BUDDY GUY: STONE CRAZY! (1979)
1) I Smell A Rat; 2) Are You
Losing Your Mind?; 3) You've Been Gone Too Long; 4) She's Out There Somewhere;
5) Outskirts Of Town; 6) When I Left Home.
For most of the rest of the decade, Buddy found
himself without a recording contract, suffering the same fate as quite a few
old Chicago bluesmen, out of vogue and fighting, or refusing to fight, for
survival. One reason may have been a stubborn refusal to adapt, like B. B. King
did, but more important, I think, was the fact that unlike B. B. King, Buddy never truly achieved major stardom either
in the 1950s or in the 1960s, and thus had no «starting capital» to begin with:
not even the good word from Hendrix could make much of an impact.
Eventually, by 1979, as it sometimes happens, Buddy
emerged on the far-from-home front — some people have to move to Japan to do
this, but Stone Crazy!, as far as I
can tell, was recorded in Toulouse,
of all places (pretty big city, but who'd know there was a market for American
electric blues specifically in the far south end of France?), released on the
small Isabel label, and only two years later picked up by the Alligator label
in the States (which is why in most conventional discographies you'll find this
record marked 1981, when it's really 1979), obviously, to very little fanfare
and even less effect.
And you can see why, because Stone Crazy! does indeed show a man who
is totally refusing to adapt, living in his own world of musical values and
happy to ignore all the developments on all the musical fronts around him. Ten
more years and the world would start admiring him for that, but in 1979-81 the
progressive drive was still strong, and this retro-Chicago-stuff just didn't
cut it. Too bad, because on a purely personal level, the album does show some
progress — about half of the tracks feature Buddy Guy in such an overdriven
mood as he'd never let us take part in previously. Perhaps there was something
in the Toulouse air that made him feel as if he were fighting the Saracens, or
maybe it was just the lack of any pressure, but on ʽI Smell A Ratʼ (no relation
to the Big Mama Thornton classic) and ʽYou've Been Gone Too Longʼ Buddy Guy is
unleashed — good news for all lovers of electric blues guitar thunderstorms.
In fact, unless my gut feeling plays a trick on
me, we'd probably have to pick ʽI Smell A Ratʼ as the first bona fide
representative of the by-now-all-too-familiar Buddy Guy playing style — «blues
against the rules», where conventional, party-approved blues solo licks may be
offset at any time with a bit of dissonance, harmony break-up, discordant
repetition of an appreciated chord instead of required moving up or down the
scale, etc. etc., any time that the soul commands it from the player. Sometimes
it's ugly, but even when it's ugly, you kind of feel that it's just because
the guitarist got so caught up in his feelings, he forgot all about his
textbook. Of course, Buddy is not alone in this respect, but far from every
respectable bluesman can allow himself to introduce that element of punkish
hooliganry into the playing — Eric Clapton, for instance, while mastering quite
a few of Buddy's old licks, never dared to follow him into that territory.
The downside of all this, unfortunately, is
that Stone Crazy! is really only
interesting when it comes to guitar solos — the song structures are as
generically 12-bar as they come, and the only thing that varies are tempos and
basic patterns (ʽShe's Out There Somewhereʼ is ʽDust My Broomʼ, ʽAre You Losing
Your Mind?ʼ is B. B. King, and only ʽYou've Been Gone Too Longʼ constructs its
vamp on the basis of Funkadelic's ʽHit It And Quit Itʼ, because, after all,
Buddy does know his way around the basics of R&B, soul, and funk — it's
just that the people of Toulouse expect him to play the blues, because it makes
for a good rhyme).
Anyway, highlights: ʽI Smell A Ratʼ (plaintive,
soulful, crazy aggressive guitar kicks in right away and almost never lets go);
ʽYou've Been Gone Too Longʼ (instrumental, funkadelicious, kick-ass energy, the
works); ʽWhen I Left Homeʼ (only partially — he makes a big case here out of
the alternation of loud and quiet bits, but there's way too little of that scorching soloing when it comes to «loud»,
and it comes in way too late, and all the rest of the time is Buddy Guy doing
his best Bobby Bland impersonation). The rest... ain't bad, really, just
nothing to write about. But as a whole, the album does have enough importance
and entertainment value to deserve a thumbs up: ʽI Smell A Ratʼ was probably the best
blues song to come out of 1979, even if the world couldn't care less at the
time.
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