Upper Lake >> Steve Willis was hitchhiking to Canada when he realized he wanted to spend the rest of his life playing music. He had just been picked up in the woods of California, the car was chugging along quietly and then the driver switched the radio on. Right then it hit him — he was going to be a professional musician.
For years Willis debated his career options, going back and forth between illustrating comic books and performing. But when he thumbed that ride, it all clicked into place.
“I said, ‘I cant do everything, it’s gonna have to be music,’” he recalled. “I’m not disappointed.”
Funnily enough, when the radio was flipped on, rock and roll was playing. But that’s not Willis’s preferred genre. He’s an Americana player, influenced by the songs that were popular before the British Invasion. That’s not to say that he doesn’t play rock and roll. He does — he does a bit of everything, from old country to New Orleans Blues — but it’s an older, bluesy style.
“I like to stick with music that’s pre-Beatles. It’s American music and once the British influences creep in it’s not as interesting to me,” Willis said.
Willis sat on his first piano bench at the age of five. Though he didn’t begin to take the instrument seriously until many years later, he has been playing in some way or another for the better part of the past six decades. Along the way he added the harmonica and the accordion to the mix. Today he continues to play all three instruments.
While he doesn’t necessarily prefer one over the other, Willis does consider the piano to be his main instrument. He appreciates the complexity and versatility of it, how multiple notes can be played simultaneously, how the left hand can perform the bass line while the right bangs out the rhythm and lead.
He explained that the piano is a particularly interesting instrument because it hasn’t changed much since the 1920s, stylistically speaking. Take ‘50s rock and roll. The piano lines in those songs are the same lines from music three decades earlier. Other aspects of music changed, like the electric guitar and the drums, but piano has always been a constant. Willis even believes Big Joe Turner and Pete Johnson, blues players from Kansas City, deserve credit for inventing rock and roll, at least when it comes to the piano voice.
Although Willis didn’t exactly intend to spend his entire life around the piano, that’s what happened. In the 1970s he was playing in bands, hauling his piano from gig to gig in the back of a truck, and he realized he was going to have to learn how to work on the instrument if he was going to keep at it. So began a second career of piano rebuilding.
“I’m either inside a piano or playing it, most of the time,” he said.
He does have a few other interests of course, but the piano tends to worm its way in. “It’s definitely the focus of my life,” Willis added. “Whether I set out for that to be the case or not, that’s the way it is.”
Willis isn’t the type of musician to encourage listeners to pick up tambourines and ukeleles for a singalong, but he does enjoy the communal nature of performing. “It’s intrinsic to music and it’s the reason I picked music all those years ago,” he said. “You can perform music with other musicians and with an audience. It becomes like a religious service in that way.”
And it’s not about the size of the audience. It’s about whether or not they’re listening, if they’re participating in the experience. “Music is a wonderful thing,” Willis said. “I think it has a way of taking, certainly the musician and hopefully the audience, to kind of a different way of seeing reality.”
Come tonight, Willis will be performing at the Tallman Hotel’s Meeting House, an intimate setting that seats about 40. Joining him for a Concert With Conversation at the Upper Lake venue will be boogie woogie player Wendy DeWitt. The show starts at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $25 plus tax and can be purchased by calling the hotel at 275-2244 ext. 0. The Tallman Hotel is located at 9550 Main St.
Jennifer Gruenke can be reached at 900-2019.
