As the youngest of five children growing up in rural Lettsworth, Louisiana, blues musician Phil Guy, now 68, recalls that "our father always had the blues playing on an old phonograph. We would listen to Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker and Lightnin' Hopkins and Smokey Hogg and people like that, and that stuff just got into my skin - it would just get into you and make you feel happy."
His older brother, Buddy - owner of the Chicago nightspot Buddy Guy's Legends, and a blues legend in his own right - took to the guitar immediately, and the young Phil was eager to follow in his sibling's musical footsteps, and those of the artists he admired on that phonograph. There was, however, one problem.
"I'm left-handed," says Guy during our recent phone interview, "and I'd never seen a left-handed player."
He says he'd occasionally attempt left-handed guitar playing, but "it didn't feel right, 'cause in my mind it would stick that I gotta play right. So just bein' a country kid and not knowin', I forced myself to play guitar right. I would turn it upside-down - you know, like the Jimi Hendrix thing way before he came out."
Guy laughs, and laughs even harder when I ask how long it took to finally master right-handed (and right-side-up) playing. "Oh, man, probably until now! I'm still tryin' to learn! 'Cause I'm completely left-handed. Nothin' else is right but playin' the guitar."
Phil Guy has subsequently done a lot of things right with the guitar. A respected fixture of Chicago's blues scene since 1969, Guy has toured several continents, was named "Best Blues Entertainer" at the 27th-annual Chicago Music Awards in 2007, and is currently enjoying some of the best reviews of his career.
Upon the release of his 2006 CD He's My Blues Brother - in which he collaborated with brother Buddy on the title track - Big City Rhythm & Blues Magazine wrote that "this is the real blues from the southern levees to downtown Chicago ... . Phil's guitar is sharp but laid back, making every note count." And stating that the blues "pumps through his veins and fires through his fingertips," Southwest Blues Magazine added that, "Phil Guy has recorded an album that proves him to be a serious contender as Chicago's last blues singer/player."
That he's still not as well-known as his older brother doesn't seem to rankle him, perhaps because Phil's considerable success stemmed directly from Buddy's success.
Phil's first professional gig, in fact, came through his brother's recommendation. The 21-year-old Buddy had been playing guitar for blues harmonicist Raful Neal's band in Baton Rouge, yet was planning to leave to explore the blues scene in Chicago. Buddy did, however, know where Neal could find a replacement. "Buddy told Raful Neal, 'Well, I'm goin','" says Guy, "'but I got a brother that can play guitar.'
"So Raful come got me, and he say, 'Man, Buddy tell me you can play, and I need a guitar player. Can you?' And I said, 'Yeah.' He said, 'Play me something.' So I played dunt-duh-duh-dunt-duh-duh-dunt." (It sounds a lot better when Guy sings it to me.)
"And he say, 'Wow, that's good! Play me somethin' else.' And I played dunt-duh-duh-dunt-duh-duh-dunt," Guy laughs, repeating the same guitar phrase. "And then he say, 'Well, that'll do, 'cause I play horrible.'"
The 17-year-old Guy got the job. "There was just three of us - Raful Neal played the harp, we had a drum, and I was the guitar - and we packed the clubs out with that," he recalls, though given the salary of a professional blues musician, "I had a day job, too. I was workin' at a place called the City Club, and I was doin' everything there - I was a porter, busboy, shining shoes ... . I was making $27 a week."
With a laugh, he adds, "And that's before they take out the income tax!"
Guy stayed with Neal's band from 1957 to 1969, by which point he had taken a new day job in a law office, "pickin' up mail and carrying stuff," he says. "Being a runner." He even considered studying to be a lawyer himself. "You know, I had all the books around me, and they told me, 'Look, you've got the run of this - if you want to study, do it.' But I had that music in my mind."
At the same time, as luck would have it, brother Buddy had Phil in mind. The U.S. State Department had recruited Chicago's Buddy Guy Band to perform a series of 13 concerts throughout Africa ("for, like, a peace-makin' thing," says Guy), and in 1969, "Buddy called up and said, 'Hey, I need a rhythm player, man. I'm goin' to Africa.'
"And that's all he had to say," says Guy. "I said, 'I'm comin' right now,' and I quit my job."
He relocated to Chicago, joined his brother's band, and soon found himself on a 13-week tour of Africa, where, Guy says, "They had no idea about the blues. No idea. They knew James Brown and Muhammad Ali, 'cause Ali was so famous and James Brown was the Soul Man. But they had no idea what the blues was about, so Buddy was the blues to them."
The tour was such a success - Guy recalls that the Afrikaners "would come on the stage and dance and get all wound up" - that in 1970, the Buddy Guy Band was hired to open for another group of noted performers.
"We toured with the Rolling Stones," says Guy. "We went to France, we went to Stockholm, we went to Germany, we went to Düsseldorf ... . It was a trip, man. Unbelievable."
And Guy's experiences were set to become more unbelievable still, as the summer of 1970 found the Buddy Guy Band joining such musical superstars as The Grateful Dead, The Band, and Janis Joplin aboard the Festival Express, the legendary Canadian train tour that made concert stops in Toronto, Winnipeg, and Calgary. (The hard-rocking, and hard-partying, exploits from which were captured in 2003's Festival Express documentary.)
"We had a jam, man," says Guy with a laugh. "A nonstop jam. We jammed 'til we'd fall out and go to sleep. I remember them guys smoked a lot of pot and stuff, and somewhere along the line they ran out of that, and we stopped at a liquor store that was close to the train tracks - they went into the liquor store and bought everything in it."
The Buddy Guy Band continued to tour and perform in its home base of Chicago for the next decade-plus, but by the mid-1980s, says Guy, "Buddy got to the point where he couldn't get the money he wanted" solely through performing, "and he had a club he owned - the Checkerboard. But I didn't have nothin' else, so I had to go out and find something else to do."
What he ended up doing was forming his own band - Phil Guy & the Chicago Machine - which blended rhythm-and-blues with rock, and which Guy calls, "a pretty good mix. You know, some clubs that we used to go to, they wouldn't let us play the fast dance music because they wanted the blues. Now, if you don't play the up-tempo music, where people can dance, these blues clubs don't want you. You've really got to, like, cross-cut. So we'll be singing the blues, and then all of a sudden I wind up singin' the Rolling Stones."
He adds, though: "It's when I go to the real hardcore blues festivals that I go back to the roots, man," and says that he's currently working on a song that, for many, will likely have deep roots in the blues.
"I got one about Bush and all the stuff that's goin' on," he says. "And just before he gets out, I'm tryin' to get it out, you know? It's called 'Blues for the President.'"
Laughing, Guy says, "It'll be a great one if I can get it out the way I want it."
