Stage curfews in New York are serious business. The watchful minders of the city’s imperious Radio City Music Hall are getting visibly nervous – it’s almost 11, and Buddy Guy and Bobby Rush are piling one blues classic on top of another. The biggest names on the guest list haven’t even done their numbers yet.
One of the Secret Service-like pros snakes onstage and whispers something in the ear of the leader of the evening’s house band, the veteran drummer Steve Jordan. From a distance, he seems indifferent.
Ever the wiley frontman, Rush keeps egging Guy on. 90 years young, Guy is in his element – he’s got a stinging answer on his Strat for all of his old friend’s exhortations, and the Cheshire Cat grin on his face keeps getting bigger. He shouts, “Y’all wanna hear another one?”
The gig in question – held on Thursday, October 1 – was officially titled Buddy's Got The Blues: A 90th Birthday Concert Celebration. The blues guitar legend – the last major living link to the origins of the form, the last big, theater-filling name in the genre who grew up on the wrong side of the hellish Jim Crow south – actually turned 90 three months ago, but the cavalry came in to celebrate either way.
And we do mean the cavalry. John Mayer, Susan Tedeschi, Derek Trucks, Joe Bonamassa, Gary Clark Jr., Shemekia Copeland, Samantha Fish, Eric Gales, Billy Gibbons, Robert Randolph, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Jimmie Vaughan, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, and Ally Venable all took their turns onstage. And that list doesn’t even include Eric Clapton, who was listed on the bill but unable to perform due to illness.
For all that fanfare, Guy opened the proceedings in the simplest way possible. He, house band guitarist Isiah Sharkey, and Derek Trucks sat next to each other, plucking away at I’m In the Mood. It had the ease and sweetness of a low-stakes front porch jam – three guys playing to an audience of none but crickets and fireflies.
That was until Trucks busted out some otherworldly slide licks on his resonator – that keyed the faithful into what was in store for the next three or so hours.
One after the other, three generations of virtuosos put their own spins on Guy’s voluminous body of work – channeling the raw spirit and knockout power of the originals and imbuing them with their own DNA.
One might call it a “dessert for every meal” situation. Ingram wailed away on a red polka dot Strat for his sharp-as-a-tack version of Crosscut Saw, and traded blistering, quickfire jabs with steel king Robert Randolph on a rendition of Shake Your Money Maker so spirited that it got even some of those in the “Google me” seats up and moving.
Asked to salute Stevie Ray Vaughan, Shepherd dug in on his Strat with a version of the Guy-via-SRV classic, Let Me Love You Baby. The ever-studious Bonamassa didn’t put a foot out of place in his version of A Man of Many Words, and sat perfectly in the rhythm slot while Gales took Let the Good Times Roll onto another planet.
Gales, in turn, singed eyebrows with Fish, while Gibbons and Jimmie Vaughan churned out Texas-sized grooves together and on their own. Guy and Mayer, meanwhile, took their high-profile sparring time in a funky direction. And of course, it had to end with the whole gang coming together for Hoochie Coochie Man and Got My Mojo Workin’.
That particular jam will likely draw the headlines and YouTube views, but, in the end, this was about Buddy Guy.
For all of the magnificent, fretboard-scorching, bows-from-the-crowd inducing 12-bar breaks the audience took in over the course of the three-and-a-half-plus hour show, it was Guy who really had the magic wand.
He can’t play torrents of notes anymore, obviously, but man, what he did with the ones he did play. He’d sting them, hit something and leave it for five, even 10 seconds while feedback curdled around.
When Guy was at his loosest, jamming on the likes of Boom Boom and I Just Want to Make Love to You with Rush, all the big names and bright lights fell away. Two guys, two of the last of their kind, running through the songs that they love, the songs that they can do more faithfully than anybody.
They’re getting carried away, they’re taking too long. Employees need to clock out, people need to go home. But Buddy Guy, 90 years old, is still playing. And neither Father Time nor a curfew is gonna stop him.
