| 4th January 2007 04:50 AM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT BEHIND THE FRETS
ORLANDO SENTINAL
50 years of blues power
Buddy Guy's guitar still screams despite decades of obscurity.
Liza Ghorbani | the Associated Press
Posted January 4, 2007
NEW YORK -- -Sitting in his record label's offices, high above the Manhattan skyline, blues legend Buddy Guy looks at a table lined with six of his signature Polka Dot Fender Stratocaster guitars, all awaiting his autograph.
But first, Guy takes a moment to recall their significance -- all the way back to 1957, when Guy left Louisiana to chase his guitar dreams all the way to Chicago.
"To make my mother feel good about me leaving I said, 'I'm going to show you I'm doing so good I'm going to drive back here in a polka-dot Cadillac,' " he recounts with a smile.
Although this spotty sentiment wasn't entirely serious, Guy paid tribute to his mother, who died in 1968, once he felt he achieved real success.
"I said I'm going to get a polka-dot guitar. And I know wherever she is, she's smiling."
These days, Guy is smiling, as well. Though he toiled for much of his career out of music's spotlight -- inspiring the likes of Eric Clapton and Keith Richards while being ignored by the mainstream -- in his later years, he has received accolade after accolade.
From his best-selling record in 1991, Damn Right, I've Got the Blues, to Grammy trophies and his belated induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2005, the mainstream is finally giving Guy, 70, his due.
And a recently released three-disc/DVD boxed set Can't Quit the Blues shows why he merits such admiration. It features highlights from his 50-year career as a guitarist, including never-released tracks, along with collaborations with Muddy Waters, Clapton and Richards, and newer talent such as John Mayer, Jonny Lang, and Keb' Mo'.
"There's a certain abandon that Buddy has that he relies on more than other people," says Mayer of his hero-turned-friend. "It's an unchained energy. Buddy Guy is what makes the electric guitar electric."
Unwritten rules of play
Ever the showman, Guy's music has always come from his heart more than his head -- to this day, he can't read sheet music, and he delights in the spontaneity and sloppiness that comes with improvising (which at times meant playing the guitar with his feet and teeth).
"I didn't want to play what was written," he explains. "And it worked."
However, the journey from picking cotton on a plantation to picking strings on stages across the world was an arduous one. After famously being taken under the tutelage of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf in Chicago, Guy became a peer of those whose styles he had once echoed, but he was less successful in seeing the financial fruits of his labor.
"Everybody was getting ripped off," he says. "Elvis Presley would have probably lived longer if he knew how much Col. [Tom] Parker was ripping him off. But a lot of the people who ripped us off were dead, and you can't get revenge off a dead person."
Of course, black artists were being neglected in other ways as well.
"The British guys introduced us to white America," says Guy of artists such as Mick Jagger, Clapton and Jeff Beck who, when they came over as part of the British invasion, credited him as an influence at a time when he couldn't even get a record deal.
"They made us go places we'd never been before."
And though now some believe being able to play the blues means having actually lived the blues, or at least being of a certain hue, Guy dismisses such musical prerequisites as absurd.
"If you got the same amount of fingers as I got, I don't have an advantage over you just because my skin is black. The only advantage I'd have was if I had an extra finger," he says, holding up his hand, then chuckling: "We did have a guitar player named Hound Dog Taylor who did have an extra little finger, but he couldn't use it."
'The blues is still alive'
Guy would rather dispel the awe surrounding his genre and see it move into the mainstream, which is why he encouraged blues-rock progeny John Mayer, now 29, to release a blues album, which he did as a live album in 2005.
"Every once in a while a young person needs to come along and fire up the record company and remind them that the blues is still alive," says Guy.
"My challenge is to defend blues as it exists in my pop music," says Mayer. "My fans know who Buddy is, and that's important to me."
Mayer not only admires Guy's musical know-how but also the way that he has conducted his career.
"I can't think of anyone else today who would stick to their guns under such oppressive conditions. He's proof that [if you] keep your head down and play people will notice."
And despite all that Guy has gone through to finally find recognition much later in life, he never lost sight of the music.
"Better late than never," he jokes of his career-spanning box set, while taking a silver paint pen to the first of the guitars adorned with white polka dots.
"Because I still can't quit the blues." |
| 4th January 2007 10:03 AM |
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| nanatod |
As I've said before, Buddy Guy is not the best living Chicago bluesman. He does have the best publicity machine of any Chicago bluesman (maybe the only Chicago bluesman with a good publicist). |
| 4th January 2007 12:53 PM |
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| Fiji Joe |
quote:
nanatod wrote:
As I've said before, Buddy Guy is not the best living Chicago bluesman. He does have the best publicity machine of any Chicago bluesman (maybe the only Chicago bluesman with a good publicist).
Buddy Guy?...I thought you were talking about Buddy Lee
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| 4th January 2007 01:34 PM |
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| nanatod |
Chicago blues guitarists I prefer over Buddy Guy:
Living:
Byther Smith and the Nightriders
Jimmy Johnson
Otis Rush
Hubert Sumlin
Little Ed Williams
Deceased:
Muddy Waters
Fenton Robinson
Dave Myers or his brother, whichever one was the guitarist for the Aces
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