Face to face with guitarist Buddy Guy

Buddy Guy, one of the biggest showmen in music history, has stage fright?

The 74-year-old guitarist, a man who is credited with helping turn the blues into rock ’n’ roll; a man who inspired Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan and other rock guitar greats; a man who did splits, jumped off amplifiers, played guitar with his teeth, played behind his back, played using drumsticks, played with one hand while taking a drink with the other, kicked over music stands, strolled deep into an audience to do his extended solos and practically invented rock stagecraft – that Guy is antsy about getting onstage?

“I was so shy as a kid that when the teacher would call me up to recite … they almost had to spank me,” Guy said in a phone interview from Chicago, where he has ruled for decades as a king of the blues world and owns Buddy Guy’s Legends blues club. He performs tonight in Norfolk with another blues legend, B.B. King.

Guy said that the first time he performed for an audience as a young man in Louisiana, he was too nervous to face it, so he turned his back on the crowd and faced the wall. The bandleader fired him.

He was good enough on the guitar, he said, and he sure liked the idea of making more money in a couple of nights onstage than he could in a week or two in a garage or picking cotton – the other alternatives for supporting himself and helping his family. All he had to do was turn from the wall to the people.

“Well, a friend gave me a glass of wine, and I been turned around ever since.”

Even now, Guy said, “When I hit the stage, I have to have a glass of wine.”

Once he faced the audience, he decided the music wasn’t enough.

“I always feel like someone will hate me tonight,” Guy said.

He’s determined to put on such a show, every night, that even the haters will say, “I didn’t like him, but he gave me everything he had.”

Guy said he doesn’t know where all the theatrics come from – things just happen onstage. “I don’t practice it in my house.”

When he takes the stage, “almost before I hit the first note on the guitar, I can look in their eyes and say: ‘I got ya.’” But sometimes, he looks in their eyes and says, “I’m going to have to do something to get them.”

Guy said he never uses a set list. At a restaurant, “they don’t make you eat what you don’t want. You get to pick.”

“I will hear voices saying play this or play that, and I turn to the band and say, ‘Hit it.’?”

So that’s the Buddy Guy cure for stage fright: a glass of wine, a drive to move an audience and a whole lot of guitar and singing talent.

Hit it.

BUDDY GUY ON...

...THE GUITAR

How did Buddy Guy decide to play a Fender Stratocaster, with its distinctive tones that inspired many blues and rock players after him?

Early in his career, he said, he couldn’t afford both a guitar and a case. That ruled out an acoustic guitar, which might get damaged on the road, so he picked a Stratocaster because it was a solid chunk of sturdy wood. Once when he was touring in Africa, the guitar, which had been strapped to the roof of a car, blew off and landed in the road. “I said, ‘Oh, Lord, I can’t afford to lose this guitar and not have the money to buy another one.” It was dinged up, but still played for many years.

...B.B. KING

“I feel like, when he plays I’m supposed to be at a desk learning – to try to figure out what he’s doing.”

...THE OLD DAYS

Guy helped form the Chicago blues style in the 1950s with Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson II, Howlin’ Wolf and others. Guy said given his appreciation for wine he almost fell into drinking too much. “That’s what you got paid with, when Muddy and Wolf and Sonny Boy were around. You were paid with that and car fare. And a good lookin’ woman – if you played well enough.”

...ON HIS PROTÉGÉ, QUINN SULLIVAN

Guy has brought the 11-year-old blues guitarist from Massachusetts on stage with him many times, had him play on “Who’s Gonna Fill Those Shoes” from Guy’s Grammy-nominated 2008 album “Skin Deep,” and is promoting Sullivan’s new album, “Cyclone.”

Guy said he’s working with Sullivan because he wants to make sure that new players will keep the blues alive and do what the British rockers of the 1960s did in giving his music new life.

“We need somebody his age to carry on.”

Dan Duke, (757) 446-2593, dan.duke@pilotonline.com