Guy, Uninterrupted
Buddy Guy riffs on his long, distinguished career and the evolution of the blues.
Published Oct. 2, 2008
Hunter S. Thompson was right when he said myths and legends die hard in America. And blues giant Buddy Guy is one of those die-hard legends, still touring and recording with a new album, Skin Deep, out this year. He has been captivating audiences for decades with his electric live show, strolling into the audience while shredding a solo like none other. On the eve of his headlining gig at the Roots 'N Blues 'N BBQ Festival, MOVE had a conversation with the bluesman about his life, work and how the music scene has changed before his eyes.
MOVE: How are you?
Buddy Guy: Ahh, for an old man I'm holdin' in there.
MOVE: It's pretty early for me, man, I don't know about you.
BG: No, no. I was born on a farm, man. I never lost that, man. I'm 72 years old and I love that morning, man, and I don't know why. A lot of people say, "Are you nuts?"
MOVE: You have become a living link to the blues tradition. What do you think is the impact of your music on these young guys like Derek Trucks, Robert Randolph and Jonny Lang?
BG: You know what? I understand it, man, because actually, I just look at it like I just went to bed once. Went to bed and I woke up and it's the same thing that happened to me. Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf was in their prime and I'm just runnin' around sayin', "I don't need to make a record. All I need to do is watch these guys play." And then I woke up and they asked me to play with them and I was like, "Wow." I didn't need a Grammy or a golden record. I just needed to play with them. And that's how I came to play with all the great guitar players, and when they found out that I was a listener, I would play, and I wouldn't try to show them up. They figured it was their time to let the light shine, you know? It wasn't a time for me, it was time for schoolin'. Then I would take it, you know, and burn for a couple of days with Jonny Lang onstage.
MOVE: What do you think about young blues musicians today and who are some of your favorites?
BG: Well to be honest with you, I like all of them, man. They got an advantage. I used to have to take a 7-inch record. You know we didn't have music television when I was a kid, and we didn't have a radio. So I started out listening to music on 7-inch records. I used to get all of my records from the record shop, and they were selling records of Muddy, Howlin' Wolf , Lightnin' (Hopkins). So I had to sit down and figure out myself. I didn't even have nobody to tune it for me. I just had to sit and wind up the six strings and let my left hand figure out what my right hand was doin', and that helped me. So I had to try and figure out in my head or in my mind, or whatever you might call it, what they was doin'. Nowadays, you can pick up instruction pages. You can watch it on television. They're showing you how to play the guitar there. They even have a gadget with numbers you can throw on the guitar that will tell you what numbers to press.
MOVE: Yeah, I've seen that with the LED lights on the frets. It's kind of ridiculous.
BG: Well, if you can learn that-a-way, it's fine. But I wasn't that fortunate. I had to pick it up myself. So these guys have a very big advantage. My last CD, I got a kid who is 8 years old who plays a solo on "Fill These Shoes." He is so cute. Shoot, I had to get him on that record, man. That's the kind of people that can keep the blues alive, you know. It's a sellin' business. Ain't nobody dig the blues of these older cats anymore, man. They don't get played on the air no more. You gotta be young and good lookin' to get on the air, you know. I don't think you have to be musical. You don't have to be good no more. You just have to be young and good lookin' to get on television. The times are changing and today, everything is running wild. We are being rushed in everything you know, the drumsticks on the chicken look like turkey legs.
MOVE: Growth hormones.
BG: Right. And with baseball, you know three years ago, everybody was getting 70 home runs when they was actually using. And then, everybody got scared and quit using, I don't think nobody got 50 home runs. With music, it's almost the same way. They got so much technology now that once you hear your playback in the studio, sometimes you have to ask, "Is that me?" Every time I play my guitar, I want to hear that.
MOVE: Is that why you look like you're sincerely enjoying it when you play live? When you crawl around onstage and go out and shred it right in front of the audience?
BG: Well you know, I learned that from the late Guitar Slim and that's just a part of me. When I came to Chicago, all the New Orleans blues guitarists would be sittin' down. It was like the jazz ensembles with four or five people in the band. They were musical, man. And when I came down there, I'd say I can't outplay y'all, but I would kick those stands off the stage and people was sayin', "Who the hell is that? This guy is wild. You got to see this." 'Cause I don't read no music. I saw Guitar Slim before I left Louisiana and I saw B.B. and I thought, "I wanna play like B.B. King, but I wanna act like Guitar Slim." 'Cause he would come in the door when they would introduce him and he'd start playin' and we wouldn't see nobody. He had a 150-foot cable, and that's the first thing I wanted to get when I started playin'. I tell you they used to steal it from me every week. I wasn't that great then but it was a stage act, people was watchin' me because I would act crazy.
MOVE: So you started out as a studio soul and R&B singer for Chess because...?
BG: No, no, no, there was no such thing as soul. In the late '50s if you was an R&B player, they didn't care what you played. Muddy Waters wasn't playin' it as a blues musician and B.B. King. They was R&B. Louis Jordan, Fats Domino, Guitar Slim - whoever was sellin' records was R&B or jazz. There wasn't no such thing as Buddy Guy, the blues player. All that stuff came up in the mid-'60s, man. When the British guys came, I'd come to America and America was going wild. And they had to stop you, The Stones and people would stop you, and Eric (Clapton) had to stop you and say, "This ain't no British Invasion. You got this here and don't even know it."
MOVE: That's what I thought was so funny about you guys playing to those sit-down venues in England and Germany. It was more popular than in America. Nobody in America had any sense of where it was coming from.
BG: Well the black people in America knew it. White America didn't know nothin'. I don't know if you're old enough to remember when Elvis went out and started singin' about the poodle. Then he came out on "The Ed Sullivan Show" and said they can't show him from his waist down. They didn't even want you to shake on television because they didn't want the white ears to be into what Little Richard and them was already doin'. We was already doin' that but they wanted to keep it away from people. And then Elvis came. But that wasn't new. He'd come out playing boogie-woogie, man, got 'em all shook up and shit like that. "Hound Dog" was Big Mama's.
MOVE: Yeah, but Elvis just made it big.
BG: What the British cats did is they put it out there, and that made most of the records. And sooner or later, America and the rest of the world found out who Muddy Waters was. And they don't know much about Louis Jordan, but he was boogie-woogie-ing like no one else...I think Bill Doggett, with honky-tonk, was the first two million-seller, unless I'm mistaken. Those were the sellers, 'cause we didn't have albums then. We used to just have seven or eight minutes that came on a 45.
MOVE: Let's talk about your new album now.
BG: You have a little better than a minute.
MOVE: You've said that the official people in Nashville didn't think you had enough seniority to produce and album like Skin Deep.
BG: Actually, it wasn't the people in Nashville. It was like most anything. It was the fact that the money had the most of the seniority, and the ones affiliated with the big fellas in the records. You know, even in the Chess days, whatever song you had listed, that's what they'd give you. If (Chess) said it was OK, it got recorded. If he said it wasn't OK, he put his line in there, and his line could be one word or a whole new song. That was the name of the game.
MOVE: So you've talked about your next album leaning towards the spiritual side. Is this still what you had planned?
BG: I really want to do a spiritual record. I really do. And my company has said it was a good idea. But right now, I want to concentrate on Skin Deep, 'cause I don't get much airplay. So I have to take it out to a concert.
MOVE: Have you had to make changes in your music lately to satiate the record companies or fall in line with their image like you did in the old days?
BG: No. I really don't think about the record companies. I think about the record buyers. The record companies will throw you out, but if you're selling records, I don't think they'll throw you out, so I'm trying to think of what I can do now to try to catch some attention and sell a few records.