Ladies & Gentlemen, This Is Nate Wiley & The Crowd Pleasers
BY JEFFRO KILPATRICK | I love Nate Wiley. I love Cliff LaMar. I love Howard Candie. Sadly, we lost all of them between 2006 and 2011.
Since the late ‘90s, these musicians were a three-times-a-week part of my life. In my early twenties, my friends and I bellied up to the back corner at Bob & Barbara’s Lounge and sketched cartoons while we watched and listened to Nate Wiley & the Crowd Pleasers. The band had been there for almost 30 years members rotating in and out… everyone except Nate Wiley, band leader and tenor sax. At that point, Cliff and Howard had been mainstays in the band for several years.
After a few years of sitting and listening and drawing with friends like Andrew Hart (my fellow co-founder of the Philadelphia Cartoonist Society), Chris DeRose and Chris Webb, the gang hatched an idea: an idea I was reluctant to be a part of. They said we should set up a few cameras and make a short film of Nate & the Crowd Pleasers to preserve this time, to preserve this feeling we get from this band.
I didn’t want to do it at first. I was anxious about asking older artists I respected to break their routine. But after Hart and DeRose bugging me (they said I had the best relationship with Nate), I convinced the band to do it.
Initially, we were supposed to shoot the whole project in 3 nights over Labor Day weekend in 2000. The wall to the side room was up. The place was mobbed every night. We got hours of amazing footage. DeRose, the sound engineer and main editor, looked at the footage and was not satisfied. We continued to pop in the bar over the next three years and take more crowd shots, pickup band shots, etc. All said, we whittled 30 hours of footage down to 30 minutes when we finished editing in 2003. The entire project was done out of the filmmakers’ pockets in a back room computer with a minimal amount of technology and resources. It was truly a labor of love for all involved.
We showed the finished video, “Shouts from the Crowd” at the Prince Music Theater to a full theater in March 2003. Nate and the boys played a set out of their element, but there was this great feeling of accomplishment, that we widened the audience and brought the band out of the bar and into the bigger world.Everyone loved the Crowd Pleasers.
In 2006, Cliff and Nate passed on. In 2011, so did Howard. A gang of Philly Cartoonist Society members carried Nate’s casket. I also had the honor to speak at Cliff and Nate’s funerals. For all the filmmakers and Crowd Pleasers fans, the world got sadder and darker.
After that, adult life got in the way. marriage, children, grandchildren, work, etc. Other than the Prince Theater, the documentary has only been viewed 2 more times in public and on DVD.
I put Hart’s paintings in as opening credits on it and finally put it on YouTube last week...17 years later. Why? Because I think about the Crowd Pleasers every day. And the world needs this now. I couldn’t stand around with no one remembering the Crowd Pleasers. People, especially those around back then, need a feel good vibe right now.
Jeffro Kilpatrick is a Philly-born cartoonist and art teacher. Follow him @jeffrokilpatrick and @jeffrokilpatrickart on Instagram.
