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Beat Street

This week at Planet M

Buddy Guy: Bring 'em In

Silvertone, CD, Rs. 499

We talked of this greatest living Chicago blues legend in these columns a couple of years ago (The Hindu, Metro Plus, September 15, 2004) in a review of his Chess years compilation, The Collection. His musical antecedents and recording career were sketched therein, and the interested reader is directed there for relevant facts and details.

Since Buddy Guy won a Grammy Award a few weeks back for his latest album Bring 'em In, it's only fitting that we pay him another visit.

A rock magazine once did a feature him with the sub-header "10,000 riff-stealers can't be wrong", and that has been the jinx that has dogged this pioneering guitarist all through his career. Being the originator of hundreds of trademark licks and explosive axe effects earned him endless imitation — allegedly the highest form of flattery.

Back in the Sixties, Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton would cancel all their engagements to catch him playing live at some club or college gig, and make copious mental notes of his every move on the fretboard. Clapton reveres Buddy Guy as the ultimate electric guitarist alive.

The long search

All that, however, never translated into recording deals, and while rock "guitar gods" were laughing all the way to the bank (or the nearest dope dealer) by lifting his stuff wholesale, Guy was wearing out his shoe soles trying to get a major label to record and market him.

Fortunately, the entire dry decade of the Eighties ended with the comeback album Damn Right I Got The Blues, put out by the Silvertone label in 1991. Featuring guest appearances by Clapton, Beck and Dire Straits axe-man Mark Knopfler, it netted him his first Grammy award that year. Since then a new Guy album has been hitting the shelves (and Billboard charts) with almost annual regularity, and the album under review has just won him his fifth Grammy.

Hearing the incisive axe-attack on this album, you would be forgiven for doing a double-take upon learning that the lead guitarist is a 70-year-old elder statesman of electric blues — a one-time sideman for Muddy Waters, Otis Rush, Willie Dixon and their like.

Purists might decry the presence of guest artistes as far-removed as Tracy Chapman, Carlos Santana and Keith Richards appearing on this outing, or that the material strays so far into R&B/soul territory. But in my view that's a testament to Guy's stature as a musician's musician. Other guests include Robert Randolph, Anthony Hamilton and John Mayer. The slow sentimental Bill Withers love ballad "Ain't No Sunshine" features perfect interplay between the low key vocals of Tracy Chapman and Guy's smoky world-weathered tremolo. Correspondingly, his electric guitar provides a tasteful foil for her acoustic, instead of overpowering it.

Similarly, I was mighty impressed by Buddy's singing on his brave stab at soul god Otis Redding's "I've Got Dreams to Remember". Getting Redding's style down pat is no mean vocal feat. Bob Dylan's love song "Lay, Lady, Lay" receives an R&B overhauling with backing from modern day soulster Anthony Hamilton's vocals and Robert Randolph's unique pedal steel slide guitar. Santana backs on their take of Screamin' Jay Hawkins's "I Put A Spell On You", while Keith Richards showcases his early R&B/blues grounding on "The Price You Gotta Pay". On the nearly eight-minute long tour de force "Cut You Loose", Guy's guitar conducts nothing short of a dialogue with the departed soul of Jimi Hendrix. Through the years, Guy's choice of material has always underlined the ironic/satirical side of the blues, and there's ample display of it on the hilarious "Cheaper To Keep Her" (about the bankruptcy that inevitably follows divorce) and "Somebody's Sleeping in My Bed" (self-explanatory).

Guy has been recently inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, finally finding some measure of success after paying his blues dues for nearly five decades. He also owns a blues club in Chicago called Legends, and is always on hand to encourage younger practitioners of this immortal art. Congratulations, Buddy Guy, more power to you and your axe, and may your tribe increase!

VISHWAMBHAR PATI

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