Allee Willis, 72, authored ‘Friends’ theme and many Top 10 hit records
Allee Willis, one of the music industry’s most colorful figures, whose eclectic credits as a writer and cowriter included Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September” and the “Friends” theme song, died Tuesday at a hospital in Los Angeles. She was 72.
The cause was cardiac arrest, her publicist, Ellyn Solis, said.
Animator and producer Prudence Fenton, Willis’ partner of 27 years, posted a photo on Instagram with the caption: “Rest in Boogie Wonderland,” referring to the Earth, Wind & Fire disco hit that Willis wrote with Bob Lind.
Willis, who grew up in Detroit, never learned to play music. But she was drawn to Motown as a child and said she learned how to become a songwriter by sitting on the lawn outside the record company’s studios and listening to the rhythms seeping through the building’s walls.
“A lot of times I would learn a bass line and then I’d hear the records and I’d go, Oh, that was ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine,’” she told The New York Times last year.
She started her career writing advertising copy and liner notes, and though her first foray into making her own music — an album called “Childstar” — didn’t get far, it brought her to the attention of Bonnie Raitt, who asked Willis to collaborate. (Willis and David Lasley wrote Raitt’s 1974 song “Got You on My Mind.”)
“September,” released in 1978, was an instant smash and went on to become a staple at wedding receptions, with its driving beat and its opening lines, “Do you remember/The 21st night of September?,” all but guaranteed to propel people onto the dance floor.
Later songs included Top 10 hits for the Pointer Sisters (“Neutron Dance”) and Pet Shop Boys and Dusty Springfield (“What Have I Done to Deserve This?”), as well as tracks for Ray Charles, Sister Sledge, Cyndi Lauper, Nona Hendryx, Taylor Dayne and Toni Basil.
“I, very thankfully, have a few songs that will not go away,” she told The Times of her successes, “but they’re schlepping along 900 others.”
Willis won her first Grammy in 1986 for writing (with Danny Sembello) Patti LaBelle’s “Stir It Up” for the soundtrack to “Beverly Hills Cop.”
In 1995, she was nominated for an Emmy for “I’ll Be There for You,” performed by the Rembrandts, best known as the theme song for the sitcom “Friends.”
She lost to the main title theme music from “Star Trek: Voyager.” But “I’ll Be There for You” was arguably more indelible in the culture as it played during the opening credits of “Friends” for 10 seasons plus years of reruns over images of the cast frolicking in a water fountain. The lyrics also captured the angst of their lives: “So no one told you life was gonna be this way/Your job’s a joke, you’re broke/Your love life’s DOA.”
Willis called it “the whitest song I ever wrote.”
Along with Stephen Bray and Brenda Russell, she wrote the music for the Tonywinning musical adaptation of Alice Walker’s novel “The Color Purple,” which ran on Broadway from 2005 to 2008. When it was revived on Broadway in 2016, she was part of the team that earned a Grammy for best musical theater album.
In 2018, she was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. But songwriting was far from her only passion. She was well known as a collector of kitsch, and her pink 1937 Los Angeles home housed her collection of candy-colored ephemera, cataloged online at her Museum of Kitsch.
Her passions also included making art (the walls of her home are lined with works by Bubbles the Artist, her alter ego), the internet (in the ’90s she developed her own social network of sorts, called Willisville), and hosting wild parties that drew a fascinating cross section of Hollywood.
Last year, she told The Times that putting together parties was “my No. 1 skill.” She explained: “I always had a music career, an art career, set designer, film and video, technology. The parties really became the only place I could combine everything.”
Allee Willis was born Nov.10, 1947, in Detroit, where she was raised.