All around it was a very good SEPTEMBER week here at Willis Wonderland LA as well as Willis W in Detroit.

Yes I know there is a Willis Street in almost every major city in the country. But this particular one is not only the exact spot my parents first met when they lived kitty corner from each in Detroit oh so may years ago, but it’s also the street that was taken over to make way for this intersection below, in a housing complex started by retired Motown singers and where we sang one of the sing-alongs for “The D” record and videos.

As the reliably magic day – the 21st of September – approached, NPR did a great story on the timelessness of my very first hit, “September”, co-written with Al McKay and Maurice White. Professors of Musicology even broke it down for analysis as to why it is so eternally happy and a song that will literally never end.

0It’s been decades now that every weekend I receive at least 5 videos of the song played at someone’s wedding or drunken karaoke spree or there’s a bar mitzvah boy spinning around his blond dream girl, anywhere and everywhere happiness is the intention. And indeed THAT makes me very happy!

Then I had literally one if the greatest days of my life in Detroit on THE BaDeYa 21st of September when I performed my very sold out “BaDeYa, Detroit!” show, featuring a 15 piece band put together from musicians and singers we discovered at the sing-alongs and while filming the feature-length-exceedingly-hybrid-documentary, Allee Willis Loves Detroit.

The show/party also included dancers from Mosaic Youth Theatre Of Detroit, one of “The D”/ Allee Willis Loves Detroit’s beneficiaries, spinning car tires over their heads, choreographed videographers leaping over drums on cymbal crashes and organ sweeps, as well as the obligatory obsessive amount of junk food I subsist on.

And then how much better does it get when you get Tavis Smily in an Afro (attempting to) shake his booty to ’September”’s sister, “Boogie Wonderland”, on Dancing With The Stars, all in the same week?!  Though he sported one of those chopped down naturals when a good footlong Billy Preston was called for.

I have been blessed with a wonderful (albeit challenging) life and am living my creative (albeit money challenged) dream right now and I thank all of you who made it possible! Remember to throw some gas money in the tank please.

BaDeYa!

Got back to LA from leg #1 of “The D”, my song/video/documentary tribute to the SOUL of Detroit, last week sick as a dog, happy as a clam, and just now rising from the dead to finally write this update. After a year and a half of ups and downs including times I didn’t even know if we were going to make it to Detroit I can honestly say these were among the all-time greatest three weeks of my life! And an exceedingly auspicious debut for “The D”.

Michigan Opera Theatre Children’s Choir:

First off, I was blessed with the single best team I have ever worked with. Everyone – from my collaborator, Andrae Alexander, to Director Danny Franzese and Producer Jason Yamas, through the camera and sound crews, interns, assistants, volunteers, et al – was talented, bright, diligent, generous, funny, and fun, and I can’t wait until we all work together again. Which, if our progress in Detroit is any indication, will be VERY soon.

Empire Boxing Gym:

I created “The D” because I love Detroit and every time I go back I meet more and more incredible people who believe in the city and are doing incredibly positive things to reimagine it.

The Greening Of Detroit:

But if I loved Detroiters for their spirit and resiliency before this trip it’s nothing compared to the love affair I have with them now. At location after location we were greeted with the biggest smiles and enthusiasm that one could ever hope to experience.

The Fisher Theatre:

Detroiters’ love for their city is palpable, infectious and ever-growing.

Mosaic Youth Theatre:

Detroit is beautiful. Really, you have to drive deep around to find all the rubble that the media and most documentaries done about Detroit constantly exploit. I can’t even tell you the joy we all felt at every single location as people swelled with pride singing and performing “The D”. You can experience some of their comments here.

The Heidelberg Project:

Now that we’re back, “The D” adventure shifts into second gear. Starting today, Andrae and I begin going through the literally thousands of tracks of music in LA while Jason leads a New York crew going through the over 700 hours of footage.

Pasteur elementary school:

In addition, the crew will be most likely be reuniting in several different cities to film and record more prominent Detroiters. We will also most likely be returning to Detroit very soon to do something very big that I’m dying to announce here but it’s not 100% yet so that will just have to wait for the next update.

College For Creative Studies:

I’m also in the midst of building photo pages for each location we shot at. These will all hopefully be up online within a couple of weeks so I will have that link in the next update.

African Bead Museum:

Thanks to all of you again who so generously donated, volunteered, or participated in “The D”. Donations still happily accepted here. And a massive shout-out again to The Detroit Historical Society for its immeasurable and continuing help and for giving this scrapyard daughter a permanent and immortal home in cement!

Detroit Historical Society:

“The D” was blessed with great news coverage while we were there. You can see the spirit I’m talking about in the following stories. Here’s a piece that ran on NBC News and here’s one that ran on Fox. NBC is also preparing a half hour special on “The D”.

Onward Detroit!
https://www.alleewillis.com/WeSingTheD/

It’s no secret to anyone within miles of  my mouth that constantly babbles on about it that I love my hometown of Detroit, the city that gets more bad raps than an unpopular war, deadly criminals, and oil spills put together. If one had unprejudiced EYEballs to look through they would see the same beautiful and spirited city that I see, the one whose people – perhaps not those who fled to the lighter color suburbs  –  still believe in and wake up with the soul that Motown pumped into their veins still cursing through their bodies to make things better. Some of that stuff musta stuck personally to me as I seem to have become in my old age the cheerleader I always wanted to become in my young age, though now for the whole city as opposed to just the Mumford Mustangs, whose colors I bore at my graduation oh so many years ago.

As most of you reading this know I’m heading back to Detroit the entire month of September, a month I helped popularize in song!,  to conduct daily sing-alongs in order to record, “The D”,  the new theme song for the new Detroit I wrote with Andrae Alexander and to simultaneously film near round-the-clock in order to make multitudinous videos and an accompanying D documentary.

Raising money to do this, or for anything in my career, has been my least favorite part of being an artist. I hate dealing with money. That’s not why I make art/music/videos/web worlds/etc. It’s antithetical to this pure artists’ brain and being to ask for money. But as an artist who 90% of the time has funded themselves, and as a songwriter who has watched my own and others’ work get essentially cast into the public domain, operating under the digital assumption that songwriters no longer deserve compensation, unless there’s some gold or green in the bank ain’t no nothin gon happen no mo.

So I launched an Indiegogo campaign to raise the money for “The D”. But I’ve been pretty shy about confronting the bane of my career – asking people for money so I can put some gas in The D tank and actually pull off what most artists would want 1,000,000+ clams to do – spend a month getting every single person in Detroit who wants to be on the record or perform in the video/film to do exactly that. And I’m prepared to do it with scotch tape and string, the usual way I’ve have to execute my career, walking the money gutted path of pennies, stripping down the grand vision that I see in my head to the thinner version my pocketbook can afford. The good news about this is that without those limitations I doubt I ever would have stumbled onto the KITSCH style I’m known for in all areas of my art –  other than my music, which remains on its Grammy high. And for this I thank those who have been either too cheap or ball-less or working at entertainment conglomerates to support me just to sit back and watch from behind the fence while I hit the home runs for those who HAVE pulled their checkbooks out.

All of this rambling to say, THIS WEEK ONLY, if you donate at least $15 to “The D” you’ll automatically be entered into the raffle to win one of an excessively limited edition of personally-autographed-by-me “Keep Your EYE on Detroit!” dashboard EYEballs in addition to all the other perks associated with the amount you contribute! Thank you, Archie McPhee, for the generous donation of these ocular wigglers.

This nifty EYEball shaker will not only liven up your car dashboard but will be a constant bouncing reminder that you’ve put your money where the underdog is and be a part of calling attention to a true American city that’s reinventing itself very much in the spirit that the United States itself was created. Forge into new territory and do it for yourself. Detroiters have no government to rely on, hell even the mayor quit, so people there are just rolling up their sleeves and executing ideas that they wouldn’t have the balls to even think of let alone build in other cities.

I’ve long said that the times that I’ve been perceived as hot in my career aren’t actually when I’m hot. It’s in the valleys when you think nothing is happening and no one’s paying attention to you because  they think you’re over when you do the work that shoots you to the top of the mountain in your so-called “hot” periods. That’s what it’s like in Detroit now, the Wild (mid)West, the city that slid first and watched all the others fall in their arrogance of “that couldn’t happen here”, and the first city to embrace, at least from the inside, that radical change isn’t re-building, it’s re-imagining and re-inventing.

You can feast your real EYEballs here where I’ve just posted gaggles of photos from my trip to Detroit in April. Then try to get your real plastic EYEball here by helping me pull off this insanely massive project I have in my head to do in Detroit this September. If one just keeps their EYEs pointed toward the ground and walks the same path one’s always walked you get the same life you’ve always had. But if one keeps their EYE on Detroit, you’ll see the path changing, leading to a very bright light in the future. Please be among those who help me shine that light! http://igg.me/at/WeSingTheD EYE will appreciate it forever!

YOU + (at least) $15 = Making Allee very happy.

Full deets on da D: http://igg.me/at/WeSingTheD

 

All the hits you can stand to hear!!! And the last time in an architectural treasure.

https://www.alleewillis.com/detroit/mumford-last-call.html

Off to host a greatest hits concert at my high school, Mumford, before the wrecking ball knocks down one of the most gorgeous Deco buildings ever ….

(Don’t start me on THAT!)…and the teachers, staff and principal are all let go so kids can walk into the cement block replacement and a wall of new faces over the summer.  So this is going to be a big, fat blowout-sendoff-of-an-affair if I have anything to say about it.  Which I do!

So 6PM. Thurs. night at Mumford. If you live in Detroit, get yourself to the funkiest couple of hours in the city.  You do NOT need to have gone to Mumford to enjoy this. Really, if I do say so myself, there isn’t a corner or mousehole in the world where they don’t know “September”.  It’s a fundraiser for the choir and tickets are only $5!!!

I’ll also be heading over to my father’s high school, Cass, which becomes only the second high school in the country to perform my musical, The Color Purple. Performances are Wed. – Sat.  Ive been waiting for the high school part of TCP since I wrote it so I can’t wait!

The rest of the week is filled with an endless slew of meetings with movers and shakers, large and small, as I feel out a couple of long term projects I want to do in Detroit. There will also be a lot of barbecue and soul food. In anticipation and though it’s not from Detroit, this was lunch from Uncle Andre’s in Studio City, Ca. yesterday:

 

Usually, I blog endlessly about my exploits in Detroit, but this time I come back to LA just in time to jump into rehearsals for my Allee Willis’ Super Ball Bounce Back Review live show at King King on May 8 & 9.  Im going to try and use this trip to become an interested and dedicated Tweeter, which has felt more like an invasion of my mental state since I signed up soon after the bird launched.  But I’ll be in trouble if I concentrate on blogging and not beefing up for my live show, using my hotel bedroom as a pretend stage and finishing the seemingly endless amounts of special visuals and animations I started getting ready with Alfonso Estrada for the show.

So Bon Voyage as I head for LAX. Listen for the tweety bird (which I’ll probably post the best of here too).  Back in a week. And back with AWMOK.com postings tomorrow when I awake in the Motor City.

Rehearsals for my May 8 & 9 return to the stage in my Super Ball Bounce Back Review have begun. Given what happened at my last show in October this is very significant!

I also leave for Detroit on Sunday where I’ll be hosting a benefit greatest hits concert at my high school and telling stories of how some of my biggest hits were written while students perform the songs. This includes kids from the dance and drama classes, concert choir, marching band and ROTC drill team.

Don’t even ask me how excited I am about that! Plus it gives me a chance to rehearse some of the stories I’ll be telling at my live show in LA in May. I’ll also be speaking to students at my father’s high school as Cass becomes only the second high school ever to perform my musical, The Color Purple. And all this is stuffed in between 8 trillion meetings with movers and shakers, big and small, to feel out a couple of long term projects that I want to do in my beloved home town.

All of which means I’m going to be completely insane over the next 30 days, which will inevitably cut down on my blogging activities as time I may have spent writing is now going toward prep and rehearsal of those ever-important two days in May, not to mention my week in Detroit.

As a result, I’m going to try and become an interested little tweeter. I don’t know if this will work as I’ve resisted regular tweeting ever since the bird first launched. As an avid natural writer, I’ve always viewed the constant barrage of 140 characters as an invasion to my headspace. I’m also someone who likes to think about what I do, so longer than 140 has always suited me best. But, at least from where my head is right now, tweeting may save me as I try to report in tiny chunks as opposed to longer daily excursions. Here are my tweets from yesterday documenting my first steps toward the stage again:

Rehearsals for my Super Ball Bounce Back Review at King King May 8 & 9 have begun! http://kingkinghollywood.com/


(BTW,What are the chances of there being another A. Willis gracing the stage with me? Well, that’s exactly the case here. That’s A. (Akua) Willis in the hat.)

Perhaps one day I’ll learn the lyrics to my own songs… Creeping slowly through Boogie Wonderland.

Slashing the script right outta da gate with Richard Dorton, my SKILLED and WELL REHEARSED tech director.

I know these are nothing dramatic and so far the only way I’m interested in tweeting is if I can have a photo as a punchline. I put this one up this morning, though the photo’s just a photo and not a punchline:

We’racing 2 finish horror film that opens my new show @ KingKing May 8&9. Best of horrific tech failures frm last show.

I hate typos like ‘We’racing’. That happened in efforts to cut down to less than 140 characters so a photo could accompany the tweet.  In the old world I also wouldn’t have wanted to give away the fact that I was making a horror film of the most Titanic moments from the last show, but in a tweet-filled world there’s no room for secrets.

Today’s a free day at home, marking the start of the three day/three suitcase packing process. Hopefully the bug hasn’t hit me full strength just yet and I won’t become one of those tweeting fools who shows you every single thing I’m putting into those suitcases.

Of course, I couldn’t resist and just tweeted that. Now I just need to knock this down to 140 charcters:

My nimble assistants, Dina and Suellen, cut face masks and assemble souvenir multipurpose “Unisex Pendants and Keychains” made out of bubblegum charms that will be for sale at Allee Willis’ Super Ball Bounce Back Review May 8&9 at King King in Hollywood.

 

 

Tues., April 5, started at 7 am. (Kill me now; that’s the middle of the night for me.) Thank God there was a Yum Yum (my dictation software just typed that as Young Dumb) Donuts open in Southfield, the suburb of Detroit where Fox News is located. So I hit Young Dumb for a quick sugar infusion and rolled up the street to Fox in time to be on the morning news. Thank God the Green Room, one of the few actually painted green I’ve been in, had a nice, squishy couch. The donuts hadn’t quite kicked in yet.

The lighting in the studio definitely woke me up…

…though unfortunately, not quite enough.

The anchor interviewing me, Anqunette Jamison, was really nice and definitely had done her research. Nothing worse than waking up two hours after you’ve gone to bed to be interviewed by someone who wished that Reese Witherspoon was sitting across from them.

Driving back we passed this sign on a building, which emulated the discombobulated feeling I still had from being up before the crack of dawn and having to sound coherent.

We also passed vintage gems like this. I love that the pigeons have checked in.

I love any and all Deco/Streamline Moderne architecture.

Other than that second story looks like an add-on. Way too boxy and wrong kind of windows.  But excellent color scheme and at least the occupants had the good sense not to knock it down.

This wall killlllled me:

I took photos next to everyone and then it was on to Mumford, my high school and the main reason I was in Detroit that week, to conduct the marching band playing a medley of seven of my greatest hits with the cast of my musical, The Color Purple, that was playing at The Fox, the theater I grew up in.

My best friend from high school, Sherry (Erman) Stewart, went with me. Which was completely appropriate as it was Sherry I wrote my first song for at 15. She was running for class secretary and I wrote her campaign theme – “Oh vote for Sher-ry/fur (erman is a mink-like animal) sec-re-tar-ry”, kind of to the tune of “This Land Is Your Land” but not really. (Even in those days I thought about copyright infringement.) Here we are standing over the plug that was our mark to position ourselves over on stage for that most auspicious musical debut.

I hope someone saves me that plug when the wrecking ball hits the school next year (don’t get me started on wrecking balls hitting gorgeous Deco buildings…). I art-directed Sherry’s campaign as well.

It’s shocking looking at that from five decades ago how little my style has changed…. Sherry, btw, won the election!

Next it was watching the marching band, pom pom girls and twirlers rehearse for our big extravaganza coming up at The Fox on Saturday.

I was shocked (and awed) at how together they were.

Then John Wilkins, Mumford’s band conductor and arranger for over 20 years, asked me to come up and conduct the band.

First I warned the kids that despite selling over 50,000,000 records I still had no idea how to read, notate or play music.

Then we swung into action playing “September”, “Boogie Wonderland”, “Neutron Dance”, “Stir It Up”, “In the Stone”, “I’ll Be There for You (theme from Friends)”, and “The Color Purple”, the songs we’d be preforming.

Here I am with the Pom Pom Girls and Twirlers. This was, of course, what I always wanted to be when I was in high school. But this photo is as close as I ever got:

I know you’re going to ask me what “GRAMMI” is. I don’t know. Perhaps a misspelling of Grammy, which I misspelled constantly myself – Grammie – after receiving one for Best Soundtrack for Beverly Hills Cop, the film that I not only had songs in but that immortalized my high school after Eddie Murphy wore a Mumford Phys Ed shirt throughout the movie, linking Mumford and I forever.

As we drove back to the hotel I finished the Young Dumb donut from this morning, though I was tempted to stop here, which I hear are the best donuts in Detroit:

My intentions were good. I was gonna wake up and spring back into action as I haven’t blogged regularly in over a week but my body still feels like it’s broken into 13 million pieces and I need a recuperation day from one of the greatest weeks in my life in Detroit that included giving a speech about the rejuvenation of the city, conducting my beloved Mumford high school marching band playing a medley of some of my greatest hits and, for the first time since my musical, The Color Purple, opened five years ago, conducting part of the show. My spirits are HIGH, like being powered by a hemi engine, but I need time to decompress, not to mention unpack my seven suitcases, go through the thousands of photos that were taken, begin transferring the close to 75 videotapes that were amassed, and somehow attempt to get back to my everyday life of music and mayhem in Los Angeles. So give me 24 and I hope to be back with something soon…

 

Here’s where I’ll be this coming weekend conducting the bows music to my musical, The Color Purple, and then on Saturday morning from 11-12:30 sharp conducting my high school marching band playing a medley of my greatest hits in the GORRRRRGEOUS lobby of the historic Fox Theatre with the cast of The Color Purple singing along.  I don’t read music (despite writing all we’re playing), and just imagine what the 60 piece Mumford marching band, 20 member pom pom squad, 25 member Color Purple cast, me and 250 attendees singing along will sound like in here… To kitsch!

https://www.alleewillis.com/mumfordinvite

My postings may be erratic this week as I’m shooting the whole week as a documentary.  I’m also the closing keynote speaker at the Rust Belt To Arts Belt conference about the rejuvenation of Detroit on Thursday. http://www.rustbelttoartistbelt.com/about/. I’m making numerous trips to my high school, going on a lot of tours of the kitschiest places in the city, seeing high school and grade school friends, attending three performances of  The Color Purple, and did I mention that my family planned my aunt’s memorial right smack dab in the middle of the day of my marching band performance and two performances of the show??!

Hopefully I’ll be posting little travelogues daily but no promises to what condition my brain will be in at the end of each day. Off to Detroit and we shall see!

Next week I’m going back to my home town, Detroit, to conduct my high school marching band playing a medley of my greatest hits in the lobby of the theater I grew up in before a performance of my musical, The Color Purple, with the cast leading a sing-along.  It’s a fundraiser to buy new uniforms for the Mumford marching band because with over 40 kids in the band, some of them are still marching around in threads from when I were there.  Although I never made marching band as I never learned to play an instrument. I never learned how to read music either which should make my conducting this event most interesting to say the least!

My high school was made famous in Beverly Hills Cop when Eddie Murphy wore a Mumford Phys Ed T-shirt throughout the film. I won a Grammy for Best Soundtrack for Beverly Hills Cop so my destiny and that of my high school  are inextricably linked.   Mumford is one of the largest schools in the city, 99% African-American and close to that percentage underprivileged. The Color Purple is about believing in and loving yourself, a rise from less nothing to everything that you never even dared to dream.  I want to instill that hope in these kids.

I know most of you don’t live in Detroit –  any of you who do please come to the Fox on Saturday April 9, from 11- 12:30 PM – but you  can still help us march. Please donate to help this most fabulous high school and help invigorate the spirit of Detroit.

And please forward the invitation or give the links to anyone you think might be interested in attending the event or donating to the cause. We need all the $$ we can get!

Invitation- https://www.alleewillis.com/mumfordinvite

All text version – https://www.alleewillis.com/mumfordinvite-text

Direct link to ticket/donation page: https://www.alleewillis.com/mumford