[Slowhand] Re: Buddy Guy

[DeltaNick]

>>"Eric Clapton is the most important and influential guitar player that has ever lived, is still living or ever will live. Do yourself a favor, and don't debate me on this. Before Clapton, rock guitar was the Chuck Berry method, modernized by Keith Richards, and the rockabilly sound -- Scotty Moore, Carl Perkins, Cliff Gallup -- popularized by George Harrison. Clapton absorbed that, then introduced the essence of black electric blues -- the power and vocabulary of Buddy Guy, Hubert Sumlin and the three Kings, B.B., Albert and Freddy -- to create an attack that defined the fundamentals of rock & roll lead guitar. Maybe most important of all, he turned the amp up -- to eleven. That alone blew everybody's mind in the mid-Sixties. In the studio, he moved the mike across the room from the amp, which added ambience; everybody else was still close-miking. Then he cranked the fucking thing. Sustain happened; feedback happened. The guitar player suddenly became the most important guy in the band. When he soloed, he wrote wonderful symphonies from classic blues licks in that fantastic tone, with all of the resonance that comes from distortion. You could sing his solos like songs in themselves. The thing is, he had seven years of the most extraordinary, historic guitar playing ever -- and thirty-five years of doing good work. Being the best has got to wear you out. So he pulled back, like Dylan and Lennon did. Anyone who plays lead guitar owes him a debt of gratitude. He wrote the fundamental language, the binary code, that everyone uses to this day in every form of popular music. The day may come, if you're a young rocker, when you'll hear one of Clapton's mellow, contemporary ballads on the radio and think, "What's the big deal? . Put on "Steppin' Out." And bow down" (Little Steven, "The Immortals: The 100 Greatest Artists Of All Time-53) Eric Clapton," "Rolling Stone," 21 April 2005 (#972), p. 52.) <<





> Buddy Guy was doing many of these things before Clapton. Buddy was way before his time and an influence to Jimi Hendrix. <




Yes, Buddy Guy did "some" of these things with his amplification, probably before Eric Clapton ever picked up a guitar. But Buddy Guy didn't perfect it, and Buddy Guy didn't change the parameters of the electric guitar by popularizing anything worldwide, as Eric Clapton did. Furthermore, Buddy Guy didn't do it nearly to the extent that Eric Clapton did. And he didn't have the powerful amplification that Clapton had in the 1960s.

 

In any case, with Guy, this was mostly a "by product" of an amplifier turned up too loud: he played with it, he toyed with it, it was a gimmick. But he didn't really "employ" it the same way Clapton did.



Buddy Guy is one of the great bluesmen, but I think you're really overstating his influence here. Yes, he influeneced Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix and a handful of others. But Eric Clapton influenced several generations of not only blues and rock guitarists, but guitarists from the jazz genre and other genres as well. And I think Buddy Guy will be the first one to tell you this.



                DeltaNick


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