Junior Wells & Buddy Guy — New York City Blues: Live 1978
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
This Wayback Machine—set for New York City, 1978—drops you off inside The Bottom Line at the most opportune time: right as the deep-blue funk begins flying.
You see, the singing harpist Junior Wells and the singing guitarist Buddy Guy are on the move, together, quite early in the year. They’re roaming outside of hometown Chicago in order to rattle other cities far and wide. Poughkeepsie, Montreal, Montreux and London will receive their visits within months thereafter. But on this frigid 9th of January, the formidable partnership and their additional four-piece band appear before you, onstage, and midway through a three-night stand at that renowned Greenwich Village club.
The show affords opportunities to hear three distinct musical scenarios: the core band warming up the room; then Buddy flaming the room; and then Junior plus Buddy demolishing what is left. Of those three, the Junior-Buddy alliance grabs the biggest slice of the pie. Five of the 10 tracks, to be exact.
Luckily, tape rolls and rolls for a raw and real telling of that Monday out on the road—New York City Blues: Live 1978.
So, for instance, when Buddy cusses out the biting winter freeze for putting a momentary chill on his amplifier, that impulsive moment is embedded in the mix. Specifically, right when he and the excitingly combative drummer Merle Perkins place “How Blue Can You Get” under 15 minutes of stress and strain never experienced at the hands of B.B. King. Guy keeps squeezing, bending, slashing, and tremolo-picking out notes which pierce the heart. The tortured cry in his voice is just as adept at wounding hearts. Further agitating the situation are Perkins’ sharp snare cracks and cymbal splash, as kid brother Phil Guy’s second guitar pokes in and out of the backdrop. Eventually, Kenny Ray’s bass line shoves them into a mini-medley given equally fearsome footing when combining “One Room Country Shack” with “Short-Haired Woman.” Within the song’s opening seconds, the creeping pace, the fits of extreme Stratocaster flare-ups, and those first, foreboding lyrics—“I’ve been downhearted, woman, ever since that day we met”—clearly inform that the state-of-affairs is as blue as it gets.
Then, an about-face.
“Chicken Heads,” pinched from Bobby Rush’s chitlin-circuit repertoire, greenlights the funkster in Buddy to bust free.
Guy remains loose throughout the set, except in his signature intensely tense, penetrating way. Junior Wells—another powder keg, but packed into a five-foot-threeish frame—is likewise his typically looser-than-loose self: freely improvising and jiving at the mic.
By 1978, both men had prolific, high-profile careers of their own. Twenty-six years had gone by since Wells signed on to the Muddy Waters Band, filling the harmonica slot vacated by Little Walter. Eighteen years had passed from when Guy bottled lightning for Chess Records in the form of the shockingly tormented “First Time I Met the Blues.” And 13 since their first, official joint venture on the groundbreaking Hoodoo Man Blues. Still, whenever the two of them crossed paths, the result was always much more than additive. It was a simple case of 1 + 1 = 3. That same math applies here.
Wells, with harmonica in hand, dives first into “Little By Little.” It’s a robust stomp that contrarily bemoans being on the losing end of a love that is dying on the vine. But if you’re looking for Sonny Boy-isms—filtered through Junior’s signature brand of tangy toughness and streetwise funkiness—then wait for “Help Me.” The nine-and-a-half-minute tribute to his mentor is flush with them. And when Wells requests of Buddy to “get funky, brother; I wanna smell what you’re doing,” Guy gladly obliges with a freaky solo. Blowing space also opens up for Douglas Fagen’s tenor saxophone.
“Juke” is another piece steeped in personal meaning to the then-43-year-old harpist. Because this was the very key that opened the door into Muddy’s band when Little Walter bolted to pursue the centerstage spotlight with his Top Ten instrumental smash. Here, Junior never takes leave of his swooping and soaring harp the entire bounding time.
“Ships On the Ocean” dramatically inches along for the vast majority of its length, doubling in duration from the early studio version that lives on Hoodoo Man Blues. Smoldering away, the somber, subdued pulse just about hovers in mid-air except for whenever the weight of Wells’ dense, sinewed singing bursts in. Yet right before reaching the close, the brakes get hit and the band suddenly upshifts into an abridged “Someday Baby.” You can never quite tell where Junior and Buddy will lead you. Or how they’re going to get you there.
Cleopatra Records, curator of the Junior Wells catalog, has been doling out treasure after treasure like this, album after album as well as the occasional wood-crated box set. And as with Live At The Newport Folk Festival 1968, Live in Hiroshima 1975 and Chicago Hustle ’82, this similarly live recording holds its own unique specialness in terms of year, setlist and fortuitous outcomes.
So, once the generically titled “Instrumental Blues” ultimately does wind down this evening of New York City Blues, you, along with that original roomful of fired-up listeners, already crave another hour spent with Chicago’s dynamic duo.
Label: Cleopatra
Release date: 7/17/26
Label website: Cleopatra Records.com
Reviewed by Dennis Rozanski
Comments