A Buddy Guy Interview and Appreciation

My in-depth 2018 interview with the blues legend, who was the first musician I ever interviewed, way back in 1986.

Tonight, I will be seeing Buddy Guy open for the Tedeschi Trucks Band at the Beacon Theatre, and I will be in my seat plenty early for his 7:30 appearance. At 88, he is the last of the Mohicans and he remains a fantastic singer, a riveting guitarist and a magnetic stage presence. He is also having a well-deserved moment in the mainstream culture with his short but crucial appearance in Ryan Coogler’s phenomenal film Sinners.

Buddy Guy has a special place in my heart. He was the first musician I ever interviewed, in March, 1986, for The Michigan Daily, my college newspaper. I had been writing for the arts section all year, focusing mostly on literary figures and Ann Arbor being Ann Arbor, I had already interviewed Tom Wolfe, Allen Ginsberg and Joseph Heller, as well as writing about mime troupes and charity concerts. I was deep into music, particularly the blues, but somehow it hadn’t occurred to me to write about it. Buddy Guy was coming to Rick’s American Cafe, where I worked and saw as many shows as I could, and I pushed Beth Fertig, the music editor - still a friend! - to cover him.

“He’s great,” she said, “But none of our writers know anything about the blues. Why don’t you do it?”

So I did. On the phone, Buddy mesmerized me with his tales of growing up in Louisiana, moving to Chicago, struggling to develop his own voice on the guitar, and the crucial tutelage of blues icons like Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson and Howlin’ Wolf. He described his hesitancy to give up his day job working as a car mechanic to go on the road as a solo act. And he bemoaned his then-current career straits, which found him label-less and robbed of The Checkerboard, his Southside Chicago blues club, by unscrupulous partners. The story, which I just re-read, was written with a golly gee naivete that makes me cringe - much more so than my literary writing at the time! But it’s an important part of my history, so here it is. Amazingly, you can read it here.

The night this ran I saw him at Rick’s, the cramped campus watering hole that hosted amazing musicians, and was completely hooked. His powerful charisma, demonic intensity and edgy psychedelic blues playing made me a true believer. I understood why the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck had for so long sung his praises and was baffled about why his career seemed so stalled. I wrote with a golly geez naivete to be perfectly honest. This is the review I wrote, headlined “A Living Legend.”

The unidentified Hendrix tune was almost surely it was “Voodoo Chile,” which I certainly knew.

When I interviewed Guy for Guitar World in 2018 for his The Blues Is Alive And Well album, many things had changed. He was still the blues’ most edgy, go-for-broke player, but his celebrity fans were no longer singing his praises in the dark. Twenty seven years after making his long-delayed splash with the star-studded album Damn Right, I’ve Got the Blues, Guy was a well-established entity and his downtown club Buddy Guy’s Legends is a Chicago fixture, and he was playing sold-out theaters and festivals rather than small bars.

His performances can be maddening in their inconsistency, but he retains the tightly coiled intensity that have always made him such a dynamic figure on stage, becoming more stylized and less unpredictable. Below is that 2018 article, right after this BG playlist I made for you. Don’t forget to subscribe and share!

This is the Buddy I first encountered. Foto – Kirk West

Buddy Guy is in many ways the last man standing: a link to the titanic Chicago bluesmen of the 50s and 60s who electrified the music and in the process birthed rock and roll. At 82, Guy is still a bundle of caged, coiled energy, emitting a feeling of tension, like a cobra ready to strike at any moment. He’s a master of dynamics who brings songs up and down, punctuating low volume, cleanly articulated Strat runs with bursts of overdriven clusters of notes, flurries of fury. And his voice is just as powerful of an instrument, displaying all the same subtleties and strength. His performances have you leaning forward in your chair to catch every note before blowing you onto your heels with a burst of muscular energy.

You can hear all of it on Guy’s new album, The Blues Is Alive And Well, which features guest appearances by Jeff Beck, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. “The love these guys have for him is readily apparent,” says Tom Hambridge, who produced, played drums and wrote or co-wrote 13 of the 15 songs on The Blues Is Alive And Well. “They all basically say they will drop anything they are doing to work with Buddy. It’s not fake.”

Jimmie Vaughan, Derek, Trucks, Buddy - last week in Austin. Photo - Bradley Strickland

These blues-based rock stars and their peers spent decades singing Guy’s praises while the bluesman was scuffling without an American record deal, despite having been a prime influence on Beck, Richards, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix and many others, as well as a direct link to Muddy Waters, Son House, Sonny Boy Williamson and other musical giants, all of whom he recorded with.

Guy finally got his shot again in 1991 with the release of his Damn Right I’ve Got The Blues album and he hasn’t looked back, assuming his rightful place as a guitar legend while touring and recording consistently and running his Chicago club Buddy Guy’s Legends.

“Buddy’s the hardest working guy,” says Hambridge, who has produced Guy’s last five albums. “He’ll always stay in the studio until we’ve got it nailed. He always plays a song all the way through and is old school in that wat but he’s open to everything around him. Everything’s on the table, which is amazing for a guy his age – and he seems to be getting more and more open.”

You were the first musician I ever interviewed, in 1985. You’ve come a long way since then sir!

BUDDY GUY: Hey, thank you, and that’s nice of you to say. But the blues still needs all the help they can get, man, because it's being ignored by radio. The AM stations used to play jazz, blues, gospel, whatever the disc jockey decided to play - now you don't hear that. I just love to hear Howling Wolf, Muddy Waters, or T-Bone and you can’t do that unless you got satellite radio.

Well that's true, but at least we have things like satellite. And your personal standing is a lot better. Back then, guys like Stevie Ray Vaughan and Eric Clapton were talking about you as their favorite guitarist which kept your name out there, but you didn’t have a record deal and were playing little joints.

Yeah, that's true. I think they helped me more than anything else. So many people have said to me, “I didn't know who you were until I heard what Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton or Jeff Beck said.” I'm like, “Yeah, okay.” You know, I was playing blues before those guys got a famous name for themselves. That's a part of this business and I'm not angry about that but we all should have a chance to be heard. We owe a lot of thanks to the British guys who helped all of us, coming in and telling everyone who Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and Sonny Boy Williamson were.

White Americans thought the British guys were doing something new. When I came to Chicago 61 years ago, if a white face walked into the club, we figured it was a policeman and weren’t happy to see them. They would take my 40 cent pint of wine and pour it out and we ain't got another 40 cents. Then I come to find out it's Michael Bloomfield or Paul Butterfield – those young white musicians started coming by, the first white fans we saw in there, listening to every note.

Tickets selling Fast. Get one now! TTB After Party W/ Special Guests

You just turned 82 and put out a great new album. Why is it important to you to still put out new music in this era instead of just touring?

I dedicated my life to this music. I went to sleep and woke up and a lot of the greats who I learned everything from was no longer here. When we were all in good health we sat around having a drink and said that whoever be here when the rest is gone, please try to keep the blues alive and well. You don't think much about that when you’re laughing about it, but all of a sudden there it is. We lost B.B. King three years ago and Muddy Waters been gone over 30 years. Like my mother told me once: "If you don't want to leave here, you better not come here.” So I understand that, but I made a pledge and I don't know nothing else to do but play music.

Most of us do it till we drop, but I feel like I'm cheating if I can't give you 100 percent. I'm 82, and I don't know what's gonna be there when I'm 83, 84, 85 so I’m going strong while I can! I did watch B.B. King very carefully. He was beginning to sing the same song three and four times a night, and everybody was afraid to tell him. I'm telling my people right now, “Don't do me that way. Just look at me and say ‘Buddy, you just sung ‘Damn Right I got the Blues’ three times tonight.’” My friend and old partner Junior Wells had the same problem.

That’s very sad, and a lot of people felt at the end, B.B. should have retired from touring. But I took my son when he was 13 because I wanted him to see B.B. He was diminished but he sang great and played some sweet licks and it was wonderful to spend an evening in his company and to be able to share that with my son, who still has signed BB poster on his wall.

Well, it's an honor to watch him and it would have been okay with me even if he sang the same song all night long. Whatever he did was worth watching. B.B. King had all the special effects he needed in his left hand. He could vibrate that left hand better than anybody that ever did it. But when you get old, you don't have what you had when you was 24, 25 years old. I used to listen to a song one time and I had it in my head. Now I've got to study that God damn thing for three, four weeks before I can remember it.

Buddy, no one is sitting in your audience thinking that's an old man up there. You have the energy, charisma, and power of a young man. Do you get that from the audience? From the music?

To be honest, I don't know. If I look out there and see somebody with a frown on their face I know I have work to do. There's so many angry people in the world today and when I see somebody smiling when I play a few good licks, I think, “You might a been angry, but I made you forget about it for those minutes that I played.” Music makes you forget about anger sometimes.

Buddy and Susan. Photo - Bradley Strickland

Your guitar playing is often pretty aggressive. Is that fueled by working out your own anger? Maybe you're not only making the audience feel better, but yourself as well.

Well I feel much better by making somebody else lose their anger. I'm not angry at anybody. I wake up everyday and wonder what's wrong with the world. Some people are angry and don't even know what the hell they angry about. I save it for the stage.

We have a lot of problems but you were born in a time and place where you weren’t even considered a full person!

Yeah! And I was down there in Louisiana recently 'cause they named part of a highway for me. Think of that! My daddy was a sharecropper. We didn't have machinery; we did it all by hand and they’d give us whatever they thought was just enough to eat to live, live to eat. Well, the parents of the people whose land we lived on came to my highway dedication and they started crying. Don’t forget where you came from.

Given all that, how big a deal was it for you and B.B. to be in the White House playing for President Obama in 2012?

That’s kind of hard to even explain. When I left Louisiana I was using an outhouse and to be in the White House playing for the President and First Lady, that was one of the unbelievable times of my life. Someone said that if we sing “Sweet Home Chicago,” we probably could get him to join in. B.B. and I looked at each other, but I thought that if I call him and he don't come, I'm gonna feel like crawling under a table and don't never come out. Sure enough, he made some speeches about us and we was hitting Sweet Home Chicago, I said, “Wait a minute Mr. President. Could you join us?” And he did. He called me back there to play a second time, looked at me and said, “I think I might have to put you on salary.” This was the President told me this!

Tom Hambridge said that you are open for anything. Have you always been so open in the studio, to trying different approaches?

Oh yeah. You never know. My eyes and ears are open to jazz and especially gospel, which was the big headliner down in the South before B.B. and T-Bone Walker showed us how to bend and shake the strings. People like Sam Cooke, Mahalia Jackson and the Soul Stirrers were it. Then B.B. come out with “Three O' Clock in the Morning” and changed guitar and I had to learn how to play a few notes and bend a string like he do. Les Paul and Leo Fender made those guitars be heard by electrifying them.

And you're somebody who really took advantage of the electrification, doing things like bending above pitch and using feedback.

I had played with Muddy and them and was happy just sitting in the corner playing rhythm for them cats but I wanted to do my own thing, too. When I was turning left getting that feedback, the guys at Chess went, “What the hell was that? Don't nobody want to hear that.” All of a sudden you put on a Cream or Jimi Hendrix record and hear what I had been doing all the time. Willie Dixon came to my house and said, “The British are coming, and you been trying to give us this ever since you been here. And we was too fucking dumb to hear what you had.” Excuse my language.

Did that make you feel satisfied that you were right, or angry that no one had let you do it earlier?

I was brought up to believe what's for you gonna come for you. What's not for you, you not gonna get it anyway. I know guitar players that can play way better than I can, no doubt about it. Some of the things I did back in the day with Muddy Waters, Howlin Wolf, Sonny Boy carry me today. They were like the Henry Fords. Henry Ford been dead how many years, but his name is still on the car.

Your early playing had a very distinct clean Strat sound.

The first time I went to California in 1967, I played the Avalon Ballroom with Jefferson Airplane and all of ‘em and everybody wanted to be the headliner and they said they had a problem so I said, “Man, I came to play. Call me out now.” Well, after that no one wanted to play after me. That’s the truth. I wasn't introduced to hippies, so I'm thinking, “What is this?” And I just went out and played and when I finished, everybody asked, "What you got in that amplifier?" Huh? Whatever Leo Fender put in there is what I got in there!

All I knew was I bought a Bassman that was about to fall to pieces; it was rusted and locked at the volume, treble, and bass. I didn't have nothing but an on and off switch. No one’s ever been able to quite replicate that sound. I was playing it wide open and the distortion and everything came out there. No pedals or special effects. Just play your amp, man, and they was giving you exactly what you wanted. My old Strat got stolen but I still have the amp.

How did you come up with the idea of playing “Mary Had a Little Lamb?” It was such an original idea to make a nursery rhyme into a funky blues.

I was playing Bill Graham’s place in New York [the Fillmore East] in 1968 and I just had the groove going and people were digging it, but it wasn’t a song. I was just grooving and wanted to keep it going so I just decide to sing, “Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow” and the people start hollering and screaming. I said, “Shit, I better record this.”

So you were just winging it?

Yeah, that was just off the top of my head. Even now, every time I get on stage I tell my band, just keep your eyes and ears open 'cause I'm gonna try to please everybody who come out to see me tonight. That’s hard to do, but I tell you what, no one’s gonna be able to say I didn’t give them every damn thing I had. That's all I can give. Stevie Ray Vaughn did a good job with the song, too.

Every time I see you, I think about what an interesting gig it would be to be in your band because you go wherever you feel like, switch songs, change tempos, hold a chord to talk, bring it down, bring it up. Are you just following your instincts?

Right. They just sit on that groove and know: Buddy gonna do that thing, just keep your eyes and ears open 'cause he gonna hit some licks. If I miss a lick and make a hole, they fill it up. I don't want to be like a sewing machine and make the same stitch every time, man. I make mistakes and then I make you forget about it. Sometimes I miss a string, especially if I'm walking around the audience and someone touches me or wants to have a conversation in the middle of a solo. Sometimes it works, sometime it doesn't.

On the song “Blue No More,” you played a Gibson hollow body. Do you like playing different guitars after playing the Strat for so long?

We were looking for different tones and I played a 355 that was in the studio. I came to Chicago with a Gibson Les Paul and they stole from that from me in Chicago 'cause I didn’t understand how pawnshops worked up here. You had to be quicker than down in Louisiana. I loved hollow body guitars too but what made me go and love with the Fender, I couldn't afford another guitar cracking up. I was on tour of Africa and my Strat blew off the top of a car, and it was scratched up, but played fine. So I stuck with that Strat!

Brothers and Sisters: the Allman Brothers Band and The Album That Defined The 70s was my third consecutive one to debut in the New York Times Non-Fiction Hardcover Bestsellers List, following Texas Flood: The Inside Story of Stevie Ray Vaughan and One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band. My first book, Big in China: My Unlikely Adventures Raising a Family, Playing the Blues and Becoming a Star in Beijing, about my experiences raising a family in Beijing and touring China with a popular original blues band, was optioned for a movie by Ivan Reitman’s Montecito Productions. I am also a guitarist and singer with two bands, Big in China and Friends of the Brothers, the premier celebration of the Allman Brothers Band.