BUDDY GUY: FEELS LIKE RAIN (1993)
1) She's A Superstar; 2) I Go
Crazy; 3) Feels Like Rain; 4) She's Nineteen Years Old; 5) Some Kind Of
Wonderful; 6) Sufferin' Mind; 7) Change In The Weather; 8) I Could Cry; 9) Mary
Ann; 10) Trouble Man; 11) Country Man.
The success of Damn Right, I've Got The Blues gave birth to a prolific pattern to
which Buddy has more or less conformed ever since, releasing a steady stream of
records with one or two year intervals that are pretty much interchangeable,
some being slightly more and some slightly less interesting, of course —
essentially, though, lovers of Buddy will want to savor them all, while those
who are largely indifferent to modern electric blues might just pay a little
attention to those few tracks on which Buddy's guitar playing occasionally
transcends the genre's limitations.
Feels
Like Rain, unfortunately, has
no such tracks. Like its predecessor, it is a mish-mash of some really old
blues tunes, some comparably old R&B hits, and a few contemporary, but
still retro-oriented compositions — all of them impeccably played and produced,
and featuring some guest stars to boost up sales; this time, though, Buddy goes
with some lesser profiles, the most notable of the lot probably being Bonnie
Raitt and Paul Rodgers, and with John Mayall and Travis Tritt in tow. Accusations
of «pandering to mainstream tastes», which sometimes accompany descriptions of
this record, are a little misguided: with or without all these people, Feels Like Rain would still feel
exactly like Buddy Guy — if he choked the arrangements up with solemn
synthesizer parts, or started studying Madchester beats, that'd be a whole
other story, but these guys are just
following the boss' directions, 'sall.
What is actually much worse than abstract
«pandering to the mainstream» is the inclusion of all those covers. What
business does Buddy really have in
trying to not just cover Muddy Waters' ʽShe's Nineteen Years Oldʼ, but to
actually imitate Muddy, both in his
vocals and his guitar playing? It's one thing to adapt the song to his own
style, but have we all lost access to the old records or something? Is the intended
target audience of the cover supposed to consist of people who'd never ever want to listen to a song from 1958
because it's, like, all mono and shit? It's not very likely that those same
people would be interested in investing their money in a record by an old
geezer who was 22 himself in 1958. Likewise, it is not very uplifting when he
tries to appeal to the James Brown fanbase (ʽI Go Crazyʼ) or, God help us, the
Grand Funk Railroad fanbase (ʽSome Kind Of Wonderfulʼ — which most people
certainly associate with GFR rather than Soul Brothers Six) instead.
My own favorite tracks here are the two
blues-rock rave-ups that bookmark the album and are credited to Buddy himself —
ʽShe's A Superstarʼ and ʽCountry Manʼ (not that he had much to compose on
either one, except for some new lyrical lines). Totally generic in basic form,
they are simply used by Buddy as launchpads for some major master soloing, with
heavy wah-wah support and a speedy, guitar-throttling approach where his note
sequences cover each other like rippling waves, rather than jagged, broken,
dissonant patterns that he favors more often. The words of ʽCountry Manʼ, which
he delivers like a passionate defense speech in court ("I'm a country man,
baby, you know I ain't ashamed / That's why I'm crazy 'bout my guitar, that's
why I surely will keep on playing"), ring a little strange, seeing as how
Buddy was always professionally associated with «urban» Chicago blues — but
then again, he did spend all of his childhood in Lettsworth, Louisiana, and if
he means that it is precisely this rustic pedigree that gives him the strength
and the stubborness to push on in his «conservatively innovative» manner, more
power to the man, I say. He certainly plays the hell out of his guitar on that
track as if each new verse he delivers on the subject provides him with extra
strength to do it.
If you are in the mood to relax a little, the
title track, written by John Hiatt and sung and played by Buddy in a duet with
Bonnie Raitt, will do a reasonably good job as well. Nothing particularly
special on the hook / riff / arrangement front, but Bonnie's slide playing is
always welcome, and her raspy vocal support in the background feels... well,
suffice it to say that there's a pleasantly optimistic vibe to all of this, and
that Buddy's singing is almost unusually sensitive and vulnerable, compared to
his usual standards.
That said, three songs to salvage out of eleven
is not a particularly awesome quota; and the rest, ranging from the puzzling (dueting
with Paul Rodgers on ʽSome Kind Of Wonderfulʼ? How gauche!) to the unremarkable
(dueting with John Mayall on ʽI Could Cryʼ? How... nostalgic...), are nothing
to write home about. Of course, that did not stop the man from scooping up yet another Grammy here for «best
contemporary blues album» — for almost total lack of competition, I suppose —
but honestly, it does not seem as if the guy was trying too hard here.
Fortunately, he would begin pinching himself way hard for the next release, just in the nick of time to escape
being pegged down as a particularly smelly dinosaur.
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