Photo: Paul Natkin
"I didn't learn nothing from a book," Buddy Guy tells NPR's Neal Conan. "I learned by ... being quiet, keep your ears open and listen.
"Boogie Chillen'" by John Lee Hooker - that's the first record I ever bought. That's the first one I could afford, matter of fact. I think that 78 cost about, what, 63 cents or something like that, from Randy's Record Shop out of Tennessee. You had to order it through the mail out in the country where I was born.
"... My sisters and brothers made my mother and father run me out of the house because I sounded like a bunch of bees [practicing that song on a three-string guitar]. You know, you couldn't play nothing [on it]. And I went out to the woodpile ... and gathered the wood for to make the fires, and my mom and them, they cook on the wood stove.
What can I, poet and professor, part-time music reviewer and college radio DJ capture in a short conversation with Buddy Guy that hasn’t already been sussed out by some equally eager reviewer looking for a verbal equivalent of a Buddy Guy guitar lick?
When you talk to someone whose pushing 87, and up at 7 a.m., on the road in a hotel after going to bed at 3 a.m. you get rawness and reality. You get the man. And that is exactly what makes him the blues icon and ambassador he is.
Taking a break from his Damn Right Farewell Tour which kicked off Feb. 17 and has already brought him to India, dozens of states, and will keep trotting around the globe well into the fall, Buddy had time for some stories. What I got from our short chat: He’s no-frills humble and sho-nuff nostalgic, but exudes a confidence forged out of 70 years of experience and has legacy on his mind.
He solos his answers like he does his polka-dotted Martin signature JC Buddy Guy Blue Guitar. It’s not simply about what he says, but how he plays those sentences.
What is a Buddy Guy morning like these days?
Buddy Guy: "Well, I am 87-years-old and I ain’t never had an alarm clock in my life and I ain’t never been late. My thing is that at my age, when I was growing up, we didn’t have any water or electricity or a gas stove or nothing like that. We had to make our own fire in the morning so you had to get up early, and I just kept it that way, man. You know, you gotta get things done.
"Last night we wheeled in around 11 p.m. At 3 a.m., I had the tv on watching the weather because I like to know what’s going on when I travel, and now I am talking to you, so that’s Buddy Guy."
How has the tour been and can you tell us a little about your line-up.
Guy: "Well, my merchandising is better than it’s ever been, I’m signing 30-40 albums a night so I am going all out for my last round. I might still do some big festivals, but no more tours. When B.B. King passed away about seven years ago, he was 89, so I’m keeping it going. Now I’m playing with these young people trying to keep up. It’s like Guitar Slim said, 'There are things I used to do I can’t [sic] do no more.' But I’m keeping up."
I have always thought of the blues as 'show and tell,' with the lyrics being the tell, and the music being the show because it gives us the details of the experience: the touch, the smells, the colors. What does your brand of blues show us?
Guy: "You know I get a standing ovation whenever I play since this tour started. We went to the Mahindra Blues Festival in Mumbai, India, and I always say, if you listen to the blues, it may not happen to you, but you know someone its gonna happen to. You got good times in your life and you got bad times and if you haven’t had any bad times, you just keep living. That’s the way I look at the blues. And the blues tell you the truth. Like I said on my last album, the blues don’t lie.”
The blues isn’t just storytelling, it is myth and imagination and hyperbole. I remember one night at Kingston Mines (Chicago blues club) in the early 90s, I saw this young bluesman, Dion Payton, have an entire relationship with a woman in the front row with his guitar and the look of his eyes. I felt like a peeping tom. Can you share a magical blues memory?
Guy: "Well if you lived long enough, you lived through all of that magic, man. You know, when I go on stage now I try and watch the faces of the people. When I’m playing, if I see a frown on your face I say to myself, 'Buddy, you ain’t playing right. You have to take that frown off that man’s face and put a smile on it.' And then, there they go again, a standing ovation. Cause they come to have a good time, they ain’t coming to have a frown on their face.
"I tell people in my club in Chicago, we all have something in life we wasn’t satisfied with, whether it’s something at your house, or whatever, don’t bring that to the club. You leave it at home. You know if you got a wife or a brother, or a cousin, and you had a disagreement and you come to the club and get a couple of shots a whiskey in you and you get everybody angry — that’s not the way to do it, man. You come to the club to listen to some good blues and you leave that other stuff at home and just enjoy life. That’s what I been doing my whole career.”
You are one of the best dressed men, period. You have a flair for fashion. Where do you get your style sense?
Guy: "I don’t know, sometimes my children come up and bring me something, but I never was that good at that vanity stuff. And to be honest, when I came up in Chicago, there was no air conditioning, and those blues clubs were so hot that if you wore a suit it was raining wet when you were playing and you didn’t make enough money to go to the cleaners the next day to get them clean so when the British guys started playing with gym shoes and blue jeans, you could wash them the next day so I was so glad I didn’t know what to do.
"If you had a suit, you might have to wait a couple of days, and then the next day of that next day, so you had to come up with these clothes you could hold on to for a week and then wash em’ by hand, dry it out, and iron it yourself. So that was the style in the early days.”
Who are some of the musicians you still get excited about? And are there some people that you want to put on our radar?
Guy: "Man, I put up the money for this guy named Christone 'Kingfish' Ingram and if I can do something for him like Muddy Waters did when he took me under his wing 66 years ago in Chicago, I’m all about it. If I can say something, a record company is gonna listen to me if I think someone got what it takes, even though now if you ain’t got satellite radio, you don’t know nobody. Because the radio don’t play no blues anymore. I’m not talking about Buddy Guy blues, I’m talking about Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf and people like that. You hardly hear that music on the radio anymore. Throughout the years young kids come up to me and say, 'I didn’t know the guitar could be played like that!' They might know me because what Eric Clapton or Jeff Beck said about me but then they’re like, 'Oh my god! That was a black guy playing that lick there.'
"A lot of young kids can’t afford satellite radio and can’t afford these concerts I’m playing and don’t know nothing about the blues. You know, everyone is looking for some kind of role model and when I was coming up the radio stations played all kinds of music, gospel, jazz, blues, whatever and now you don’t get that on the radio anymore. I just want to be a role model for these young kids growing up and listening to music.”
Don's Tunes
