From Blues Revue Magazine
By Tom Callahan

Lil’ ED Williams freely admits that he’s a throwback to an earlier era of blues. But in typical Lil’ Ed fashion, he confesses to that with a smile that seems as wide as his five-foot-one-inch frame is long.

Anybody who has seen Lil’ Ed & The Blues Imperials perform has a story. Maybe it’s a tale about the gut, the fez, duck-walking through the audience, or strolling gingerly along the bar top, never disturbing a drink, all the while playing a blistering slide guitar. Or they will talk about his flying leaps across the stage. Or his chiropractic-defying backbends.

Williams has stage presence; he is a dynamic showman, as his legions of loyal fans, known as “Ed-heads,” will attest. Yet his showmanship does not mask the fact that he is a gifted musician. Williams harks back to the Chicago blues of Muddy Waters, Elmore James, Hound Dog Taylor and, of course, Ed’s uncle, J. B. Hutto.

Williams is a genuine Chicago blues man, born on the West Side in a Lake Street neighborhood. He’s only 45 years old—a youngster in the blues —but he has been playing professionally for a quarter-century. There are not a lot of native Chicago players of his generation keeping alive the ferocious, open-key slide playing of those earlier postwar giants. His sound has the raw feel of the deep blues, and the title of the first track on his latest Alligator release, Get Wild!, says it all: “Singing Slide.” But Williams is not an imitator. Get Wild! displays his maturation as a songwriter, as he poignantly writes about turning his life around after overcoming personal demons.
 

“My blues is gutbucket blues,” Williams said. “It gets down in the gut so that it makes you wiggle instead of cry all the time.” He punctuates his comment with a low chuckle that’s part growl.

When he was 12, Williams started learning the blues at the feet of a master, J.B. Hutto. “When J.B. was teaching me, he was playing Hound Dog Taylor,” Williams said. “He was playing Muddy and Jimmy Reed and John Lee Hooker. This is the stuff I strive off. This is where I got all my feelings from. It’s in my blood. It’s in my heart.”

Ironically, his first instrument was the drums. His younger stepbrother, James “Pookie” Young (who would later become The Blues Imperials bassist), was given a guitar. But Williams knew what he wanted to play. “I was too much into that slide,” he said. “I wanted to make that ‘Hawaiian’ sound. I was hooked on that. So I kept asking J.B., ‘How do you do that? What makes it glitter like that?’ I had no idea that he was moving his hand at 60 miles per hour.”

Hutto took Williams and Young on the road with him when Williams was only 16. Williams remembers his uncle painting a mustache on his face and outfitting him in an oversized suit coat and a big hat to get him into a club in South Bend, Ind.

“J.B taught me a lot of things in life”, he said. “He taught me not just how to play the guitar, but how to interact with people. He was a great uncle, a real mild hearted man. A lot of that rubbed off on me. I saw the happiness in his life and that’s what I wanted to be.”

But having a legendary uncle did not open many doors in the blues world. In 1975, Lil’ Ed & The Blues Imperials played their first gig on the West Side at Big Duke’s Blue Flame and split their earnings: $6 and two bottles of beer. The West Side blues scene had changed by the early ’70s. Slide masters had given way to string squeezers like Otis Rush, Freddie King, and Magic Sam.

Williams said, “when I was coming up in the clubs, playing slide guitar, older musicians told me that if you weren’t playing in 440 standard tuning, it wasn’t right. They just figured that it wasn’t right to play in that open key tuning.”

But Williams kept playing that way and still does to this day. For 10 years, his band rehearsed constantly, playing for peanuts in small clubs at night and holding down day jobs. Williams worked as the buff-and-wax man at the Red Carpet Car Wash in Morton Grove, Ill., 30 miles from Chicago. (The Red Carpet still exists, but has moved to downtown Chicago. A picture of Lil’ Ed with his first two albums hangs proudly on the wall.)

In 1986, Williams’ story took an old-fashioned Hollywood twist and a legend was born. Bruce Iglauer, president of Alligator Records, wanted Lil’ Ed & The Blues Imperials to do a song for his “New Bluebloods” series. Iglauer booked a studio, and Williams arrived straight from work. Neither he nor his band mates had been inside a studio before.

“I had on my boots and car wash suit,” Williams said. “We didn’t know what was going to happen, what to expect. We walked into this place with all this glass and all these booths. Bruce kept us all together and I just started playing like I was doing a normal show. I stared duck-walking and back bending and we just couldn’t stop.”

Three house later, 30 songs were recorded and Williams had a record contract. Twelve of those songs became the Blues Imperials first album, Rough Housin.

Williams was soon on his first flight to Canada to do a show, “scared to death,” he said, of flying. Over the next several years, the band would tour the world to support two more Alligator releases: Chicken Gravy & Biscuits in 1989 and What You See Is What You Get in 1992. People delighted in his stage antics, which, like the music and the fez, were directly influenced by his uncle.

“I watched the way people reacted to J.B.” Williams said, “And I was hoping that they would react the same way with me.” Lil’ Ed’s duck-walks and forays into the audience are not choreographed. Nor will you ever see the same show twice. “The whole thing with me is that I cannot play the same songs in the same order every night,” he said. “I can’t do it. Sometimes I’ll start by playing an album song or sometimes I’ll just make something up, get a groove going and just go from there.”

The first few times he leaped off the stage, it caught the band by surprise— Pookie reached out to catch him. “It’s a ‘spirit moves you’ king of thing. I can stand onstage all night and still have a good time,” he said. “But once we lock and the band is tight and everything is rolling like it should be, that’s when I have to move. I can’t stay still.”

But the relentless pace took its toll. By the early ’90s, Williams disbanded the The Blues Imperials to deal with his own drug and alcohol problems. During this hiatus, he recorded two fine albums for Earwig: Keep On Walking’ with former Blues Imperial Dave Weld, in 1996 and Who’s Been Talking with Willie Kent, in 1998.

He has been clean now for three years, and returned to Alligator in 1999 with the reunited Blues Imperials. (In addition to Williams and Young, the band includes Michael Garrett on guitar and Kelly Littleton on drums.) On “Change My Way Of Living,” a slow-burning blues from Get Wild!, Williams sings: “I was a bad boy/I didn’t do the things I should/Running the streets all night long/Till I looked in the mirror one morning and all I had was gone.”

Williams gives thanks to God, his wife Pamela (to whom Get Wild!, is dedicated) and his counselor for helping him recover. If the album proves anything, though, it’s that Williams has not lost his edge; the music is raw and cutting as anything he’s recorded. It also includes two J.B. Hutto covers, “Too Late and Pet Cream Man.”

“It’s even better now,” Williams said of his music. “I think like I used to think before I started that other stuff. I’m aware of what I need to do, and I love myself so much that I want to do it. I’m back to myself. I want to make people happy. I want to make them feel good. That’s part of me.”

And Williams plans to keep doing it long into the future. He hopes to get back into the studio next year to record a new album. In the meantime, he continues to duck-walk across stages all over the world. The Blues Imperials play every weekend, either at clubs or private parties. “You don’t have to be rich to hire Lil’ Ed,” Williams said, laughing.

No matter where you see him, be prepared for an energetic show that you’ll be talking about the next day. And don’t be surprised to hear a little blues history lesson, a throwback to the music’s earlier days.