We started off the night right by hitting up Bluesfest for some fish and chips for dinner. Let’s be honest…when you enter the gauntlet which is Bluesfest (10 days of rocking), you slowly run out of groceries at home and it’s a lot easier to eat out. But this is a bad thing people! Palmer’s advice – Pick up some groceries!
Met Vero’s friend Chantal at the Jonny Lang concert and we were hanging with Karilee, Krista, Mike and Trish. Jonny Lang has been around for the past decade and he’s still young! He was entertaining but the cream of the crop was the guy manning the tambourine and one song brought him out in the spotlight with his spot-on impression of a train conductor (pulls the cable, Woo-Woo!). There was also this excellent dancer across the field who was into the music.
So, back to Jonny…he was a great guitar player. He had the greatest face while pulling off his licks. Krista referred to it as his ‘sex’ face. I would hate to think that this is actually the face he has while having sex. I found there were a few too many ballads coming out of his set, but this is a premature analysis considering I thought he was only one for one hour and I think he played for 2 hours and I only caught 45 minutes of their set.
Why did I only catch 45 minutes of the show? Because it was time to head out to Buddy Guy at the River Stage! We headed to the beer tent to stock up on beer. Please refer to a future entry which will be the latest in my Open Letter series to Bluesfest. Let’s just say that whatever happened to us is more atrocious than the lawnchair people.
(insert the future entry on the Open Letter of the Transition between the Rogers Stage and the River Stage.)
We show up to the River Stage and I can hear the sweet tones of Buddy Guy eminating from the stage. We couldn’t see too well as we were very far from the stage and in front of many tall individuals. This was unfortunate. But the sounds…the SOUNDS!
Let’s talk about Buddy Guy for a moment. Yet another artist whom I don’t know anything about. All we know about him is that he’s 73 years old and can still rock. He taught Hendrix, Clapton, Jeff Beck and Stevie Ray Vaughn everything they know about the stage performance and guitar playing. Who invented playing the guitar with their teeth? Buddy Guy. That’s right.
The fascinating aspect of Buddy Guy is that he was very erratic with his show. He would be in the middle of a song, get bored of it, yell out “Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute!”, end the song, talk about how he taught some guitar player a song, then rip into some Hendrix for us. Then he would get tired of it and move onto something else. At least he made it seamless and the band knew he was like this. It is almost like it was planned.
There was also a moment where he left the stage and kept playing. I had read about this and realized that he was probably going to get a drink or go to the washroom! Sure enough, he stops playing for 90 seconds and then starts up again and shows up on the stage about 4 minutes later! Ha ha! I had these visions of him walking back to the porta-potty, doing his business and then heading back to the stage.
The abrupt nature of the show didn’t stop as he started a song and as soon as he was done the first verse he abruptly left the stage and that was the show! Very odd! But it didn’t matter. We were witness to a legend. This man could play. REALLY PLAY. He didn’t slow down at all and he was a great showman. I am definitely going to open up my knowledge of music to include Buddy Guy. If you have the opportunity to check him out, do so. Two enthusiastic thumbs up.
