He wrote hundreds of songs here and Winterbottom acted as a part mother, part friend. It was originally supposed to be a short stay but in the end he lived their until 1998 when Winterbottom got married. This sequence repeats before he ended with his trademark slogan "Rock over London, Rock On Chicago" followed by a random commercial slogan such as "Wheaties, the breakfast of champions" or "Packard Bell, America's number one selling home computer." When asked about this he said "If I didn't end my songs with commercials, I wouldn't know what to say."Īfter he moved out of Meiners' he moved in with Carla Winterbottom who had worked at the art supplies store owned by Richard Goldman. Wesley's songs were characterised by four phrases then a repetition of the title four times. Meiners put together The Wesley Willis Fiasco shortly afterwards.
Inspired by Meiners, Wesley decided to become a rock star and the pair stayed up one night writing songs, the first of Wesley's hysterical rants. Another, guitarist Dale Meiners, let Wesley move in with him for a short time in 1990 or '91, and it was around this time that Wesley became interested in playing the keyboard. Wesley already had an interest in music, having become fond of wearing a Walkman he fed with rock and metal tapes and as he made friends with musicians, he became interested in making his own music. he soon started frequenting a nearby art supplies shop where the staff and regulars took to him and the owner, Richard Goldman, put him up on a couch. After that, the art shop owner started to buy his work. Wesley's creativeness started with drawing, in late 1989 one art shop by the name of John Stulgate encountered him sketching, even in the cold weather and invited him in. Willis claimed to have "schizophrenia demons" in his head that take him off of his "harmony joy rides" to put him on "torture hell rides". Of a huge black guy throwing bins at buses and screaming unitelligibly on the Subway but the amount of these suggest not all of them are true. Many stories abound of Wesley in the 80s. That was October 21, 1989, and he was shortly thereafter diagnosed as having chronic schizophrenia. Wesley describes the incident saying "I wanted to bust a brick upside my head and kill myself." He says it happened while he lived in his mother's home in the '80s.Īccording to The Daddy of Rock n’ Roll, a documentary on Wesley Willis, he was forced during his childhood to watch his mother sexually abused at the hands of countless boyfriends and the catalyst to his mental problems, being held at gunpoint by one of his mother's friends who stole the $100 he was saving, is often blaimed on one of her boyfriends with a drug habit. Money was tight and food was hard to come by between monthly checks from the state, says Michael Willis, 34, who works for a brick manufacturer in Augusta.įor years, Wesley has told the same story about the day he started hearing voices. In the '70s and '80s, several children, including Wesley, moved back home to live with their mother in the projects. The Willises married in 1953, according to Annie Ruth Willis, and separated in the late '60s. Another son seems to have disappeared – several siblings said they hadn't heard from him in about a decade. Many of the siblings didn't meet one another till they reached late childhood or adolescence.įour of the seven Willis sons, counting Wesley, are "slow," as family members term it. Another, Tyreida Powell, says she lived in seven. One sister, Deanna Keyes, says she lived in five foster homes. (Their father apparently lives in Chicago and several of his children haven't seen him in years.) Wesley was raised with two older brothers in a handful of foster homes. Wesley Willis's parents had a fitful and violent relationship, according to their mother, Annie Ruth Willis. All but the youngest boy were raised in foster homes in groups of two or three, according to interviews with six of Wesley's siblings. He was born in 1963 and had a very torubled childhood. Wesley Willis was a 6'4", 350lb schizophrenic street singer from Chicago who died in 2003. As there's a current shortage of Band Profiles I thought I'd post this Wesley Wilis one I've been working on for a while.