THE STREETWISEMEN

A few weeks ago I befriended a blind little homeless man named Wicked Willy Yonkers. Before meeting Willy, I would see him loitering outside of my neighborhood Starbucks peddling Streetwise, a Chicago-based magazine homeless people sell to keep them off the streets. From a distance, Willy's hunched frame and suspicious demeanor make him look like a cartoonish depiction of a brilliant but misunderstood scientist. When you get closer though, you realize he's more like a malnourished hobbit who has wandered into the city by accident. His gnarly beard is like iron wool after a long day of scraping orange, lead-based paint off of a shed. His poor posture can probably be attributed to the five-pound prescription eyeglasses that pull his head towards the earth, and, I'm not positive, but I'm fairly certain that his teeth are actually poorly chiseled wood chips. Because of his appearance, I assumed that he was completely out of his mind, so I struck up a conversation with him on my way out of Starbucks one day, hoping to milk some material from his presumed schizophrenia. Instead, I got an earful about his metal band, the Streetwisemen.

Initially, I asked about the magazine. I figured that if the homeless people who sold the magazines actually wrote the articles as well, it might be a worthwhile purchase. With the kind of endearing tone that you'd expect to come from a precocious high school mathlete, he told me that although he wished he wrote for the magazine, he actually only wrote lyrics for his metal band. You see, when he isn't selling Streetwise, Wicked Willy Yonkers dresses as a disgruntled Viking and screams songs about burning down elementary schools or forging justice for the workingman.

After a few minutes of tangential rambling, and a sales pitch encouraging me to vote for the Streetwisemen to open for KISS on their upcoming tour, it became clear that he loves rock and roll more than I will ever love anything for the rest of my life; to the point that although homeless, blind, and nearly 40, he continues to pursue his dreams of being a heavy metal icon. When mounted onstage, he's nothing less than a rock and roll Adonis. I wanted to know more about his impossibly impressive dedication to rock and roll, so I set up a time to ask him and his band mates a few questions. When I met with him for the interview I was not happy to see that he trimmed his beard.

Vice: Let's start from the beginning. How did the band get started?
Joe Scott: We got to know Will when he was hanging out outside of Smart Bar and Metro a lot, where we all worked. All of us used to play in bands, and then Will told us that he was a singer.
Gubb Conway: Then he just pulled out this book with all of these songs that he had lyrics for.
Wicked Willy Yonkers: Some of which have been ditched or put on the back burner because we have a few minor concerns about how far we can go with them. "Kill the Man" was kind of for the workingman. Unfortunately, the ending matches the drum thing on a KISS song, and we're not sure how far legally we can take this one. Then there's "Burn the School," which was one of the first songs that I wrote and finished in high school. But we're worried about the opening lyrics, which are "no more pencils, no more books, no more teacher's dirty looks." Alice Cooper did those in "School's Out." However, I think that that particular lyric might have been used by kids before Alice Cooper. We don't have a regular legal staff that we just have a flat rate for, so we don't really have a way to, you know, do that.

OK, so what are your shows usually like? Where do you guys usually play?
Willy: We've played at Metro, we've played at Doubledoor, we've played at Sylvie's…
Joe: Lincoln Park Zoo.

You played at the zoo?
Willy: No, we didn't really play in the Lincoln Park Zoo, but we played in…
Joe:Well, it was for a…
Willy: Let me explain this one, will you? The Lincoln Park thing was NEAR the Lincoln Park Zoo for the Streetwise company picnic. We've also played 3 shows in Joe's hometown. Our first one was an FOP benefit, on the FOP grounds at the park.

What's FOP?
The Fraternal Order of Police. I think that was the only benefit show we've ever played.

That's amazing.
Then we played a private show at this one dude ranch. Everyone was wearing ponchos and stuff. It was an opening show for Team Hoss. Actually, I guess we played two and a half shows in Joe's hometown. We were supposed to play at Flatrock Bar and Grill, but uhh…
Joe: The bowling alley roof collapsed.

Haha. Awesome. Have you guys ever toured?
Willy: No, but we've always talked about it. The Warsaw high school class of '91 is having their class reunion soon, and what I'd really like to do is go down there and play for the class of '91.

Based on the other shows you've done, it sounds totally possible.
It would be a lot of work and money. I just want to play that reunion to let the people I went to school with know what I'm doing these days. Of course, who knows what the state of this band is going to be in the summer of 2011. I mean, we're not Jerry Lewis you know? We can't plan a telethon a year in advance and already have it figured out how we want to swear at the camera crew.

You've been writing music since high school, right?
Well, I've been doing song lyrics since high school.

Were you in a band?
I was known for sitting in class and day dreaming about being in a band called the Rookies. The band was named, in real life and in the make believe daydream realm, after a sports bar and grill called Rookies.

Wait, you were in a fake band in high school that was somehow in "real life" and also in the "daydream realm"?
Well, two of the members of the band, the two who actually existed, were the Figge brothers--Chris and Paul. That's spelled F-I-G-G-E. It's a German name, in case you actually put that in the article. There are two ways to spell that, but that's the German form. They were also in another fictitious band called the Figge Brothers that were a lot like the Allman Brothers and a little like Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Do the Figge brothers know that you used to have this imaginary band with them?
Paul I don't think does, and Kris, he may or may not. I guess but we never really talked about it.

Alright…
Anyway, the Rookies debuted in 1974. By the time I wrote "N.O.B.S." in 1986, there were already quite a few albums up out.

I'm very confused. Is the Rookies a real band?
No. It's a fictitious band. I created them as an imaginary band, imaginarily starting in 1974.

What were the names of their albums?
Let me see if I can remember them all… they had so many. In '74 they put out their debut album, which was called First Year, then in '75 they had their second album, which was self-titled, and then in '76 a double album, which was a commemorative record to the bi-centennial year, the album was called Old Glory. It even had national anthems played on the electric guitar and some live stuff played at a bicentennial party in Times Square.

And none of this was real?
Yeah. This is all imagination, that was '76…

You're fucking with me.
Joe: No. The Rookies are definitely a band that he's spoken about before.
Willy: Then in '77, they put out an album called Rook and Roll, which became kind of a slogan for them. In '79 we had an album called Food Fight. That one was pretty interesting, because I was able to take some reality and turn it into a nightmare during a concert tour. In 1975 in real life I lost my voice for almost a week, and then in '79, while we were in concert in Des Moines, I was singing and lost my voice again, which delayed the tour for a while.

Bummer.
Well, that's kind of what encouraged me to keep writing. In 1988 we released Rookenstein, then, in 1982, there was Hard Rock Pays.

Jesus. Did you ever do any album artwork with the Rookies? I assume you did other things besides just write lyrics, right?
Well, I've had ideas for albums and album covers. Like, Take the L to Hell of course would have been an L train going INTO hell, with actually flames, you know, in hell.

OK.
Rookenstein was actually a monster being struck by lightening.

There we go. Pretty basic.
Those were probably the two best ones I'd say. Actually, there was another one that might not be recognizable unless you were in this demographic, because the album title had to do with something called rolling for the Jukebox. You used to be able to roll dice with the bartender for money to play the jukebox. It's not really around anymore because most states have cracked down on it, even though it's not really gambling. The game was usually called "horses," and there was this thing called "a horse a piece," which was when you won one horse and the bartender won the other, and that became the album title. On one side of the album jacket--this would have been circa 1983 if it was in real life--one side of the album jacket had horses on it, and the other side had dice on a bar. That's how the album title "a horse a piece" came about. OK, I think it's time that I let the other guys say a little bit now.

[Willy wanders away.]

Wow. I've never met anyone so dedicated to anything in my entire life.
Gubb: He's totally into it. He's passionate about it and really cares. He just wants to play music.
Joe: Seeing Will move on stage, you know he's moving very genuinely because, since he's blind, he's never really seen anyone else on stage to take his movements from.
Gubb: We all used to live together in a house, and Will would come over to eat something, or get clothes, or whatever he needed to get through the times, and then he would stay for like three days or so. Just hanging out and always having a great time.

[Willy saunters back.]

Willy: Alright, so what kind of sleazy crap did they say about me. Probably none of it's true, that's why I want to know what they said. Especially this guy Joe Scott. I bet he told you that I have 38 children, none of which are by the same mother or are in the same city.

He definitely said that. Is it true?
Willy: No. Nothing further from the truth.

Alright Willy. I trust you.

WORDS: BEN MAJOY
PHOTOS: MICHAEL LITCHFIELD