live below and play at. And it just inspired me to no end. So I would go there. I’d go to London to see the Stones play the Marquee Club. I’d love to go down to Memphis to find Elvis Presley in the early days.
Speaking of The Beatles, I understand you have a connection to John Lennon
Yeah, it was beyond surreal. You know, I grew up as a total Beatles fan – Beatles, Stones, Kinks, Who, Searchers, all that British Invasion stuff, and I loved Motown; there was just a variety of music on AM radio back then. But I was making my second album for Arista – the first one came out in 1980, early part of that year – so December 5th we went into the Record Plant in midtown Manhattan near Times Square, where I made my first record. So we were in the Record Plant and Thom Panunzio, who worked with Jimmy Iovine a lot, was co-producing that record and I’m there with my band and it was a Friday night and John Lennon had started that Monday before us with Yoko. He was producing a Yoko record and they were doing a song called “Walking On Thin Ice,” which is an extraordinary track.
Friday night, and Thom Panunzio had worked with John Lennon before, and we were just starting our record and we were in Studio A and John was upstairs in the mix room and they had recorded earlier and when we started on Friday, they were up in the mix room doing overdubs. And we were all just excited and thrilled knowing John was in the building and we were all huge fans. So Sunday night at midnight the phone rings in our studio and it’s John’s engineer and he says, “John is out of guitar strings. Could he borrow some?” And we thought, John Lennon needs guitar strings? Hell yes! So we gather some strings and I was going to put a note to John. I was going to write: “Thanks for all the music, Love Willie.” But I thought, that’s too corny. I’ll tell him when I see him on Tuesday night. We’ll have time to say hello then.
So we sent the strings up about midnight, came in the next day about 4:30. I have somewhere a copy of the schedule of that day and John was in at 7:30. We’d usually go till two in the morning, something like that, and the engineer said that John played on those strings for like three or four hours. So the guitar that you hear, that searing guitar on “Walking On Thin Ice,” it’s really raw and incredible, that was on my strings and it turned out to be the last thing he ever played in the studio. The next night, a phone rings in our studio, and we were recording a song called “I Can’t Get You Off Of My Mind” and I was playing the piano on it and it was a piano that John played many times. So the phone rang, we were listening to a playback, and Thom took the call and said, “I’ll be right back. You guys carry on.”
Unbeknownst to me, he had told the engineer, cause he had a friend in New Jersey who was bugging him, an autograph collector, “Can you get me John’s autograph?” So Thom figured, I found this out later, we did a favor for them and he could ask a favor back. So the phone call was that John was leaving the building coming downstairs and he’ll meet you at the elevator and he’ll give you an autograph, which he did, and I got a copy of it. The guy’s name was Ken but Thom told him it was for the guy who gave him the strings. So John wrote, “To Ken, who strung me along, Love John. Peace and love, 1980;” and he drew a little picture of his face. Anyhow, he went out into the night and five minutes later, literally, he was shot.
We were in the studio and all of a sudden, Thom Panunzio walks in, and it was like fifteen minutes later, and says, “Somebody just shot John.” And I was actually playing that piano the moment he was shot. And then the phone was ringing off the hook. We watched TV like everybody else and we were all crying, it was horrible. We went out to a bar and it was a miserable night. But to be there, that’s the first place I’d go back in history if I had a time machine. I’d go back there and I would go back to when that phone call happened and I would intercede and say, “Hey, don’t go home right now” and call the cops.
Then years later, in 1992, I was touring with Ringo and his All-Starr Band. Somebody recommended me and we had an amazing time in the northeast opening up shows. It was Dave Edmunds, Nils Lofgren, Joe Walsh, his son Zak Starkey, Todd Rundgren, Timothy B. Schmit of the Eagles. It was just an incredible lineup and such an honor. So the last night of the tour we were in Saratoga, New York, and again, I’m just this kid that had a dream and moved to New York City and had so many things happen to him – The Who, the Lennon thing, I’ve been so lucky – so the last night of the tour we did our set, we’re playing like 15,000/20,000 seat sheds and I’m watching Ringo from the side of the stage and his last song before the encore was “Photograph,” the song about Lennon, and I had tears in my eyes listening to him play it.
Ringo comes off the stage, and this is incredible, he sees me about forty feet away and makes a beeline over to me, extends his hand and gives me a big hug and says, “Thanks Willie, you did a great job.” Total old-school. Gives me a hug, you did a great job, you and the boys, thanks so much, all the best, you want to come sing, you want to join us for “Get By With A Little Help From My Friends” and I said yeah. I knew Nils Lofgren and Rick Danko of The Band was onstage and Rick was a friend of mine and Ringo introduced me, “And you all know who this is.” So I got to sing and during that moment singing that song, I was thinking about John, who wrote that song for Ringo.
