(Colorado Daily)

RIP Wesley Willis

Art is one of the greatest things about life. Anyone can make art. There are plenty of people out there to whom Jean-Michel Basquiat’s art is wholly unappealing, annoying even. At the same time, many people would rather have bare walls than to hang landscapes or still lifes. Life is like that. It’s what makes being a human among other humans so much fun: everything looks different depending on who you are.

Wesley Willis’ music was appealing, for some reason, to a lot of people. It wasn’t as if he was a virtuoso. Far from it. The accompaniment to his poetry came directly from the electronic brain of his keyboard. A 2-year-old could play what he played.

It was a fitting combination though. In a way, Wesley was like his keyboard. Everyone knows what they do, but not how they do it. Like someone was throwing a switch, he just turned on and out would pour 50 songs. You got the impression there were 50 more lining up in his head, ready to go.

Wesley’s songs were by far some of the strangest prose ever put to music. He wrote about everything. And I mean everthing. From his own battles with forces both real and imagined to homages to people who he admired or who helped him along the way, Wesley turned his most emotional thoughts into art. It was both amusing and sad to see. As funny as it could be to hear a man talk about getting kicked off the bus for freaking out and swearing at people, somewhere inside you just knew it killed Wesley that he acted that way. He never would have been such a huge draw as a musician if he weren’t a little nuts, of course, but it’s a shame he had to live a life filled with such torment.

Oddly enough, Wesley’s other art, his drawing, are strangely bucolic and calm. Most were city scenes from his native Chicago, his home and the battleground of his mind’s war on itself. It was hard to reconcile that a man who wrote such bizarre, tormented songs, could draw equally beautiful pictures. Maybe he drew what he wanted his mind to see.

Wesley had a great rapport with his fans, despite his illness. He’d mill around before his shows, talking to people (or to god, or a caribou), giving out headbutts and howls to his fans.

My greatest hope is that what some people accused all of us, his fans, of doing, exploiting a sick man, was not true. I don’t think that’s the case. The money from playing shows and selling records provided Wesley with money he needed to live a reasonably normal life. People loved to see him perform his demented songs, but were also awed by his beauty.

Following his death, the Web site of Alternative Tentacles, a label that has released several of Wesley’s more than 50 recordings, ground to a halt due to high traffic. It can only be that people genuinely cared about this man, simultaneously a giant, black clown and a deep intellectual. He forced us to face the cruelty of fate and the ridiculousness of life, sometimes in the same, 30-second song.

I think probably the the thing I will always remember about Wesley was something he said once when I was interviewing him. I got almost nothing of use from the entire conversation, but one quote jumped out. In the middle of the conversation, Wesley shouted “Hello, I am having fun.”

So were we, Wesley.

So rock over London, Rock over Chicago, and Rock on Wesley Willis. Headbutts all around.