More than once now, a Chronicle staffer has hung up the phone, turned to me, and asked, “Is Bradley Williams Mexican-American?”
No, he’s not. He’s every bit the Polish kid who arrived in Austin four years ago, originally from Michigan by way of San Francisco where he’d been busking. Yet it’s understandable that Williams might have picked up a bit of a Tejano accent. After all, he came here specifically in search of conjunto, a quest for an accordion master to teach him the real deal, a Luke looking for his Yoda, if you will. Since then, he’s completely immersed himself in the Tejano culture, making himself something of a storied figure here in Austin: He learned to sing the songs, even though he didn’t know Spanish; he teamed up with Isidro Samilpa, one of the Eastside’s premiere conjunto veterans, to form Los Pinkys; helped take that group to a position of great respect within the conjunto community, landing in San Antonio’s prestigious Tejano Conjunto Festival while getting frequent airplay in that town on KEDA’s “Radio Jalape�o,” with two excellent albums on Rounder.
It’s gotten to where some people wonder if he’s Tejano even after meeting him face-to-face. And although it would be rather brash to say Bradley Williams has conquered San Antonio, he has at least planted a flag and decided to look for new territory to explore — South Louisiana, look out.
Yes, Williams has started a Cajun band, and after only a few months of existence, it’s shown him to be quite the cultural chameleon. Of course, as with his partnership with Samilpa in Los Pinkys, Williams is helped along in his new Gulf Coast Playboys outfit by stellar bandmates, most notably fiddler Ralph Williams, formerly of the Bad Livers, and guitarist Steve Doerr of the LeRoi Brothers. With help like that, sounding good is, if not automatic, at least less of a challenge.
And indeed, they sound great. Again, Williams doesn’t know the language, but he’s learned the songs and plays them with impressive skill. In fact, Williams has mastered something that few cultural interlopers have ever managed — the ability not to sound like a cultural interloper. Nothing stinks worse than roots musicians who don’t have the frame of reference for the form — the dying genre of blues, now played mostly by middle class-bred white boys, being a prime example. Somehow, Williams suffers no such malady, despite having made only one trip to Acadiana, the Cajun region of Southwest Louisiana.
Perhaps it’s because Williams isn’t approaching Cajun music from the academic, white-boy perspective. You know folk music geeks; sure, they want to dance when they go to a Tejano bar or Creole dancehall, but they’re also there to study, observing speech patterns, dance steps, courtship rituals — everything — filing it away into neat little categories in their minds. Williams isn’t like that. He just wants to jam, absorbing the rest through contact and plunging himself into the Eastside and Southside life. He doesn’t seem to need that safety net of returning to his original culture. He’s completely happy where he is.
“I used to work for a Japanese wholesale fish market for about 10 years,” explains Williams. “I was the only white dude there, and I loved it, because I didn’t have to listen to somebody yapping at me in English all day about a bunch of bullshit. I could go there and do my work, and I started learning Japanese. Then they started bringing in Vietnamese, and then Laotians, and to me it was cool. Every lunch hour was something totally new, learning something about their culture, or eating something different; they’d invite me to parties. I’ve always been, I guess, culturally curious. Or just interested in people. Yeah, it’s funny — I always seem to put myself on the outside, the only white speck in the sea.”
“One thing that fascinates me since knowing Bradley,” says Playboys drummer Bobby Fuentes, “Is that when I first met him, it was through Los Pinkys. He was singing in Spanish, and I said, `Man, that’s cool — white boy knows Spanish.’ And I remember, I tried to converse with him in Spanish, and Bradley wouldn’t respond. I thought he was blowing me off. Come to find out, he couldn’t speak Spanish, he just sings the words perfectly.”
That’s the real litmus test that bears out Williams’ talent for assimilation — his biggest audience comes from the Tejano world. B.B. King once said you can’t fake the blues; if you’re putting people on, they’ll know it. Williams isn’t making a cheap facsimile of conjunto. He could’ve played it safe by playing only Westside joints, but chose instead to cut his teeth on Austin’s Eastside, at the Happy Days Lounge, and on the San Antonio conjunto circuit. It also helps that Luke found several Yodas, including Flaco Jimenez.
“Flaco is the person that introduced the world to San Antonio-style conjunto,” says Williams. “It’s pretty cool, because I know Flaco. From the very first time I met him, he was my friend. He said, `Hey man, your accordion sounds out of tune. Bring it over to where I’m staying.’ He showed me how to tune it, just sat there drinking beer, talking, playing songs…. Since I moved to Texas, it’s been really neat: I’ve been sharing the stage, opening for him…. It feels good when he comes up to me and says, `Hey man, you’re doing a good job. Los Pinkys got a good reputation in San Antonio.'”
Since Williams has obviously mastered conjunto, one might think the leap to Cajun music an easy step. One would be wrong. Cajun accordion and Tejano button accordion are not the same thing, nor are the styles of music. But that hasn’t presented Williams with too big an obstacle; he bleeds talent and determination, which allows him to focus that talent until he achieves his goal. Williams wanted to explore all the possibilities of the accordion, and had both the natural ability and burning desire to do it. One suspects that if mastering multiple accordion styles was difficult, it probably made him try that much harder.
“I just like the music, and people started coming around me,” enthuses Williams. “I was just messing around with it, and people started showing up. Bobby’s into anything. So we tried it, and we had a bass player, Danny Taransky and we started practicing. And then I got ahold of Ralph White, and had Ralph come over for an afternoon, and man, we had fun. Just me and him, acoustic, had the doors open, the windows open, the music vibrating off the wood floor. It really had that feeling of those old 78s, of Am�d� Ardoin. Ralph really somehow draws up that energy; he’s a very primitive-energy kind of player. He’s a soul mate in some ways. I like that energy too, just pure dance energy.”
The outcome of that energy, the Gulf Coast Playboys, have been nurturing and honing their sound to a small coterie of rabid Cajun dance fans at the New Chaparral Lounge on South Congress. The setting is perfect: It’s a classic, dilapidated, low-ceiling honky-tonk with a great dance floor — the kind that’s spawned many a classic country, conjunto, Cajun, or Creole dance band for decades now. As soon as the Playboys start laying into those Cajun licks, striking up the “Lake Charles Two-Step” or “Grand Bosco,” one instantly feels transported about six hours to the east, suddenly stepping into the likes of Slim’s
Y-Ki-Ki or Richard’s.
“[The New Chaparral] is a real place,” stresses Williams. “The very first time we went in there to set up Saturday morning at 10am, somebody was in there crying in their beer. Literally. Just wailing. I said to Bobby, `I think you picked the right place.’ We wanted a honky-tonk, we got a honky-tonk.”
Williams says that the Playboys are currently only a side project for its in-demand musicians. Los Pinkys, despite being recently dropped from Rounder, are still going strong. “We’re working on another record right now,” says Williams, “and we’re gonna put it out ourselves — shop it around. We’re gonna make another one like Esta Pasion, real traditional.”
Surely it seems the Gulf Coast Playboys could develop into something more, however. They’ve already produced a tape that can be had at their gigs, and it sounds as good as anything you might pick up at one of those truck stops near the Sabine. Certainly one would hope they might make a South Louisiana tour to see if they can charm the natives. They’ve definitely charmed at least a few already.
“When we were at the Continental Club [during his tamales-and-gumbo jam at SXSW], somebody from New Orleans said, `Y’all aren’t from Louisiana?’ I said no. She said, `Y’all could pass. You fooled me.'”
This article appears in April 11 • 1997 and April 11 • 1997 (Cover).