Album review: Buddy Guy, 'Living Proof'
3 stars (out of 4)
Albums by aging stars pondering their mortality have become a cottage industry since Johnny Cash started working with producer Rick Rubin in the ‘90s. Since then, everyone from Gil Scott-Heron to Tom Jones has been making back-to-basics albums that deal at least peripherally with life’s long, final fade.
Buddy Guy, no stranger to songs dealing with chilling realities, addresses his 74 years with a mixture of drama and bravado on “Living Proof” (Silvertone) aided by producer, drummer and co-songwriter Tom Hambridge. Loosely tracing Guy’s life story from his boyhood on a Louisiana sharecropping farm to his current status as a septuagenarian blues icon, the album is free of the guest stars that have occasionally diluted the artist’s past efforts. The exceptions are cameos by Carlos Santana and B.B. King, with whom Guy sings an affectionate, low-key duet.
The production is a bit slick, the Chicago-style blues vamps fairly predictable. But Guy is still a menacing guitarist. On “74 Years Young,” he starts out acoustic, almost muted, as the singer measures how much time he’s got left. Then, about 90 seconds in, he cuts loose on electric guitar, not so much a solo as a bazooka blast of clustered notes. “Thank Me Someday,” “On the Road” and “Too Soon” all give Guy plenty of room to make the ground shake, and “Skanky” dispenses with vocals altogether so that Guy can make his ax swoop. At his best, Guy’s lust for violence and distortion has more in common with the late free-jazz master Sonny Sharrock or Sonic Youth than it does classic blues. Amid the album’s stolid, sometimes plodding traditionalism, Guy’s shrapnel-tossing tone brings some much-needed tension and surprise.
greg@gregkot.com