When I left home: my story (2015)
After I Left Home
One Whole Chicken
I’d heard Magic Sam, another gunslinger, playing around town. He had seen me win a bunch of those Sunday afternoon guitar-cutting contests. After I had won my fourth pint of whiskey in a row, he came up to me and asked, “You ever been in the studio?”
“One time back home at a radio station. Cut me a song.”
“Anything happen with it?”
“I put it on tape and gave it to Leonard Chess.”
“Chess like it?”
“Don’t think he ever heard it.”
“Sounds like Leonard Chess. He don’t listen to nothing except what Willie Dixon gives him.”
“Who’s Willie Dixon?”
“Bass player. Songwriter. Or at least a guy who knows how to put his name on a song, whether he wrote it or someone else did. Worked for Leonard for years.”
“Maybe he can help me.”
“I can help you, Buddy,” said Sam. “That’s why I’m here. Willie Dixon and Leonard Chess done fell out. Willie be working with Eli Toscano, the guy who puts out my stuff.”
“At Cobra Records?”
“Eli owns Cobra. I want you to meet him. Want you to meet Willie too.”
I tried to figure out Magic Sam’s angle. I couldn’t. Turned out he didn’t have none. Just wanted to help.
I was excited ’cause I knew Cobra was where Otis Rush made “I Can’t Quit You, Baby.” Magic Sam was cutting sides over there along with Harold Burrage and Betty Everett. I’d hear those songs on the radio—and that was good enough for me. Cobra wasn’t Chess, but no one was taking me to Chess, and now all of sudden Magic Sam was taking me to Cobra.
The operation was on Roosevelt Road on the West Side, which was why you had folks talkin’ ’bout the West Side blues style of Magic and Otis. Toscano had a little record store with a garage in the back. The garage was the studio. Behind the counter at the store was a man I recognized from posters around town.
“Ain’t you Harold Burrage?” I asked.
“That’s me.”
“You selling records here?”
“Sure am. Wanna buy some? Got my own records for sale.”
“I’m supposed to meet Magic Sam.”
“Why?”
“He wanted me to meet Eli.”
“To make a record?”
“I guess.”
“Eli don’t record just anybody.”
Sam walked through the door just in time to say, “This cat ain’t just anybody. He’s Buddy Guy. He plays guitar and sings.”
“We got enough guitarists and singers ’round here,” said Burrage, a good singer himself.
“Not like this. Where’s Eli?”
“Where he always is—in the back shooting craps.”
Sam walked behind curtains. I heard voices, and in a little while Eli Toscano came out. He was a short man with a foreign accent. Never did learn where he came from originally. He was very direct.
“Play something,” he said.
I broke into B. B. King’s “Sweet Sixteen” so strong that Burrage practically jumped over the counter and told Toscano, “Give this motherfucker a contract. Now!”
“He gotta talk to Willie first,” said Toscano. “I’m not doing anything unless Willie wants to do it.”
Willie Dixon took me to a big barbecue restaurant where he ordered a whole chicken. I figured that was for him and me to share, so I didn’t order nothing. But when the platter arrived, he took the entire bird in his hands and started tearing into it. I mean, he devoured the whole chicken in nothing flat. Didn’t offer me a single bite. But that was okay. I wasn’t there ’cause I cared about eating but ’cause I wanted to make a record. Later, though, I’d learn that Willie would devour songwriting credits just like he devoured that chicken.
Willie was a big man, about twenty years older than me. Must have weighed three hundred pounds, but it was mainly muscle, not fat. He was a talker. When I’m with a man like this, the more he talks, the more I shut up. According to Willie, he’d done everything and knew everyone. He came up from Mississippi, where he saw the KKK take a black man, bury him up to his neck in the ground, and then sic the dogs on him. He described how the dogs fed on his face until he was dead. Then he talked about coming to Chicago and making all these records in the forties with famous people, and how without him no one would have heard of Chess.
“How come you ain’t there now?” I asked.
“Money, son,” he said. “It’s always about money. Leonard wasn’t giving me my due. Was also interfering too much with how I make the records. Toscano’s letting let me do it the way I wanna do it—the way it should be done. You heard ‘I Can’t Quit You, Baby’?”
“Everyone’s heard that.”
“That’s my song, my arrangement, my production.”
I didn’t even know what the word “production” meant, but I wasn’t about to ask.
“You like Otis Rush?” Dixon asked me.
“He’s great.”
“I’ll get him to play on your record.”
“Oh, man,” I said, “if you get him, you won’t need me.”
“We’ll get him to play in the background. I like two guitars on a song. Y’all can harmonize.”
“I don’t know how.”
“I’ll show you. I’ll show you everything.”
“What song am I gonna sing?”
“I got lots of songs.”
“I got some ideas of my own,” I said.
“I wanna hear them, Buddy. Maybe I can do something with them.”
“How much I get paid?”
“You worried about money, son, or you worried making a record?”
“I wanna make a record, but didn’t you say it’s always about money.”
“I’ll take care of you, Buddy. You just take care to be on time.”
“When do we start?”
“Gimme a few weeks.”
In those weeks I went looking for new clubs where I could play. The competition was so keen that, even after I did okay at one spot, someone might come behind me and draw a bigger crowd. Then the owner would get off me and on him.
There was as many jazz clubs in Chicago as blues clubs, and some of the cats told me I could handle a jazz gig if I learned to fake the chords and play songs like “Flying Home” and “Little Red Top.” I loved jazz and appreciated all that the jazz guitarists were doing. T-Bone had jazz flavor to his blues; Matt Murphy and Wayne Bennett could work their way through any jazz song. They were wizards, but I wasn’t. I could barely get through a jazz set. I spent most of the time fumbling.
One night Earl Hooker heard what I was doing. “You trying to play shit you don’t know how to play,” he said. “I don’t know how to play it either.”
“You don’t?”
“I don’t wanna know. It confuses my brain. Blues is good enough for me. Don’t go off in too many different directions. Just go in one. Stick to the blues clubs, baby.”
Theresa’s, down in a basement at 48th and Indiana, was one of the biggest clubs on the South Side. I wanted to play there, and one night I showed up hoping that the owner, Theresa Needham, had heard of me.
“Not only have I heard of you,” she said, “but I heard you played here last night and you wasn’t shit. You can’t play worth a damn.”
“Last night? I wasn’t here last night.”
“The hell you wasn’t. I know one nigger from another, and your black ass was here last night playing some sorry shit. Folks ran outta here swearing they’d never come back. I told you never to come back.”
“Must have been someone else?”
“You arguin’ with me?”
Wasn’t sure what to say next. Theresa was a sight to behold: a mean-looking lady wearing a dirty apron with two pockets. In one was a pistol, in the other a billy club. Theresa was no one to fuck with.
“Begging your pardon, ma’am,” I said meekly, “but with all due respect I ain’t ever set foot in your club. Maybe there’s someone who looks like me or is going around using my name, but he ain’t me. If you let me play one song tonight, I do believe I can make my point directly.”
“One song, nigger, and then you out.”
“You mind if I start playing from out on the street?”
“Don’t got any more time to fool with you. Just play and be gone.”
I hooked up my 150-foot cord and started from outside the club. I went back into my Guitar-Slim bag of tricks, turned my amp so loud that dogs started barking, and gave it all I got, beginning with Bobby Blue Bland’s “Further on Up the Road.”
“Goddamn,” said Theresa, seeing the customers go crazy for my act, “why didn’t you play that shit last night?”
“I keep saying, ma’am, that wasn’t me last night.”
“Well, I want you in here tonight, and tomorrow night too.”
From then on people packed her club to see me until Theresa became my biggest fan. With that steady work, I figured I could afford to move out of Shorty’s into a place of my own.
Found me a kitchenette at 4625 Lake Park on the South Side, not far from Muddy. It was tiny, but all them apartments were tiny. I was just grateful to have a bed of my own. No more waiting around for Shorty to get up and go out. It was a luxury—sleeping whenever the hell I felt like it.
Weekend before the Cobra session, I was playing a gig at Mitch’s Jukebox Lounge. Joint was jammed. During the break I had to go to the bathroom. I kept my guitar on the bandstand under the watchful eye of the club owner, Jimmy Mitchell. When I got back, the guitar was gone. My heart dropped to the floor.
“Jimmy!” I cried. “What happened to my guitar, man?”
“Nothing to worry ’bout, Buddy. All under control.”
“What you mean under control? I’m missing my guitar.”
“Your valet took it.”
“My valet. You know me, Jimmy. You know I don’t got no valet.”
“He called himself your valet.”
“He was lying. Which way he go?”
“Out the back door.”
I ran, but the back alley was empty. My “valet” was long gone, along with my Gibson Les Paul.
This was on a Saturday. The Cobra session was Monday—no guitar, no record. What the hell was I gonna do?
I had only one idea. It meant eating my pride, but sometimes that’s what you gotta do.
Sunday afternoon I headed over to Theresa’s, where the boss was back in the kitchen, wearing her apron with the pistol and billy club sticking out.
“What the fuck you doing here so early? Go home and rest up for tonight.”
I started stammering. “I … I … ”
“Boy,” she said, “what you want?”
“They stole my guitar.”
“They did what?”
“They stole my Gibson.”
“How the hell they do that?”
“Cat told Jimmy Mitchell he was my valet and ran off with it.”
“Jimmy Mitchell is one ignorant motherfucker. What you gonna do now?”
“Don’t know.”
“Doesn’t Mitchell know that your guitar is your bread and butter? You should get him to buy you one.”
“He won’t.”
“Figures. He’s a cheap bastard.”
“I’m in a jam,” I said. “Got me a recording date Monday and no guitar.”
“You got money to buy another one?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Now wait a minute, boy. You couldn’t be here expecting I’d give you that money?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Then why you here?” she asked, her hands on her hips.
“Thought maybe I could borrow the money.”
“Borrow how much?”
“Figure a Strat could cost $160.”
“What the hell is a Strat?”
“The kinda guitar Guitar Slim plays.”
“So Buddy Guy, thinking he’s as good as Guitar Slim, wants to buy him a fancy guitar.”
“Well, ma’am …”
“Don’t ‘well’ me. Just come take this fuckin’ money and pay me back soon as you can. I figure the way you been playin’, you gonna wind up richer than all of us.”
Next thing I knew, she reached deep into her brasserie and fished out $160.
Cobra Records, here I come.