'Don't wash it baby, just serve it to me raw ... ' from 'Pussy Stank.'
An appropriate lyric that fits the marriage of Andre Williams and the Sadies—a 'blue' bluesman and an alt-country band that represents the last bastion of filthy humor. Before Richard Pryor's That Nigger's Crazy (1972) blew cussing and nastiness into stratospheric popularity, 'blue' humor had a safe niche in the Black community with backroom comedians like Redd Foxx, Moms Mably, and LaWanda Page (yeah, that LaWanda Page). After Pryor's success with Nigger and his co-screenplay credit on Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks wisely cast Cleavon Little in the lead over Pryor because it would have become 'a Richard Pryor movie'), filth and nastiness became commonplace (even Foxx and Page were on primetime). A talented personality like Bette Midler could fashion a character like the Divine Miss M who delighted in naughtiness and built a massive following on it (particularly a gay one), but with a clumsy media artist like Madonna 'blue' just got smutty and boring (another copy of 'Sex' anyone?). It takes talent to get dirty and not be merely 'dirty' (tip of the hat to Prince and Jinx Titanic), which is why the A.W./Sadies collaboration is still the best dirty show in town.
Fronted by Dallas and Travis Good—though the Sadies are from Canada they sound like Texas (deep backwoods moonshine Texas)—the Sadies' sting defies roots music, which is why their teaming with A.W. makes sense.
A.W. is a bonafide blues god from before the advent of rock and roll; he keeps generational company with Willie Dixon and Ike Turner. According to legend, when the Sadies and A.W. first connected and were hammering out their sound, Williams opened the creative flood gates by saying, '... tell the Sadies to play it like this ... . Put your dick into it son.' With recording and songwriting credits on 'Greasy Chicken,' 'Bacon Fat'(covered by the Cramps), 'My Sister Stole My Woman,' and 'Shake a Tail Feather,' A.W. is unquestionably the genuine article. 1999's A.W./Sadies collaboration, Red Dirt, and its U.S. European tour attested to that.
Four years down the line the collaboration made a rare visit to a packed Beat Kitchen. That the crowd was mostly twentysomething, attesting to the fact that there will always be an audience for jolly filth with the subtlety intact. And as A.W. hit the stage in a midnight-blue silk suit and matching bowler, he's obviously happy to give it to them. Early in the set he had his audience on his mindset. After asking the crowd, 'How many boys think they're gonna crack their cookies tonight?,' a voice yelled back, 'I'm gonna fuck SOMETHING.'
But what makes A.W. unique is his playfulness and talent for pushing the humor. His hair slicked back in an ancient processed do, cooley rocking back and forth in the groove, he's not only slyly sexy (ina way that's foreign to the gay world), but downright seductive.
On 'I Can Tell,' a typical 'my-baby-left-me' blues crawl, he got away with a raunchy aside ('I can tell/by the way you smell/that you've been having fun without me...'), without disrupting the song's sorrowful pitch. 'Jailbait' was goofy fun ('17 and a half? That's still JAILBAIT!' he boomed like a whorehouse judge) with the song turning into high-pitched comedy for the finish ('Please judge,' he whimpered, 'don't send me to Cook County Jail, 'cause that's where they take the booty.')
But 'Let Me Put it In,' a raunchy sex vamp, defined not only A.W.'s oeuvre but the chemistry between him and the Sadies. Slow and quiet, the song wallowed in a muddy lurch as A.W. begged/propositioned over and over, 'Let me put it in ... baby.' And that's the song (until A.C. suddenly pipes in, 'If you let me put it in I'll buya a beamer!'). Dallas and Travis just kept noodling on and on and A.W. kept quietly pleading, 'Let me put it in ...' There was a change in key and A.W. was now murmuring 'It's good baby, it's good ... the pussy is good ... .' And as he slid into a violent climax, in more ways than one, the Sadies rose with him. Orgasmic, dirty and blistering, the song erupted in a geyser of high art and low-down smut. It may have been filthy, but it left me feeling refreshed and enlightened. Like good sex.