 “74 Years Young”: The cover of Guy's Living Proof. |
“When I was 21 some of my older friends, who are no longer with us, they’d say, ‘You’re still a baby,’” Guy said. “And then they said the same thing when I was 31, then 41, and I thought, ‘Man, when do I get old?’ I’ve been hearing that ever since I first went to Chicago—‘You’re still wet behind the ears.’ So when do I get dry?”
Bear in mind here that Guy turned 21 in summer 1957, at which point he was already a formidable blues guitar craftsman who had just made the big move from his native Louisiana to Chicago. So the answer to his own question—“Man, when do I get old?”—is, apparently, never. More than ample proof of this can be heard on his new album, Living Proof, out Sept. 28.
On the album, Guy, 74, takes a hard look back at a remarkable life and career that have made him so many things now: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee. Five-time Grammy award winner. Profound influence on a generation of rock titans including Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Pioneer of Chicago’s famous West Side sound and living link to that city’s landmark era of electric blues. With 23 trophies, Guy has received more W.C. Handy Blues Awards than any other artist. He has received the Presidential National Medal of Arts and the Billboard Century Award for distinguished artistic achievement. Rolling Stone ranked him 30th among its 100 greatest guitarists of all time.
And yet at a time when many of his surviving contemporaries might be content to let their past achievements do the talking, Guy is positively brimming with new sounds and fresh ideas. The man clearly has no intention of going gently into that good night, as evidenced by Living Proof’s opening track, “74 Years Young.”
In fact, the start of each new decade always seems to energize Guy; witness Stone Crazy (1981), Damn Right, I Got the Blues (1991) and Sweet Tea (2001). So it is with Living Proof, with songs such as “Thank Me Someday” and “Everybody's Got to Go” that are sincere personal meditations on Guy’s past, legacy and mortality.
“The life I’ve lived is what we’re singing about,” he said. “These songs are exactly what I came up through in my life; what I’ve experienced.”
And he’s experienced a lot, and it wasn’t all good, so the man knows whereof he speaks. His late-’50s and 1960s battles with seminal Chicago blues label Chess Records, which refused to record him playing in his own style, put stinging restrictions on his career until he left the label in 1968 (“They said I was just playing noise, and wouldn’t let me get loose like I wanted to”).
Nonetheless, his loud, aggressive and flamboyant live performances from the 1950s onward proved him a musician’s musician with an unpredictable style of musical extremes that could range from traditional to radical within a single performance. Well more than a decade after his career took off in earnest during the late 1980s blues revival, the New York Times noted in 2004 that Guy “mingles anarchy, virtuosity, deep blues and hammy shtick in ways that keep all eyes on him” and called him a “master of tension and release” whose “every wayward impulse was riveting.”
 Buddy Guy. Photo by Christian Lantry |
At Guy’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2005, Clapton told the audience that Guy “was for me what Elvis was probably like for other people—my course was set, and he was my pilot.”
The bad old days at Chess are long gone now and, to put it mildly, Guy greatly appreciates the unwavering support he now gets from his record company and the team around him.
“These guys said, ‘It’s your guitar; your studio; you just go be Buddy Guy,’” he said. “And I’ve been trying to be that for 50 years. I had the freedom of playing with only me to say, ‘Let me try that again.’”
Although Guy will forever be associated with Chicago, his story actually begins in Louisiana. One of five children, he was born in 1936 to a sharecropper’s family and raised on a plantation near the small town of Lettsworth, about 140 miles northwest of New Orleans. Guy was only seven years old when he fashioned his first makeshift “guitar”—a two-string contraption attached to a piece of wood and secured with his mother’s hairpins.
On Living Proof’s “Thank Me Someday,” Guy recounts his early efforts with that crude instrument, and his ability to keep faith when his family ran him out of the house for making such a racket with it.
“I would go out in the yard, on the levee, to practice,” he said. “We didn’t have electric lights or running water—you could hear that guitar a mile away in the country, so I’d have to go a long way away so they didn’t say ‘Get out of here with that noise!’”
Living Proof also illustrates Guy’s versatility. Stalwart blues fans will note that songs such as “Too Soon” and blistering instrumental “Skanky” show his proficiency at roadhouse R&B.
Not that he gives a damn about genre distinctions. Not in the least.
“Before the ’60s, we were always just R&B players,” Guy said. “Then they branded us—there was Chicago blues, Memphis, Motown, and so we were considered blues players. But in Chicago, if you wanted to keep your gig, you had to be able to play all the top tunes on the jukebox, whether that was Lloyd Price or Fats Domino or Ray Charles. Now if you play a Little Richard song, the audience looks at you like you’re crazy, but we always had to do that for a black audience back then.”
An especially important element of Living Proof is that longtime friend and fellow blues titan B.B. King makes his first guest appearance on a Buddy Guy album. Together, they reel off the introspective “Stay Around a Little Longer” like the old friends they are. Guy doesn’t take his relationship with King for granted, though. Never has.
“B.B. created this style of guitar we all play,” Guy said. “I grew up listening to people like him, T-Bone Walker and Muddy Waters, and I still take 95 percent of my playing from him. So to have someone like that in the room with you makes chillbumps come up on your skin.”
The only other guest on Living Proof is Carlos Santana, who joins Guy on the slinky “Where the Blues Begins.” Noting that he and Junior Wells covered Santana’s “Vera Cruz” more than three decades ago, Guy said, “When I’m playing with someone that good, I just have to close my eyes and say, ‘Here I come!’”
Asked what exactly it is that he considers himself living proof of, Guy answers modestly, with no mention of his own talent or his influence. For him, it’s more a matter of sheer perseverance.
“Do you know how many guys I started out with who just threw up both hands and quit?” he said. “My first wife said to me, ‘It’s me or the guitar,’ and I picked up my guitar and left. We still laugh about that. But I’m still picking away at it. I don’t know nothing else.”
Besides, Guy said, it’s just not in the nature of those who understand and play the blues to simply stop doing it.
“I heard B.B. King say, ‘I can’t slow down, because I still think there’s somebody out there who doesn’t know who I am yet,’” he said. “But, you know, blues players don’t stop; they just drop. It’s like my mother used to say about religion—I’m too far gone to turn around.”
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