The cramped dressing room upstairs at the Roxy on Sunset Boulevard is spilling over with band members, Hollywood big shots, hangers-on. Actor Gary Busey is sucking on a cigar and pumping hands like he’s running for mayor of Los Angeles. Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes, Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Paul Stanley of Kiss, Melissa Etheridge . . . this is starting to look like a benefit concert.
Off in the corner, seated on a couch, is the reason they’re all here. Buddy Guy’s face is unlined, his cheekbones regal. Dressed in overalls and with a guitar in his lap, the 56-year-old blues ambassador still looks a bit like the country kid who made his way to Chicago from a Louisiana sharecropper’s farm 35 years ago.
Back then, George “Buddy” Guy was so broke he would’ve given almost anything for a sandwich-except his guitar. He refused to pawn it when he couldn’t find work, and his stubborness paid off. An admiring stranger brought him to the 708 Club on the South Side, where he dazzled a who’s who of Chicago blues musicians with his uninhibited showmanship. When he was done, Muddy Waters gave him a salami sandwich and a piece of advice: “Don’t even think about going back to Louisiana.”
Since then, Buddy Guy and his guitar have spread his passion for the blues around the world. His records are collectors’ items in Japan, he has headlined festivals in Europe, and in the last few years, the late-night talk shows have come calling-a sure sign of celebrity. Here at the Roxy, there’s a stream of friends and worshipers jostling for position next to the glass of cognac at his feet.
Stanley kneels and whispers into Guy’s ear. Busey stomps over for a bear hug. Then another hand is extended.
“Hi, I’m Melissa Etheridge. . . .” Guy looks puzzled.
The singer leans closer. “Melissa Etheridge,” she shouts into his ear. Guy smiles and nods and clasps her hand.
Malcolm and Angus Young of the mega-platinum metal band AC/DC are finally face to face with their inspiration, one of the guitarists who brought meaning to their young working-class lives in Australia decades ago. They have braved a downpour to honor Guy with a cliche. “Ever since I was a kid, I been into your stuff,” Angus squeaks.
Guy beams again. He clutches more hands. He poses for pictures. And he doesn’t have a clue who most of these people are.
Most of them-the Black Crowes, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Melissa Etheridge, AC/DC-have sold more records in one year than Guy has in 30. It seems like the same old story: Blues begat rock, the rockers cashed in and the bluesmen became afterthoughts.
But the rock guitar pantheon-Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan-never forgot Guy. They copied him, befriended him and championed his genius in interviews. Eric Clapton simply called him the greatest guitar player he had ever seen. All that, and Guy still couldn’t even get a record deal in the 1980s.
With his 1991 release for the Silvertone label, “Damn Right I’ve Got the Blues,” Guy made up for lost time. Whipped together in a week in London with producer John Porter and with help from Clapton and Beck, the record went on to win a Grammy and has sold 250,000 copies domestically, 600,000 worldwide.
Those figures put Guy just a notch below recent blues best-sellers such as Robert Cray and John Lee Hooker and “are exceptional for a blues album,” says Michael Tedesco, director of Silvertone North America.
Silvertone has even bigger plans for the recently released follow-up, “Feels Like Rain,” again produced by Porter.
“Our goal is 1 million sales worldwide,” Tedesco says. “Last time, we sold a quarter-million in the U.S. through the back door. Now we’re a little more up front and visible.”
Weekly sales of “Feels Like Rain” soon after its March release were 35 percent ahead of the pace set by “Damn Right,” he says, and it continues to sell steadily if not spectacularly. “Not that he’s going to compete with Mariah Carey on the charts, but he’s ready to cross over into the mainstream and enter that echelon of the transcendent blues artists,” Tedesco asserts. “This is Buddy Guy’s time.”
Or so it certainly seems in Los Angeles. Despite a driving storm, the Roxy is packed, the humidity is high and the walls are wet. When Guy’s manager, Scott Cameron, finally succeeds in clearing the dressing room, he looks at the guitarist and asks, “You ready?”
“I been ready since we got outta the rain,” Guy answers, and his band-bassist Greg Rzab, guitarist Scott Holt and drummer Ray Allison-cracks up, glad to be done with the glad-handing and ready to get down to business.
Just two nights before, Guy performed at Buddy Guy’s Legends, his club on Chicago’s Near South Side. He had done a set of acoustic blues with his longtime partner, Junior Wells, a throwback to the loose-limbed jams of his youth at the Checkerboard Lounge. Now, here he was on the stage of the Roxy, where virtually every significant rock star of the last 20 years has appeared. It was as though his career had flashed forward three decades in just two days, from the intimacy of a South Side blues club to the glitter of Sunset Strip.
Years ago, Guy couldn’t buy a gig in Los Angeles, much less at the Roxy. “It took me a long time to crack L.A.,” he says at his hotel room before the show. “Here it’s big fish eatin’ up the little fish. That’s the way of the world. I don’t sell as many records as a lot of guitar players, and action speaks louder than words.”
That night, Guy is a shark in a sea of blues. He transforms everything from Cream’s “Strange Brew” to Otis Rush’s tortured “I Can’t Quit You Baby” into a catharsis, circling the microphone stand, shouting his lyrics. When he closes his “She’s a Superstar” with a brief quote from Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile,” the place goes bonkers. Then it’s on to Willie Dixon’s “I Just Want To Make Love to You.” Eyes squeezed shut, the neck of his guitar pointing skyward, Guy holds a note for what seems like a minute, then makes it quiver. In the audience, knees are buckling.
Afterward, he graciously endures more glad-handing and more pictures, then he and the band pile into a van bound for the hotel with bags of carry-out barbecue. They laugh and joke but don’t talk much about the show. Guy will go to bed, wake at his usual hour of 5:30 a.m. and crank out a few pushups. Then it’s on to the next city, Cincinnati. Business as usual.
“I didn’t dream of myself being an entertainer; I’m just a guitar player,” he says with typical modesty. “I’m still the same person who drove a tow truck in Chicago, broke those horses down on the farm, worked as a cook at LSU. I don’t care if I get 30 gold records, I’m not gonna forget where I came from. I’m not gonna forget people. A ladder is easy to climb, but miss just one step and find how fast you can come down.”
As Guy speaks in the living room of his sprawling, split-level home in Flossmoor, which he shares with Jennifer, his wife of 17 years, and their two children, Rashawnna, 15, and Michael, 13, and he is surrounded by reminders of his increasing wealth and popularity. Framing the fireplace are a Grammy, a fistful of W.C. Handy Awards (handed out annually in Memphis by the Blues Foundation) and pictures of him with some of his admirers, including Vaughan and Clapton. He has five cars, including a late-model Rolls-Royce and Ferrari and a 1958 Edsel. “Sometimes I think I should write `Damn Right I’ve Got the Blues’ across the hood,” Guy says with a chuckle.
It’s a wonder Guy can enjoy his fame at all. He still spends nearly 300 days a year on the road, a grueling schedule for a man who has been popping prescription pills daily for 19 years to relieve hypertension. When a journalist calls the household, as he has done over the last few years, to inquire when Guy will be home, it’s usually Jennifer who answers with a polite chuckle. “Oh, I expect him back sometime next month.”
Jennifer helps out at Legend’s, but has a full-time job raising the couple’s two teenagers while her husband’s touring. Guy’s six children from his previous marriage-Charlotte, Carlise, Colleen, George Jr., Greg and Geoffrey, ranging in age from 31 to 21-were essentially raised by their mother.
“It’s a shame to say, but a lot of the boys I don’t know where they live at,” Guy says. “My daughters have four grandchildren, and the boys got four or five, but they don’t let me know about all of them.”
In separate interviews, Guy and his wife echo each other: “It isn’t easy being married to an entertainer.”
“I wrote a song called `She’s a Superstar’ on my new album for her,” Guy says in his L.A. hotel room. “When you’re married to an entertainer, sometimes you’re almost strangers. With that song, I just wanted her to know that I’m in this room, alone, when she’s in the house, alone. And that I miss her.”
When he takes a rare break from the road, Guy still can be seen in front of his home, shoveling snow or waxing one of his cars. Otherwise, a visitor will probably find him in the kitchen preparing one of his specialties: red beans and rice, mustard greens, black-eyed peas. “People ask me, `Why you want a house like this smelling like red beans?’ ” he says. “And I say, `That’s how I got this house, by eating red beans.’ “
That down-home flavor remains his connection to his past, to who he is. “I’m a country man,” he sings on his new album, still “green as a pool table and twice as square.” He notes with pride how he used to milk cows, plow the fields and break wild horses down on the farm in Louisiana. With that work ethic came a modesty instilled by his parents, who died a year apart in the late ’60s.
“They always told me, `Don’t be the best in town, Buddy, just be the best till the best comes around,’ ” Guy says. “It’s like when I was touring with B.B. (King) last year, going on stage before him made me feel sick. I tried my best, but I knew how it was. `There’s Buddy trying to excite you with his show stuff, running out into the crowd. But now you`re gonna hear the guitar like it’s supposed to be played.’ “
For all the artistry in his fingers, all the passion in his voice, Guy is humble, almost to a fault. His full-throttle performances are often more like tributes to his mentors and peers rather than showcases for his personal vision. Seldom does he finish a song as he jump-cuts from Clapton, Beck, Hendrix and Vaughan to early influences such as T-Bone Walker, John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters. Amid this shotgun history of rock and blues and note-perfect imitations, Buddy Guy sounds like everyone but himself.
“In the clubs, it’s comin’ at you from all directions-`I want to hear some Muddy,’ `I want to hear Eric Clapton,’ `I want to hear you,’ ” Guy says. “So you start wondering, who do I do this for? So I throw it all in there. Buddy Guy is trying to be Mr. Good Guy. People were always telling me, `Buddy, you ain’t that good. You ain’t gonna be able to get over just being yourself.’ So you just fight like hell to try to make everybody happy. I still got that old-fashioned way of thinking that everyone can be happy with me.”
John Porter, the British-born producer of “Damn Right” and “Feels Like Rain,” says Guy “wasn’t allowed to make a record for so long that there’s a certain sense of `It might all stop tomorrow,’ and then it’s back to the grind. There’s a certain amount of desperation in his performance, to not let go of it, and sometimes he tries too hard to please everybody.”
In the 1960s Guy’s fierce reinterpretation of the blues didn’t please the one man who could’ve made him a star: Leonard Chess, owner of the famed Chicago blues label. Chess thought Guy’s slash-and-scream guitar style was an abomination, so he recorded Guy sparingly, and then only in a traditional blues context. The guitarist had to drive a tow truck just to make ends meet.
Then one day Chess heard the blues-based electric rock of Hendrix and Cream, who had taken many of their licks from Guy, and he called the guitarist into his office.
“He held up these two rock albums and said, `Go ahead, kick my butt. You were right all along,’ ” Guy recalls with a laugh. “I think everybody got beat up by record companies in those days. They’d tell you they’re doing you a favor by letting you record. `You got the name, and we got the money.’ When they asked Muddy once what Chess took from him, he just said, `I don’t know what he took from me, but he made me Muddy Waters.’ So we took that as pay, I guess.
“But I’m not bitter. If I was, instead of sitting here right now, I’d be in a line for food stamps. You just hurt yourself by not going on.”
Chess wasn’t the only one unaware of Guy’s abilities and potential. When Guy’s son Greg expressed an interest in guitar-playing a few years ago, the boy wanted to emulate Prince.
“I told him if he liked Prince, he’d better learn some Hendrix, and I bought him some albums,” Guy says. “Then he saw a TV special on Hendrix where he was saying how he got some licks from me. My son said, `Dad, I didn’t know you could play like that.’ And I said, `You never asked me.’
“He’s 21 now and got a Marshall amplifier and everything, so I invited him down to Legends, and I told him, `Now I gotta show you who I am.’ And after I was through, he said, `I don’t think I’m ready for you.’ That’s the disadvantage a blues player has compared to other artists. If your own son doesn’t know about you, what other kids are gonna know about you?’ “
To bridge the gap, a succession of contemporary stars are used as window dressing on the new Guy albums, from Clapton and Beck on “Damn Right I’ve Got the Blues” to Bonnie Raitt and Travis Tritt on “Feels Like Rain.”
“The guests give you name recognition,” says Silvertone’s Tedesco. “Maybe people will take him seriously and realize that Buddy Guy isn’t just someone playing 12-bar blues on the back porch.”
Tedesco also had Guy cut a wide variety of music besides straight blues, including songs made famous by James Brown, Ray Charles and Marvin Gaye, as well as rockers John Fogerty and John Hiatt. It’s an approach that makes blues purists cringe, and even the producer isn’t wholly satisfied with the picture the records present of Guy.
“After bringing in some of his friends on `Damn Right,’ I wanted to do `Feels Like Rain’ with just Buddy,” Porter says. “He’s old enough to make his own record, but I was overruled. I mean, Travis Tritt-that doesn’t have anything to do with anything. And there’s a track with John Mayall (`I Could Cry’) that is vastly inferior to three or four tracks we didn’t use.”
Porter was particularly upset that “an absolutely wonderful version” of a Little Willie John blues, “I Need Your Love So Bad,” was axed from the record. Tedesco, a guitarist who has a sensitive ear for music and a deep appreciation for Guy`s abilities, says he also loved the Willie John cut, but pointed out the album already had one excellent slow blues, Guitar Slim’s “Sufferin’ Mind.”
“The point of the record was not to dilute Buddy Guy but to show the full range of his abilities by giving him a wide variety of great songs to record,” the Silvertone executive says. “And I think we succeeded.”
If Guy is concerned about sharing space with more famous guests on his own record, if he’s discouraged about having to record potential pop crossover tracks such as “Change in the Weather” at the expense of a searing blues, he doesn’t say. An artist who has been battered so long by people telling him what he should be, what he should sound like, tends to feel less precious about his “artistry.” All he knows is how to go all out, all the time.
“He’s amazingly easy to work with,” Porter marvels. “It’s like, `You name ’em, we play ’em.’ It’s essentially up to him. If he’s on top of it, if he gets the song, everything flows. If he doesn’t, it’s not gonna happen. He likes to do everything live, so it’s all raw and immediate. There are not many people left who have the guts to do it like that.”
One such performance is Guy’s interpretation of James Brown’s “I Go Crazy.” Like a pit bull tearing into a sirloin, Guy roars, “You got to live for yourself, yourself and nobody else!”
The line seems more than a little ironic, given that Guy seems to have spent his entire career doing exactly the opposite.
But Guy says: “I don’t want to think about it that way. I’ve been unhappy through my life a lot, but I didn’t share it with anybody and I don’t want nobody else to have that feeling.”
Instead, Guy brings a joy to the most despairing lyric. He even sings his anguished “Five Long Years” in concert with a smile. It’s a smile tinged by gratefulness and disbelief, as though he’s still coming to grips with the fact that his time has finally arrived, that all those people in the audience are really here to see him perform.
“I’m dreaming about playing in Israel in a few weeks, because my family is very religious and the Bible is part of our lives,” he says. “That’s another milestone for me, a place where, being black, you never think of going. I remember Christmas 1975, I was on the other side of the world playing in Africa, and at that time of my life I had never even played a date in Mississippi or Cincinnati.
“I walked out on the night of Christmas Eve, and saw this beautiful sky, and I remember telling myself I couldn’t believe I was there. That’s how I feel now.”
