Buddy Guy has one of the most distinctive guitar sounds on the planet―a singing, searing, dirty tone he creates by opening his amps up loud and having absolute control over his extremely expressive vibrato.
But it wasn’t always that way. At least not to the Chicago blues legend’s ears. According to Guy, a string of producers including famed blues impresarios Leonard Chess and Samuel Charters stifled his studio playing for decades. As he puts it: “They wouldn’t let Buddy Guy be Buddy Guy.”
Today, Guy, who turned 72 on July 30, sounds like no one else. His hot-butter-and-grits tone is all over his brand new album
Skin Deep; it’s the same sound that made him one of the most potent and influential players in the clubs on Chicago’s south and west sides in the late 1950s and early ’60s.
Guy came into his own 50 years ago with the help of
Muddy Waters. A typical Saturday night would find him swinging from the rafters of a gin joint packed by African-American steel- or autoworkers, making his Stratocaster squeal, moan, and howl.
Jimi Hendrix was inspired by these epic, night-long performances, although other prominent Guy disciples like Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton would have to wait until he toured Europe to hear what his playing was really about.
That’s because producers like Chess and Charters, for whom Guy nonetheless did brilliant work like his 1960 Chess Records debut single “The First Time I Met the Blues” and the 1967 Vanguard label classic
A Man & the Blues, didn’t know what to make of the noise that came from Guy’s cranked-up speakers. It was nothing like Muddy’s warm purr or
Hubert Sumlin’s sweet warble. So they simply weren’t having it.
Guy’s initial sessions for Cobra Records, which yielded 1958’s “Sit and Cry (The Blues)” and “Try to Quit You Baby,” got closer to his sound than most other discs he’d cut in the ensuing 30 years. Cobra’s owner Eli Toscano “didn’t have but one reel-to-reel tape deck,” remembers Guy. “His studio was a little ol’ garage with barrels out back. There was no booth or nothin’. Everybody was just packed into that garage. I think the echo chamber was out the back door. I brought in a 60-watt Fender Bassman and my ’57 Stratocaster and they recorded exactly what I gave them.
“After that, everybody told me how to play … like they knew better than me. Leonard Chess, [producer] Willie Dixon. They told me my playing wasn’t worth a damn. They always made me turn down and lay off the distortion. They’d tell me, ‘That ain’t no blues. That’s just noise.’
“
Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix used to say, ‘Go to London, Buddy. The people who make records there will let you have your way.’ But I kept saying to myself, ‘I can do that here. I don’t have to go.’ Sometimes I pinch myself and wonder why I didn’t listen to them. Maybe I would have got recognized earlier.”
Guy feels that 1990’s
Damn Right, I’ve Got the Blues, which pits his Marshall-powered excursions against some furious playing by Beck, Clapton, and other guests, was the first disc since his Cobra days to really capture his sound.
“I didn’t record for most of the ’80s because I hadn’t had my freedom,” Guy said just after
Damn Right was completed. “Now I’ve finally got the freedom I’ve been wanting for 30 years and more. And I’m just cutting loose.”
That’s especially true during one of Guy’s concerts, where his string-bends cry, his leads are raw and nasty as a chainsaw, and his slow, quiet pentatonic solos creep into the soul of his audience.
Since
Damn Right, I’ve Got the Blues, Guy’s managed to ignite genuine fireworks in the studio on several other albums. Now, boasting his filthiest guitar tones yet, there’s
Skin Deep. His army of Stratocasters wails through his new amp of choice, the Buddy Guy signature model
Chicago Blues Box, made by Lombard, Illinois-based boutique manufacturer Butler Custom Sound. Guy’s tone on numbers like “Lyin’ Like a Dog” is harmonically rich and powerfully uncompromised, allowing every detail of his playing―including his pick hits―to emerge even in his most flurried solos.
He sounds, unmistakably, like Buddy Guy.
Read a review of Buddy Guy’s new album Skin Deep
here.