At any given outdoor blues festival, 15.6 percent of the audience will spend 91 percent of its time watching one thing: the hands of the lead guitar player. (OK, so I made those percentages up, but I think they’re close.) Certain artists super-serve this guitar-freak minority, and that, in the most extreme cases (we won’t name names), can leave the other 84.4 percent of the audience spending 91 percent of their time staring blankly into their cups of beer.
Lil’ Ed Williams is most certainly not among the chopsmeister/face-scruncher guitarists that perform at any given festival. And he has an unmasked disdain for the breed, which we’ll get to in a minute.
Lil’ Ed and the Blues Imperials bring a crucial facet to any given outdoor blues festival: They bring the party. “I guess you’d say I play the boogie blues,” the affable musician says by phone from his home in Chicago. “I do stuff out of the ordinary speed. I like to speed it up, sometimes make it super-fast, see how fast we can get it.”
With that, Lil’ Ed lets out a hearty laugh, which he does often. He brings that same ebullience to the stage — smiling, joking with the crowd, dancing, high-stepping, knee-dropping. In a word, house-rockin’. And he wears funny hats, fez-style high-risers in an array of bright colors and patterns. “I made the first one myself in the ’80s, rolled up some cardboard and covered it with material,” Lil’ Ed reminisces. “I showed it to my wife and she said, ‘That ain’t no way to make a hat!’ Now she makes ’em with regular old material we might get at Walmart; puts a little foam in it to make sure it don’t sink down.”
Make no mistake: Lil’ Ed and the Blues Imperials might be about “having fun with the people,” but they are, in fact, a tight four-piece unit that can deliver the goods from throughout the blues realm, be it the requisite boogie stomp, funky R&B, wicked shuffles or, yes, a sleazed-out, Windy City slow blues. And while Lil’ Ed’s fingers might not mesmerize the guitar geeks, he’s definitely got game with his ax. His trademark is a slide guitar style so slicey that it sounds like he’s using a switchblade. His playing isn’t perfect and he’ll tell you so. “Man, when I was comin’ up in Chicago, the great ones made mistakes and just laughed it off,” he says. “It’s not about perfection, it’s about feeling.”
This article appears in Mar 31 – Apr 6, 2010.