BUDDY GUY: SLIPPIN' IN (1994)
1) I Smell Trouble; 2) Please
Don't Drive Me Away; 3) 7-11; 4) Shame, Shame, Shame; 5) Love Her With A
Feeling; 6) Little Dab-A-Doo; 7) Someone Else Is Steppin' In; 8) Trouble Blues;
9) Man Of Many Words; 10) Don't Tell Me About The Blues; 11) Cities Need Help.
This is as straightahead as it ever gets: nothing but pure electric
blues, eleven heads in a row, and not a single guest star in sight — an
impeccable experiment in the «can I do it alone?» genre. Of course, this also
makes it twice as hard to say anything uniquely meaningful about this album, unless
it is in the comparative genre... and it's not that difficult to slip into the
comparative genre here, considering how few originals there are. The choice of
covers is actually not all that trivial: for instance, there are two songs by Charles Brown, both of
which were covered in 1963 by Sam Cooke on his Night Beat album. Coincidence, or the result of some fortuitous
nighttime listen? There's Freddie King's ʽLove Her With The Feelingʼ redone in
the style of ʽHoochie Coochie Manʼ, because Buddy loves ʽHoochie Coochie Manʼ,
but he can't play ʽHoochie Coochie Manʼ on all
his albums, so a little strategic thought is in order here. There's Denise
LaSalle, there's Fenton Robinson... all sorts of interesting blues people that
rarely appear on the first pages of blues encyclopaedias. But, of course, it's
still just the blues.
Points worth mentioning, in addition to Buddy's
reliable vocals and guitar escapades, are: (a) a sweet appearance by legendary
Johnnie Johnson, Chuck Berry's pianist of choice, contributing a feather-light
(in the good sense of the word) solo on ʽ7-11ʼ; (b) a suitably comic
arrangement of ʽSomeone Else Is Steppin' Inʼ, with ridiculous «party noises» in
the background and a drunken choir joining in for the final line of the chorus
— but thanks, Mr. Guy, for reminding me where the Stones stole their ʽBlack
Limousineʼ from; (c) ʽTrouble Bluesʼ features a lo-fi production style, with plenty of hissing and crackling to
artificially age the song — see Mr. Guy flirt around with indie aesthetics!;
(d) ʽCities Need Helpʼ, one of the two originals, is Buddy adopting a socially
responsible posture — kind of like Bobby Bland on his moody, smoky early 1970s
records. He still cannot resist from the temptation to turn it into a guitar
pyrotechnics feast midway through, though, and I concur. Are we going to become
more socially conscious if Buddy Guy tells us that our cities need help? No.
But if he goes on beating the crap out of that guitar, who knows what changes
that might eventually bring about in our social consciousness.
In terms of beating the crap out, I would
probably single out ʽPlease Don't Drive Me Awayʼ, where the man brushes the
dust off the wah-wah pedal for a speedy, destroy-everything-in-its-path type of
solo, sometimes bordering on the psychedelic; and ʽSomeone Elseʼ, for such an
essentially comic number, also boasts a fairly mean tone, with each note
threatening to snap you in half. Beyond that, it's Buddy Guy and his
predictably ecstatic blues guitar — lots of improvising, not a lot of artistic
invention that could be correlated with words. Which means it is time to award
this album its well-deserved, if unexceptional, thumbs up and move on.
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