Venue:
CMAC Arts Center in Canandaigua, NY
Date: 13/07/2019
At 6:30 on the dot (or in this case, the polka dot) Buddy’s band fire up, to an auditorium that is barely one third full, out strides the man himself. If there’s one thing Buddy knows, it’s how to work a crowd. Even if it’s still daylight, most are still at the bar, and you are set up ten feet from the front of the stage.
Buddy works the “room”, exhorting one and all to sing along (and “not to f it up”). It works, and as more take their seats the better it gets. No precious promotion of the last album – he plays the songs he knows are most likely to be recognized. Opening with “Damn Right I’ve Got The Blues”, he gallops on into “Hoochie Coochie Man”, John Lee Hooker’s “Boom Boom” ,“Who’s Making Love To Your Old Woman” and “Cheaper To Keep Her” where he points out he didn’t write it, he just sings it. Anyone still on the fence is won over when Buddy strides out into the crowd to get up close and personal -well, with those of us in the more expensive seats anyway. I admit it – I was a foot away from Buddy Fucking Guy! Buddy exits to a standing ovation.
Next up, after just a 15 minute break are Gov’t Mule. Truth be told, my main reason for going. And sadly, I’m a bit underwhelmed. After Guy’s showboating Mule are just a little too detached. Interaction with the crowd is limited to a few words here and there, songs are played without introduction. Warren changes guitar after pretty much each song and no matter what his tech does, he seems to have to give each one a final tune. It’s not that they didn’t play well – some stunning slide on “Mule” and a glorious “Dreams”, a rousing “Lola Leave Your Light On”. But playing isn’t the same as performing.
It may have been Mule that tempted me to go, but the chance to see Skynyrd, even if Gary Rossington is the only remaining “original”, was the icing on the donkey. Officially it’s the “Last of the Street Survivors” tour, a farewell that started in May 2018 (dates have just been added that take the tour into November). Unofficially a fellow gig goer tells me it’s the “Boost the 401k (pension fund) Tour”. The band’s reception is more akin to a form of mass worship. Everyone knows what they are there for, and no one is going home disappointed.
Johnny Van Zandt has fronted the band longer than founder and brother Ronnie, and he’s the focal point, even if it’s Rickey Medlocke – tall, gaunt, with a shock of white hair and unbowed on stage by age or playing a Gibson Explorer – that draws the eye. The 15 song set list is pretty much 1976’s “One More From The Road” with “Searching”, “Crossroads” and “T For Texas” making way for “Skynyrd Nation” and “That Smell” and “The Ballad of Curtis Loew”. Van Zandt and Medlocke dart around the stage and seem to be having a blast, whilst the rest of the band only step out for choreographed moves or solos. Rossington is more understated, maybe he’s just not having so much fun. If it looked like a chore for anyone it was him.
After “Sweet Home Alabama” the band quit the stage but everyone knows there will be an encore, and everyone knows what it will be. Van Zant sings the initial verses before planting the mic stand stage front and center with brother Ronnies hat on top, the hammyness of the staging stopping short of turning to full cheese when a video of Ronnie takes over the vocal. It’s well done when it could easily have been over done. The Skynyrd Nation heads home, happy, homage paid.
The audience:
One MAGA t shirt, one NRA. Mostly over 60 and some of the most falling over drunk by the end I’ve ever seen at a gig. But all well behaved, and a venue with fantastic sound and really friendly staff
It made me think..
A few more bands need to take a leaf out of Buddy’s book.
Great when Buddy steers just the right side of overperforming. Nice review. Are you saying they played Free Bird as the encore ?
I touched Buddy Guy’s shoulder while he was doing his audience walk-around at a blues festival at Crystal Palace in the early ’90’s
He won’t have forgotten, I’m sure.
As a night of blues rock and boogie, you couldn’t complain about that line up. With decent North American summer evening weather, some bbq and beer, maybe a jazz cheroot, it would be fine ( as long as u had a chair).
I first saw Buddy with Junior in 1973. An epiphany hence my nom de plume.
Years later I was in Chicago for work and went to his Blues Bar. Jimmy Witherspoon was booked but was ill. Instead another hero of mine Otis Rush stood in. I left at 4 am he was still soloing away.
It was a smallish venue And sparsely attended. There was an area to the side of the stage with seats and a little fence around it. There sat Buddy and his entourage. I suspect he was there coz it was Otis playing.
I thought about telling him about my awe at seeing them when I was 16 and how I had loved the blues ever since. .. But I didnt.
I somehow acquired a hooky copy of a Buddy Guy & Junior Wells album “Alone & Acoustic” several years ago and it’s probably my favourite blues album. Just the two of them guitar, harmonica and voices. Fantastic stuff.
In lil’ ol’ New Zealand in the late sixties I somehow acquired a copy of Junior Wells’ “It’s My Life Baby!” LP, which Buddy is all over. I’d never heard anything like it. So loose and tight and raw and nothing like the English stuff (which had led me to it). I remember the sleeve notes too, which were typical of the time in that they were quite passionate and descriptive, especially of the ambience of the Chicago club where some of it was recorded. I think I’ll have to buy the actual album again as I can’t read the Google images! Anyway that’s Buddy Guy’s place in my musical upbringing.
Those Vanguard albums were fantastic. See also Comin At You by Jr, with Buddy on guitar. Mystery Train and a great version of Tobacco Road.