Willy DeVille
Birth name Steven Douglas Kreisman
Born September 24, 1938
Los Angeles, California
Died April 19, 1993 (aged 54)
Los Angeles, California
Occupation(s) Session musician
Instruments Saxophone, flute, woodwinds
Willy DeVille (born William Paul Borsey Jr., August 25, 1950 – August 6, 2009) was an American singer and songwriter. During his thirty-five-year career, first with his band Mink DeVille (1974–1986) and later on his own, Deville created original songs rooted in traditional American musical styles. He worked with collaborators from across the spectrum of contemporary music, including Jack Nitzsche, Doc Pomus, Dr. John, Mark Knopfler, Allen Toussaint, and Eddie Bo. Latin rhythms, blues riffs, doo-wop, Cajun music, strains of French cabaret, and echoes of early-1960s uptown soul can be heard in DeVille’s work.
Mink DeVille was a house band at CBGB, the historic New York City nightclub where punk rock was born in the mid-1970s. DeVille helped redefine the Brill Building sound. In 1987 his song “Storybook Love” was nominated for an Academy Award. After his move to New Orleans in 1988, he helped spark the roots revival of classic New Orleans R&B. His soulful lyrics and explorations in Latin rhythms and sounds helped define a new musical style sometimes called “Spanish-Americana”.
DeVille died of pancreatic cancer on August 6, 2009 in a New York hospital. He was 58 years old. Although his commercial success waxed and waned over the years, his legacy as a songwriter has influenced many other musicians such as Mark Knopfler and Peter Wolf.
Willy DeVille was born in Stamford, Connecticut. The son of a carpenter, he grew up in the working-class Belltown district of Stamford. His maternal grandmother was a Pequot, and he was also of Basque and Irish descent. As he put it, “A little of this and a little of that; a real street dog.” DeVille said about Stamford, “It was post-industrial. Everybody worked in factories, you know. Not me. I wouldn’t have that. People from Stamford don’t get too far. That’s a place where you die.” DeVille said about his youthful musical tastes, “I still remember listening to groups like the Drifters. It was like magic, there was drama, and it would hypnotise me.”
DeVille quit high school[10] and began frequenting New York’s Lower East Side and West Village. “It seemed like I just hung out and hung out. I always wanted to play music but nobody really had it together then. They had psychedelic bands but that wasn’t my thing.” In this period, DeVille’s interests ran to blues guitarists Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, and especially John Hammond. “I think I owe a lot about my look, my image on stage, and my vocal riffs to John Hammond. A lot of my musical stance is from John,” Deville said. He credited Hammond’s 1965 album So Many Roads with “changing my life.”
As a teenager, DeVille played with friends from Stamford in a blues band called Billy & the Kids, and later in another band called The Immaculate Conception. At age 17, he married Susan Berle, also known as Toots, and they had a son named Sean in 1970. DeVille struck out in 1971 for London in search of like-minded musicians (“obvious American with my Pompadour hair”), but was unsuccessful finding them; he returned to New York City after a two-year absence.
His next band, The Royal Pythons (“a gang that turned into a musical group”), was not a success either. Said DeVille: “I decided to go to San Francisco; there was nothing really happening in New York. Flower power was dead. All the day-glo paint was peeling off the walls. People were shooting speed. I mean, it was real Night of the Living Dead. So I bought a truck and headed out west. I traveled all around the country for a couple of years, looking for musicians who had heart, instead of playing 20-minute guitar solos, which is pure ego.
By 1974 Willy DeVille (under the name Billy Borsay) was singing in a band with drummer Thomas R. “Manfred” Allen, Jr., bassist Rubén Sigüenza, guitarist Robert McKenzie (a.k.a. Fast Floyd), and Ritch Colbert on keyboards. The band called themselves Billy de Sade and the Marquis, but changed the name to Mink DeVille the year after; at the same time lead singer Borsay adapted the name Willy DeVille. The same year, DeVille persuaded the band members to try their luck in New York City after spotting an ad in The Village Voice inviting bands to audition. Guitarist Fast Floyd and keyboard player Ritch Colbert stayed behind in San Francisco, and after arriving in New York, the band hired guitarist Louis X. Erlanger, whose blues sensibilities helped shape the Mink DeVille’s sound.
Personal life
Willy DeVille was married in the early 1970s to Susan Berle (February 19, 1950–August 12, 2004), who was known as Toots Deville. Toots and Willy had known each other while growing up in Stamford, Connecticut. They were married in 1971, and he adopted her son, Sean. Alex Halberstadt, Doc Pomus’s biographer, wrote about Toots, “Half French and half Pima Indian, Toots favored a pair of nose rings, snow-white kabuki make-up and a Ronettes-style beehive the color of tar. She’d once put out a lit Marlboro in a woman’s eye just for staring at Willy.”
In 1984, DeVille married his second wife, Lisa Leggett, whom he met in California. She became his business manager. They lived near New Orleans and on a horse farm in Picayune, Mississippi. After her suicide in 2001, he married Nina Lagerwall (daughter of Sture Lagerwall), his third wife, who he met in New York in August 2000. They returned to New York City, where he spent the rest of his life.
Death
In February 2009, DeVille was diagnosed with Hepatitis C, and in May of that year doctors discovered pancreatic cancer in the course of his Hepatitis C treatment. He died in New York City in the late hours of August 6, 2009, three weeks shy of his 59th birthday.
Discography
With Mink DeVille:
1977: Cabretta (in Europe); Mink Deville (in the U.S.) (Capitol)
1978: Return to Magenta (Capitol)
1980: Le Chat Bleu (Capitol)
1981: Coup de Grâce (Atlantic)
1983: Where Angels Fear to Tread (Atlantic)
1985: Sportin’ Life (Polydor)
As Willy DeVille:
1987: Miracle (Polydor)
1990: Victory Mixture (Sky Ranch) 1990 (Orleans Records)
1992: Backstreets of Desire (Fnac Music) (Rhino, 1994)
1993: Willy DeVille Live (Fnac Music)
1995: Big Easy Fantasy (New Rose)
1995: Loup Garou (EastWest) (Discovery, 1996)
1999: Horse of a Different Color (EastWest)
2002: Acoustic Trio Live in Berlin (Eagle)
2004: Crow Jane Alley (Eagle)
2008: Pistola (Eagle)