Molly Peterson

Weepin' for Willie

He was smoking in bed, apparently.

Tim Fry and Andrew Sell took me to see Weepin’ Willie one glorious night in 1996 when we were using Mike Conathan’s house as our personal manse post-4th of July (Mike having decamped to New York, because editorial assistants at Simon & Schuster never slept). it turned out to be Willie’s 70th birthday. He was wonderful, if especially because of the venue. He could play. And the other patrons at Joe’s Twin Villa were such a scattered lot, not entirely the whiteys I would have expected.

Also, there was cake.

The last time I saw Willie was in a double bill in Central Square in Cambridge – he was playing at the Cantab’s downstairs venue, The Third Rail – Little Joe Cook was holding his traditional stomp upstairs. There’s got to be some astronomical equivalent metaphor for that – like when Mercury and Venus pass between the Earth and the Sun at the same time. We ran between the two clubs like giddy schoolchildren. I think I bought CDs. I have no idea where they went.

I hadn’t heard about his troubles in 2005. On an upside, he had a bed, which seems to have been an improvement. 81 years isn’t too shabby.