Two days, six acts, three thousand Rupees. A fair equation if each of the acts was as good as the other or even somewhere close to the Legend, Buddy Guy himself.
Let’s go in reverse and start with the rip off. Ex DJ and TV presenter Luke Kenny singing the Blues? You know just what to expect when he comes on stage and says ‘Blues and Rock N Roll’ in the same breath. It pretty much stretches all six strings to breaking point. For the next hour or so (one of those very, very long hours) one wondered what on earth he was doing up there, with no pretensions of being a Blues singer. Since when does ‘ Roll Over Beethoven’ feature on a Blues line Up. Oops. I forgot about the Rock n’ Roll bit, mentioned earlier. There goes 500 bucks.
Next!! Now we’re talking some down n dirty feminist, ballsy, guy bashing stuff. Welcome Shemeika Copeland, all five feet of power packed dynamite. And boy could she sing and strut her stuff!
Mississippi, Memphis, New York, New Orleans and her grandma Jessie’s Church. This was one roller coaster ride that had as many curves as Ms. Copeland and then some more. Shemeika bared her soul and through her music and left us wondering which poor sod messed around with her. He was in almost every song – in spirit at least. Thankfully, Shemeika showed her true Blue roots, and lived up to her ole daddy Copeland’s name, all right. Now, there’s hope….
Hope which was quickly squashed like a bug under a guitar distorter. Along came L’il Johny Lang and God alone knows what he sang. Whatever it was, it wasn’t the Blues. Which just reaffirmed the thought that no matter how hard he may try, a White man just can’t sing the blues.
It had nothing to do with the origin, but everything to do with hundreds of years of pain borne by a race, purely because of their colour. For when those
‘coloured’ guys sing the blues, the Gods could weep.
Li'l Jhonny shredded his guitar and our ear rums along with it. He screeched and hollered and sent us all running towards the bar. Where of course, the rip off continued unabated. Three hundred bucks for a small peg of whisky in a plastic glass? Have a few and you’re looking at one more concert ticket over the weekend!
Day One. Strike two. Strike three and you’re out, Mahindra Blues.
On day two, I realised that there is a God above. And he sent down an Angel from Shillong.
The band was Soul Mate, but I’m sure every hot blooded guy at Stage 1 wanted that Blues singing angel as a ‘soul mate’. The band knew their stuff and their lead signer could charm the devil himself. Now we’re talking!
Soul mate belted out one blues riff after another and had everyone screaming or more. A good beginning.
The next act for the day, just before the legend, was the Matt Scofield trio. One look at this tall blond guitarist with a wicked grin placed him right up there in Hollywood, an Axe murderer or serial killer
in a B grade movie. But if there was an ounce of boredom in the room, this guitar toting ‘ axeman’killed that too. Matt is a very talented blues guitarist and kept the audience going for an hour or so, with blues from various parts of America.
For a Blues Lover like me, this was a real treat unfolding. The disasters of day one were now a distant memory. As Matt skipped from one city to another, changing his bluesy riffs as he went along, my eyes wandered amongst the audience.
There were all the usual suspects. People I’ve been seeing year after year at innumerable Blues and Jazz festivals. But there were many people who seemed to be attending a blues festival for the first time in their lives. Pretty women in their chic black dresses, happily swaying to the beat, trying to figure out what the fuss was all about.
Then there were the BBMers – Black Berry Maniacs, frantically texting, BBMing and uploading pix throughout the concert. It just goes to show that the average person’s attention span and threshold to ‘not connect’ has gone down to about 30 seconds.
I also encountered the ‘record the whole concert’ monster lurking ominously behind me. Arm outstretched in a state of rigor mortis, clutching a mobile camera for 2 hours, he did not flinch an inch. One false move and that mobile would have gone flying intro the audience. And believe me, I was tempted to make a few of them…. Our man fearlessly followed his calling, probably missing every bit of music and the real energy around him. Well I hope he enjoys his 3000 rupee video clip!
Every once in a while a ‘whoo hooo’ would pierce the air, followed by a loud round of applause. As my eyes skipped across the audience like a languorous slow hand strum, I spotted him.
For a minute, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Here was this portly chap, possibly a bit tanked up, but high spirited for sure. I have no idea what he’d been smoking, but he was burning up the floor all right. It did not matter what tempo the music was at, he was like an old 45 going on 78 RPM. I couldn’t help laughing as I saw him gyrate to that blues guitar. He would have given Munni an inferiority complex and made her truly ‘ badnaaam’.
At 9.00 p.m, the moment we had all been waiting for was upon us. The man, the legend, Buddy Guy walked on stage. For anyone who knows anything about the Blues, Buddy Guy needs no mention. Suffice to say that he is not just way up there with the greats he is one of them!For then next two hours, the youngest man in the room was 74 years young, which also happens to be the first track on his latest CD. Old Buddy showed ‘em how it should be done. H strutted, whistled, clucked, cussed, played and charmed the pants ( and skirts) of every one in the room. It’s one thing to play the blues guitar like he can – it’s another to pay it with a drumstick, tongue, teeth an even a duster cloth. This was guitar fireworks at its best, without missing a riff.
Buddy’s band was a league apart from anything that we had heard in the last two days. He threatened never to leave the stage and we would have been happy if he would have fulfilled his threat. The finale came with Buddy calling Shemeika, Matt and Johnny back on stage for a crazy jam. Buddy gave us ‘fever’ but Shemeika was the sweetest antidote to it, and the chemistry between them had to be seen to be ‘believed’.
I think our dancin
g ‘Munni’ caught the ‘fever’ too, as he over heated and simply melted away. Thank heaven for small mercies. A bolt of lightning struck the raised arm of ‘rigor mortis recorder’ and he let go of his mobile to applaud!!It was a night of red hot blues all right. And now that it’s all over, I guess I’ll have to listen to my free Buddy Guy CD, and wait for next year…..
Bombed, bluesed, but not busted…
Gypsycy
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