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Tea time
At 65, still menacing the stage, whipping on his polka-dot Strat like an acrobat, you wouldn't take Guy for a day over 45. And as one of the last old-school Delta blues vets, he can't complain. He runs one of Chicago's most lucrative nightclubs, has four Grammies etched into his rosewood neck, on top of a current Best Contemporary Blues nomination for last year's Sweet Tea (Silvertone/Jive), which only gets sweeter as the reviews keep pouring in. If Buddy was saucing up medium-rare sirloins throughout the 1990s, Sweet Tea is pork rinds sizzling in lard. And the frying pan is red hot. For Guy, the album was just what the doctor ordered, putting both him and this particular brand of Mississippi blues back on the map for the first time since the huge success of his 1991 Grammy-winning Damn Right I've Got the Blues. Says Guy: "When they told me they wanted me to go to Northern Mississippi and play Junior Kimbrough's music, I said 'Who's Junior?' I'd searched for everything out of Mississippi from Son House and B.B. King to Fred McDowell. I thought I'd found everything till I heard this." At first, he was skeptical. For a signature Chicago blues man who traditionally works the fret board like a globe trotter, the stripped-down hill sound from Northern Mississippi, dominated by one-chord repetitions and hypnotic sustain, didn't seem appealing. But Buddy, who understands the torture of going without a record contract for 15 years like he did until 1991, wasn't about to pass it up. The disc is thick with the Fat Possum groove from Oxford, Miss., including Kimbrough's "Done Got Old," T-Model Ford's "Look What All You Got," and a wicked rendition of Lowell Fulson's "Tramp," all reminiscent of that old-time, smoky juke-joint sound. Despite his early hesitation with Sweet Tea, the album turned into a masterpiece that some are calling his best. Among its ranks are pianist Bobby Whitlock of Derek and the Dominos, Jimbo Malthus of the Squirrel Nut Zippers, and drummer Spam from T-Model Ford's band. The album's success is partly chemistry, partly replacing the hi-tech with ancient equipment, and partly from giving Buddy new terrain to struggle with. "They put me in the hallway and said, 'We just want you to be Buddy Guy, but we want you to play this Northern Mississippi sound.' I had my doubts, but then I started having so much fun with one of those cuts, 'I gotta try you.' Man, we got 12 minutes on it. They couldn't stop me." For Guy, who was born in 1936 Lettsworth, La., Sweet Tea was in many ways full circle. This kind of Mississippi blues differs little from his younger days as a 16-year-old sharecropper's son when his dad brought home the family's first radio. "You would hear spiritual," says Buddy, "some country-western and jazz. You didn't have all the different music like now. I used to be a baseball fan, and when that half-hour blues program came on, the game was canceled. I had to go sit down and listen to Smokey Hogg and those guys play that stuff." One of Guy's earliest inspirations came when Lightnin' Slim from the Baton Rouge passed through the tiny town of Lettsworth and played a gig at the commodities store where Guy's mother and father would pick up the weekly sack of flour and salt pork. Lightnin' Slim plugged in on the front porch, giving Buddy's young ears their first taste of electric guitar with John Lee Hooker's "Boogie Chillen." After playing the club scene himself in Baton Rouge, Guy migrated north in 1957, building a name in Chicago as a sessions musician among the likes of Sonny Boy Williamson, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, and Howlin' Wolf. "When Little Walter, Muddy and Wolf and them would call me to play, that was my Grammy. That's as high as I can get. Man those guys, if you were talking to Muddy Waters or Howlin' Wolf you'd be pattin' your feet. That's how good I felt when I was around them." Soon after establishing his voice in Chicago, Guy signed with the Chess label in his own right. His sound was dazzling and raw, ushering in a grittier era of rock-edged blues in the early '60s, helping to ignite the British invasion after influencing big name blues players like Keith Richards and Eric Clapton. But because he was black, like the rest of Chicago's blues greats, Guy never got the big commercial break he deserved. "I was out there before all those big name guys come along," says Buddy with a laugh. "But like Muddy Waters said, I'm a victim of circumstance. They would never let me turn up my guitar and play at the Chess studios. They said, 'Man, ain't nobody wanna hear that shit!' And then all of a sudden one of the guys came and said, 'Buddy, I want you to kick me in my ass.' I said 'For what?' 'Because what you've been trying to play for us is sounding like hot shit.' I said 'What is it?' and he put on a Cream album. When I went to England in 1965, Rod Stewart was my valet and my opening act. I haven't had a chance to talk to him since, but with as many records as he's selling today, I want to ask him if he'll take me on as a valet now." The blues and masters like Buddy Guy have always struggled to survive in the exponentially cutthroat world of radio America, continuously forced to the fringe and overlooked under the stiff competition of big-selling young white talent and fleeting trends. Or as Buddy puts it, "I don't want to knock 'em for making these millions of billions of platinum albums, but I would love to hear Muddy Waters' voice come in once or twice a week. That would please me. Hopefully someday, I might play the right note, and they'll say 'We gotta get this in the rotation, it's good.' With the reviews, I thought I had opened that gate with Sweet Tea, but that's not so. The blues is like the automobile. There's more tech and it's more modern now, but you still have to drive." In 1981 with the resurgence spawned by Stevie Ray Vaughan, the blues got a shot in the arm as labels began searching for veterans like Buddy Guy, B.B. King, Koko Taylor, and James Cotton. These days, with blues on the wane again, Buddy is concerned about their extinction. When he talks about survival, he rarely talks about "me" as much as "us," meaning the music and those who make it. Eric Clapton's recent invitation for Buddy to play at the Concert for New York, the success of Sweet Tea, the Grammies, the 40-year career studded with peaks and valleys, these are only a means to an end, turns on the road to keep the blues alive. It's Buddy Guy's calling, and there's no slowing him down. "Like my mother said to me before she passed, 'Son, if you're getting me flowers, give 'em to me now so I can smell 'em. I can't smell 'em when I'm dead.' When John Lee Hooker passed, I was watching baseball on TBS and between every inning they'd play John Lee Hooker, and I said 'Why do we get this after we leave? How come he couldn't hear this?' The blues was there before anything else. But they don't play it on the radio that much anymore, man. The young people aren't getting exposed to it, and that's what worries me. There's only two of us out here traveling now. Me and B.B. King, and we're not babies anymore." Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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"Man, I went to sleep yesterday and woke up a senior citizen," says Buddy Guy with a chuckle. "The kids look at me now calling me a legend, and I'm saying, 'Wait a minute. Just yesterday I was being patted on the back by Muddy!'"
