BUDDY GUY
@Bedford Bluesfest, Bedford, TX
August 31, 2002
You can never tell what sort of Buddy Guy show to expect. One the one hand, he's the blues guitar legend known to blow into some small club and tear the roof off of the place until well past last call. On the other hand, he's the showman who may spend 10 minutes of any song slapping at the guitar strings with a handkerchief or humming inaudibly off-mic, losing his audience as he loses himself in whatever's behind that maniacal grin.
Taking the stage before a startlingly large crowd on an unseasonably mild August night near Fort Worth, Texas, Guy and his quintet launched into a chugging "Got My Mojo Working." Without pausing to catch a breath, Guy and crew lent another Muddy Waters song, "I'm Ready," a sultry swagger. When he sang, "I hope some schoolboy starts a fight," he looked like the odds-on favorite, still strong in stature and relatively young in appearance at 66 years of age. Though the crowd cheered enthusiastically, it wasn't until the third song, "Damn Right I've Got the Blues," that they clearly recognized something they'd come to hear. And it was on Guy's best-known song that it first became evident that not only was the band tight, but Guy was in exceptional voice.
Buddy Guy's reputation as a hotshot guitarist tends to overshadow his vocals, and that's understandable. But not unlike his playing, his singing can be a wildly unrestrained smear of shrieks, whispers, gospel shouts and soulful emoting. Tonight, though, Guy pared some of his vocal excesses, demonstrating what a versatile and exciting singer he can be. No song was a better showcase for his pipes than "Feels Like Rain," which is solid-yet-homogenized on the CD of the same name. Here the crowd followed him as he slowed it down and worked it into a Stax/Volt soul stew. From there he segued immediately into, of all things, Bill Withers' "Use Me." Before the song could stretch out and assume much character of its own, though, Guy had yanked the band into a firewater cover of BB King's "Five Long Years."
It wasn't until an extended romp through "The Tramp," from Guy's Sweet Tea CD, that he jumped headfirst into excess. While the band vamped over a Northern Mississippi-by-way-of-Chicago riff, Guy took off into the audience, startling fans as he sat in an empty lawn chair for some extended buzzsaw soloing. It would be easy to fault this as indulgence, but hey, he's Buddy Guy, and this was an outdoor blues festival. Restraint has never been his forte, and to be honest, it was fun to watch and hear.
Returning to the stage, Guy made it clear to the audience that he intended to give them a lesson in how much fun the blues can be. They didn't mind when he told them that if they thought blues is sad music, "Ya'll don't know shit." From there he started John Lee Hooker's "Boom Boom" before U-turning into a minimal reading of Waters' "Hoochie Coochie Man," which the audience recognized and greeted accordingly.
It was before he strapped on an acoustic guitar that he told the crowd they should call up their local radio stations and ask them why they don't play the likes of Lightnin' Hopkins and T-Bone Walker. "That music is being ignored a lot," he said. Guy accompanied himself sparingly as he sang a snippet he called "Things Have Changed." Soon the whole band jumped in for a romp through Ray Charles' "What'd I Say," featuring great keyboard work by Tony Z. They wrapped up the acoustic mini-set with a somewhat sterile reading of Marvin Gaye's "Trouble Man" before closing the show proper with an electric sample of Jimi Hendrix's "Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)" and an instrumental version of Stevie Ray Vaughan's "Cold Shot."
As a man who has rubbed shoulders and swapped licks with blues legends like Waters, Howlin' Wolf and Otis Spann, Buddy Guy doesn't have to prove a thing. He could keep taking the stage for as long as he is able, and blues devotees would crowd the aisles to experience whatever sort of show strikes his fancy. It's called resting on one's laurels, right? But Guy is capable of a rarely-matched intensity when he gets it in his head that he has something to prove, which was exactly the case at the Bedford Bluesfest. Brian Briscoe
