playin’ the blues
I’d like to offer my heartfelt thanks to the woman in the balcony who asked Buddy Guy to play “Feels Like Rain” last night.
That had to have been one of the most beautiful performances turned in on the Center for the Arts stage so far. Guy squeezed so much feeling from his guitar, bending a note and sustaining it until he nearly made that Fender weep.
He also gave the audience a lesson in singing the blues, teaching them how to savor the “rain …” from the chorus. He extended that advice to all things pleasurable.
“Whatever you’re doing in life,” he said, “hold it a little longer.”
Several times throughout the sold-out concert, the 71-year-old guitarist teased the possibility that he might play all night. He told the adoring audience he might move to Jackson Hole “so I can be just like a snowman.”
Guy rocked and rolled, playfully engaging the crowd, blowing the eardrums one moment before dropping to a hush the next. His show was a tour through blues history, with stops at Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, John Lee Hooker, Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton.
With a bluesman’s swagger, he sang of cheating wives and sad dreams, wailing through classics like “Hoochie Coochie Man” and “Someone Else is Slippin’ In.”
“I know how to play so funky you can smell it,” he declared.
The high point of the show had to be his trademark tour through the crowd, which came during the song “Drowning on Dry Land.”
Toting his guitar around the theater while playing wirelessly through an amp, Guy made the rounds, strutting back and forth across the middle of the orchestra before heading to the balcony for a rousing solo.
It was during this tour of the balcony that a fan requested “Feels Like Rain,” a song written by John Hiatt. Guy obliged when he returned to the stage.
The nearly 90-minute set was certainly the most dynamic (and loudest) concert yet in the center’s plush new theater. Several people in the wings of the balcony spent the night on their feet, a first for the facility. Guy even allowed a fan to reach out and strum his guitar.
When it was over, we spilled out into the street to a flood of moonlight over Cache Creek. Guy’s singing and playing were still ringing in our heads. It was a moment to hold a little longer.
