One night in the early '80s, the long-defunct downtown Tampa rock showcase London Victory Club hosted an act well outside its purview. Buddy Guy and Junior Wells were Chicago blues royalty, the real deal — not ambassadors like B.B. King, who'd sooner be found coolin' on Johnny Carson's couch than sweatin' in a nightclub.
So Buddy, singing and playing guitar, and Junior, singing and playing harp, were rockin' the joint. The modest-sized crowd was eating it up. This was well before itinerant blues musicians regularly turned up on Bay area stages. This was a treat. Suddenly Buddy, still shy of 50, left the low-rise stage and strolled into the crowd, his guitar cord trailing behind him. And he kept going, the cord unspooling like a skinny garden hose. And he kept going still — out the door and onto the sidewalk. The crowd merrily followed the crazy pied piper with the Afro-Sheened hair. He smiled and kibitzed with the onlookers, all the while cranking out blazing guitar licks. You could hear the applause way down Franklin Street.
Buddy's guitar walk was a trick he'd pulled in countless gigs over the years — just another riff in his showman bag — but on that night at a rock club in Tampa, it was magic.
Buddy Guy has come quite a ways since that Tampa night. In the '80s, he was little known beyond Chicago and the community of learned blues fans. He's 71 now, a bona fide music legend, a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer who still puts on mighty shows, even if he's cut back on the stage gymnastics. "The older you get, it takes its toll on you," Guy says over the phone. "But some people expect you to be able to do the same stuff."
Which is not to stay that he performs like a cigar store Indian. Guy contorts his taut body, struts around those big festival stages (no more rickety nightclub bandstands), lighting everything up with a megawatt smile and contagious enthusiasm — not to mention his stinging guitar work, which was a seminal influence on '60s British blues-rockers like Clapton (who cites Guy as his primary influence), Beck and Page.
About five minutes into our interview, Buddy Guy says something that's patently untrue: "I'm a second-class guitar player, compared to some of the great ones. So I had to be a showman."
To the contrary, Guy is arguably the most important bridge between traditional electric blues guitar and the blues-based style of rock titans ranging from Mike Bloomfield to Hendrix to Stevie Ray Vaughan. While doing mostly session work for Chess Records in Chicago during the late '50s and '60s, Guy developed a brash, distorted guitar tone and aggressive attack. It contrasted with both the polished, jazzy picking of B.B. King and T-Bone Walker, and the naked primitivism of Muddy Waters.
"I couldn't be like them, so I had to squeeze them strings a little harder, amplify a little louder, hold the notes a little longer," Guy says. "When I came to Chicago, 50 years ago last month, blues guitar players would sit down with music stands and lead sheets, play by the book. I was, 'Wait a minute. I can't read no music. I gotta stand up and jump around and make someone pay attention to me.' I was playin' notes from T-Bone, but louder and with more energy and more showmanship."
George "Buddy" Guy caught the latter part of the Great Migration of African-Americans from the Deep South to northern industrial cities. While 14 years earlier Muddy Waters had left a Mississippi plantation, Guy quit a $28-a-week janitor's job at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. On Sept. 25, 1957, he hopped on the 8:14 a.m. train from Hammond, La., to Chicago and got off at 63rd and Dorchester just before midnight.
Although he'd developed a rep as a guitar slinger around his hometown, he had no designs on becoming a professional musician. Figured he'd land a better-paying custodian gig and get to watch the blues giants in clubs at night, maybe learn something and bring it back to Louisiana.
It wasn't long before Guy, having handled himself well in a few guitar battles, took up residency at the fabled 708 Club and fell under the tutelage of Waters. (The first time the two met, Mud treated a broke and famished Guy to a salami sandwich.) Guy quickly became a first-call studio musician on Chess recordings for Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter and their legendary ilk. Label owner Leonard Chess let the kid cut a few singles, but not in the trademark rambunctious style of his club performances, which Chess called "motherfucking noise."
Guy's frustration over his Chess tenure is well- documented, but these days he takes a more charitable tack. "I just wanted to get in there and learn," he says. "Muddy or Wolf would say, 'Get Buddy,' and I never wanted to step on their toes. I didn't need no gold record. Playing with them, I got as high as I could get. When they'd call me [for sessions], I felt like I was still in class."
Unbeknownst to Guy, while toiling away in America he was developing a reputation in England among a bunch of teenage guitarists enamored with the blues. He first sojourned to the U.K. in 1965; Rod Stewart acted as his valet, and he shared a bill with The Yardbirds. He was surprised at all the mop-topped white kids heaping hero worship on him.
Guy parted company with Chess in '67, and soon his life as a musician would drastically change. "I was driving a tow truck and playing guitar at night," he recounts, "I had seen a few white people come into black blues clubs in Chicago; guys like Paul Butterfield and Mike Bloomfield would sneak in, tryin' to learn the blues. I used to think, 'What, they got cops in here?'
"I got called to be in a [music] festival in Ann Arbor, Michigan — and the crowd was all white. Then we went to Toronto, and there was a crowd of 30,000 white people, and my name was being called. I'm thinkin', 'What the hell is this?' Then we went to Boston. It was all white there. Then University of Rochester. All white.
"Then they sent me to San Francisco. We drove out there, and we saw all these kids with long hair, the hippies, and it was 'What the fuck is this?' We were headin' to the Avalon Ballroom, and we got lost. So we see this big line of people, and we roll the window down. 'Where can we find the Avalon Ballroom?' 'This is the Avalon Ballroom.' We got out and got in line. They didn't know we was in the band, and we didn't know we didn't have to stand in line."
Guy laughs and continues, on a roll now: "When white people got hold of the blues, it changed everything. I got friends ask me even now, 'What was it that turned [your career] around?' I don't know. I didn't never play anything different. [The late soul singer] Tyrone Davis came to me and asked, 'How you draw white people? I can't get that crossover.' I don't know what it was. I didn't do a damn thing different."
Guy's first crossover didn't stick. The '60s gave way to the 1970s, a decade marked by sophisticated soul music, disco, wimp-rock, metal and punk. The blues became an afterthought. Most of the '80s were just as harsh, although Guy managed to pay the bills by barnstorming with Junior Wells. A blues reawakening, sparked mostly by Vaughan, cracked the door, and when in 1990 Clapton showcased his hero on his 24 Nights concert at London's Royal Albert Hall, Guy kicked the door down.
He signed with Silvertone Records, a major label subsidiary, and in '91 released Damn Right, I've Got the Blues. On the heels of that hot seller came Feels Like Rain ('93) and Slippin' In ('94). All three discs — built on Chicago blues, but taking ample stylistic liberties — bagged Grammy awards.
In the ensuing years, Guy's singing has become more nuanced, factoring in whispers and sighs and falsetto flights, while not abandoning the wild-hair howl that marked his early days. He has maintained his deal with Silvertone over the years, his last album of new material, Bring 'em In, coming in '05, the same year he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. A three-disc career retrospective, Can't Quit the Blues, was released last year. And when any self-respecting blues festival lands Buddy Guy as a headliner, it's nothing less than a coup.
He may be a septuagenarian, and he may have led off his 2001 Sweet Tea album with an acoustic track called "Done Got Old," but Guy's not about to hang up his polka-dot Stratocaster. "I don't even think about hitting the rockin' chair," he says. "My success came late in life. I still enjoy what I'm doing, and the people look like they lovin' it.
"Me? I can't stand still."
This article appears in Oct 31 – Nov 6, 2007.