If you bought art supplies, made copies, or went to rock shows in Chicago at any time in the last decade you probably met Wesley Willis–and if you did, you didn’t forget him. He was six-foot-five, over 300 pounds, with a long scar on his cheek. He addressed friends and strangers and sometimes himself in a powerful, rumbling voice. Maybe he took notice of you and insisted on one of his almost catlike head butts–that’s how he got that distinctive mark on his forehead, like a bruise-toned third eye. Maybe he just asked you to say rraaah–rock, that is. Unnerving, those sincere requests for fleeting intimacy, but how could you say no? He wasn’t asking for anything it would hurt to give. Unless he also wanted your last $20 for two of his Rock and Roll CDs.
Mostly he accompanied himself on cheap preset synthesizers, but for a few years he had a full band, the Wesley Willis Fiasco, assembled by recording engineer Dale Meiners, who helped Willis record his songs and navigate the health care bureaucracy. “People, like, kind of point him out as being schizophrenic, and a hard guy to deal with,” Meiners told MTV’s Tabitha Soren in 1996. “He’s not. Wesley’s really cool. You know, I’ve dealt with guys who are addicted to heroin, and stuff like that. That is a real bad time, you know? Did you ever see the Chuck Berry video?…There’s some very strange rock stars out there. Wesley in comparison is very cool.”
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At the funeral, Bagley was weeping too much to speak comfortably, but had brought a video presentation. There were scenes of the big man drawing cityscapes from the John Hancock observatory and eliciting growls from bemused tourist boys. There was a signature scene of him forehead-to-forehead with a young woman, just nearly brushing noses with her in a sort of Eskimo air kiss.
The only member of Willis’s family to speak at the funeral was Jerry Willis, who confessed to having drifted apart from his brother over the years. Reunited with Wesley as he lay ill by a former roommate of Wesley’s, Carla Winterbottom, who called every relative she had a phone number for, he made a moving plea to the gathering to make contact with lost loved ones before it’s too late.
