I posted this one once before but it’s about hot dogs, it’s Memorial Day and this the best instructional weener video I’ve ever seen. Everything about it – the hand modeling of hot dogs, the abrupt editing, the dialog delivery, plates going out of frame, the product itself, not to mention the use of the American flags – all conspire to make this a klassic Kitsch theatrical event. Don’t miss the dreamy musical montage at the end… and have a glorious dog-filled Memorial Day!
Winning the Grammy in 1986
Yesterday I wrote an open email to a widely read music industry newsletter re the longstanding mistreatment of songwriters in the entertainment industry, veering off into the music industry ignoring the Internet until it had almost swallowed them up. Today, Mark Cuban posted this on his Facebook page which led to it spreading virally. I’ve had so many people email me and send me Facebook messages today I decided to post what I wrote myself:
Hi, Bob (Lefsetz). I’m Allee Willis. Songs I’ve written include September, Boogie Wonderland, Neutron Dance, What Have I Done To Deserve This, the Friends theme and the Broadway musical, The Color Purple. One of my earliest hits, Lead Me On by Maxine Nightengale, was co-written with David Lasley, who Andre Pessis talked about in his email to you. We also wrote the first cover I ever got, Got You On My Mind, by Bonnie Raitt in 1974. I’m weighing in because in 1981, after getting hundreds of songs cut in just a couple of years, I was the first songwriter who tried to unionize writers because of all that Ellen Shipley wrote about and more. I was also the first pop songwriter I know of to embrace the Internet in 1991. I started designing a collaborative social network in 1992 and, much of that time with my then partner, Mark Cuban, got laughed out of publishing and record company offices when we suggested they take the Internet and all digital technologies seriously.
The songwriting union never got off the ground as much because of the ever-confusing work for hire issue as the fear many songwriters had of being blackballed. Our mistreatment wasn’t the dirty little secret of the music industry. If it were a secret that at least would have been something. In reality, it was a non issue, not even a notch in the totem pole of consciousness.
I’ve written with and for hundreds of incredible artists and my songs have been at the top of the Pop, R&B, Jazz, Country, Dance and Alternative charts. I absolutely love writing songs and composing scores. But with success came an emptiness from the 1001 ways to screw a songwriter, long accepted as standard industry practice. This was coupled with a growing trend that if you were a songwriter who wrote for artists or producers other than yourself what you had to write to get records was progressively more homogenized. The dumbing down killed me even more than the screwing.
Other things that made me nuts (and thankfully led to a massive branching out of my career beyond songwriting): A) Writing up to ten songs for someone and only seeing one or two make the album despite being told repeatedly you’re the only writer working with them. (Where there’s no payment there’s no accountability.) B) Artists and producers sitting on songs for months and years until they had enough of them that the earliest songs felt old and they were cast out like a homeless kitten with one leg. C) Giving away pieces of publishing and songwriting shares just to get cuts lest your spot be filled by a more de-spirited and desperate songwriter than yourself. D) Settling for mere songwriting credit when your demo was used as the actual record – I was literally told by a major female artist that I didn’t deserve credit as a producer or arranger as I was “only the songwriter and that’s what songwriters do”. E) Babysitting artists who had absolutely zero songwriting chops, doing whatever it took to keep your brain functioning as they deliberated whether an ‘a’ or ‘the’ was better for their already idiotic lyric. I’ve often said that unless you were the artist yourself, being a songwriter was like changing towels in the restroom, only difference being that the restroom attendant got paid.
And then there’s movie soundtracks, where songs are sent out as temp tracks to be copied by other writers. One of the last straws for me was when I received a copy of my own song, Neutron Dance, already out on a Pointer Sisters’ LP, and told to rip it off for Beverly Hills Cop. After my co-writer, Danny Sembello, and I stewed for a couple of weeks we decided no one could rip us off better than ourselves. We wrote a parallel song that mimicked the lyric – Neutron Dance’s “I don’t want to take it anymore, I’ll just stay here locked behind the door” became “I can’t stay here while I go nowhere” in the new song. We slightly adjusted the drum track. We never heard anything after we submitted it – another standard practice after you’re hounded to hand something in. Three weeks before the film was released we found out that only because Jerry Bruckheimer pulled a tape out of his wastebasket that his song screener had passed on and checked it to make sure he could tape over it did he hear our copy song, Stir It Up, and insist it go into the soundtrack. They never found a better song than Neutron Dance and that stayed in too. Not only did I win a Grammy for Best Soundtrack but, in one of my favorite musical moments, I was named one of the most dangerous subversives living in the United States by the Communist government when they mistranslated the song as Neutron Bomb.
A decade later, in fairly infamous songwriting lore, two of the three producers of Friends, a full year after the song was a hit, demanded songwriter royalties because they had given me notes. I don’t know very many composers who write for film or tv who don’t get notes from producers or directors. By that point I was full throttle into my interactive career, building my prototype for willisville, my social network, and spending every dime on it that I earned from consulting for Microsoft, AOL, Silicon Graphics, Electronic Arts, Fox, Disney, Warner Bros. and Intel, who partially funded the prototype build (tho in reality I was stuck adding music and visuals to an excessively dorky technology they had already invested in). So I just gave in and watched my share of the Friends theme plummet because, as I heard it, these producers always wanted to be composers. To add insult to injury, The Rembrandts never agreed to the song being released as a single as they resented not writing it by themselves so despite it being one of the biggest airplay records of the year singles income was nil.
In 2006, I had songs in three of the Top 10 films of the Year – Babel , Happy Feet and Night At The Museum. I didn’t know about any of them until I sat in the theater and heard them. Then it meant spending money to hire someone to track them down and to see if I’d been paid. Shouldn’t the songwriter, not to mention co-copyright owner, be informed and allowed to negotiate when their songs are used?
Currently, I have a theme to a hit VH-1 show that’s already run one season and is filming the next right now. The production company still hasn’t submitted cue sheets to BMI for season one and the credits are so small and run so fast no one can even see my name which, I guess, isn’t a real problem as songwriting credits aren’t even listed.
Fate in the theater world is not much better. Depending on the producer, composers and lyricists have little to no say about the way their music is arranged or mixed or how their show is promoted. Musicals take an average of five years to write so this can be especially heartbreaking.
The blessing of all of this was that very early on I was so unhappy I started to paint, soon after motorizing my art to my music. This led to art directing tons of music videos for people like The Cars, Debbie Harry and Heart. I kept writing songs, still loving the actual act of songwriting, and also because my publishing deals helped finance each new field I went into. But music publishers were not great at recognizing the value of multi-media careers. Brain dead might be a more accurate description. Despite selling close to 50,000,000 records my advances were numbifyingly low compared to writers who had much less success. As opposed to thinking a broad artistic vision might actually enhance the contribution I could make my multi-medianess was looked at as a threat to the number of songs I could churn out. The exception to publishers wearing blinders (altho the low advances still persisted) was Kathleen Carey at Unicity (MCA), who hooked me up with Pet Shop Boys by selling their manager some of my art which led to me being hired to do their portrait. During the sitting Neil Tennant put it together that I was the same A. Willis on some of his favorite records and we started writing WHIDTDT that night. And also, Judy Stakee at Warner/ Chappell, who took my interest in digital technology seriously and introduced me to Mark Cuban in 1992. Despite this, W/C would hear nothing of removing my song quota and letting me function as their Internet liaison, scoffing at my predictions that things like CDs and record stores would cease to exist and radio play would become irrelevant. Anyone who cites Napster as the official beginning of the fall of the record industry still has their head in the sand.
These days I’m living my dream, finally singing my own songs for the first time since my one and only Epic album, Childstar, in 1974, integrating the songs with my art, videos and online worlds. My first video, It’s A Woman Thang, has close to 1,000,000 views with no promotion at all and was a winner in the Viral category of the 2008 Webbies. The second one was featured on YouTube and won four W3 awards. The latest, Hey Jerrie, featuring me and a 91 year old female drummer on an oxygen tank, was the twelfth most popular video in the world on YouTube within 48 hours of its release a few months ago. These days, a least if I get screwed I’m screwing myself, which is ultimately more satisfying as I can always get a meeting with the person doing the screwing. I’ve been toying with business models on the web for eighteen years. I may not be rich from it yet but I’m rich as an artist with a larger and larger loyal following which, ultimately, is the greatest reward of all.
Reinvention was always easier for me than letting my personality and pride be clubbed out of me like a baby seal. I have a had a blessed life. I have watched myself go from battered songwriter grabbing at whatever crumbs were thrown my way to a strong, centered and fearless artist. I’m a better songwriter now than I ever was. I still have the same old bullshit befall me as a songwriter but I don’t stick around long enough to suffer. It’s been a long, concious battle but as Celie says in The Color Purple, “I’m Here”. Very much here. I thank the publishers and record industry for doing to us what Wall St. and the banking industry did for the American people – take such advantage and pay us so little regard that we’re stripped back to nothing, individuals who now have more chance than ever to do something spectacular on their own and change the world.
With the spectacular mini-skirted, go-go booted guitar playing singing stars, who I’m credited with discovering, in the living room of their mobile home, 1986. For a Del Rubios smorgasbord plus “Neutron Dance” and “What Have I Done To Deserve This” as you’ve never heard them before run here.
I’m a monster fan of integration be it a business strategy, department store or coffee cup design. The integration of the ‘o’ from ‘Disco’ into the cup handle is genius to the point that the monster mistake made is excusable. That drippy moss green ceramic glaze is vintage Hippie, as far away from a Disco color scheme or technique as imaginable. Which kicks this cup even higher on the Kitsch scale than cup design alone.
…with all the eggs, chicks, peeps, bunnies, roosters, shredded cellophane and bagels upon it. I made this out of foamcore and the aforementioned materials Easter,1998. There were recipes for “Eggs In Exciting Ways” from a vintage cookbook under the brim. I’m wearing the hat now and having a very Happy Easter and I hope you are too.
My relationship with technology has been one of the most intense and complex relationships of my life. Here I am with my main squeeze in 1991, the first Powerbook ever released, a 170.
I was always a multi media artist, combining my music with my art and interactive parties long before ’91 when I first I attempted to combine these artforms in a digital realm. My dream was to redefine music, art and socializing in the as yet unembraced Pop medium, the Internet, where the audience was as much creator/ collaborator as the artist herself.
My premise, which I shouted from every keynote podium from 1991-1997, was that art and information were no longer under strict control of the person who originated them but, rather, the co-product of the people who interacted with the art and information. In the Digital Age, the artist would shift from sole owner/creator to cruise director, merely providing the first piece and directing from there a never ending sprawl of mutations from users who were interested enough to impact the original work.
This premise was blasphemous to captains, worker bees and artisans alike in the all ruling Entertainment Industry. I viewed them as horse farmers, belligerently staring as prototypes of the Model-T cranked down dusty roads at the dawn of the 20th Century, arrogantly holding on to the belief that nothing could supplant the sale of their well bred horses. But the horse farmers didn’t understand that the promise of automobiles was the reforming of communities and a collapsing of time and space. Just like the Entertainment Industry almost 100 years later didn’t understand that the promise of the Internet, mobile devises and any connection that linked virtual and physical space meant the very same thing – a redefining of community, living space and beyond anything, the empowerment of common man.
In 1992, after I proclaimed my total disinterest in all artforms linear, I started developing an idea for willisville, the world’s first visual and collaborative social network. It would also link the Internet to TV, radio, film, video, books and physical spaces. You can bone up on it in detail here.
Attempting to sell this vision in 1992 and throughout the 90’s was like living in the basement of Hell. No one in Hollywood could fathom funding it as the Internet was to them a very creepy, laughable space. Folks in Silicon Valley could think of funding it but only if enabled by technologies they had already invested in. The one we were saddled with at Intel, who funded a willisville prototype in 1995, had about as much potential of encouraging socialization and artfulness among users as inviting someone to a party on the promise that you were going to rip their toenails out without anesthetic.
So, in 1997, after spending every penny I had ever earned on trying to sell my vision of the Internet as a social environment I crept back into writing songs and painting and even writing a Broadway musical. I still built websites, rather distinctive ones at that, but I shoved my quest to build the Brave New World and staying at the forefront of social technology down so low into my solar plexis it felt like I was made of cement.
This went on for almost 10 years. But painful as my self-imposed exile was, I was aware that my brain had been profoundly reshaped from the previous seven years of attempting to make order out of all the disparate forces coming together to define The Digital Age. And this impacted the linear work I started doing again. I was always an artist who looked to integrate my music with my art but now I was capable of thinking on a zillion levels at once, connecting everything so that one singular vision resulted from trillions of different threads.
The linear arts – music, art, videos, musicals, whatever – seemed simple and straight ahead after all the years of thinking about art as a never-ending series of connections and collaborations that linked to a lifestyle rooted in self-evolution whose very engine was kept running by the connections and creations made in cyberspace. I welcomed a break from the tedium of tapdancing for money, always hoping someone would be smart enough to invest in a non linear vision of social art. I once again loved linear songwriting and painting for the pure joy of creating. I hadn’t felt that way since I had my first hits in 1979 and felt the pressure of a follow-up and the boredom of working in just one medium.
But with this simplicity a new kind of artistic self torture identified itself. Things like Ebay, Amazon, YouTube, MySpace and Facebook had popped up. Wait! Wasn’t I the one who had thought of garage sales, homemade art, parties and collaborations in cyberspace? Wasn’t I the one who had preached Power To The People a full decade before the proliferation of social networking sites? I, who was sooooooooo ahead of the curve on all things digital, was now the last one to the party.
It finally hit me when The Color Purple opened on Broadway at the tail end of ’05 and I had a little breathing room to figure out what I wanted to do next.
If I started singing my own songs I could do the videos and build web worlds and begin to have the kind of presence in cyberspace I had envisioned for everyone so many years before.
My first smash-up, “It’s A Woman Thang”, co-starring my alter-ego, Bubbles the artist, exploded on YouTube in 2007 and won a Webbie Award Honorable Mention in the Viral category. (I recently uploaded a wayyyy better resolution version of it so watch this one if you haven’t seen it already.) I’m on my fourth one now, “Hey Jerrie”, featuring me and a 91 year old female drummer on an oxygen tank. I view these videos as welcome mats into my world. But if that world is to be the one I envisioned oh so long ago it meant I needed to understand technology, integration and trends as deeply as I did in the 90’s.
I write, sing, play on and produce the records and write, paint, film, animate, direct and produce the videos and web components. I do some of the functions with partners and some without. To support the output I slowly and resentfully built my MySpace and Facebook pages. I made myself build pages wherever anyone told me to – Bebo, Uber, et al – and hated each one more than the last. I understood that these things were necessary but MySpace felt like one big hype assault from fledgling bands and hooker wannabes. Most of the other ones felt like pale imitators.
My breakthrough came when I finally started adding friends on Facebook after having a page that had all the life of a stillborn baby for almost a year. I looked for people who liked soul music, animation, kitsch, Atomic design and all the other stuff that I was not only interested in but had turned out like a mofo for decades. Some people never responded. But the ones who did were enthusiastic. And I communicated with them when they communicated with me. I understood that this social network had found an incredible abbreviated way for people to realize the potential in each other and form new alliances that physical space never encouraged them to do.
But Facebook cuts you off after 5000 friends. Which means you have to uninvite people when you hit that mark. Bad Facebook. Seriously stinky rule. I’m a party thrower. I have friends. Talk about a major shortcoming if you’re lucky enough to be popular.
Other than the fact that I, like most folks I know, are run ragged by attending to all the little gardens they have scattered all over cyberspace because they all lack something major that would allow for one centralized online presence, I realize I am finnnnnnaly building my own social network, finding what I enjoy about all the ones that already exist and building little presences wherever I can stand the interface. It’s not the elegant cul-de-sac I once dreamed of with willisville but there’s a little piece here and a little piece there and with enough overtime and bus fare it’s manageable.
I’m in the midst of said proliferation now. I’ve been consciously thinking about cyberspace for 18 years. I have no idea what tomorrow holds. I rarely have. I just know that I hate to be bored. I hate creating what I’ve already created. Reinvention is my middle name. I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. But my brain enjoys getting watered and I can finally see green pushing up through the ground. If you’ve read this far perhaps you’re ready to hop on the bus and take the ride with me.
Anyone who knows me knows I love reality tv. I am SO not ashamed to admit that. Just like I wasn’t ashamed to admit I LOVED the internet in 1991 when everyone around me thought it was dorky and useless. I like reality. I’ve dedicated my life to trying to live the best one I can.
I love reality shows about creative process like Project Runway and Top Chef. But bottom feeders like “I Love New York” seriously steal my heart. I loved loved LOVED that show and its star. And I loved loved LOVED two contestants on it even more, Chance and Real, the two brothers who came in 2nd and 3rd on Season 1.
Soft spoken Real and firecracker Chance were fascinating because even as as they were vying for the heart of a lunatic the love and respect between them was always apparent. And they were hysterical. But trust me, any time one of them brought up their band, Stallionaires, there wasn’t a brain cell in my head that thought it would be anything more than ok.
I live for combining hi and lo culture. I have no interest in the middle, the safe zone where mediocre talent whose of-the-moment work clogs pop culture like sludge from the Exxon Valdese. I love to take the very top levels of art, music, technology and design where style and innovation live and jam them together with what’s happening at the bottom, where passion, guts and a bizarre take on art rule. Many people think reality tv falls into the lo category. Maybe that’s why I love it. And maybe that’s why I jumped at the chance to meet Chance and Real when my friend, Steve Lindsay, who I met in 1985 when he asked me to co-write the Dance Fever theme, told me he was managing them.
I would have written with Stallionaires if they were the worst band in the world just to meet them. But guess what, they’re FANTASTIC! As is brother #3, Love, who joins them on their spin-off ‘Real Chance At Love’ that debuts on VH-1 in November.
I haven’t been this happy with collaborators in a long time. Not only are they just as rough and tumble, spontaneous and untrained – i.e. fearless – as I am, they are incredibly musical, hooky and full of spirit to boot. And interested in news ways of doing everything – from the music itself to the mediums it will live on. And they’re very, very fast. No nudging notes around on a grid until everything snaps into place as stiff as a corpse. It’s not about precision; it’s all feel all the time, just the way I like it. And we’re all indie, which means no pansy ass decisions by producers or entertainment conglomerates to dictate our fate. We live or die by our own sword.
And then there’s this. When Love, Chance and Real were 11, 12 and 13 they were discovered by Paulino DeCosta, the percussion maestro of Earth Wind & Fire, the band that discovered me when I wasn’t much older than Stallionaires are now. My obsession with percussion came from watching Paulino. They’re equally obsessed with percussion because of him.
I wish I could leak the record we just finished, “Does She Love Me?”, but it’s the first single and theme song to their VH-1 series so I have to play by the rules and wait til the show airs. It’s an eternally happy song like “September”, my first Earth Wind & Fire hit. You’re in a good mood from the downbeat and you can feel the writers’ joy in every beat.
I know some people won’t understand how I went from The Color Purple to this reality universe. But for Bubbles & Stallionaires it’s all about people being all they can be and experiencing genuine joy as they do it. It’s the same basic story.
I’m not the type who stays on a ship that sails the same course every time it sets out to sea. I get bored, I fall asleep and I’m outta there. Thank you, Stallionaires, for slipping me a big, fat happy pill because I’m way onboard.
This Friday night, Sept. 12th, Bubbles and I have a piece in the DOLLYPOP show at the World Of Wonder Storefront Gallery in Hollywood.
Featuring works that are a salute to the country and breast icon, Dolly Parton, whose musical (God help her) “9 to 5” opens in Los Angeles next week, my/our piece is a sensitive 3-dimensional portrayal of the songstress on stage with former paramour, Burt Reynolds.
To see how this piece went from an empty canvas to the anatomically endowed wonder that is the final painting go here.
Yours in Dolly and other big things,
Allee
Here’s why I have been so blog poor over the last few months, my little 9 month labor of love, my life philosophy rolled into one bouncing bundle of sound, sight and spirit:
Allee Willis Presents Bubbles & Cheesecake “Editing Is Cool”
