Buddy Guy at Massey Hall in Toronto for his sold out performance on March 30.Jag Gundu Photography
On stage Thursday evening at Toronto’s Massey Hall for the first of his three concerts, blues guitarist Buddy Guy reminisced about his first visit to Canada. “I didn’t know about myself as a musician before I came here.”
An interruptive man in the audience yelled, “Festival Express,” referring to the memorable musical train trip across the country in 1970 that involved not only Guy but the Band, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Ian and Sylvia Tyson’s Great Speckled Bird and others. “No, not Festival Express,” the guitarist replied. “It was Mariposa. Why don’t you let me finish?”
Of course, letting Guy finish his story is what this is all about. A Chicagoan by way of Lettsworth, La., he is 86 years old, on his Damn Right Farewell Tour. “You damn right, I’ve got the blues,” he sang, first thing, “From my head down to my shoes.”
He talked a lot. He played here and there, never to the electrified heights we associate with his prime. He sang that he was our hoochie coochie man, and that “I’m here to mess with you.” There were tricks, such as thrusting his hips to the quick hits of the drum – bam-bam! At one point he laid his Stratocaster guitar atop an amplifier and played the riff to Cream’s Sunshine of Your Love by batting the strings with a hand towel.
These kinds of shenanigans are typical of the blues-based showmanship model invented by artists such as Guitar Slim, a hero of Guy’s who used to walk through audiences while playing. Slim had a hit with The Things That I Used to Do in 1953. Seventy years later, Guy is doing the things Slim used to do, walking in the aisles at one point at Massey.
So, plenty of razzle, but little dazzle. Somewhere along the line, Guy (and many others of his generation), decided playing blues alone wasn’t enough to sell tickets. You say it is showmanship; I say it sells the music short. “If you don’t like the blues, you’re in the wrong house,” Guy said early on during his sold-out concert.
But it is his house, his blues, his rules. He indeed is our hoochie coochie man, making pretty women jump and shout: “Then the world wanna know, what this all about?”
The concert was about 80 minutes. Guy and his four-piece band ran through a number of songs, rarely finishing any of them. Instead, the music moved fluidly from one piece to another, with moments of conversation happening more than occasionally. “I’m gonna play something so funky you can smell it,” he said at one point.
The audience was encouraged to participate. Guy went so far as to admonish the crowd when it failed to sing along enthusiastically enough to his liking. Again, this is blues showmanship 101. Some people like it.
Guy showed off his guitar skills in short eruptive bursts that defied the building’s fire codes. Vocally, while he can no longer manage the high falsetto notes he once hit with ease, his lower register was fine on Muddy Waters’s She’s Nineteen Years Old, Little Milton’s Grits Ain’t Groceries and his own ballad Skin Deep.
In addition to his story about playing the Mariposa Folk Festival (in 1967, at Innis Lake in Caledon, Ont.), Guy talked about growing up impoverished in Louisiana, with no running water. This was context – for his life and, perhaps, for an understanding of the blues.
American writer and literary critic Ralph Ellison once described the genre as “an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy, but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.”
Guy does most of his own squeezing and fingering of the jagged grain on the neck of the guitar. His playing of How Blue Can You Get? answered the song’s own question. At the end of the show, he walked along the rim of the stage tossing guitar picks to the front-row people. Catch them if you can, but, better yet, catch where Guy is coming from.
Buddy Guy plays Toronto’s Massey Hall through Saturday; Ottawa Jazz Festival, June 28; Montreal Jazz Festival, June 30.
Brad Wheeler