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Wet Willie was, after the Allman Brothers Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd, the hardest-rocking of the Southern bands to come to national attention in the early 1970s. For seven years, from 1971 until 1978, they produced an enviable array of albums awash in good-time music, rollicking high-energy blues-rock, and white Southern soul, and for their trouble they racked up just one Top Ten hit ("Keep On Smilin'") and a lot of admirers. In contrast to the Allman Brothers Band, whose jumping-off point was really Cream and who based their music on long jams, Wet Willie were closer in spirit to Booker T. and the MG's and perhaps the Mar-Keys, of Stax/Volt fame, much more steeped in sweaty, good-time R&B than the blues-rock of the Allmans or the country-rock of the Marshall Tucker Band. Think of what Lynyrd Skynyrd might have sounded like with but one lead guitar on a white chitlin circuit, if such a thing had existed. The band, originally called Fox, got together in Mobile, Alabama behind the powerful vocals and distinctive sax of Jimmy Hall, with Jimmy's brother Jack on bass and banjo, Ricky Hirsch on lead and slide guitars and mandolin (as well as writing a lot of the songs), Lewis Ross on the skins, and John Anthony (later succeeded by Michael Duke) playing the keyboards. They counted the Rolling Stones and the Animals among their influences, but their sound was closer in spirit to early Otis Redding or Little Richard in his prime -- which made the move to Macon, Georgia in early 1970 a natural one, the town being Richard Penniman's onetime home, as well as the headquarters of Capricorn Records, the company run by Otis's one time manager, Phil Walden. Wet Willie auditioned for Capricorn that summer and were at work on their debut album by the fall of that same year.
Despite sharing the same label as the Allmans and the Marshall Tucker Band, Wet Willie wasn't like either of those groups. They jammed, but usually not for stretches of more than ten or 12 minutes, and they weren't laidback Southerners. Rather, Wet Willie played an intense, very vocal-oriented brand of white Southern soul. Indeed, they were probably the only white group that one could imagine doing a song such as, say, "Papa Was a Rolling Stone, " and not embarrassing themselves in the process.
Their first two albums were released with barely a ripple, and their third, a live concert document called Drippin' Wet/Live, was the first to scrape the lower reaches of the Top 200 albums. The group's third studio release, Keep On Smilin', finally gave them a hit with the title track, a peculiar piece of reggae-flavored Southern rock, and yielded a handful of other popular tracks including "Leona." The addition of the female backing group the Williettes only opened the group's sound out further with a gospel and soul sensibility. Dixie Rock and Wetter the Better followed in short order. The band issued one final album on Capricorn in 1977, which was followed, perhaps too closely, by Wet Willie's Greatest Hits (Capricorn by that time had run into severe financial problems and was releasing anything that looked like it might sell).
The band jumped to Epic Records in 1978 with a whole new lineup -- only Jimmy Hall and Michael Duke from the earlier incarnation turned up on Manorism. Neither this record nor its follow-up, Which One's Willie, could do much to change public taste, which had moved on past even the Allman Brothers and the Marshall Tucker Band -- forget about Wet Willie. The group finally broke up in 1980 after nearly a decade of great records and even better shows. -- Bruce Eder, All-
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