BUDDY GUY: THE COMPLETE CHESS STUDIO RECORDINGS (1960-1967; 1992)
CD I: 1) First Time I Met The Blues;
2) Slop Around; 3) I Got My Eyes On You; 4) Broken Hearted Blues; 5) Let Me
Love You Baby; 6) I Got A Strange Feeling; 7) Gully Hully; 8) Ten Years Ago; 9)
Watch Yourself; 10) Stone Crazy; 11) Skippin'; 12) I Found True Love; 13) Hard
But It's Fair; 14) Baby (Baby, Baby, Baby); 15) When My Left Eye Jumps; 16)
That's It; 17) The Treasure Untold; 18) American Bandstand; 19) No Lie; 20) $100 Bill; 21) My Love Is Real;
22) Buddy's Boogie.
CD II: 1) Worried Mind (aka
Stick Around); 2) Untitled Instrumental; 3) Moanin'; 4) I Dig Your Wig; 5) My
Time After Awhile; 6) Night Flight; 7) Crazy Love (Crazy Music); 8) Every Girl
I See; 9) Too Many Ways; 10) Leave My Girl Alone; 11) Got To Use Your Head; 12)
Keep It To Myself (aka Keep It To Yourself); 13) My Mother; 14) She Suits Me To
A Tee; 15) Mother-In-Law Blues; 16) Buddy's Groove; 17) Going To School; 18) I
Cry And Sing The Blues; 19) Goin' Home; 20) I Suffer With The Blues; 21) Lip
Lap Louie; 22) My Time After Awhile (alternate vocals and mix); 23) Too Many
Ways (alternate take); 24) Keep It To Myself (alternate take); 25) I Didn't
Know My Mother Had A Son Like Me.
Like most of his colleagues at Chess, Buddy Guy
had his output measured in singles, not LPs; unlike some of his luckier
colleagues, though, he was not even allowed the privilege of putting together
an LP from some of these singles until his very last year on Chess (where,
according to most accounts, he was treated as sort of an underdog) — which made
his early discography seriously confusing until MCA finally got around to
putting it all together on this double disc package, as part of their general
program to systematize and preserve their legacy. Even so, compared to so many
other Complete Chess Studio Recordings
series, two CDs seem fairly pitiful — indeed, the label saw little sense in
maintaining Buddy Guy as an independent artist, preferring to use him for
session work rather than individual stardom.
And indeed, discrimination accusations aside,
those early «formative» years do not really give us the Buddy Guy that most of us are accustomed to — the consummate
showman and guitar wizard with his own unmistakable, and highly eccentric,
dialect of the blues language. His very first singles were actually released in
1958 for the smaller Cobra Records (and are pretty hard to locate, as you'd
have to go for an obstinately chronologically representative collection), where
he worked close to Otis Rush and seems to have been highly influenced by that
style — deep-echo, ominous soul-blues with vocal wailings and screechy guitar.
A year later, he switched to Chess, where he continued to explore that Otis
Rush vibe, but also put out «blues de-luxe» tracks in the glitzy style of B. B.
King, dabbled in danceable R&B (in fact, danceable anything — one of the tracks here is not called ʽGully Hullyʼ for
nothing), and basically was willing to try out any idea as long as it had some
probability of selling.
The problem is, the one thing the world is most
grateful to Buddy for is his guitar playing, and these early Chess singles do
not paint a very good picture of it. First, although Buddy's playing was a big
influence on everybody from British bluesmen to Hendrix even in the first half
of the Sixties, his «classic» style of playing did not truly emerge until after
he himself was «re-influenced» by the blues-rock explosion of the second half of the Sixties. And second,
according to most accounts, Buddy was at his most influential when playing live
— not an option here, with just one track (ʽStone Crazyʼ) giving him enough
space to stretch out with some serious soloing, and most of the others molding
him more as a singer and entertainer than a blues player. And he is a good singer, wailing and crooning
along with the best of 'em, yet hardly doing anything here that would put him
over the level of the aforementioned Otis Rush — or B. B. King and Bobby Bland,
for that matter.
The collection does feature some of the songs
that formed the foundation of the Buddy Guy legend. There's ʽLet Me Love You
Babyʼ, his firmest affirmation of aggressive masculinity that would later be
covered by Jeff Beck and Rod Stewart, among others, as an early anthem of
blues-based hard rock. And there's his blues-rock transformation of ʽMary Had A
Little Lambʼ from 1967 (here entitled ʽGoing To Schoolʼ — copyright reasons?),
which many people know from the Stevie Ray Vaughan version — although, to be
fair, the importance of the recording is more in its general idea that «anything
you want can be converted to kick-ass scorching blues» than anything else,
because it is not outstanding in any other respect. And those early singles,
ʽFirst Time I Met The Bluesʼ and ʽI Got My Eyes On Youʼ, they would also become
regular live staples — and both introduce those signature «quivering» guitar
licks that sound as if he were pulling on those strings like they were
bowstrings, loosing an arrow at the listener (I think Keith Richards and/or
Brian Jones did a good job copying these licks on the Stones' early records).
So yeah, there's plenty of fun and importance
here, but, unfortunately, the completeness of the package also means that there
will be a lot of crap — I mean, most of these upbeat R&B numbers that he
did in the early Sixties, with female backing voices and cheery brass sections
etc., are completely skippable (ʽBaby Baby Babyʼ, etc.): for better guitar
work, you do not have to travel a long way from there, and for better
entertainment value, you'd rather want to cross over to Smokey Robinson or
Wilson Pickett. Even as the Sixties were advancing, he was still saddled with
novelty material like ʽLip Lap Louieʼ and ʽI Dig Your Wigʼ — compensating for
this with occasional stabs at serious jazz (a cover of Art Blakey's ʽMoanin'ʼ
is here, too) which show respectable technique, yet it was never highly likely
that Buddy Guy would ever be respected as a jazz guitarist. Additionally, four
tracks here actually feature guitarist Lacy Gibson instead of Buddy, and on one
of them (ʽMy Love Is Realʼ) Lacy even takes lead vocals, leaving it unclear
what Buddy's contribution to the track was in the first place.
Some of his better material from those years
eventually made it to his first and last LP for Chess, Left My Blues In San Francisco (which we will tackle separately),
but on the whole, these 47 tracks could easily be reduced to about 10-12, if
you want to properly understand what all the hoopla about Buddy was in the
pre-Hendrix era. To the ones already mentioned add something like the scorching
confessionalism of ʽMy Time After Awhileʼ... the weeping licks on ʽI Cry And
Sing The Bluesʼ... the fast, fluent, fun playing on ʽBuddy's Boogieʼ... and
yeah, that's about it for this one. Still, I guess the same criticisms apply to
B. B. King as well, who spent the first two decades of his career stifled by
the confines of his studio, his image, his technology, and his time, before
really exploding in the mid-Sixties, so let us not hold his buddy Buddy to
impossibly higher standards and still acknowledge these
«beginning-of-the-legend» years with a modest thumbs up (especially since there
is, at the very least, nothing openly bad
here: even the novelty numbers and the hip-shaking dance fluff are really very
innocent.)
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