Alas, it is with great sadness that I report that the long-anticipated but much-dreaded inevitability in my life finally came to pass.
Wild Bill’s is officially closed.
The doors closed without ceremony or fanfare early last month. Like every other time before, there were a few weeks when I hoped that this was a false alarm, just another bump in the 20-year-long, very bumpy road of one of the tiny Vollintine juke joint. But it wasn’t so. This time it was for real. No more red lights, 40’s and wings. No more Soul Survivors playing into the hazy, drunken, wee hours. No more Cowboy or Woman’s World dancing in the aisles. No more Tony C. reminding us all that “we just havin’ a little fun.” No more influx of frat boys and sorority girls, overdressed and sloshed from whatever formal they just left, stumbling in the door ten minutes before closing time. No more Horace falling asleep in the corner. No more of any of the countless other wild-and-crazy-anywhere-else but pretty-much-standard-fare at Bill’s characters or shenanigans. No more gettin’ your fill at Wild Bill’s.
I went to Wild Bill’s practically every Saturday night for practically all of my adult life. There were a few years when I wasn’t a regular there, during the time I was away from Memphis in graduate school, but for almost all the rest of the time since I was 19 years old, it’s been my home-away-from-home. In fact, some of my dearest and longest-lasting friendships are with Wild Bill’s people. Over the years, I met a lot of strange, wonderful, eccentric and interesting people there. Most of them were locals, many of them were tourists, but several were even celebrities. As anyone who knows me will attest, I didn’t just go to Wild Bill’s, I was nothing short of apostolic about the place. (If apostles occasionally payed the utility bills, that is.) Bill Storey, the namesake of Wild Bill’s, and his wife Lerlene were like my second parents. I’ve told this story on this blog before, but my very best memory of Wild Bill’s was walking into the club, after almost SIX years of being away, meeting Bill at the door and having him say to me “Hey, Leigh, where you been?” as if I’d only been gone a couple of weeks. THAT was the kind of of place that Wild Bill’s was in its heyday.
There isn’t another place in Memphis like that anymore– Green’s Lounge was like that, but it burned down in 1997. I’d like to say something dramatic like “an era has passed” but I’m a Memphian and I know that eras are always passing in and by Memphis. Sometimes– not nearly often enough– this town holds on tight to its treasures, but far more often it razes them to the ground and then realizes afterwards what it lost. I don’t know that there will ever be another place like Wild Bill’s in
Memphis again and, if there is, it will be only a nostalgic recreation of what once organically was, like the “new”
Stax or the “new” Raiford’s. Or the “new” Beale Street for that matter.
We Memphians have a pathological tendency to take for granted what is here and what is great about what is here. Many of the crumbling, disintegrating and abrading structures around us are, in fact, resilient storehouses of Memphis’ history and culture. They ooze with a kind of generative, magical force that has always made Memphis culture that is as organic as Memphis water, Memphis air and Memphis soil. as the air, the soil and even the crumbling, eroding, e is an unbelievably deep and rich and generative cult