It was a cold one last night in Chesterfield as folks waited in line to enter The Factory to buy a cold one and wait for the legendary Buddy Guy.
The place was packed with blues-loving lifers, ready to pay homage to one of the all-time greats. Most in the crowd go way back with Guy: Half the men in the crowd were gray-headed. The other half were bald.
However, the oldest man in the room was the blues giant himself. Buddy Guy took the stage four months shy of 87 years old but nonetheless lithe of body, robust of voice, feisty of spirit, Stratty of Caster. At first, he let his guitar do the talking, peeling off some signature bawling b-strings before shouting the declarative title line of “Damn Right, I’ve Got the Blues.”
Even Buddy’s outfit had the blues — custom-embroidered, blue-striped Dickies overalls, a blue-floral shirt and a navy ball cap from his own Legends blues club in Chicago.
Handling his beige Fender with frets worn to black slung from a strap that also said “Damn Right,” Guy was in a playful mood from the start, making the guitar talk by scraping the neck with his arm, pulling his ear with his right hand while bending notes with his left and hip-thrusting reverb squalls out of the guitar.
“They don’t teach you this in school,” Guy said off-mic so that only the front rows could hear him, displaying the kind of audacious confidence and control that has allowed him to play circles around everyone in eight different decades.
Guy took the audience on a tour of blues history, often playing just snippets of tunes, bleeding one song into another and stopping his band on a dime, especially when the audience flubbed a singalong part. “I didn’t come all this way to hear you fuck up this song,” he said, teasing the crowd halfway through “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man.”
“For some reason they don’t play this kind of music on the radio anymore,” he said at one point. Sure enough, he was a blues ambassador all night, covering standards associated with Muddy Water, B.B. King, John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed and more.
Some of the best moments though were on his late-period comeback tracks, like a gorgeously tender “Skin Deep” that showed off a still-impressive falsetto and a scorching “Someone Else is Steppin’ In.”
A time or two, Guy threw the audience for a loop. Early in the show, he laid his guitar on an amp and whacked the strings with a drumstick. Later, he walked through the aisles of the audience, soloing the whole time, at one point appearing to head into the bathrooms before his handlers redirected him stageward.
“At my age, I get lost in my hotel room,” Guy later joked.
Regardless, he still knows his way around the fretboard and across his own biography, telling stories about showering in the rain as a kid, bailing on his first music teacher and how Mick Jagger helped increase Guy’s profile in the ’60s.
“If you don’t like the blues, you’re in the wrong fuckin’ house. Because I’ll go back and get shit like this,” he said as a way of introducing “How Blue Can You Get?” which featured Guy all over the sonic spectrum — gentle picking at the beginning and squalling overdrive at the end.
After a satiny version of “Fever,” Guy played a medley of licks from Hendrix (“Voodoo Child (Slight Return)”), Clapton (“Strange Brew”) and others before bringing out opening acts Ally Venable and Eric Gales for a guitar-orgy finale on Little Walter’s “Everything Gonna Be Alright.”
It was an uplifting capper on a rewarding night with a master bluesman with an indefatigable rock and roll heart. “I'm just trying to keep the blues alive,” he told us. Damn right.
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