NICE GUY FINISHES FIRST : After Years of Playing in the Shadows, Bluesman Buddy Guy Takes the Spotlight

There may be no musician more aptly named than Buddy Guy. Eric Clapton has cited the Chicago bluesman as not only “by far and without a doubt the best guitar player alive” but also as a great, warm human being. Onstage, he’s such a crowd-pleaser that he often seems to be pulled in 10 directions at once.

He’s the sort of family man who, when he has a day off touring, will fly home to mow the lawn or blow the snow. Once when he was a guest on a fellow bluesman’s album, contractual reasons prohibited them from listing him as Buddy Guy, so they used the pseudonym “Friendly Chap.”

But his amiability hasn’t always worked in his favor. Despite his flamboyant showmanship onstage, the 56-year-old hasn’t been the sort to put himself forward. In interviews, he would speak in reverent tones of the Chicago originators he’d worked with, such as Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, or he would heap praise on the players he’d influenced like Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck or Stevie Ray Vaughan.

In the meantime, he’d gone 12 years without having a record out, and he says now that his earlier recordings were compromised by his kowtowing to producers who toned down the wild enthusiasm he brought to his live shows.

“They wouldn’t let me record like I was doing in person with that wide-open blastin’ distortion,” Guy recalled last week from a tour stop in Portland, Ore. “They were telling me, ‘Don’t come in with the noise like that.’ So I didn’t know what the hell I was doing because I was always being told I didn’t have nothing special, and that’s all I knew. I always doubted myself.”

He is feeling a little more confident now that he has been able to record a couple of albums the way he likes. The first, 1991’s “Damn Right, I’ve Got the Blues,” won him a Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Album, five blues-world W.C. Handy Awards, and gold-record status in several countries. There’s little reason to doubt that his newly released “Feels Like Rain” will follow suit.

Actually, the live sound with which Guy is now connecting (he’ll be at the Coach House tonight night with John Mayall) can be a blues purist’s nightmare. He’ll apply the same over-distorted volume and flashy speed that British players used to excess; he’ll jump styles five times in a solo; he’ll mug, clown and go through some of the most grandstanding stage antics since ‘50s New Orleans bluesman Guitar Slim. Yet, despite--or perhaps because of--his inattention to form, Guy’s music comes across with a volcanic force, overwhelming listeners with his passion and love of the blues.

He was born in Lettsworth, La., and had only heard blues music on the radio when one day traveling musician Lightnin’ Slim came through the farming town with an electric guitar, plugged his amp into an outlet outside the market, and commenced to playing “Boogie Chillen.” The young Guy gave his allowance to Slim so he’d play it again. Guy soon got a guitar himself and started playing in nearby Baton Rouge.

In 1958, he took a bus to Chicago but, hungry and daunted by the big city, he decided almost immediately to return home. Fate interceded in the form of Muddy Waters, a salami sandwich and a late night jam session. Befriended by the elder blues master, Guy stayed in Chicago, playing and recording with Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson and other Chess Records artists, as well as performing solo and establishing a long musical partnership with harmonica player Junior Wells.

Guy said he was unaware that the music was gaining notice beyond Chicago’s South Side. The first inkling came when white kids Paul Butterfield and Mike Bloomfield started showing up in the clubs.

“The first thing we thought was that they must be cops, because there wasn’t no white people listening to no blues then,” Guy said. He soon found that there was a hot new generation of guitar slingers influenced by his work.

“The same time producers were trying to get me to stop sounding like me, it turns out Jimi and Eric and these other guys was picking little licks from me,” he said, referring to Hendrix and Clapton, who at that time was playing with Mayall. “Eric and Beck both told me they were into country and Western until they first heard me on an album (the live “Folk Festival of the Blues”) playing behind Muddy and Wolf. They said that turned them around.”

Guy said it never struck him as out of place that white British kids would be emulating Chicago’s tough music.

“If musicians tell you the truth, we’re all doing somebody’s music. I think music don’t come in the length of hair or the color of skin. Music speaks in all languages and nationalities. I just think that any man that’s interested in playing an instrument and loving it the way I love it--the way I’m sure those kids loved it--they’re going to be pretty good at it.

“Back in the early ‘60s, Chicago and Chess Records was the only place putting out that type of music, that guitar and harmonica stuff, so it was like a magnet. The first place I saw the Rolling Stones was leaning against a wall at Chess in the ‘60s, because Chess was the record company then if that was the sound you liked. And these players helped a lot of us, introduc ing us back when people didn’t know who the hell we were.”

Though Guy became internationally known to blues fans and has been able to make a solid living playing clubs and festivals, he went through the ‘80s without a record. He was told that when his name was mentioned during that time to a major label representative, the response was, “Isn’t he 90 years old? I thought he retired.”

“All that time it was flashing back in my face that I didn’t have anything to offer. Back when the record people wouldn’t let me cut loose in the studio I always thought, ‘Well, I have to learn something more.’ Then I woke up and I’m damn near 60 and I said, ‘Well, if I ain’t learned something by now that somebody can pay attention to, it’s getting pretty late. The sun’s going down on me, so it’s time to give this Buddy Guy lick a try.’

“A couple of years ago some record people asked me if I had anything new and I said, ‘Well, yeah, I got something new, because whatever I got is new because you all ain’t never let me use it no way.’ ”

When Silvertone Records (which also records Mayall and J.J. Cale) offered to let him record the way he wanted to, Guy jumped at the chance.

“I said, ‘Thank God.’ Things finally went my way, and my way wasn’t too bad, so they say, because it did get me a Grammy,” Guy said slyly. “On ‘Damn Right, I got the Blues’ I played my guitar as close to the way I do in person as I could, and I’m intending to even get more of the performance of Buddy Guy live in there.”

That ‘live’ quality is one of the liveliest anywhere. In performance Guy’s guitar and expressive voice don’t so much utter as they erupt, in a flow unchecked by premeditation or fear of mistakes. Guy can’t say that there’s a logic to it.

“To be honest, what goes on in my head is going straight through my fingers. I’m just hoping I can play enough good notes to make someone pay attention to me and say, ‘He’s not too bad at all.’

Referring to shows with Clapton at London’s Royal Albert Hall in recent years, he said, “I don’t rehearse at all. I was doing some things with Eric. I came in to rehearse with them and he said, ‘What are you, crazy? Why’d you come here?’ I said I’d come to rehearse and he said, ‘Go on back. You ain’t going to play it like you rehearsed it noways.’

“And that’s true. I never had any schooling in how or what to play. I just loved the damn guitar so much I didn’t care if I made a mistake, it sounded good to me. I just give you the best I got.”

His new “Feels Like Rain” album stretches over broader territory than most blues artists assay, from the title track by John Hiatt to a funky version of Marvin Gaye’s “Trouble Man.”

“When I did (“Trouble Man”) their mouths dropped wide open in the studio. They said, ‘I didn’t know you could do that.’ I said, ‘What the hell do you think I was doing before I was Buddy Guy?’ I had to do everybody’s tunes, because I wasn’t the best guitar player in Chicago. They had Earl Hooker, Freddie King, Magic Sam, all these guys who could wipe you out with that damn guitar so bad. I had to play Little Richard, Fats Domino, Jackie Wilson and everybody else to keep audiences happy.”

He recorded 19 songs for the new album including some slow blues, but the tracks that predominate on the finished product are bright, up-tempo pieces.

“We got down in the alley on it, but also we were trying to get some of the bigger radio stations that do not play Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf to hopefully feel that maybe some of it would fit on their station. What’s unfit about the blues I do not know. But I told myself if I get slick enough, they might play it on this big rock station. Then, if a kid buys the album, he’ll find (Waters’) ‘Nineteen Years Old’ right next to that song. I was trying to outsmart them. I don’t know yet if it will work.”

With Waters and so many other seminal bluesmen now gone, Guy said he feels a responsibility to keep the music vital. He owns a blues club, Legends, in Chicago that two nights a weeks opens its stage to young players so they can hone their chops.

He thinks the music is a bridge to understanding that the world needs very much right now. Even though he came up in the rough and sometimes violent clubs of the South Side, Guy claims “the whole world is worse now than it was. It’s not safe, I don’t care where you go now. I don’t think it’s all a racial thing. There are neighborhoods I hate to go through, and I’m black as tar.

“I wish we could make people respect one another a little more than what we do now. My family raised me to respect someone if you want to be respected, and I don’t think people nowadays look at it that way. It’s every man looking out for himself in a dog-eat-dog world.

“I think people are just mad about the way things are. The question that’s asked of me most is, ‘To be a good blues player do you have to live it?’ They mean living below the poverty line, the way I was brought up. I look around now and think if that’s the case, if things don’t change in the next few years, we’re going to have quite a few blues players, ain’t we?”