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."
OK, now seems like an ideal time for Lil' Ed's rant about what he calls Guitar Gods. "Those type-a guys, they up there and got they ass to the crowd … looking at the drummer. They play outa they head, not they heart. They hit all the licks and make all the notes and play super-fast. What a lot of these young musicians today are doin' is mixin' up the blues with what you call fusion rock, all that shit. You can bring in the rock 'n' roll — that's just another form of the blues — but the blues just wasn't made to mix with fusion rock.
"When they comin' up, these guys hear Stevie Ray's greatest hits and they learn it, but they forget one thing: They learn the solos, but they don't learn the ending. They play solos on top'a solos, but they don't learn how to end it. It's like they settin' off firecrackers just to watch the sparks fly. I sit back and watch the audience and it's like they sayin', 'What the fuck?'"
Lil' Ed Williams, closing in on 55, grew up "poor, but not that poor" in Chicago under the tutelage of his uncle, J.B. Hutto, himself a wildman of the blues, slide guitar master and wearer of funny hats. Lil' Ed rubbed elbows with some of the legends, opened for B.B., John Lee, Bobby Bland and others. (He always wanted to share a stage with Muddy, but Muddy died before he got the chance.)
While building up his rep, before becoming a fixture on the blues touring circuit, Lil' Ed played in a lot of bars on the West Side of Chicago. This was during a period when African-American culture had more or less rejected the blues — even in the Windy City. "I used to hate to play for black crowds," he says. "I told my booking agent one time, 'I ain't playing for no black folks.'
"Instead of recognizin' the music and havin' fun, they wanted to put the music down. I played on the West Side for years and every time I played there I walked out pissed off. There'd always be some guy in the crowd sayin', 'This is the sorriest ass music I ever heard.' I say, 'Then why you come in here?' 'I come in here to get me a drink.' 'Then why don't you get you a drink and leave.'"
Lil' Ed doesn't have to suffer fools like that anymore. And he sees a modest resurgence in interest among African-Americans. "It's changed a lot," he says. "There's a lot more blacks in the blues societies that are comin' out. They seem to be true blues lovers."
Lil' Ed's biggest reason for optimism is the steady influx of young people he sees at gigs. "People ask me if the blues is gonna die," he says and pauses. "It ain't gon' die. It ain't gon' die because I get all these youngsters comin' up to me sayin', 'That's some great music you playin'.' One of the last gigs I did was for a blues society and there was mostly college kids. I was impressed. My fans was there, but some of my fans was too old to shake it the whole time. They'd get up for a minute and have to go sit down for awhile.'"
Lil' Ed bellows out a laugh. "After my regular fans got to sittin' down, these youngsters was dancin'. Dancin' to the blues. They dance wacky, but they was dancin'."
This article appears in Apr 7-13, 2010.