Capricorn has made its smartest move in the Wet Willie band's young career by putting the group on a stage in front of an audience and turning the doggone tape machines on. The band's first live album—long overdue—is the truest representation yet of what Wet Willie really sounds like; it will do nothing to dissuade those who already know the group, and it will likely win Wet Willie a whole new group of converts.
A "wet willie," by the way, is the regional reference to the old high-school trick of dousing one's finger in one's mouth and inserting it into the ear of one's companion: Lead singer Jimmy Hall calls the band's material "greasy music for your ear," and that's as accurate
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as he needs to get. Wet Willie plays what is rapidly becoming Southern club music—visceral, blues-influenced - but - not- dominated, glove-tight and raunchy stuff upon which the burgeoning Southeastern rock night club business is virtually predicated. What distinguishes Wet Willie from the spate of Southern bands now scrambling for record contracts is that club music handled wrongly can deteriorate into secondary importance, supporting the party spirit instead of generating it. Wet Willie never allows that to happen: It's a party all right, but by God, it's
Wet Willie's party.
The group has nothing profound to say lyrically: no cosmic revelation, no messages of importance for their Brothersn-Sisters. They aren't angry at anything, or even a little bit depressed. Wet Willie feels good, and when it is playing well—as it was when this set was recorded at the Warehouse in New Orleans—it projects a type of regionalism that embraces rather than excludes a sort of rock & roll Southern hospitality. The style is down-home and quite, quite powerful, drawing as it does from an unlikely fusion of Baptist choir, local punk band and symphony orchestra experiences. Wet Willie is intrinsically a live band as well; two Capricorn albums have put down the notes, all right, but haven't come close to defining the group's stimulation and exuberance at having somebody to play for. The band's relationship to its audience is crucial in understanding it, much as it was for the early Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, and this is why Drippin' Wet is such an important album for them—not because it presents applause and reaction, but because the very existence of an audience is making the band play as hard as it can.
The set consists of several regional covers (including a frenzied reading of Arthur Crudup's "It's All Right" and a pounding version of Taj Mahal's "She Caught the Katie") and some original material. Wet Willie uses Otis Redding's too-much-ignored "Shout Bamalama" as its signature, racing a little too fast with it here but still keeping the song's bottled excitement under control. The classic boogie woogie tune "No Good Woman Blues" is augmented with solid harp work by Hall and Leon Russell's "I'd Rat
