Buddy Guy's 'Blues Singer'

Buddy Guy lives in my hometown. I'm not talking about Chicago, I'm talking about Flossmoor, a particularly white, southern \nsuburb of the city.\nFlossmoor is an isolated place. Buried beneath cavernous oak trees, it is surrounded by mildly dangerous, lower-class black towns like Ford Heights, Hazel Crest, Country Club Hills and Middle America -- consumer culture riddled (you know, business parks and endless strip malls), asphalt suburbs. You can't park a pickup truck in your driveway in Flossmoor, or leave your lawn unmowed -- it's against the law. The town was built up around Western Ave. as a weekend and summer retreat for rich, city businessmen.\nI'm not trying to suggest that Buddy Guy has sold-out or become a forgetful, middle-class black, because he's still an oddity in the town. He can often be found sitting on a lawn chair in front of his nuevo mansion, jerry-curl in full regala and having as little to do with the politics of Flossmoor as the blues should.\nOriginally born in Lettsworth, La., Guy moved up to Chicago, as many bluesmen had, in the late '50s. He became part of a kind of second-wave of urban blues guitar virtuosos. Eventually, he was more noted for his live act than the blues singles he put out on the Chicago-based Chess label.\nAnd so it went. He became a legend in his adopted hometown, and sat on his status for years. He had a comeback, at least in celebrity, in 1991 when his first album in a decade, Damn Right, I've Got the Blues, won a Grammy. He could often be found playing or hanging out at Legends, his Chicago blues club. But it was as if he was going through the motions, using an extra long guitar cord so he could walk into the audience and say, "How you doin' tonight?" to random patrons as he played fluid impersonations of himself.\nSo what is the big deal now about an acoustic record by another bloated, famous musician? Especially when said bloated musician's new record features pervasive guest whores B.B. King and Eric Clapton.\nTwo things gave hope for Guy's new album, Blues Singer. One was 2001's Sweet Tea, a celestial, psychedelic blues album that literally came out of nowhere. Working from the studio of the same name in deep Mississippi with the noted blues purists of the Fat Possum label, he created an album that was unlike any other in his career. The songs were unknown and Guy screamed his way through them rather than using his crusty, falsetto whine. And for the first time he sounded desperate. Not for the adoration or the cash money, but for the music to be successful on its own terms.\nThe second thing that gives hope to Blues Singer is that rats were found at 754 South Wabash -- Legends. This may seem unremarkable, perhaps a bit disturbing to former visitors, but something about the news item struck me as uplifting. Rather than covering up the grit in a wash of neon and glass, hence making it a fine place for middle-class day tripping, there were rats running around Guy's blues club. It only seems ambiently correct.\nSo is Blues Singer the acoustic flip side of Sweet Tea? Is Guy's newfound integrity still intact?\nDespite using the same studio and the same producer, the answer is a very disappointed and grimly stated no. Guy's delicate falsetto is back and so are the uninspired covers. The performances are wooden and the licks extremely obvious. King and Clapton's turns aren't quite overbearing, but wholly unnecessary. \nIf you want to hear a 40th or 56th version of Skip James' "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues" or John Lee Hooker's "Crawling King Snake Blues," by all means listen to the disc, but Guy's versions are far from revelatory. Because also gone is the Fat Possum band, now replaced by the likes of Tony Garnier (a veteran of Lucinda Williams and Carly Simon sessions) on bass and famed studio drummer Jim Keltner (a former Fiona Apple and James Taylor sideman). These characters have very little to do with Diaspora sound, and fail to take the music to any significant place. \nThe hoodoo-voodoo conjuring of Sweet Tea is completely absent, which leads me to hypothesize that Guy recorded this album in Flossmoor, not southern Mississippi. Blues Singer reminds me of past Fourth of July's in my hometown, sitting on a hill at the local country club to watch the fireworks as night fell. Little kids hunker in awe as their rounded fathers puff on cigars with content smiles upon their faces and one eye to the revelry of their children. The fathers are proud of themselves, as they should be, because they've earned their way in the world and the Fourth is merely a manifestation of their success.\nIt's these kids that become problematic, they see the fathers' hubris as given and not earned and expect it too. They are privileged and unmoved by anything but drugs and sex, and then they make bands with those two things as the goals. Perhaps they perform some blues numbers, and they kind of sound like those on Blues Singer.