What Bubbles Means To Me

by Allee Willis

I discovered Bubbles the artist in February of 1999 following a fantastically uninspired music and art creative sinkhole that lasted seven years. I had stopped writing songs in 1994. My swan song was "I'll Be there For You", the theme to Friends. I was bored with what I had to write to keep a publishing deal and desperately frustrated with the funkiness and rawness of my songs getting so homogenized when they came out as records. Beyond anything, I was far more interested in emerging interactive mediums, namely the Internet, and exploring new forms of interactive music and art. But no one in the record industry wanted to know from that in 1994, least of all my publisher who thought I was nuts saying that music wasn't going to be sold in record stores any more, radio wasn't going to be the primary hit making medium and I could be their conduit into the new world. I had also called a halt to my art career two years earlier, wearying of galleries who forever viewed me as "a songwriter who paints". My disappearance into interactive realms that started in 1992 lasted five years while I conceptualized and developed willisville, the first social network in cyberspace, a story driven online world that linked to tv, radio and print media as well as physical social spaces like clubs and coffee houses. In plain English, it was everything you could do online in one place - email, shop, play games, chat, create art and music, search, a completely unheard of concept in 1992 - all wrapped inside of an interactive story as you communicated with virtual characters and other human beings who were logged in. It was eBay, myspace,YouTube and Amazon rolled into one. My partners for much of the time were Prudence Fenton and Mark Cuban and between the three of us, Grammys, Emmys, eventual ownership of audionet.com, hdtv.com, the Dallas Mavericks between us, we couldn't get arrested. I finally gave it all up in 1997 when I realized that life for an artist at that time in new media was about tap dancing for money and success had little to do with the making of art. But I did emerge from that period with a new brain. And one that was looking for some way to have fun again making the linear music and art I thought I had given up forever.

It took two more years but when Bubbles exploded into my brain I knew that was it. I absolutely loved kitsch. I was credited for discovering The Del Rubio Triplets for God sakes! And I had had enough hits that I was pretty confident I was capable of creating higher, more popular forms of art and music as well. I realized that Bubbles, an intentionally bad artist who painted from her heart and glorified her community of 'friends' in her work, was the way to combine all my artforms in both hi and lo form into one big ball of expression. For the first six years, Bubbles was purely an artist. I said I didn't know much about her and had stumbled on her on the Internet when, in fact, I painted 100 paintings in two months and introduced her - a no-show, of course - at a party/auction in my backyard where the paintings hung by clothespins on a line. Ninety two paintings sold, twelve of them to Lily Tomlin who promptly asked Bubbles, with me signed on as a consultant, to take her entire body of work and redesign it into lilytomlin.com. A few weeks after the auction, in an article about eBay where I was cited as one of the most foremost enthusiasts, The New York Times speculated that Bubbles really was me. I always denied it although almost everyone who bought her paintings and ceramics knew it really was me. Bubbles never showed up at her art openings - how could she if I was there? - and everybody played along. Lily talked about Bubbles on Letterman saying she was one of the most significant artists of the 20th Century. Tracy Ullman booked Bubbles on her short lived Oxygen show, "Invisible Panty Line", and had to interview me instead. I believe that some Bubbles buyers did, in fact, believe she was real. And to me, in fact, she was real. She was the side of me who always had fun, who believed ferociously in her own creativity and never censored her expression. Allee was always thinking about if a song would get on the radio, if a painting would sell. I realized that as an artist I was much happier and freer as Bubbles. I had found a way to love making art again. But musically I still felt shut down. I could write songs and have fun doing the demos but ultimately the records that came were expressions of the artists and producers who cut them, not mine. This was helped some when I got the gig to write The Color Purple musical. I knew nothing about Broadway or musicals. But the thought of musicalizing something as brilliant as The Color Purple seemed perfect fodder for song inspiration. I loved working with my collaborators, Brenda Russell and Stephen Bray, and loved the freedom of escaping the confines of pure pop songs where choruses needed to repeat and thoughts held to 3 minutes. But I was still in a position of having to compromise, as all good collaborators must.

Holly Palmer and I had first written together in 2000, the year Bubbles was "born". I had little interest in writing more songs and praying they miraculously got covered. But I loved her voice so I said yes when her publisher called. I immediately loved that she appeared to be as spontaneous as I was. Or, should I say, as Bubbles was as Bubbles' state of mind was quickly mutating my own more jaded one into an infinite playground. I don't read, write or play music. I love electronics because I can go a bar at a time and plunk down whatever I hear. I don't care about things lining up on a grid in ProTools. If it feels good it stays. My favorite harmonies aren't those that are in perfect three parts. I love Prince who sings whatever he wants whenever he wants. I love whatever feels good. I love mistakes. I love incongruity. I love to flow. It's not easy for composers who write by more conventional methods to work this way. But I could see a spark in Holly's eyes the wilder the process got. I never write a whole song and then record a demo. I'm in record from the second I start getting ideas. It can be a melody, a string line, a drum beat, I DON'T CARE. I just add ideas as they come to me. I could care less what the songs's about, whether it's a verse, chorus or fade I'm working on or whether all the little parts I'm recording have any relationship to each other. I love juxtaposition so what do I care about that? But I do have supreme confidence that if I create things in a certain time and space that I will figure out a way to string them all together. And that that structure will differentiate my songs from other Pop or R&B songs that look for more cohesion (Listen to What Have I Done To Deserve This - Pet Shop Boys with Dusty Springfield. PSB were always tortured by there being four distinct parts that felt like four different songs. To me that song was a prototype of my writing style). So Holly could hang with all of this. And the more rules we threw out, the looser the writing and recording was, the more she would light up. We ended up writing six songs together. I would die over these demos but then, as I usually did hearing records that were made of my songs, I didn't think the records quite captured the true spirit of the song or the girl.

Holly called me to write for the next 5 years. I always said no as The Color Purple was all consuming. By the time I emerged in early 2006 she had joined Gnarls Barkley and said no to me. By the time she finally called me in Oct. 06, when she left to pursue her solo career again, I just did it because we always have fun. And because, by this time, Bubbles' artistic frame of mind had completely replaced mine and Holly was someone Bubbles could easily hang with. This time I told Holly I had to also co-produce the records with her so they would sound like what we had written. Without even thinking Holly agreed and we started to write and record like we always did, stamping our feet for drums, singing bass lines without any intention of replacing them with the real thing, and singing lines of totally spontaneous lyric without correcting notes that ran out of air or phrased to their own beat. Five minutes into our first song, It's A Woman Thang, Holly turns to me and says "I don't want to do a solo album; we should do this as duet. Cheesecake (her recently mined nickname) should be Bubbles' protege and let's do an album called The Soul Of Bubbles & Cheesecake." Now, I started out wanting to be a singer and fell back to songwriting when that didn't work. I lost all ambition to be the singer in the mid 80's. But I thought that concept of Bubbles & Cheesecake, especially The Soul Of Bubbles & Cheesecake was brilliant. Because it was the free and uninhibited versions of Allee and Holly. And in all my years of writing songs and having hits I never once felt like my true sound was ever heard. And, to a large extent, I felt that Holly was Allee's protege anyway. She had learned a whole new way to write and record because of me and I had found someone who could be as loose and unconservative as I was and, even better, pull more out of me than I ever had strength to do alone. So here we are, newborn babes collaborating with our more evolved and seasoned selves. A far as I'm concerned, long live Bubbles & Cheesecake.