Being a brief and incomplete, not to say inaccurate, history of Robert Wills, aka Bob Diddley, Rastabilly Bob, Count Rubbertoes Linguini, Bobby Q. LaTour, Raw Bird Troubadore, etc., etc.
I was born in Paris,
Kentucky, on May 11, 1949. My father, the only son of a Henry County farmer,
was editor/publisher of the McLean County News for most of my childhood.
My mother taught elementary school, and played organ in the Methodist Church.
Number three of six sons, I grew up in Calhoun Ky, a town of 800 on the banks
of the Green River. See
Family
Portraits.
Calhoun was an ideal place to be a kid. There was much to explore;
farmland was a short hike across the school grounds, and nothing was too
far for a bicycle trip. A swimmable river runs through the town, and for
me, there was comfort in knowing that everyone knew everyone else. All that
comfort fled abruptly upon my reaching teenagehood, and and embarking upon
the endless quest for "something else", which haunts me somewhat still.
Being a teenager
in the magical/mystical 60's, my coming of age was abstractly shaped by James
Bond, the Beatles, Playboy and MAD magazines, Tim Leary, the Kennedys, Martin
Luther King, the Fondas, Bob Dylan, Frank Zappa, etc.
While in high school, I formed, along with my brother Richard and half-dozen
other non-musicians, the sincerely awful whine-pop band ill-advisedly named
Da Fings. Everybody called us The Daw-Feengz. Having shed most of the least
musical members, we reformed as Sir Arthur & Co. Having convinced
ourselves we were bound for glory, we rented time at Raymond Rich's studio
in Central City. We recorded two songs I had written, "Julie" and "Next Time",
and had them pressed to 45-rpm records, the medium of the day.
Raymond was a friend of Chet Atkins, who was chief of RCA in Nashville, and he sent Chet a tape of our songs. Nashville was impressed, and signed us to a tentative deal. Unfortunately, our project was turned over to an imported hotshot from New York, who didn't see the naive genius which had been at work in shaping our sound. Danny Davis, anxious to show the Nashville crowd how to make records, insisted upon our recording songs by established songwriters. We were handed what must be the worst song Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill ever wrote, "Listen to the Music". We recorded it, but so did a cookie-cutter one-time wonder band, and the next thing you know, THEY were on American Bandstand, and Nashville quit taking our phone calls.
University didn't work out well for me, because I just had too many hours for too many years of formalised edu-indoctrination, and my heart and mind were no longer in it. This, of course, put me in line for the privilege of flying around the world to shoot at strangers in their backyard, which I declined, for personal reasons.
My aversion to joining the misguided debacle in VietNam sent me to Toronto, where I lived in Yorkville at the sad end of the Hippie Era, when pot and acid were replaced by speed and smack. Sensing that something was wrong with that picture, my tribe and I migrated to another neighbourhood, and later to a farmhouse in Churchill, just south of Barrie. Our neighbours there were the King City Slickers, a just-out-of-high school group of bluegrass musicians, later to form the nexus of Prairie Oyster. We lived at Rivendell with "premies" of Guru Maharaji, and post-hippie farmies, students of Stephen Gaskin.
Rivendell was home
to the Hazy Valley Band, incorporating ideas from the Grateful Dead, the
Incredible String Band, the Perth County Conspiracy, and the Farm Band. An
early virulent form of political correctnitude forced a change in name to
Waterwheel, without affecting much change in musical direction.
It was in Churchill that I met Elke Bzdurreck, a painter and the mother of
my only child, Alexander Oakley
Wills. With Alex on the way, Elke and I moved rural Pontiac County, Quebec,
and bought a farmhouse we named the Rhythmn Ranch, site of my first multitrack
recording studio. Elke still owns that house, and operates a
gallery/studio there.
Marion Gordon and Richard Wills; photo by Chris Newell
In the first years of living in Pontiac County, Richard and I, and some of the back-to-the-landers in the neighbourhood began Ironwood, a country-rock outfit, which played up and down the Ottawa Valley. We played covers from Hank Williams to Bob Marley plus originals. It was, for several years, a successful way to earn a living, playing three nights a week. We finished the project with a flair, recording "Randy the Lad" and "Rodeo Clown", never to play together again. Most copies of the record were destroyed in the same tragic fire which took the old Riverview Inn off the map.
silkscreen poster by Elke Bzdurreck
The comers and goers who functioned as studio musicians at early Rhythmn Ranch sessions were known as the Rhythmn Ranch Hands. Other bands which came and went during those years included; Death Warmed Over, the Trout, Rural Rock Five, los Audios Amigos, and Burning Bush (the only group of the lot deemed worthy of recording or photographing).
Guy Renaud, Paul Seguin, Carolyn Steele, Rastabilly Bob,
Tom-Tom Fishelo, of Burning Bush; photo Phillip VanHorn
Chapter Two;
During 1984~85, Elke and I parted, and I began a partnership with Marilee DeLombard.
She had built a house and lets me live there, so I built her a web page, and you can go there!
or, take me
back
so I can watch the DiddleyVee!