Allee Willis is a one woman creative think-tank. A multi-disciplinary artist and visionary thinker whose range of imagination and productivity knows no bounds, Willis’ spectacular success exuberantly defies categorization; unique pales as a descriptor. She is a GrammyY®-winning and Emmy and Tony nominated composer whose hit songs have sold over 50 million records and whose first musical, The Color Purple, is currently a hit on Broadway, Willis is also a seminal cyber-pioneer who conceptualized Internet realms and was an outspoken advocate for them in the days when “new” media was an unknown to most. She is an impresario of inspired parties and events-as-performance art on a grand scale, most of which have taken place at her L.A. home, which has been called, “the house of atomic kitsch.” Beyond that, she is an internationally shown visual artist whose vibrant paintings, hand-painted ceramic ware, kinetic motorized sculptures and fanciful furniture is collected far and wide. Her expansive vision further extends to art direction, set design, and the co-creation of animated episodic series.

Looking ahead, her aim is to envision all manner of projects that integrate the different mediums in which she delves in order to create veritable symphonies of innovative interactivity. People Magazine, in a feature article boasting multiple photos of Willis’ famous kitsch collection, has called this artistic overdrive, “a multi-threat creativity that itself seems like a Godzilla out to conquer Lalaland”—and now, with her music and ideas for the smash Broadway musical adaptation of The Color Purple, the Big Apple as well. In 2006, as co-composer of the Tony® Award-nominated score for the The Color Purple and songwriter for multiple hit selections featured in Hot Feet, the Earth, Wind & Fire-themed “jukebox” musical, she becomes the first woman, and one of only five composers total, to have written music for two shows opening on the Great White Way in the same season. It’s a distinction that puts her in the company of an elite group including Georges Gershwin and Cohan, Irving Berlin and Marvin Hamlisch—all of whom, no doubt, would have been tickled pink to tickle the ivories at one of Willis’ famous house parties.

Allee Willis composed the music and lyrics for The Color Purple with fellow songwriters Brenda Russell and Steven Bray. There’s a deus ex machina twist to how the trio came to create the blues, jazz, ragtime, funk and gospel-infused score for the show, which opened in December ’05 and is sold out for well over a year (a national tour has already been announced, something usually touted at least 12 months after a Broadway production debuts). Willis had been consulting on musical direction for Purple for a year and a half when in 2001, producer Scott Sanders called her for her insight on Brenda Russell, whom he was considering enlisting for the show. As it happened, Russell was at that very moment driving over to Willis’ house to collaborate with her and Bray on scores for Willis' two alternative animated series, Driving While Black and Fat Girl.

Willis suggested to Sanders that they compose as a team, and 4-½ years later, the show—with a book by Pulitzer Prize winner Marsha Norman—features their transcendent Tony-nominated work, which is as creatively transformational as the Steven Spielberg-directed film of the property was from Alice Walker’s original book. As reported by the New York Times, “the three worked in their idiosyncratic style, mixing high-tech tools--Ms. Willis’s 17 networked Macs, which they used for research, and programs that allowed them to digitally record complete orchestrations--and very low-tech instruments like an old manual eggbeater or sandpaper—‘anything that might inspire an idea for a rhythm,’ Ms. Willis said.” On opening night, lead producer Oprah Winfrey said, "It's important that you understand that there are divine miracles happening when you are associated with The Color Purple. It has been a force in my life, and this is a full circle for me.” Its success has had a profound impact on Willis’ life and career as well.

Allee’s previous brush with Broadway was in the mid-1970s as a hat check girl at the fabled Manhattan nightspots Catch A Rising Star and Reno Sweeney’s. Willis, who was raised in Detroit—where the music of Motown got in her blood—graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in Journalism before moving to New York in 1969 and landing a copywriting job at Columbia and Epic Records. She penned liner notes and advertising for most of the on-roster black and female acts before turning her talents to songwriting. “I bought a tape recorder and a piano,” recalls Willis. “I didn’t know how to play—I still don’t—but I had a friend that did.”Her first song, “Ain’t No Man Worth It,” was partially composed on a bus; her first ten songs were released in 1974 on Epic Records as Allee’s one and only album, Childstar. Her stature as a recording artist proved a conflict of interest with her staff job, and she was forced to quit. Then, after a single tour, she was dropped from the label. “It was a blessing in disguise,” says Willis. She was then officially a starving artist—except for the free food she got during hatcheck shifts.

But the songwriting took off. The first person Allee Willis ever played her original tunes for was Bette Midler, who she’d been introduced to in 1972 by her friend Sharon Redd, a member of Bette’s backing group The Harlettes. She later visited Redd on a Bonnie Raitt session and, “as luck would have it,” says Allee, “Bonnie was one of the three people who bought my album. She said, ‘Go home and write me a song,’” and Raitt recorded “Got You On My Mind” for ’74’s Streetlights. Also via the Harlettes, Willis met veteran producer David Rubinson after she relocated to Los Angeles, where she’d always wanted to live. He was working with R&B diva Patti Labelle in 1977, and she became the first artist to consistently cover Allee’s songs, including the hit “Stir It Up.”

Allee landed a publishing deal at A&M in 1977. After being turned down by just about every other publisher in town, “Chuck Kaye heard half a song and said, ‘that’s it, we’re going to sign you,’” remembers Allee. In the first eight weeks, she had eleven covers. By the end of the year, she’d sold ten million records, second only to the Bee Gees, the year of Saturday Night Fever! She has collaborated with Bob Dylan, James Brown, Herbie Hancock and countless other music luminaries. A GRAMMY® winner for soundtrack music for 1985’s Beverly Hills Cop (a #1 album), Willis is one of contemporary music’s most prolific songwriters.

At the same time that her work was regularly climbing the charts, Willis became a sensation for the performance art events she masterminded at her pop culture-filled residence which, in the “hooray for Hollywood” 1930’s, was MGM Studio’s official party headquarters. Most frequent from the mid-‘80s to the early ’90s—but continuing on through subsequent years--her thematically choreographed soirees drew A-list celebrities, art world stars, pop culture icons and notables the world over who thought nothing of jetting in to attend. For invitation-only, private get-togethers they garnered an amazing amount of press, and Willis sees them as vehicles through which she freely expresses all her multi-media talents to serve one fabulous end. Among the most memorable are “The Night of the Living Negligee, 1-3,” a series of all-star, all-girl pajama parties and the “Borscht Belt Birthday Party,” a wry-on-rye affair commemorating Willis being named, “one of the most dangerous subversives living in the U.S.” by the Russian newspaper Pravda because they mistranslated her hit song “Neutron Dance” as a nuclear-themed “Neutron Bomb.”

In addition to causing Communist Russia-era angst, the song was a #6 Billboard pop smash for The Pointer Sisters. Willis’ top hits also include: Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September” and “Boogie Wonderland,” Pet Shop Boys (for whom she’s also designed a logo) with Dusty Springfield’s “What Have I Done To Deserve This,” and Maxine Nightingale’s “Lead Me On.” The Cold War ended, and Willis later went on to pen the Emmy-nominated #1 hit and top-selling television theme “I’ll Be There For You” from Friends. Recently, she composed the theme and score for the new VH-1 hit So NoTORIous, Tori Spelling’s hilarious send-up of her life in the celebrity spotlight.

No matter how out-sized her musical success has been, Willis has always seen it as one piece of a broader creative platform. In the ’80s, she became known as a visual artist for the kinetic motorized sculptures she made, many of them themed to correspond with her songs—beginning with her first piece, “Neutron Dance” in 1985. Works including “Boogie Wonderland” were part of her first solo gallery exhibition, 1985’s “Wear The Right Clothes Even At Home.” In 1987, Willis also authored a column for Details Magazine, “Some Like It Smog,”in whose pages she introduced her greatest musical discovery, the octogenarian, mini-skirted Del Rubio Triplets, who went on to tour the world and appear on over 20 network television programs as well as Willis’ own high-profile happenings. In 1999, Allee’s next major find was Bubbles the Artist, whose deliciously naive paintings and ceramics have legions of ardent admirers, and whose affairs are managed by Willis. The rich lore surrounding Bubbles’ history and identity is detailed at her Willis-created site bubblestheartist.com, a vibrant web destination that embodies Allee’s evaluation that, “I would describe my style as a blend of the highest tech and design and the lowest kitsch.” It was rumored in The New York Times that Willis actually is Bubbles the artist.

New media and the interactive realm have been a constant in Allee Willis’ creative process since the beginning of the ’90s—in 1991, a positively Paleolithic age in terms of mainstream computer use, her home was one of the first fully-wired, networked locations in Los Angeles. For the remainder of the ’90s, she and partner Prudence Fenton dove headlong into developing willisville, then a radically new approach to interactive content that employed narrative frameworks to navigate the site intuitively, merging multiple technologies and platforms into one story-driven environment. Fortune Magazine cited willisville early on as one of the emerging Internet’s most exciting companies, and its progress was closely followed by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

Willis went on to consult for Intel, Microsoft, AOLand Disney, and created characters, stories and virtual worlds for a variety of other entertainment and technology companies.In September 1997, representing 3,000,000 BMI songwriters, she addressed the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property regarding artist rights in cyberspace. In tandem with Bubbles, Willis’ heralded cyber-artistry conceived the acclaimed site lilytomlin.com on which she still collaborates with Tomlin and Jane Wagner. Built with tens of thousands of web pages, it’s a fluid online portal based on Tomlin’s life, characters, and her Tony Award-winning play The Search For Intelligent Life In The Universe, in which the character Kate is based on Willis. “In fact,” says Allee, “all the photos of that character are made from a photo of me with Lily’s head fused onto mine” (sporting the same asymmetrical haircut that’s been Willis’ trademark for over two decades).  Willis and Bubbles also designed jenxxonvoxxy.com for Jennifer Aniston.

With her own auspicious and historic Broadway debut, Allee Willis’ signature vision and creative intelligence enters a new phase. In imagining things beyond The Color Purple, she says, “What I really want to do is use all the talents that I have, in one place, for one property.” To understand where Willis is going, “you have to open your mind to a degree of inventiveness,” quipped journalist Anne Stockwell in a recent profile, “that’s frankly a little scary.” 

Can a pull-out-all-the-stops party at the house of atomic kitsch be far behind?