INTERESTING READ (Page 1 of 2)

He's right on the money about Buddy Guy. I saw him on a bill @ BB's annual Blues Brews & BBQ about 5 years ago and he never played one song start to finish and stopping to say he taught Jimi this and that. It really amounted to about an hour of hot air and became annoying early on. I would have paid the same price to hear more of Tommy Castro and Susan Tedeschi and then straight into BB. It was about as obnoxious as watching the Los Lonely Boys when they bring their father out and he hogs the rest of the show like that's what everybody came to see.

                                                                                      Gimme My $$$$$'s Worth,

                                                                                      J Dawg

It's ironic that tickets for this show in D.C. went on sale today. The line-up sounds close to the same. This review is from 2004?. It's not just Buddy Guy riding the tide of their past with an air of entitlement. Taj Mahal, Bobby Rush..to name a few. They are the "monsters" that "we" as a collective audience have made them. Too much guilt about how unfairly they were treated in the past. The problem with all this is it crowds out the up and coming players, like Joe, who will own the blues of the future....Cathy

I've seen Guy when he was "on." And it was truly an amazing experience. Guy when he's "on" smokes any blues guitarist on the planet.

Of course when you've done it as long as he has and only relatively recently gotten the respect you've deserved, I'll give him a free pass.

I saw Buddy a couple years ago, and it was the same. More, "See, I can play this **## too", while playing an endless stream featuring fragments of Cream, Hendrix and John Lee Hooker covers. I think there may have been one original song played the whole night. Too much of that, and not enough Buddy. When he has so many excellent songs that are his to choose from, why spend the whole evening playing covers? Hell, even after he left the stage the band ended with an instrumental version of "Smoke On The Water". But, he's a great entertainer, I'll give him that. What he did play was excellent, but it's more of him going through the motions these days. I hail him for being one of the greatest guitarists ever, that can't be denied, it's too bad he doesn't show it enough these days.

great point joe

When he hits the stage you just FEEL him!!!

                                                                                   J Dawg

We're not talking about sports. Sports have numbers you can measure. Music is trickier. Point is, when Joe has the influence and clout that Buddy Guy and BB King have, then we can talk. Joe would probably say the same thing. Joe is great, one of the best of his generation. He's definitely my favorite of the new guys. But you can't deny BB and Buddy's influence. That goes for Hubert Sumlin too. Those guys can still walk on stage, play one note, and blow everybody away. Period.

When Buddy Guy can take John mayer on stage and John puts his guitar down and walks off the stage because he is not worthy, that speaks volumes. This is what the blues is all about, and what makes it completely different to other genres of music. It's reverence of the past. When Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf are still spoken of as contemporary, that is showing extreme respect for the past and the history. Now, granted, sometimes the blues needs to be taken out of the past a little bit so that it will evolve, but what makes the blues so dynamic is that past and the present are equally important. They are not simply discarded.