The Most Dangerous Woman in America

Q. : According to the Soviet government, songwriter-artist Allee Willis may actually be (a) a black male songwriter from Detroit; (b) America’s High Priest of Nuclear Art; (c) Pee-wee Herman’s favorite movie date; (d) a clear and present danger to world peace; (e) all of the above.

A. : (e), as in All-ee.

ALLEE WILLIS is looking for a knife. She is also looking a little dangerous, holding a baseball bat in one hand and a yellow zippered bag marked “Auto Cash” in the other. Sunglasses screen her eyes. Willis’ hair, a dirty-blond tangle of conflicting intentions, hangs loosely to one shoulder and, high above the other, stops abruptly at mid-skull, as if whacked off by a passing bus. The other noontime shoppers at Burbank’s Valley Thrift Store pay her little mind.

“Oh my God, I don’t believe this!” she exults. “Bakelite. Danny, look at this!”

Her friend Danny Ferrington peers over Willis’ shoulder and sticks a hand in the utensil drawer.

“Check this out,” Ferrington says, pulling out a child’s spoon. “I’ve never seen one this size.”

“Oooh,” squeals Willis; “A complete set!” She latches onto the missing blade and pairs it with the fork and spoon. “This is fabulous,” she says. “I mean, this just makes my day.”

Willis takes off down the aisle, eyeing the array of used teapots and toaster ovens like a seasoned Egyptologist examining the contents of King Tut’s tomb. Most items she dismisses as ersatz, overpriced or plain worthless. There is one last treasure, however: a tattered album of family photos from the early 1950s. Out of focus and fading, they stick to the pages like old, brittle dreams.

Allee Willis is in heaven.

“I look at this stuff and I’m there, you know?” she says. “This is what I want to do with my art. This is what my life is all about.”

The art of figuring out what Allee Willis’ art--indeed, her life--is about has taken on new dimensions in the last year. Before, Willis had earned modest fame as an archivist of “Atomic ‘50s” memorabilia and as the author of about 450 recorded pop-music songs; her home and its furnishings had appeared in periodicals such as Art & Auction and Metropolitan Home; her art was getting noticed, and her house parties were justifiably famous for the sheer magnitude of their flamboyance. Willis, 37, was a semi-hot commodity.

Then, last summer, the Soviet newspaper Pravda printed an article that denounced Willis as “a nuclear gravedigger,” accusing her of brainwashing the youth of America into thinking of nuclear conflict as survivable, if not inevitable. Reuters picked up the Pravda article and hot-wired it to newspapers around the world. A day later Willis was the center of what she hyperbolically labeled “a world crisis.”

The evidence Pravda presented seemed, on the one hand, flimsy and, on the other, rather fabricated. Willis is the co-author, with Dan Sembello, of the 1984 hit “Neutron Dance,” which heated up the sound track for “Beverly Hills Cop,” the biggest comedy success in Hollywood history. The song, however, did not exactly recommend preventive air strikes on the Politburo: In reality, its message went no further than an upbeat rallying cry urging listeners to dance on in the face of Angst and disaster, two afflictions common to teen-agers and starving artists, but hardly the stuff of SALT III talks.

Furthermore, Pravda got the lyrics wrong. “A powerful nuclear explosion is approaching,” Pravda quoted from the song, inventing words new to Allee Willis. And yet, even if the substance was garbled, Pravda’s premise may embody a certain exquisite truth. Allee Willis as one of the most dangerous people in America? The same Allee Willis known to hang out with dangerous subversives like Pee-wee Herman and Bette Midler? This had to be some sort of kooky Cold War joke. A joke, that is, until one stops to consider the context of the charge. If American pop culture can be viewed as a force for geopolitical change, and if what rocks the Establishment can roll across borders, then Willis poses as great a threat to the cultural order as any artist working outside conventional channels.

“Her gift as an artist,” says film director Rusty Lemorande, “is Allee’s ability to make the technological revolution seem innocent again. She’s one of the few contemporary artists I have seen who functions like a psychoanalyst, helping the rest of us make sense of the world. There is no question in my mind that she’s destined to be of lasting importance.”

“It’s never ‘business as usual’ with Allee,” says performer-film maker Toni Basil, a multimedia guerrilla herself and a close Willis friend. “Her business is the unusual. She’s always done a lot of individual things real well, but now they’re really coming together for her.”

Things haven’t always come together for Willis. Consider the chronology surrounding the hit song “Neutron Dance.”

“I was really low,” she remembers, standing in the living room of her pink stucco bungalow, designed by renegade architect William Kessling and built, in 1937, as a party retreat for MGM Studios. “I’d just broken up with my boyfriend. As a songwriter, I couldn’t get myself arrested. I’d found out that I’d lost all my money to an unscrupulous business manager. I totally hated the music business. I had no--I mean zero--idea what else to do. My garden was planted with bowling balls. I mean, give me a break.”

In 1983, Willis’ song publisher, Kathleen Carey, put her together with songwriter Dan Sembello. Their mission: Come up with a catchy song for the film “Streets of Fire.” That was not unusual; since 1974 she had been churning out hits for such artists as Patti LaBelle (“Come What May”), Earth, Wind & Fire (“September,” “Boogie Wonderland”) and Maxine Nightingale (“Lead Me On”). Her style owed much to vintage Motown--Willis grew up in Detroit and worshiped at the altar Berry Gordy built--yet she excelled at marrying classic R&B; to the contemporary pop-oriented rhythms of the ‘70s. In industry circles, Willis’ reputation was occasionally confusing (“A lot of folks in the business think I’m a black man”), and she was often in demand--so much so that by the mid-’80s, with $30 million in record sales to her credit, even industry folk who didn’t know her from Lou Rawls referred to her reverently as the “Rock Doc.” She doctored songs by everyone from George Benson to Bob Dylan and Herbie Hancock.

So it was perfectly ordinary for her to work on a song. What was out of the ordinary was that “Neutron Dance” took 31 minutes to compose. “It just absolutely happened,” she says of her collaboration with Sembello.

“It can take me an hour just to get the opening bass line,” Willis admits, confessing in passing that she plays keyboards poorly, never studied music and spins records on equipment that was obsolete when hi-fi was considered technology’s cutting edge. “Once in awhile you get a song that just sort of flows out of you, but that’s pretty rare.”

What happened to “Neutron Dance” was a chain reaction: It didn’t make it onto the sound track for “Streets of Fire,” but the Pointer Sisters recorded it and the song became a chart buster, after which it did get into “Beverly Hills Cop” and subsequently shot into Grammy orbit. Willis and Sembello had quickly covered it with the similar-sounding “Stir It Up,” which also wound up in the movie, sung by Patti LaBelle--and which also became a hit. By this point events started taking on an almost otherworldly cast.

Bear in mind that Willis has no use for Hollywood’s star-vehicle, mass-market sensibility, to which “Beverly Hills Cop” surely belongs. In movies, as in most manifestations of pop culture, her tastes tend to run much farther afield--all the way to her founding of L’ Chien Cinema, a loose affiliation of “Plan 9 From Outer Space” devotees whose attitude toward contemporary cinema may be characterized by the assertion that they’ve never seen a bad movie that couldn’t have been worse. She knew little about “Cop’s” script and even less about leading man Eddie Murphy, whom she vaguely remembered from TV’s “Saturday Night Live.” Assuming that she would be surrounded by gaffers and press flunkies, Willis attended her first preview wearing paint-spattered clothes and, as the evening unfolded, a look of utter disbelief.

Stars drove up by the limoload--the movie had the aura of Instant Smash--but the kicker came when Murphy walked out on screen wearing a Mumford High T-shirt. Though the shirt would be a hot seller in its own right, Willis knew it in a slightly more personal context. Mumford High was her alma mater. Her adolescence and that T-shirt were on intimate terms.

It dawned on her that this was all getting, well, a bit freaky. Here she had just seen the film that showcased the song that was rescuing her career and replenishing her bank account and may even have kept her from sticking her head in the oven, and the whole story was built around a wisecracking black guy from Mumford High!

Perfect.

It got better.

“That summer I went back to my high school reunion,” she says. “I felt pretty ambivalent about it since I hadn’t kept in touch with anybody, but I finally figured, oh, what the hell. I walked into the auditorium and there must have been a thousand kids there, all wearing shirts from the movie. And it wasn’t just Allee Willis Day, either--it was more like Allee Willis Year. They gave me the key to the high school, they read my entire discography from the stage . . . It was like every validation I’d ever wanted from my family. It blew me away.”

Into several new directions. Burned out on formula songwriting, Willis turned to painting for creative release. As with music, she had never taken an art class in her life (“If you’d asked me three years ago to draw a tree, I’d have killed myself “). Willis’ first canvas was conceived during an all-night session with boxes of discarded TV knobs and cans of old house paint stashed in her garage. The painting, which hangs in her living room today, features a pair of crude stick figures, assorted appliance handles and a note reading: “Dear Henry, I don’t know who you are anymore. I feel like I’m invisible, between your job and that damn TV. I’m at mother’s. Don’t bother to call. Eunice.”

Conceived as therapy, it came out looking like a Detroit housewife’s emancipation proclamation. Willis was offered $1,200 for it by artist Kim Milligan--whose work Willis has purchased.

“Suddenly I was getting calls from all these galleries,” she says. “The more I went to openings, though, the more they turned me off. People would stand around with a glass of wine and talk to each other like it was your basic cocktail party. At my parties, I’d invite 150 friends and make them behave as outrageously as possible. Nobody at these gallery openings even moved. I finally decided that if I couldn’t make the people move, I’d make the art move.”

With Greg Abbott, Willis began making motorized wall pieces, the first of which was called--”Neutron Dance.” Like others of its genre, “Neutron Dance” the sculpture takes a Red Grooms-like urban tableau and jazzes it up with wry mechanics. In this belt-driven, beat-driven, off-the-wall-yet-on-it universe of hers, dancers spin, buildings sway, whole cartoon landscapes spring to life. “Neutron Dance” also became a centerpiece of her 1986 debut show at LA Eyeworks and City Cafe, which drew a mix of actors, painters, musicians, designers, porno stars, studio execs and others who, like Willis, tended to think of most art galleries as wax museums with Brie.

Suddenly the Rock Doc was on a new roll. She sold “Neutron Dance” to film maker Lemorande and was soon commissioned to design a rooftop “space station” for his house and a custom car, the “Mole Mobile,” for his new film, “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” not yet released. She jumped into videos, from the slickly commercial (viz., designing and building “the entire set, from watches to instruments,” for MTV’s No. 1 video, Breakfast Club’s “Right on Track”) to the deliciously low rent (the $300 underground epic, “They Must Be Told,” made with friends Lauren Wood, who stars in it, and Ed Millis, with cameos by Linda Ronstadt, Buck Henry and other famous faces). She met partner Greg Abbott at a cocktail party (“It was perfect--we were both reaching for the same cheese ball”) and branched out: They design and build furniture as well as motorized art pieces. She hooked up with pop star Thomas Dolby and did the sound track for “Howard the Duck.” She introduced a monthly column in Details magazine, “Some Like It Smog,” that reads like Alexis de Tocqueville in Los Angeles as told to Lewis Carroll.

Finally, just when Willis figured “Neutron Dance” had run its crazy course, she went to work writing songs for the film “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” That movie just happened to be about an ordinary woman who stumbles into a spy ring and winds up being pursued by KGB agents--which just happened to be uppermost in her mind when a friend phoned from Boston and told her about the Pravda piece.

“All I could think of,” says Willis, “was, How do they even know who I am? Was the KGB following me? I couldn’t believe it. Here was a song--and a piece of art--that I’d created out of desperation and that to me was nothing but positive and humorous. And I find out instead that I’ve created a world crisis.”

The more Willis thought about it (and the publicity fallout fairly dictated that she do nothing else), the more “Neutron Dance” seemed to affirm every lesson she’d learned as an artist: that the work itself was open to the most unlikely interpretation, yes; but, more important, that in some transcendent way, it operated best on a level far beyond her control. Or, as she puts it, “My whole career is based on two truths. What can’t possibly happen, happens. And what should be happening, doesn’t. There’s no middle ground.”

Now there isn’t much space, either: Her house has grown short on square footage. Claiming that she needs “about 90 more rooms” for her art, Willis has her eyes out for a different kind of embassy, “a new world headquarters.” Meanwhile, the Willis imperative is to get out of the backyard and into a more public arena: The permanent installation at Cafe Mambo is hers, and a few days ago she presided over the pre-opening festivities at the Stock Exchange downtown, where her video sets, a mural and Abbott-Willis motorized pieces will be on display for a month. “My private life is disappearing,” she says. “Even now, I may be too well known. That sort of thing can get dangerous.”

Did someone say dangerous? Well, that’s what the Soviets said when they linked her to the “bosses of mass culture” who corrupt our youth and make a mockery of detente. Given their record of accuracy, the Russians no doubt knew a lot less than they let on. Then again, maybe--just maybe--they knew more.