While Buddy Guy is bummed that the Chicago blues club scene isn’t what it used to be, he could tell you stories about it for days.
“When I first came here with Muddy Waters and them, there was no cover charge, but you had to buy drinks to be in there,” he told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay during an early morning phone call not far from his own Buddy Guy’s Legends club in Chicago. “And that was the money they were making. A lot of us had to get a day job to make ends meet.”
The guitar legend—who got his start playing in Waters’ band—turned 90 years old at the end of last month, and he’s well aware that he’s one of the last of a scarce breed.
“You got Willie Nelson, Bobby Rush, and Buddy Guy. And we’re the last of the 90s guys that are still doing it, and ain’t coming on stage in a wheelchair,” he boasted.
Guy did recall how his old friend, fellow blues legend B.B. King used a wheelchair on and offstage in the last few years of his life, and mentioned that he himself too uses a wheelchair from time to time, but only to help with long walks at the airport. Otherwise, he’s still perfectly mobile, and doesn’t even need to sit down when performing.
“I still stand. And [for] how [much] long[er] that’s gonna be? I don’t know. I’m playing it a day at a time, and trying to give you the best I’ve got,” he admits. “I think the human body is like an old car, man: I don’t care how long you keep it, but if you drive it, sooner or later, it’s gonna rattle.”
But while he’s clearly at peace with becoming a nonogenarian, Guy is very adamant about how far he is from hanging up his Strat for good, despite his so-called farewell tour earlier this decade (which wrapped its U.S. leg in the exact same setting he’ll be in next Sunday.)
“They misunderstood me about that. I said I was gonna slow down,” he clarified. And especially since he seems up for still performing, maybe that’s for the best.
Last summer, Guy secured a new generation of fans during his appearance as an older Sammie Moore at the tail-end of “Sinners,” in which said protagonist—in true Buddy Guy form—was owning and performing at his own Chicago blues club. Director Ryan Coogler even admitted that he pitched the role to him one night at Buddy Guy’s Legends partially because his often-hermit-like uncle, who died in 2015, always made an exception to go out for the night whenever Guy came to town.
“Let me put it to you like this: I’ve been going to this grocery store for 35 years,” Guy began. “I went to check out at the counter with a box of salt and a loaf of bread, and the lady who’s been waiting on me for 35 years just looked up, threw up both her hands and started screaming. I said ‘I didn’t steal nothing,’ and she said ‘no, but you’re in a movie!’”
It gave him a scare, but even if it takes playing an older version of a Miles Caton character, Guy is more than happy to pass his beloved genre down to younger fans. And he doesn’t even blame those who didn’t know who he was pre-“Sinners.”
For that, he points the finger at radio. “When we only had AM stations, they played everybody’s music. Gospel, jazz, and blues,” he recalled, adding that he’s noticed how the rules around using profanity in music have loosened up tremendously since he sang “Dirty Mother for You” over 50 years ago. “They said ‘you’ll sell a few albums if you curse a little bit,’ so I’m trying to wonder why blues isn’t playing equally,” he laments.
But once he’s onstage, there are no rules. Guy strums his Stratocaster with rags, he wiggles his junk, and tells tales of his storied life, along the lines of how his very first guitar was a rubber band attached to his mother’s wall with nails. But his signature polka dots? Not much of a stylistic choice.
Before leaving Louisiana for Chicago in the fall of 1957, he tried to cheer up his mother Isabell—who had recently suffered a stroke—by saying that he’d come home in a polka-dot Cadillac one day. He never got that car, and Guy still sees that as him having lied to his mother, who died in 1968, years before he became widely revered. He eventually had Fender build him a polka-dot Stratocaster, which he has since said is him living up to his promise as best as he can. “All I can do is say that polka dots serve as a reminder that I lied to my mom,” he solemnly explained.
And she’s not always the only family member of Guy’s with him onstage, either. His son Greg was among those who joined him at Clearwater’s Ruth Eckerd Hall two years ago, and is apparently spontaneous enough to possibly join dad again in the same room next weekend. “Sometimes, he shows up and doesn’t let me know he’s coming in,” he quipped, adding that Greg didn’t really grasp his dad’s influence until he got older and saw him play at a club one night.
Here’s hoping that club is still open.
Pitch in to help make the Tampa Bay Journalism Project a success.
Subscribe to Creative Loafing newsletters.
Follow us: Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | BlueSky
