Weeks and Khan both had big musical starts with the R&B band Rufus, albeit at different times. “[Rufus] was such an incredible musical experience that I just couldn’t get into any music I played after that,” Weeks told BASS PLAYER in ’05, speaking of his years with a pre-Chaka incarnation of the band, and explaining a subsequent year-long hiatus. By the ’79 session for Naughty, Weeks’s musical break was long behind him, and his resumé had a growing string of hits.
“Papillon (Hot Butterfly)” was written by Gregg Diamond, a disco producer whose biggest success was “More, More, More” by the Andrea True Connection. Diamond cut and released the track in 1978 under the name Bionic Boogie, with Luther Vandross on lead vocals and Jim Gregory on bass. The track featured a steady, disco-licious eighth-note pulse with a pervasive underlying 16th-note swing, manifested in Gregory’s skipping bass rhythm at the end of every bar. (You can hear it on YouTube.) Willie Weeks took this construct further on Arif Mardin’s production for Chaka Khan, infusing every aspect of the line with his own deeply internalized swing-16th groove, and countering the strict verse reading with daring melodic statements in the choruses.
Long harmonica notes open the track, setting the mood for the song’s nostalgic lyric. The groove kicks in at the top of the verse, anchored by Weeks’s muscular tone, headbobbing eighth notes, and bar-ending skips and shuffles. When the chorus makes its big IV chord entrance, Weeks marks the moment with a steady but swinging D major arpeggio at bar 15, following up with a syncopated take in the next bar. The second half of the chorus’s first four-bar phrase—bars 17 and 18—marks the first of many moments showcasing Weeks’s inventive approaches to successive root notes. With a swinging descent in bar 21 and octavepounding pedal tones at the end of 22, Weeks ushers in a return to the verse’s more controlled feel.
Weeks briefly breaks out of the second verse’s pulsing discipline for a quick beat-three fill in bar 26. At D, the swinging D major arpeggio signals the second chorus, which Weeks populates with progressively populous fills and syncopated rhythms. The bridge kicks off at E, where Weeks manages to make a bar of quarter notes feel like a bass solo, anticipating the range-leaping syncopations that follow. Behold the bliss of bar 43, which relies heavily on the non-chord pitch of the open E string in the rich style of Motown’s James Jamerson. Weeks dances from root to root for the remainder of the bridge, locking tightly with Steve Ferrone’s drum groove while flitting lightly among the soaring string and vocal arrangement. The return to comparative mellowness in verse 3 is short-lived, as Willie rips into full-on Jamerson mode for the third chorus (G). Dig the alternating 16th notes on beat two of bar 58, and how the whole two-bar phrase boogies its way 16th-wise to resolution on bar 60’s downbeat. Delectable fills throughout the final chorus culminate in bar 71’s melodic strings of 16th-notes, leading back to the eighth-notes of the main groove. In the outro, the main verse gets a twist courtesy of an upper-octave F# pluck near the end of the two-bar phrase, and some 16th-note playfulness in bar 85.
“When I go in I want to be very positive and very open and energetic,” says Weeks about his attitude toward session work. “When I get ready to play, I try to open myself and be affected by the music. I try to let it all come through me and happen naturally. That’s how I do what I do.”