Andre Williams’ working hours have changed. A decade ago, Williams was a washed up R&B singer who rose at dawn no matter how unforgiving the winter cold. Each morning, he would greet commuters crossing the Randolph Street bridge into the Loop, hoping to collect enough spare change to ensure he could feed both his belly and his crack habit.
Now, at age 64, Williams is strolling stages in clubs around the country at the midnight hour, a dapper dresser with a burlap voice, howling about sex, murder and mental illness with the fervor of a man who has scraped bottom and lived to tell about it.
“I’ve got a thousand dollars in my pocket, and I couldn’t be happier, because the people love us!” Williams’ voice booms over the phone from a pit stop in Kansas. He has just polished off a breakfast of bacon and eggs and is about to jump back on the road with his touring band, the Toronto country-punk quartet the Sadies.
“I just wanna work every day,” Williams says. “I don’t want no day off. I wanna wear out as many young boys’ bands as I can. I’m like a farm team. I’m teaching these kids how to go out and get the job done, how to bust a club wide open. How to entertain!”
Williams, who headlines Nov. 27 at the Empty Bottle, is a singer renewed after spending most of the ’80s in a haze of drug addiction and poverty. His censor-defying classics — “Bacon Fat,” “Jail Bait,” “The Greasy Chicken” — began stirring outrage in the ’50s, and laid the foundation for a mercurial dance with fame that was never quite consummated. He worked as a producer with Motown’s Berry Gordy, fine-tuning acts such as Mary Wells, the Contours and the Temptations. He later collaborated on the final Ike and Tina Turner album, in 1973. In between he flitted among a variety of Chicago and Detroit-based record labels, signing talent, writing hits such as “Shake a Tail Feather” and generally earning a reputation as a huge but unmanageable talent.
“I got hired and fired by Berry Gordy at least 12 times,” he says. “Now Berry wouldn’t dare talk to me, because he knows I am the nucleus of his success. Ike Turner, I like but don’t respect. Berry I respect but don’t like. He couldn’t take the fact that I was so good looking. Berry could write a song, he was the best producer ever sent down from heaven, but he needed someone to put songs into effect. You can write a song but it’s like having a rocket sitting on a launching pad at Cape Canaveral. You need somebody to take it somewhere.”
Williams’ outrageous bluster is what makes his records such collectors’ items; his double entendres don’t just push the boundaries of taste, they incinerate them. In an era when Elvis Presley’s suggestive hip movements were enough to set off censorship alarms, Williams poured on the raunch with an audacity that might’ve made 2 Live Crew blush. Yet there was also something nervy and celebratory about his hard-core rhythm and blues crossing the baritone outlandishness of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins with Redd Foxx’s nastiest humor. It has proved an inspiration to cutting-edge acts of subsequent generations: Shockabilly avatars the Cramps covered several of Williams’ songs in concert for years, punkers the Gories backed him on a recent album, and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion took him on tour.
“I write songs like I do because I have no choice,” Williams says. “People call it lascivious, but I was honest. I’m like a musical correspondent. If you’re an (expletive), I will write a song that says you are an (expletive). I try to treat a bad scene right. I write what I see, and I sing what I write.”
Williams’ blunt, brass-knuckled style fell out of favor in the disco era, and the singer says, “My ego took control and nearly destroyed me, because I felt I was no longer an important person. I went into a depression, drugs came next, and there was a nine-year flight to nowhere.”
He was rescued from the streets by an old acquaintance, who hooked him up with a producer eager to record new versions of his old hits for the CD market. Williams kicked his drug habit and since has recorded two more albums: “Silky” (1998) is steeped in dirty R&B, while the latest, “Red Dirt,” is a country-soul effort for Chicago-based Bloodshot, in which emotionally wrenching material such as “I Can Tell” alternates with explicit wink-and-a-leer ditties such as “She’s a Bag of Potato Chips.”
“It’s a different day now,” Williams says. “People accept my songs. Before, they would say to me, `Don’t bring that (garbage) into my house.’ I couldn’t make a living, but I haven’t changed. Only the times have.”
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