The Thrilling Inconsistency of Buddy Guy
At his best, Buddy Guy is everything his ardent fans claim: an incendiary guitarist who makes every note count, both technically and emotionally, as well as a tortured singer. When ax and voice are both in full shriek and Guy is not hamming it up, he’s a wonder to behold. And if he does ham it up too much of the time, perhaps it’s because that’s the only way a true bluesman can earn a living these days. Whatever the cause, that tendency makes him our most frustrating bluesman at least as often as he’s our best.
Old-school blues aficionados insist that his best work is his earliest. He combined his take on B.B. King’s single-string attack with his take on Guitar Slim’s flash for his four 1958 Cobra sides (especially “This Is the End” and “Trying to Quit You Baby”).
The contemporary blues audience, including what’s left of the old-schoolers, seems largely satisfied with his post-1991 comeback output, starting with Damn Right I’ve Got the Blues – which, despite dodgy material and too much reliance on superstar guests from Clapton to Knopfler, is the best currently available on eMusic.
Yet there is one great Guy album that tends to get taken for granted. A Man and the Blues, recorded soon after he left Chess in 1967, is to this day the best album Guy has ever done (as an album – Chess collections rate awfully high, too, but they’re assemblages of singles and other material from the vaults put out years after the fact). It’s got everything you want in a Guy set – tensile guitar work that screams and stabs, frenetic vocals that can give you chills, and a terrific band featuring Otis Spann on piano. Plus, producer Sam Charters, unlike everyone who’s directed Guy in the studio since, knew how to keep the star in line. There’s none of the usual Buddy Guy excess here; his solo work sounds more explosive precisely because it’s so terse and to-the-point. As Van Morrison likes to say, only the best and later for the rest.
That’s evident from the very first track, the title song, with Buddy and Spann both right there on the piercing intro, virtually stuck to each other like white on rice as the saxes, at first barely audible, become more distinct. Buddy’s guitar virtually grabs you by the shoulder and shakes you; when he solos later in the song, he alternates between aggression and a purr that suggests maybe the blues aren’t the worst thing you could be stuck with, after all.
The jazzy, swinging “I Can’t Quit the Blues” features nimble guitar underpinning nimble vocals. Buddy’s guitar work on “Money (That’s What I Want)” couldn’t be more insistent, especially when he and Spann take off together and the rhythm section scrambles to keep up. “One Room Country Shack,” like “Sweet Little Angel” a few tracks later, is a dazzling reading of a blues standard; Guy takes Mercy Dee’s plaint even slower than most of the many others who’ve done it, until the sorrow – angst might be more like it – turns meditative, almost metaphysical, and his voice takes on a panicky edge that’s sharp and angry – like he’s outraged and trying to figure out how he got there in the first place. “Mary Had a Little Lamb” is the nursery rhyme, a simple little figure that keeps repeating and repeating and building up steam until it smokes. “Just Playing My Axe” combines twang and fuzz, alluding to both the Stones ‘”Satisfaction,” as well as the aforementioned “Sweet Little Angel.” The album goes out on a slow one, “Jam On a Monday Morning” (said jam taking all of 2:52, by the way, and saying as much as Guy’s 12-minute live workouts of today). It’s further proof that nobody plays a slow blues like Guy.
And that’s just his work as a leader – let’s not even get into some of the hard-hitting collaborations between Guy and harmonica player Junior Wells right now (though maybe we will some other time). In short, there’s a reason Guy has been such a huge influence on great rock guitarists from Hendrix on down, and it’s not like there isn’t other Guy solo material worth checking out, both on eMusic now and hopefully coming to eMusic soon. But any discussion of Buddy Guy as a straight-up bluesman begins with, among a handful of undeniable gems, A Man and the Blues.
