One of Buddy Guy’s most memorable performances is on the song “First Time I Met the Blues.” It’s a life-changing supernatural being in Guy’s telling, as scary as it is inspiring.

    Scott Holt, who will play Jan. 21 at Buddy Guy’s Legends, can relate. In his late teens while growing up in Tennessee, he became obsessed with the guitar and Jimi Hendrix. After six months of playing all day, every day, he saw Hendrix’s inspiration, Buddy Guy, in concert. When he met Guy later that night, Holt couldn’t even speak.

    “My father took me to his show and afterward he was talking to Buddy, explaining my music obsession to him; he had to do all the talking because I was just starstruck,” Holt recalls with a laugh. “But Buddy invites me to his hotel room the next day, and there we were sitting across from each other playing guitars and him telling me stories about Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson, Muddy Waters. I didn’t understand the depths of what was happening, but it was the beginning of what has been a 20-year friendship.”

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

  
Eric Clapton performs at Crossroads Guitar Festival on Saturday. (Tribune photo by William DeShazer) View more Crossroads pictures HERE.

    In the months leading up to his Crossroads Guitar Festival on Saturday at Toyota Park in south suburban Bridgeview, Eric Clapton had been saying it would be his last.

    After a decade of uncertainty, Buddy Guy’s Legends finally has a new home – and it’s a lavish improvement on just about anything the venerable Chicago blues scene has ever seen.