Buddy Guy

Album Reviews:

1967: Left My Blues in San Francisco [1962–1967] 8/10

1974: Drinkin‘ TNT ’n‘ Smokin‘ Dynamite –> see Buddy Guy & Junior Wells

2001: Sweet Tea 10/10

2003: Blues Singer 6/10

2010: Living Proof 8/10

2013: Rhythm&Blues 5/10

Compilation Reviews:

1983: Buddy Guy (Chess Masters) [1960–1966] 8/10

1992: The Complete Chess Studio Recordings [1960–1967] 10/10

1999: Buddy’s Baddest: The Best of Buddy Guy [1991–1999] 6/10

Left My Blues in San Francisco

Too many ways to call me, honey

Vibrant, out-going, eager to entertain – Buddy Guy’s first album places him as a master of many trades, be it the soulful vocalist shouting down horn sections or the guitar trickster imbuing the lonely bluesman pose with sexiness. Or is it his first album? In keeping with distribution realities up until the 1960s, it is actually a grab-bag of singles from the past few years, garnished with a few novelty tracks. After Guy had burst on the scene with soulful, careening and pretty radical amplified blues in the early 1960s, his label Chess was looking for a market when popular tastes shifted towards orchestrated, horn-heavy soul. Take a look at the cover and title: This is aimed at young West Coast hippies getting down to Janis Joplin and Hendrix, not at Chess’s base of Chicago residents.

As such, this record sports some cheeky, shuffling rhythm&blues numbers closer to Etta James or Otis Redding (“Crazy Love”, “Too Many Ways”) – and these are good stuff, Buddy Guy can do it all. But when juxtaposed to slow-burning, guitar-heavy blues tracks that have Guy digging deep vocally, it’s really no contest. “When My Left Eye Jumps” is the clear classic of this set, but jazzy, rhythm-heavy tracks peeping at funk music like “Buddy’s Groove” or “She Suits Me to a Tee” are more than worthwhile addition to Guy’s catalogue, top stuff when taken track by track, though less coherent than even his later Chess anthologies from this era. With its tonal shifts and sparring soul-blues-rhythm&blues styles, this “album” therefore works much better as a compilation – which it actually is –, and you can clearly hear how Guy was a vital force to move Chicago blues away from its delta blues beginnings, adding a stress on immediacy and joviality to electric blues, orienting towards a young audience living in the cities.

All tracks on this album are available on The Complete Chess Studio Recordings.

Sweet Tea

I’m an old man – and I’m not the same

Sweet Tea is among Buddy Guy’s best works – and it is one of the most important blues albums of his career, of the decade, of the post-blues era, or of the genre. Not because it had lasting influence on a style, but because it is unique. Buddy Guy leaves the confined space of soulful electric Chicago blues to record the songs of hill country blues men – Junior Kimbrough, CeDell Davis, but also a version of “Tramp” you have not heard like this – that had just become known with their weird atavistic style on the Fat Possum label during the 1990s. Now, hill country blues is based on rolling, slow-moving one-chord vamps, soulfulness is met with hypnotic grooves, and there is no actual space for lightning-fast guitar soloing. To place Guy in this context is counter-intuitive, and the result is mind-melting. An enormous, dirty fuzz-bass front and center, ancient amps (which they dug out) and on top Guy’s screaming, detached guitar, his vocals moaning and groaning blues one-liners that are even more reduced than the usual blues couplet – Guy sounds as if he has left the blues orbit and doesn’t understand how to fight the centrifugal forces pushing him out.

All these elements mold into a wondrous, mesmerizing morass of thumping drums and wailing, snake-like, slowly uncoiling guitar that is part swamp, part space – I don’t know if the ‘heavy psych’-label some use is appropriate, but I get the idea – maybe not psychedelic, but it is rather psychotic, and it is a testament to the blues and Buddy Guy that this worked as a true experiment: No one could have predicted the absolutely epochal one-off sound this brew created. The album also rightly establishes Junior Kimbrough as a sort of Robert-Johnson-like figure when it comes to creating his own definitive blues song book out of tradition. I am absolutely in love, electric blues for the 21^st century.

Blues Singer

I have the blues three different ways

Buddy Guy in a reconstructionist acoustic blues setting – museal or inspired? There are only a handful of recordings with Guy on acoustic at all, so this does earn the plaque of historical interest right away, and it is an attempt to carry the torch for some of the delta blues greats (Skip James, Son House, Robert Nighthawk) as well as some prominent John Lee Hooker-numbers and well-chosen lesser known blues artists that were of importance (Johnny Shines, Frankie Lee Sims). Guy does not make these songs his own, he presents them to you – and while Guy is a stellar guitarist and an intense, underrated singer, the styles here suit him to different degrees. Compare the laidback, sinewy drawl of Hooker’s classic “Crawlin’ Kingsnake” or Shines’ “Moanin’ and Groanin’” with Skip James’ ghostly “Killing Floor” – Guy adapts his singing, does the famous, detached James-falsetto, but he’s clearly more at ease with one of those idioms than he is with the other (it’s the one with an electric tradition). And while there are some great tracks (mentioned “Kingsnake”, or the suggestive, unmoving “Anna Lee”), there are some duds: On Son House’s “Louise McGhee”, Guy plays an acoustic blues pattern over and over, but there are no miniscule variations, no imperfections, the playing and singing is simply too clean. I like Blues Singer as a project and a document, but as a blues album, it’s good but not captivating.

Living Proof

Never had enough of nothing

Leaning on his scintillating guitar more than arguably ever (if that is possible), Living Proof right from the start shows that Guy retained the right lessons from his roots-oriented 2000s. The album as a clear, but gritty sound, the opener sports a quiet delta groove and vibrating, vulnerable vocals, Guy reminiscing about what he’s done – and what he’s still doing, as around the 90-second-mark, he starts to shred his guitar into pieces out of nothing – it’s a bit jarring, really. It’s a coup-de-théâtre – from the grooving delta right into the shrill noise attack to the city –, but it works. It feels like when you heard him play for the first time. The rest of the album has the mandatory cameos (B.B. King, Carlos Santana), which are the weakest entries as they succumb to shmaltzy nostalgia. But most of the record is Guy with a loud, muscular Chicago sound, boogie-ing the house down or laying down blazing solos over slow, confident grooves. There is a welcome lack of a soulful horn section, for instance – and when it’s used, it’s just there for rhythmic punctuation. This blues record by a 74-year-old more than half a century into his career sounds, to put it bluntly, fresh.

There’s a bit of desperation fueling Guy, I think, as he feels that he might be the last of a dying breed, but I’m glad that he turns this energy into good records, using the opportunity at the brink of the millenium’s second decade to show he’s still the genre’s howling dervish, shredding up the place with unmatched joy.

Rhythm&Blues

Just gotta be the best till the best come around

After a row of great recent albums boiling over with enthusiasm, the guest star-studded double treatment, forebodingly titled Rhythm & Blues, from the very beginning poses as the all-encompassing archival update of current crossover-blues. The division of a „rhythm“ and a „blues“ LP here is mainly for decorum and doesn’t greatly reflect the music on each LP (slightly more rock and soul – with horn section, mainstream soul choirs and all – on the „rhythm“ LP).

This is a quite uniform batch of hyper-charged Chicago blues with familiar soul and hard rock ingredients – the latter enhanced by the appearances of Steven Tyler, Kid Rock and the likes. While the rockers do their best to keep up (Tyler’s performance benefits from the fun he gets from singing with an obvious idol), it is Guy’s hollering voice and burning guitar that steals every single second – and truth to be told, this isn’t a compliment for a double LP. Variety goes out the window, although the tasteless schmoozy country soul exercises with Keith Urban („One Day“) stands out, as does the excellent, hauntingly low-key „Whiskey Ghost“. Beth Hart’s appearance on „What You Gonna Do About Me“ is great vocally, but especially this song shows you that Guy sometimes stresses the energy of his razor-guitar over the soulful rendition of a tune.

Guy wants to show you he can do everything with everyone, that he [i]is[/i] the man to go to for „rhythm“ and the man for „blues“, obviously, and apart from a few highlights (the mentioned „Whiskey Ghost“, the hard rocking „Evil Twin“, a nice guitar battle with Gary Clark Jr. on „Blues Don’t Care“), the album is drowning itself out by its own constant overload of encyclopedic endeavour paired with too much of a fattish recipe. Still, enough quality material to take its spot in Guy’s discography.

Buddy Guy (Chess Masters)

You don’t have to love me always, baby

Buddy Guy’s early 1960s singles for Chess had been compiled before on a considerably larger vinyl set (by Vogue, so for the European market where the singles where hard to get), and Chess also put out an LP with similar, but not identical material. So as an LP filled with a selection of Guy’s simply fantastic early Chicago blues singles, full of hair-rising, sharp guitar, soulful horns and Guy’s howl of a voice, this is great if you need a dose of this for your record player at home. The selection is not completely clear to me – the inevitable blues standards are here (“First Time I Met the Blues”, “Stone Crazy”, “My Time After A While”), and the other material is simply excellent, as well. But there does not seem to be an actual rationale about which A- and which B-side made it onto the LP (when it comes to hits, “Ten Years Ago” is conspicuously missing, for example). As an object, the compilation is obsolete, as it was replaced with the Complete Chess Studio Recordings.

The Complete Chess Studio Recordings

Blues all in my soul

Essential double-disc of his complete Chess recordings (1960–1967) – the «second» recording phase of his solo career, here in its entirety. Chess tried to promote its stars as crossover artists, and while there are jaunty rhythm&blues numbers (“Skippin’”, “Slop Around”) and some silly novelty tracks (“Hully Gully”), Buddy Guy sings and plays one thing to perfection: sharp, soulful blues with scintillating guitars and supple horn support – a style which he developed alongside Magic Sam and Otis Rush and which was strictly set against their forebears Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters as a new blues brand of the Chicago style: slicker, but intense and passionate. The highlights are obvious: Classics like the exhilarating, cathartic “Stone Crazy” or “First Time I Met the Blues”, among others. But while not quite tailored to his strengths, there are some jazzier, jammier rhythm&blues gems here like the chilled-out “Buddy’s Groove” or the mellow, groovy “Moanin’” – yes, the hard bop classic, you’ve read correctly.

These discs contain the tracks that paved Guy’s way to become a guitar legend, although this is still miles away from the extended soloing of coming years. Some of the attempts here to take focus away from his guitar work are actually a plus, as it makes for variety and it’s all quality material, no doubt. As a set, it’s perfect: The entire label catalogue of a blues legend in the making. Great.

Buddy’s Baddest: The Best of Buddy Guy

The jury don’t know but I think the public sure understand

After defining some of the future vocabulary for the electric guitar in the 1960s, experiencing relative stardom among the blues and rock crowd touring the 1970s, mostly fueled by his reputation among popular guitarists, (such as Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimmy Page, Santana or Eric Clapton, the latter particularly influenced by Guy), and successfully playing for the niche crowd throughout the 1980s, Guy is among the most responsible to set a foot of blues in the door to mainstream in the 1990s.

Three thoughts about this compilation:

First, as a collection of music: it’s decidedly not Buddy’s Baddest, but it covers his career in the 1990s – an important phase for Guy (and in extenso the blues), as it started with 1991’s surprise hit Damn Right, I’ve Got the Blues setting the tone of mainstream blues and Buddy’s own sound for the rest of the decade (until he turned everything upside down with 2001’s epochal Sweet Tea): slick sound, voluminous solos, slight reverb, well-rounded booming rhythm and brass sections with little identity – but all this with a decisive back-to-Chicago-roots attitude, less dependent on mainstream R&B and soul than, say, 1980s Robert Cray. It’s still influenced by that slick sound – bland brass section and a forcibly funky bass in some bad instances –, but it’s post-soul, so to speak. While I don’t go for the soul rock of “Mustang Sally”, Guy’s 1990s magic was that he could record supposedly tired standards like “Five Long Years” and make them smoke again, as well as contributing wonderful subdued instrumentals like the one about Vaughan’s death, “Rememberin’ Stevie” – just a fantastic emotional piece, gluing Guy’s piercing Chicago style effortlessly to Vaughan’s elastic Texan fret runs.

Secondly, as an overview compilation: it’s decidedly not a reasonable summary of his Silvertone years, but an above-par cash-in compilation: Lean heavy on the two successful albums that most had bought anyway, chip in one or two deep cuts from the others to fake a flavour of comprehensiveness and add a previously unreleased bonus track to lure in completist-suckers. Actually, it’s three previously unreleased tracks in this instance, so fair enough (two duds, but “Innocent Man” is a slow drag, filtering Muddy Waters through Hendrix going towards swamp blues – cool). They are nowadays also available on Silvertone’s box set Can’t Quit the Blues (2006) – but other than that, this is the only place to get them.

Thirdly, as an object of desire that you could buy in stores. When this came out, I was on a teenage budget and followed the classic mindset that compilations might give you the most bang for the buck. Those were different times. I immediately bought this, thinking I had a substantial body of Guy’s work in my discman, loved it, and by accident met Buddy Guy about a week later. I was awe-struck and didn’t know what to say. He realized and simply asked me how old I was. After telling him, he looked at me and said: “You got some time”, and signed this thing. And that is why this is the best Buddy Guy-CD ever – imagine they hadn’t just issued that and I wouldn’t have had a reason to buy a Buddy Guy-CD at that point in time.

1, 2, 3, 4: Damn Right, I’ve Got the Blues (1991)
5, 6, 7: Feels Like Rain (1993)
8, 9: Slippin’ In (1994)
10: Live! The Real Deal (1996)
11: Heavy Love (1998)
12, 13, 14: previously unreleased