LIL' ED INTERVIEW

AN INTERVIEW WITH...

When it’s time to stop I’m thinking: Let’s have some more fun!

It’s almost thirty years since a young Chicago guitar slinger by the name of Ed Williams and his band were invited by Alligator president Bruce Iglauer to cut a side or two for an anthology of young hot talent he had in mind. Debut LP “Roughhousin’” was followed by seven more albums and numerous gigs all over the world, from small clubs to the main stage of the renowned festival in his hometown. Lil’ Ed still plays that mean slide guitar, writing or co-writing most of the tunes, giving everything with each performance whilst nor forgetting to crack a joke and to pull faces – backed by a band on fire. He toured Belgium and France to promote his latest album on Alligator, Jump Start, and thanks to the nice people at Alligator we met up with Ed and his wife Pam at their hotel a few hours before their second gig at the Banana Peel. A thoroughbred entertainer on stage, Ed equally enjoys talking in depth about his music.

Ed, I’d like to go back in time a little and compare your latest album to the first one you recorded for Alligator in 1986, nearly thirty years ago now.

Lil’ Ed
‘Everyone wants to hear the story about the first one. I remember Bruce (Bruce Iglauer, boss of Alligator Records) coming to the club I was playing. I had no idea who he was, but the rhythm guy did and he was excited, he said ‘It’s Bruce Iglauer!’. Anyway, he comes in and watches me doing my thing and having a good time and next he comes up to me and says ‘I wanna do two songs with you’. Well, that was what I’d been waiting for, because me and my brother had wanted to do a 45 you know. At that time in Chicago, you had a booth and you could bring your music on a cassette tape and sing and it would make the record right there! Only thing, it cost 100 dollars to make it! So when Bruce made me this offer I said ‘Yes, I wanna do this’. So we go to the studio and I think we’re gonna do a single because he’d mentioned two sides. I had no idea he was thinking of an album. Anyway, I walked into that studio, well, I didn’t know what to expect because I’d never actually seen a studio before, I had no idea how it looked like You see, all studios are downtown and I hadn’t been downtown that much.

In comes Bruce and he shakes my hand and asks if I’d been in a studio before... The guys were setting up and Bruce put those boards between us, but mine was lower so I could see everybody. Bruce knew exactly what he was doing, he knew if I could see everyone I would get into the music and have a good time. Next, we put the earphones on and the music sounds really good through them, I’d never heard our music like that before. Well, we do a song and we get applause, so this is good and we do one more and we get applause and now I’m getting into my stage mode because now I have an audience and I play like I play in the clubs, doing duck walks all over the place – I have a 100 yard cord, you see - and the people there go crazy, so we continue and we do about seventeen, eighteen songs, maybe twenty. And Bruce comes up to me and says ‘This is really great, why don’t we do an album?’ So we play like another ten to fifteen songs and we end up with thirty-three songs in just three hours... I never stopped, it was like a live show, an experience I’ll never forget about.... I was 21, 22, Bruce Iglauer comes up to me and shakes hands and I was on Alligator Records!’.

ME, I’M VERY BLESSED

Which are the differences between then and now? Have things evolved, changed...? You’ve travelled all over the world, I imagine you now walk into a studio with a different attitude.

Lil’ Ed
‘Many things have changed now. A lot of youngsters tend to forget that you have to be known in order to survive in the blues world. You have to pay your dues, meaning you couldn’t travel all over the world without a contract or back-up. Bruce was my back-up when I started, someone who keeps things rolling. Nowadays, things are a lot harder in the blues world. There’s no more smoking in the clubs and no more drinking or just a wee wee bit. When I went to a bar, you went there to get toasted you know, you didn’t go to a bar to sip tea but to have a good time and have fun. The world has changed a lot in this respect. Of course, the good thing is you may not run over someone and wake up behind your wheel the next morning not realizing what happened. On the other hand, the musicians and the bartenders suffer. The bartenders suffer because people buy a Coke rather than a Hennesey, so his economy is going down. Or he may hire a DJ who will work for half the money and drop the pay of the musicians hoping they will still come out and play. What a DJ plays you can hear at home, but a musician, a good musician, he goes up there on stage and gives all he’s got... but if he gets up there and has to work for scratch he’ll get up and look at his watch all night or play one song and talk for twenty minutes’.
‘Me, I’m very blessed, I haven’t got one back-up, I’ve got two. The first is my wife: she stays with me, she comforts me, she’s my manager, she keeps me busy and the business is going real good. I’m not a good flyer so it’s good to have my wife around when we fly who says ‘It’s all right, the plane is just shaking a little’. Two: Bruce is right behind me. When I’m frustrated with the music, I can call Bruce and we can talk, talk for hours and he’ll sort things out and explain about the business. So when I ask him ‘Do I really have to play there for that amount?’, he’ll explain, he’ll say ‘Look what’s going on’ and he’ll remind me of what’s actually happening. He knows that when I get out there I’m gonna do what I have to do with every breath in my body and hit it as hard as I can ‘cause I don’t look at my watch. I don’t care about the time, I care about the people having a good time, so I don’t care’.

LIKE A BAZOOKA

Thirty years of experience must have affected you musically, I imagine.

Lil’ Ed
‘The first experience was, well, I’d never done that in my life. Now, I go into a studio prepared, I have to be ready for these things: checking the songs, checking things with the band. You used to be able to spend seventeen hours in the studio and still make money. You spend seventeen hours in the studio now and you lose money. You have to pay all these people and their prices have gone up too, see?’.

Nowadays, you wouldn’t go into a studio and cut thirty-three songs in three hours?

Lil’ Ed
‘Well, I could still do it, I’m sure. Of course, we’re all getting a bit older and the things you used to do you just can’t do anymore. Now, you have to be ready and be prepared. If no-one stops me, I think I could still do thirty-three songs in three hours, but now I would rehearse everything before walking into the studio’.

Your record company sent me a biography and I came across the word ‘bazooka’ in a review.. Can you identify with that? When I hear a song like ‘House of Cards’ from your new cd, I don’t think you sound like a bazooka at all.

Lil’ Ed
‘What do you mean, ‘bazooka’?

It’s like firing on all cylinders.

Lil’ Ed
‘Hey, I certainly do that!’.

CRAZY IN NEBRASKA

You certainly do, but not on ‘House of Cards’, nor on ‘Musical, Mechanical, Electrical Man’.

Lil’ Ed
‘True, but ‘House Of Cards’ is more laid-back on cd and more beat-up live. I have a great time playing live and I told Bruce he should record me live at least once. I think he’s afraid of losing money, but I could do a live record with all new songs, I can do that and the people would love it. I’m a ‘reminiscer’ you know, meaning I can take anything from the top of my head and just do it, I can start grooving and do the words right there. The cool thing is you only need two channels, one for my voice and one for the music and you take all that back to the studio. Just put me in a place where people go crazy, like the Zoo Bar in Lincoln, Nebraska, that’s my home away from home’.

Nebraska, of all places!

Lil’ Ed
‘When I go there, the people are jumping and dancing. The Zoo Bar is amazing. I’ve got this big blues following there, the place is always packed with people screaming and hollering and dancing, and my adrenaline is going up and more and more so with every set and I’m hitting it. When I leave the stage there I’m so tired but also so happy’.

If I understand you correctly, your laid-back songs get a rough treatment on stage. Still, you must have a reason for doing them in laid-back style on the record.

Lil’ Ed
‘The thing is, when you’re doing a record, the record producer doesn’t want you to make mistakes and I find that kind of intimidating. In olden days the guys made mistakes and it didn’t matter, on old records you can hear the mistakes because they kept playing and had fun! Being the musician that I am, having been around for over thirty years, if I make a little mistake I can cover it up. I’m pretty good at that, but now everything has to be so perfect’.

MORE FUN!

I identify you with jokes, word-play and fun, your lyrics too are full of puns and humour.

When you sing about diving into a swimming pool, I’m not sure you’re talking about a swimming pool and at the end it turns out you can’t swim anyway. ‘Musical, Mechanical, Electrical Man’ is full of humour too and on stage you’re cracking jokes, pulling faces, rolling your eyes, making funny steps and so on. It’s something I often miss in European blues men, it’s all too serious, showing off, showing how fast they can play. But they don’t seem to have fun.

Lil’ Ed
‘That’s me, those things are me, and my wife helps me with the lyrics. About ‘Musical, Mechanical, Electrical Man’: my daughter always says I’m musical and mechanical, so I wrote a song about that. About the absence of fun, these guys play with their head down and you know why? Because they worry about the time. They’re not looking at the audience, but at their watch. When they got twenty minutes left they do a ten-minute solo and another song and it will be time to go home. When it’s time to stop, me I’m thinking ‘Come on, let’s have more fun, let’s do this, we gotta do two more!’. That’s me’.

I think more blues artists were like you in the past.

Lil’ Ed
‘Right! Those old cats really were into what they were doing, they would do it all night. You couldn’t stop those cats! When I was coming up on the West Side of Chicago, I used to join the old cats in the basement at eleven and come out thinking it was one or two in the morning, but it was six in the morning and I couldn’t see with the sun in my eyes, because it would be daylight and I would have to go to work. I had to be at work at eight, so I went home, took a shower and got right back out of the door’.

MORATORIUM ON HATE

More on the serious side, I quite like ‘Moratorium On Hate’. It’s a nice song and it has beautiful; meaningful lyrics. And it’s about time someone like you said it.

Lil’ Ed
‘My wife wrote those lyrics’

Pam Williams, Ed’s wife:
‘That song was written during the presidential campaign and all these politicians were coming on saying how they were going to stop crime and make things better. And I thought there should be a way to do that by putting a moratorium on hate. Ed already sang about this in ‘Got To Be Wise’, which is on the album ‘Chicken, Biscuits and Gravy’. You know, the gangs are taking over in certain areas, terrorizing the neighbourhood. It needs to stop, people should get together and stand up for their neighbourhood. That would help crime come down a lot. I knew a lady who stood on the street corner in a really bad section of Chicago because she didn’t want kids to sell drugs and a kid came up to her and said ‘How long are you gonna stand there’ and she said ‘As long as you do’. People should do that’.

Lil’ Ed
‘It’s a great song, it brings a lot of sense in life, many people like it. When I first started to sing it, I thought people wouldn’t get it, you know how people go like (speaking in a grave and menacing voice): ‘You get a moratorium on this and a moratorium on that’. You have to know what it means in order to relate to it, but the people were singing and clapping along and telling me they loved that song. It relates to a lot of stuff: to the world of the politicians, to life in general and to a lot of things happening in the West Side of Chicago. When I sing it, I’m thinking of all these things it relates to and it makes me sing with more heart. Yeah, this is a song that really gets in my heart’.

‘Life Is A Journey’ has a message too.

Lil’ Ed
‘That song is about me and my wife. She wrote the lyrics. She writes stuff that she knows I would like to say to her. We’ve been married for a while. I think she knew I was gonna like the song, because it speaks to both of us. We were two wild cats when we first met each other and we both had to find out things. We knew there was a journey for us out there, but we didn’t know where. I do believe we were put together so we could make that journey together. It clicks so well because me and her basically like the same things, we love being around each other, so what more do you need?

Neither one of us were thinking about settling down, but it was meant for us to be together. When she wrote this song I could see in her eyes she was talking to me and when I sing it she knows I’m speaking to her. Yes, the audience connects too. I remember this one guy sitting in front of me nodding his head and he comes up to me afterwards and says ‘That’s my story’’.

THE LEGACY OF J.B. HUTTO

How about ‘No Fast Food’? I thought you really meant it, but when I came to the line about the nice steaks I wasn’t too sure…

Lil’ Ed
(Laughter) ‘My doctor was talking about this (points to his belly). My wife carried on alone for a while, but I don’t care too much’.
Pam Williams: ‘It’s supposed to be funny, though. Bruce put it in his mind no-one was going to find it funny unless you sing it goofy...’

Bluesman J.B. Hutto is your uncle, that’s a direct line. Does that affect you? I mean, you’re not just Ed Williams, you’re the Ed Williams whose uncle is J.B. Hutto. Does it feel like there’s a blood line you want to continue?

Lil’ Ed
‘This is the reason I started making this music in the first place, to keep J.B.’s legacy alive. Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to play music, but before he passed he was still teaching me and he said ‘I want you to keep this going, you started something and it’s gonna go all over the world and I want you always to remember me when you get it done’. At the funeral, I said to him at his casket that I would never let this legacy die, that it will always be part of me, because J.B. is part of me. He’s the joy that I expose, he’s the love that I share. He’s the quietness. I learned so much from J.B. and the thing is I’m still learning from him.. He taught me, he gave me this reminiscing thing, where he sat down and just started singing and grooving and make a song out of it. People give me a lot music of J.B.’s that never came out, recordings where he did this reminiscing thing. He gave that to me. And now when I hear such recordings, I pick it up immediately because this was meant to be for me, and I don’t think it will ever go to anybody else, it will be for me till I leave this world.’

‘J.B. was my favourite uncle, he was like a dad. My dad left me when i was six years old. He walked out saying he’d be back the next weekend but he never came back. My great-grandmother raised me, then my aunt took over, then my mom took over, but J.B. was always there. I never even knew how close he and mom really were. Sometimes he’d kick off his shoes and stay with us two or three weeks, it was amazing. I do this in remembrance of J.B. Hutto. Everything I do relates to him. He said ‘Don’t try to play like me, play like you but keep me in mind’ and that’s the thing I carry with me. Sometimes on stage I can feel him inside me, because sometimes I hit notes only J.B. could hit but I do hit them and the next morning I wonder ‘How the heck did I do that?’, but that’s him, he’s still there, he’s still with me’.