Of course, it’s hard to take the country out of the girl when she’s been playing it for so long. Somewhat surprisingly, though, Willis confesses that she didn’t grow up on country music, despite an army-brat raising that included stints in Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia — all places where one would guess she’d get influenced by country music.
“Yeah, you would think so — but I didn’t,” she responds. “My dad had a Dolly Parton record and a Kenny Rogers record, but at that time — that was the ’70s — they weren’t really putting out the greatest country music. So, I didn’t have a great impression.”
What did make an impression was rockabilly, as a result of Mas Palermo, her boyfriend (and eventual husband) during her high school days in the Washington, D.C., area. “He was in this great band called the Vibrato Brothers; it was kind of a roots-rockabilly band. They broke up and needed a singer, and Mas really pushed me on them — one of those ‘girlfriend in the band’ kind of things. I think I was 17 when I had my first gig; it was pretty scary. I was really not naturally inclined to be a performer; I’m very nervous. But it was the thrill of a lifetime.”
About a year later, in 1987, the band (which had been renamed Kelly & the Fireballs) moved to Austin, part of a musical migration from the D.C. area that began with guitar-slinger Evan Johns and also included roots-rock band the Neptunes. Johns had come a few years before the others and had played for awhile with the LeRoi Brothers, kingpins of a mid-’80s Austin roots-rock scene that Willis says was primarily what drew the Fireballs to move there.
“Our first gig was opening for Evan Johns; he was a big influence on us,” she recalls. “Everyone in the band was friends with him; he had taught one of the guys how to play standup bass. He was their hero.”
After the move to Austin, Willis found herself surrounded by a significant and supportive country-music community, which helped lead to a drift in that direction with her own music. The Fireballs broke up a few months after the move; Willis and Palermo subsequently hooked up with three top local musicians (guitarists Mike Hardwick and David Murray, and bassist Brad Fordham) to form Radio Ranch, which was the band on her 1990 MCA debut Well Travelled Love. (“I was the only one that got signed, but that first record was really a band record; it was equal contribution,” Willis clarifies.)
A primary influence at the time was a close kinship between Radio Ranch and the Wagoneers, a talented trad-country band that released two albums on A&M in the late ’80s but split shortly thereafter, ultimately having come along a few years before their time in relation to the mid-’90s alt-country boomlet. “The Wagoneers had just been signed when we got here, and I became good friends with them,” Willis recalls. “They would let me sit in and do a couple songs with them, and, I kind of learned about country music from them.”
It’s been a long journey since those early Austin days, with plenty of detours and diversions down a variety of avenues. In the end, does Willis still consider what she’s doing now to be country music?
“Yeah, pretty much I do,” she answers. “I mean, I’m afraid to say it, because I don’t want to limit it. I want people to be open-minded about it. But it’s country music to me. I think my next record might be different than this one; the songs that are floating around in my head right now have a stronger country feel to them.
“But this was just sort of a ‘redemption’ record I felt like I needed to make — just being able to feel free, without any restraints on me about what I should be, or how this song should be directed in order to get played on the radio, or any of that other stuff. I just wanted no boundaries.”
ND co-editor Peter Blackstock first saw Kelly & the Fireballs at Austin’s Hole in the Wall in September 1988, and most recently saw Willis in Austin at Stubb’s in December 1998. The more things change, the more they stay the same…
