BUDDY GUY: SWEET TEA (2001)
1) Done Got Old; 2) Baby
Please Don't Leave Me; 3) Look What All You Got; 4) Stay All Night; 5) Tramp;
6) She Got The Devil In Her; 7) I Gotta Try You Girl; 8) Who's Been Fooling
You; 9) It's A Jungle Out There.
I have no idea what the title is supposed to
symbolize (was "sweet tea" the finest taste to be tasted by a young
Buddy during his early Louisiana days?), but the album is indeed Buddy's finest
in a long, long while. It continues the strange pattern of alternating a
rougher-edged, more aggressive and inventive record with a softer, calmer, more
commercial one — but there's something extra special here that was not seen
either in Damn Right or in Slippin' In, the two real good 'uns.
Perhaps it's his new band, now including Davey Faragher of Cracker on bass and
Jimbo Mathus of Squirrel Nut Zippers on second guitar, that gives Sweet Tea its edge — at the very least,
I can definitely vouch for Faragher as far as the bass goes, because this is
the first time we have such a deep, echoey, rumbling bass sound on a Buddy Guy
album, and I love it.
More generally, though, Sweet Tea sounds like it's out there to say something, not just to
show the world that Buddy Guy is still playing the blues. The first track is a
consciously laid trap — an acoustic moanin' blues, courtesy of the
then-recently deceased Junior Kimbrough, on which Buddy laments that he
"done got old" and that he can't look, walk, or love "like I
used to do", in the general fashion of an old Negro spiritual. Of course,
that's a ruse — already the second track, the lengthy, slow, threatening ʽBaby
Please Don't Leave Meʼ shows that getting old sure don't prevent Mr. Guy from
playing God of Thunder if he sets his heart to it. That great psychedelic
distorted tone is back, and coupled with Faragher's doom-laden bass sound, it
gets the old mojo workin' — the entire seven minutes seem like a voodooistic
ritual performed by the man to ensure that his baby don't leave him. And who
could, after such a performance?
A few tracks down the line, he tries to repeat
the exact same ritual with the even longer, but less effective ʽI Gotta Try You
Girlʼ — same bass, same tempo, same style of vocal incantation, but a little
less fury and a little more plodding with the solos; also, in this modern age
endless repetition of the lines "I gotta try you girl, we gotta make love
baby, no matter what you say girl" could get you arrested in some parts of
the country, but I guess this could probably never stop a real man like Mr.
Guy. Still, for about five or six minutes the ceremony can be just as breathtaking
as its shorter and angrier predecessor.
I am not going to launch into a detailed explanation
of the other tunes, of course — suffice it to say that there are many more
covers of the late Junior Kimbrough here, as well as some other blues pals of
Buddy's (CeDell Davis, Lowell Fulson, etc.), and only one «original» (ʽIt's A
Jungle Out Thereʼ, yet another bit of socially-conscious preaching on Buddy's
part that sounds like an imagination-less sequel to ʽCities Need Helpʼ). The
important thing are not the individual tunes, but the overall sound of the
album — that bass, that echo, that renewed ferociousness on those sharply tuned
guitars, well, it's not exactly a revolution, but it is the hugest and
brutal-est update of the Buddy Guy sound ever since the underrated Breaking Out experiment in 1980. And,
funniest of all, it is a huge f*ck-you to all those new generations of blues
players. Who would be the very first blues musician to come out with a solid
update of the blues idiom in the 21st century? A 65-year old native of Lettsworth,
Louisiana, that's who. Now let us see you top this, Mr. John Mayer. Thumbs up.
Really enjoyed this one George. Cranked up, the bass really gave my speakers a workout.
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