A couple of nights ago a friend (with obvious music industry connections) emailed me and asked if I would like to attend a Buddy Guy concert at the Forum in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.  Two free tickets would be waiting at the door and I was to be his guest.

 “Buddy Guy?”  I thought after replying.  “Who the hell is Buddy Guy?”  I’ve followed music pretty actively over the past 30 years but a quick brain scan of everything that I knew about Buddy Guy yielded only a faint image of some old Chicago blues guy, somewhat flashy, who played guitar loudly.

We got to the Forum and tickets had been left at the window as promised.  An usher led us to our seats.  We kept going and going and going, closer and closer to the stage until the usher could go no more.  He directed us to two seats in the very front row - right beneath the headliner’s microphone.  We were so close that most of the fury from stage seemed to fly over our heads like a storm over a bunker.  But what we may have missed in audio assault, we more than made up for in proximity to the performer. Had I wished, I could have reached over and tied Guy’s shoe laces together while he played his guitar in front of me. 

 I had no idea what to expect.  But to my pleasant surprise, I discovered that Buddy Guy is not just some “old blues guy”.  He’s an engaging entertainer - not a scripted entertainer in the Las Vegas / Branson sense (although I’m sure he’s done some of that in his career) but one who entertains by looking deeply and thoughtfully into his repertoire of skills and experiences to find something meaningful for his audience each night.  Every night.  He wasn’t bitter or burned out or any of those things that seem to haunt a lot of the old players who feel that time and notoriety have passed them by.  He struck me as warm and genuine.  He’s been doing this every night for probably 50 years yet this show seemed fresh and vital.  

 He has a fan-base that can only be described as “rabid”.  They came in a bewildering array of old Buddy Guy tour shirts and hollered his name relentlessly, screaming from the back of the auditorium that he was the best and generally detracting from the quality of the show.  Throughout the evening, he constantly had to “shhhhh” them so that he could make his more subtle points. 

 “Did you bring your tools?” he asked a young 17 year-old guitar player in the audience. “You gotta bring your tools,"  Guy told him, "otherwise how you gonna do your work?  If you’re a bricklayer and you don’t bring your tools," he mock lectured to the hoots and howls of the crowd, " you ain’t gonna lay no brick!”  Guy eventually invited him up and let the young man play the old man’s guitar.  The kid rocked.

 Buddy Guy’s biggest tool is his guitar, which he plays in an aggressive, stinging style of plucked and stretched strings reminiscent of B. B. King only rougher and more physical.  Alternating between full-force, full volume attack and playing so softly that he could barely be heard, Guy mixed his own material with blues classics and then combined it with work from Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Marvin Gaye and others.  Guy and his band slipped effortlessly from blues to rock, jazz to funk, producing a full-throttle sound that was as contemporary as it was timeless.

 But what impressed me the most was his ability to convey so much emotion, so much anguish and joy with his voice while barely making a sound.   For stretches he sang barely a note, letting his body language and facial expressions sing for him.  Clinching his fists, buckling his knees and howling from deep within, he was able to produce a maximum of emotion from an absolute minimum of sound.  The man can do a solo with his face alone. 

Buddy Guy has the tools and he brought them.  All of them.  He’s much more than an old blues guy.  On this night he definitely laid brick.