When I Left Home (24 page)
Authors: Buddy Guy
When we arrived, someone said that, aside from performing, we were expected to conduct an afternoon “workshop.” When I asked what that that meant, the man said, “It’s where you play and talk about how you make your music. People can ask you questions. It’s very informal and gives the fans a chance to understand why you do what you do.”
Sounded good to me.
“How many people turn up for these things?” I asked.
“A few dozen. We put you in a tent and set up folding chairs.”
Me and Junior got there early to set up. Turned out that the tent was already filled with people, so they had to move us to a giant-sized tent. That got filled up in a hurry. People were standing everywhere. In the end, where some of the other workshops had as many as a hundred fans, ours had thousands.
George Wein, the fellow who ran the festival, ran around saying, “Who the hell are these guys?”
He had never heard of Buddy Guy and Junior Wells—but the fans had.
That same year I was booked into the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. This was my first real taste of the hippie scene. I didn’t go looking for any these hippie bands, but they found me. Jefferson Airplane, for example, called me to open their shows.
I was a little nervous before playing the Avalon. The white hippie musicians liked me, but would their fans follow? Did they want me to play Tex Ritter songs? Did they want rock and roll? Couldn’t be sure. I wasn’t about to take no chances, so I lit up the Avalon. I gave ’em my best balls-out Guitar Slim show. I was hanging from the rafters, blasting my shit until all them hippies looked like they were climaxing from good sex.
Sex was on my mind because of all the free-love talk. I found me a couple of hippie chicks during that trip and had a nice taste of what they’d been talking about. Yes, sir, I didn’t see nothing wrong with no free love.
My hit with the hippies got me booked into New York. I was excited because it was my first time playing the big city. The joint was called the Scene, and the Chamber Brothers were on the bill with me. God knows what I did that night—played the guitar between my legs, over my back, on top of my head.
During a break Waterman said, “Hendrix is here. He wants to tape you. He wants to jam with you.”
I remember hearing Hendrix’s name from that time in Toronto, but I still wasn’t all that sure who he was. Hadn’t heard no records by him and didn’t know what the fuss was about.
“Sure,” I said. “Let him record. Let him jam.”
He came in with a reel-to-reel recorder that he set up in front of the bandstand. Can’t remember the song we did, but he joined in with no problems. Said he was used to being in the background. He had a wild look but a shy manner. When it was time for him to solo, I heard him as a good bluesman who, like me, went looking for new sounds and didn’t mind if he got a little lost along the way. He had a wah-wah pedal and used it to make certain points. Earl Hooker had that pedal earlier, but Hendrix leaned on it much heavier than Earl did. I could hear that Hendrix was something else.
After the set he thanked me.
“You’re one of my teachers,” he said.
I was flattered, but I couldn’t remember getting paid for any lessons. I wished him luck and never saw him again.
Our first white fans were musicians who came to the black side of Chicago and sat in. Michael Bloomfield, Paul Butterfield, Steve Miller, and Elvin Bishop were some of those cats leading the early charge. When they got famous with bands of their own, they never forgot us. They told the press, “Listen to Muddy and Walter. Check out the Wolf and John Lee. Don’t forget Buddy. These are the originals.” I wasn’t an original, but I was glad to be named in that company.
When the British guys like John Mayall, Eric, Beck, Mick, and Keith hit it big over here, they also put their money where their mouth was. When they toured, they had us open for them and told their fans, “These are real cats. Buy their records. Give ’em their dues.”
In 1969 the State Department had me go all over East and West Africa. I took my brother Phil along so he might heal quicker from the death of our parents. We had to get eighteen shots before we took off, and I was a little nervous about what I’d find. I knew Africa was nothing like the Tarzan movies I’d seen as a kid, but what would it be like?
Every country was different. Many were primitive, with topless women washing their clothes in a ditch. Other places were more modern. The Peace Corps people were there to escort us. We ate in the homes of diplomats. When our driver wasn’t invited in to eat with us, though, I got mad. Inside the diplomat had air conditioning, while outside it was 120 degrees. I told the diplomat I couldn’t sit down at his table knowing that the driver was about to have a heat stroke. The diplomat was black, but I could see that he looked down on the driver because the driver’s skin wasn’t black enough. His skin was lighter. Interesting to see that certain black-on-black prejudices in Africa were opposite ours. For way too long African Americans saw light as better. In Africa I heard some say dark is better. None of it makes sense. It ain’t better or worse; it’s just different. All prejudice is fucked up.
I met Idi Amin, who requested that I play. Naturally, I did. I didn’t know it, but around this same time he was cutting off people’s heads. I played best as I could, but later I thought,
Man, what if I had hit the wrong notes?
Man, what if I had hit the wrong notes?
Someone asked me when I got back to Chicago if going to Africa felt like going home.
“No,” I said. It opened my eyes to a lot of things. I thought I knew poor before, but African poor was on a deeper level. Of course I related to people with skin the color of mine. And I heard music and saw dancing that was new to me but also very old. I felt Africa deep in my soul. But it wasn’t my home. Sure, it was the original home, but my real home was Louisiana. Nothing would ever change that.
A few weeks after I was back in the States I ran into B. B. at O’Hare Airport. Both our planes were late, so we had time for coffee.
“We ships passing in the night, ain’t we, B?”
“Helluva thing, Buddy,” he said. “I’m just lucky to keep working.”
“Man, you always gonna be working. You B. B. King.”
“The real truth is that I was just about to lose my audience—what with black folks making money, going middle class, and not wanting to hear no blues.”
“That audience is just about gone, B.”
“Sure is. But here we are playing to a bigger audience that’s white and don’t have none of their parents’ prejudices.”
“It’s a beautiful thing,” I agreed.
“Wasn’t for these English acts, I’d be playing a bar in Three Mule, Mississippi. Here I am on my way to Fillmore East in New York City. I think Bill Graham got me booked with the Byrds. Where you off to, Buddy?”
“A traveling hippie festival in Canada. We going by train to four or five different cities. They say it’s gonna be bigger than Woodstock.”
“Hendrix on it?”
“Don’t think so,” I said. “But Janis Joplin is.”
“You ain’t fixing to mess with any of those hippie girls, are you, Buddy?”
“Only every chance I get.”
I flew into Toronto, where they had the Festival Express, a custom train just for the musicians on the tour. First gig was Toronto. Then we was riding the rails to Winnipeg and Calgary. These were big outdoor venues for tens of thousands of people. They were calling it Woodstock on Wheels.
I had my brother Phil in my band then, and we had a blast. The other artists were the Band, the Grateful Dead, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Tom Rush, and Ian and Sylvia and the Great Speckled Bird. Janis was the headliner.
I got good respect from the other artists. Janis couldn’t have been sweeter. In the high cotton of Hippieland, she was the queen, but she never had no airs about her. But you couldn’t separate her from her bottle of Southern Comfort. She clung to it like a baby clinging to a bottle of milk. Janis was flying high. We was all flying high. There were so many drugs on that train that it’s a wonder the thing didn’t go off the track and float up into the sky. Man, the drugs had exploded. Funny thing about the hippies, though, is that when they smoked up all their dope, they’d come to us for our whiskey and wine. But that was okay with me. Love was in the air, and who don’t love love?
This was just a month after the Kent State shootings, so political fever was running high. The concerts had so many kids wanting to get in that they started crashin’ down the gates. There were riots. The promoters were going crazy. The fans were saying that the $10 ticket price—a lot for those days—was too high and music should be free. I didn’t get paid too much, but I didn’t care because this whole new audience was digging what I was doing. The musicians, meanwhile, were complaining that the Canadian Scotch wasn’t no stronger than 56 proof. And all the time cameras were rolling. They made a documentary movie of the tour,
Festival Express
.
Festival Express
.
I loved the tour because of the good vibes with the artists and fans. I wasn’t blowing grass, but I got a contact high just being on the train and standing on stage under a heavy cloud of marijuana smoke.
Jerry Garcia came up to me before a show and said, “Buddy you take a hit off this and you’ll play some shit you never heard.”
I took the hit.
After the show Jerry asked, “Well?”
“You were right,” I said. “I didn’t hear shit.”
Pot ain’t my thing.
Couple months later—this is still 1970—the Stones had me and Junior open up their tour in Europe. We went to Finland and France, where the venues were even bigger than Festival Express. I’m talking about soccer stadiums. Mick and Keith were cool—they was always saying nice things about me and Junior. But not all the fans felt like Mick and Keith.
Opening some of them shows, we were booed. Fans wanted the Stones, not two blues cats from Chicago. They’d paid good money to hear their Stones, and I couldn’t blame them for being pissed. If I was a hippie living in Helsinki who saved up my hard-earned cash to hear the Rolling Stones, I might be pissed too. I actually felt bad for those people booing. Wish I could have given them what they wanted.
In some cases Junior and I were able to do that. There were some blues lovers out there. When I met them afterward, they told me straight-up that they discovered the blues through the Stones. During those magazine and TV interviews when Keith had mentioned Muddy, the fans went back to listen to Muddy for themselves. It was like B. B. said: the British boys were bringing us along on their ride.
Far as the Stones themselves go, this was the summer after their winter concert at Altamont Speedway in California where there had been a killing. I know that the Stones like to party, but far as I could tell, they were low key on this tour.
It was during this same September that the news came in from London about Jimi Hendrix. He was dead at twenty-seven. Month later the news came in from L.A. that Janis Joplin was also dead and also at twenty-seven.
These deaths broke my heart. Wasn’t that I was close to either of them. But our paths had crossed, and I could see their talent and the promise of beautiful careers. Jimi busted through boundaries that needed to come down. Others had come before—I’m thinking of spacey players like Ike Turner, Earl Hooker, and, especially, Johnny Guitar Watson—but Jimi had the balls to carry it into new territory. He wasn’t afraid of taking his guitar to the top of a mountain of Marshall amps. He’d turn up the volume loud enough to wake up your grandmother in the grave. That’s what he wanted to hear. And he knew that’s what the kids wanted to hear.
Janis had her own idols—Tina Turner and Etta James, for sure. She’d be the first to tell you that her mamas were all black. She sang black. She proved that the color of your skin don’t have shit to do with the depths of your soul. Janis had soul, but like Jimi, she was a shooting star, quick to shine and quick to flame out.
Sad.
During that same tour with the Stones I got a beautiful surprise. I was backstage at the Paris concert when Eric Clapton came up to me with a funny-looking cat with the face of a foreign diplomat.
“This is Ahmet Ertegun,” Eric said, “president of Atlantic Records.”
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