There is no better musical education than jamming with players who have some years on you – players with experience, whose command of the instrument elevates all around them.
Ask anyone who has played with the great Buddy Guy. He is blues guitar’s preeminent showman, its standard bearer. No one has been doing it longer. No one does it better. And Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top was no different to the hundreds of players who have jammed with Guy over the years; being onstage with him was a chance to learn something.
Speaking to Jay Mohr on YouTube, Gibbons reflects on Guy and his mission to keep the blues alive, night after night. “He will be doing it, and doing it, and doing it again, it doesn’t matter where, or when, he just likes doing it,” he says.
Gibbons recalls one of the special nights when they got to jam together, an unscheduled guest spot at the Montreux Jazz Festival, when Guy was “one of the top name Saturday night artists”.
Gibbons and Guy have played Garbage Man Blues at Montreux together, but this performance, Gibbons’ “favourite”, was when they played T-Bone Walker’s Stormy Monday, or, to give it its unabridged title, Call It Stormy Monday (But Tuesday Is Just as Bad). Gibbons says he was not prepared to play it that night. He was just there to watch Guy’s set. But there was a little peer pressure involved, and musicians are nothing if not easily led.
“A buddy of mine came over and said, ‘Man, you oughta sit in!’” recalls Gibbons, who politely protested. “I said, ‘I haven’t been invited.’ He goes, ‘Well don’t you know Buddy Guy?’ I said, ‘I know him. But I don’t know if he knows me.’ He said, ‘But you recorded together!?’ I said, ‘It doesn’t mean anything. He’s recorded with everybody!’ And he said, ‘I’ve got a guitar. I’ll loan it to you. Just go up. Just walk on.’ And I did.”
The band were playing Stormy Monday, but not the version originally recorded by Walker. After all, this is one of those blues standards that everyone puts their own stamp on. BB King has done it. Slash has done it. The Allman Brothers have done it (with Gibbons). Albert King played it. On this night, Guy and his band were doing their thing with it.
I said, ‘Buddy, you’ve been at this so many years, so successfully, do you have something you can share with other guitar players, maybe?’ He said, ‘Yes’
“The band saw me coming, and the bass player said, ‘Yeah, come on. Come on!’” says Gibbons. “And Buddy had his back to me. They plugged me in. Somebody had a spare amplifier.”
Only Guy and his band were switching it up on the evening; they were going to do the Bobby Bland version, which is a little different – it’s a little awkward, not least from an administrative perspective. It was original released as “Stormy Monday Blues” and this led to a royalties snafu. But Gibbons’ problem on the night was more musical.
Bland’s guitar player, Wayne Bennett, skewed towards jazz guitar, and his version is hard to get under the fingers.
“The Bobby Bland version, the LP version, which included the middle guitar solo, was the genius of Wayne Bennett, and it is one of the most difficult guitar solos to mimic,” says Gibbons.
Gibbons was feeling game, though. He had been working on it. And he did all right. Guy approved.
“You can get kinda close. I started playing it because I had gotten close,” he says. “And Buddy Guy turned around, smiling, he knew it note for note.”
Of course he did. Afterwards, Gibbons says he took the opportunity to ask for some advice. Guy could have been specific, shared a technique, maybe a gear tip – famously, it was BB King who advised Gibbons to use a lighter gauge of electric guitar strings and he never looked back.
Gibbons says Guy had something else in mind: “I said, ‘Buddy, you’ve been at this so many years, so successfully, do you have something you can share with other guitar players, maybe?’ He said, ‘Yes. When you are playing, look down at the guitar neck, and look as though you can’t believe what you’re doing!’ [Laughs] I said, ‘Okay!’”
That's a real showman's logic: if you look as though can’t believe what you’re doing, maybe the audience won’t believe it either. It's like what Guy told MusicRadar in 2020: "If people come see you, I think you should give them every damn thing you’ve got."
