Wednesday, September 5, 2001

Music review
Buddy Guy: Sweet Tea
By Alan Tolleson
Skiff Staff

Blues musicians have a decisive edge over other artists — the older and more haggard they become, the more believable their vocals seem. They don’t go out of style, because they were never in style.

With age-improved voices, however, often comes degenerated guitar playing ability, a geriatric collection of ailments and a significant decrease in sanity. That said, Buddy Guy has done nothing but improve with age.

His murky new release Sweet Tea shows that the constantly-touring 65-year-old hasn’t lost a step and is actually treading on new turf, more swampy and staggering than ever. This album focuses more on raw, hypnotic Mississippi Delta-style blues than his earlier, more formulated work did. Guy drags you through nine tracks of haunting honesty and electric lust.

After the bare-bones opening track “Done got Old” and the thunderous pounding of track two, “Baby Please Don’t Leave Me,” it’s quickly evident that Sweet Tea is an album deserving of some shelf space in your record collection. “Done Got Old” starts things off with some stripped down country blues licks and Guy’s stark, weathered voice moaning deeply, repeating the song’s title as if it were a DJ’s hook or sample, and explaining in short rolling phrases, “I can’t do the things I used to do.”

The desperate truth he creates — an American music legend directly explaining what has happened to him and will happen to us all — is guaranteed to put a lump in your throat. But be warned, it’s a tolling listen — not the feel-good summer album of the year.

Guy follows the haunting opening with “Baby Please Don’t Leave Me,” a track that the self-proclaimed “very old man” scorches with wildfire. The guitar thunders along, rumbling and scattering, and Buddy’s solos sound at times like multiple guitars or hell-bound howls, growling for over seven minutes. The album’s centerpiece, “I Gotta Try You Girl” is a 12-minute cookout that boils and tumbles, with a groove so deep and cool, you’ll wish you were a menthol cigarette. Much of his greasy fretwork is filtered and twisted to sound like it’s piped into the center of your brain, and the fuzz, screams and feedback summon a ghostly nod to Jimi Hendrix, a man Guy and his bluesy friends influenced decades before.

Sweet Tea is guitar-laced, simmering in places and burning in others, providing most of the album’s depth. The lyrics and guitar assault can be heavy, and are repetitive within each track, but wonderfully and hypnotically so. The album also maintains a powerful lust-driven personality that stays true to itself, linking the songs as great albums do and greatest hits albums do not. With excess grime and unvarnished tracks, Sweet Tea is a rich country blues album, with a shot of electricity to the heart. It’s one of the year’s best, and one of Buddy Guy’s best. It took one of the original masters to remind us how the blues ought to sound, and what a treasure we have in our aging blues-men.