Reverend Billy C. Wirtz
Reverend Billy C. Wirtz (born William McLean Wirths in 1954, Aiken, South Carolina, United States) is an American blues musician, comedian and writer. His material consists of comedy routines set to music.
Biography
His father worked for the United States Atomic Energy Commission, his mother was a writer and sociologist who worked to reform the police department. His family moved to Washington, D.C. when he was eight years old.
The comedy album boom of the early 1960s was a significant influence, particularly Allan Sherman's My Son, The Folksinger. He started playing guitar at ten, and played in covers bands in his early teens. Working at the Waxie Maxie's Record Store helped broaden his taste, discovering the blues, as well as jazz and gospel. Wirtz developed a friendship with blues piano legend Sunnyland Slim who invited him to Chicago in June, 1979. He began his career as a solo artist in 1981. In 1982, he recorded his first album, Salvation Through Polyester, on No Big Deal Records. His song "Teenie Weenie Meanie", described as "a tasteful vignette about a midget lady wrestler" led to a six-month-long contract as a "Manager" with Professional Wrestling From Florida (PWF). While there he worked with Dennis "Median" Knight, The Nasty Boys, Gigolo Jimmy Backlund, and Dallas Page. Twelve years later, he returned to Professional Wrestling with a three month stint on WTBS Monday Nitro.
Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping
Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir is a performance community based in New York City.
Origin of Reverend Billy
Bill Talen (born May 25, 1950) is a Dutch-American Calvinist Minnesota-born, Franconia College-educated actor who moved to New York City from San Francisco in the early 1990s, where he had originally created a character that was a hybrid of street preacher, arguably Elvis, and televangelist called Reverend Billy. This character was performed in various San Francisco alternative theater venues, where Talen had earned a considerable reputation as both a performer and a producer (Life On The Water theater, the Solo Mio Festival, Writers Who Act, etc.) In New York, Talen began appearing as Reverend Billy on street corners in Times Square, near the recently opened Disney Store. Times Square had recently begun its transformation from a seedy but lively center of small-time and sometimes illicit commerce—and also of New York theatre—to a more gentrified and tourist-friendly venue for large companies like Disney and big-budget stage productions like The Lion King. Whereas other street preachers chose Times Square because of its reputation for sin, Reverend Billy's sermons focused on the evils of consumerism and advertising—represented especially by Disney and Mickey Mouse—and on what Talen saw as the loss of neighborhood spirit and cultural authenticity in Rudolph Giuliani's New York.
