Rock and Roll Hall of Fame songwriter Doc Pomus said about the band, "Mink DeVille knows the truth of a city street and the courage in a ghetto love song.

And the harsh reality in his voice and phrasing is yesterday, today, and tomorrow — timeless in the same way that loneliness, no money, and troubles find each other and never quit for a minute.

Said DeVille, "I met Manfred at a party; he'd been playing with John Lee Hooker and a lot of blues people around San Francisco.

"[2] Willy DeVille occasionally sat in with the band Lazy Ace, which included Allen on drums and Ritch Colbert on piano.

From 1975 to 1977, Mink DeVille was one of the original house bands at CBGB, the New York City nightclub where punk rock music was born in the mid-1970s.

"[8] Wrote Daily Telegraph critic Neil McCormick: DeVille and his band reached deep into blues and soul, the classic romantic pop of Ben E. King and The Drifters, with a side order of Spanish spices and New Orleans Zydeco swing.

They favoured castanets over tom-toms, and accordion over distorted guitars, and Willy delivered his vocals with a sweet, tuneful flexibility that brought out the emotional resonance beneath his nasal sneer.

What the wiry, dapper DeVille had that tied him to fellow CBGB resident bands like The Ramones, Television, Blondie and Talking Heads was an edge.

Critic Robert Palmer wrote, "Mr. DeVille is a magnetic performer, but his macho stage presence camouflages an acute musical intelligence; his songs and arrangements are rich in ethnic rhythms and blues echoes, the most disparate stylistic references, yet they flow seamlessly and hang together solidly.

In December 1976, Ben Edmonds (1950–2016), an A&R man for Capitol Records, and previously an editor for Creem, signed the band after spotting them at CBGB.

These five guys ... were obviously part of the new energy, but I also felt immediately reconnected to all the rock & roll I loved best: the bluesy early Stones, Van Morrison ..., the subway scenarios of The Velvet Underground, Dylan's folk-rock inflections, the heartbreak of Little Willie John, and a thousand scratchy old flea market 45s.

Both men, members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, had apprenticed under Phil Spector and helped shape the Wall of Sound production technique.

These producers were a natural fit for Mink DeVille, whose members' tastes ran to the Ronettes, the Crystals and other 1960s-era New York City bands with their Brill Building sound.

I put on a live recording and after the first song, the band's version of Otis Redding's 'These Arms of Mine,' Nitzsche motioned for me to stop the tape.

[18] Steve Douglas played saxophone, and the Immortals, a cappella singers whom Willy DeVille discovered at a reggae concert at Max's Kansas City, sang background vocals.

"[2] On Return to Magenta, Willy DeVille and producers Nitzsche and Steve Douglas employed lavish string arrangements on several songs.

Wrote Alex Halberstadt, Pomus's biographer: One night Doc's pub crawl took him to The Bottom Line just a block east of Washington Square Park (in New York City).

Cigarette smoke wafted into the shaft of light from offstage while the sax player blew Earle Hagen's "Harlem Nocturne".

[7]DeVille said about their first meeting, "Now here I am at 29, a writer, doing pretty good and I've just been asked if I want to write songs with a guy who helped lay the foundations for the music I fell in love with sitting at my mother's kitchen table when I was only seven years old.

"[22] Willy DeVille hired Jean Claude Petit to supervise string arrangements, and he dismissed the members of the band except for guitarist Louis X. Erlanger in favor of new musicians, including accordionist Kenny Margolis.

"It says something about the state of the American record business—something pathetic and depressing—that Willy DeVille's finest album fell on deaf ears at Capitol," wrote Kurt Loder of Rolling Stone.

[23] Said percussionist Boris Kinberg, "Capitol in the U.S. didn't know what to do with it because they perceived Willy as this punk rocker from CBGBs and he came back from Paris with a very different kind of record.

To the symphonic sweetness of the Drifters he added his own Gallic romance and, in his vocal, a measure of punk rock's Bowery grit.

And he has expanded the scope of his music by adding elements of French cafe songs and Louisiana zydeco to the mixture of rock, blues, Latin and Brill Building soul that was already there.

[28]DeVille recorded two albums for Atlantic, 1981's Coup de Grâce (produced by Jack Nitzsche) and 1983's Where Angels Fear to Tread.

Both albums featured saxophonist Louis Cortelezzi and had a full-throated Jersey Shore sound that evoked Bruce Springsteen and Southside Johnny.

Wrote critic Thom Jurek about these albums: (Both) are truly solid albums—despite lukewarm reviews at the time—showcasing much of Willy's theatrical personality and his own desire to provide for the elements of fantasy in rock music that the early rockers and doo-woppers did in the 1950s and 1960s (and that Piaf and Brel did in France).

Rootsy, hook-laden rock, iconic balladry, and the theater of aural experience were all contained in songs that offered the illusion that one could still find acted out under a streetlamp-lit stage, in front of a trashcan bonfire, narrated by one costumed in the decadent attire of a Euro-trash lothario-cum-stiletto-carrying 1950s gang banger ...

Explained Kenny Margolis, who played piano and accordion in DeVille's early 1980s bands, "I don't think the American public had a chance to experience him because in America at that time you had MTV telling you what to like.

"[31] However, David Wild of Rolling Stone praised Sportin' Life, calling it "[t]he most modern, polished sound of (Willy DeVille's) career."