A Few Thoughts On Roy Buchanan

I’ve had a copy of the Roy Buchanan two disc set “Roy Buchanan-Sweet Dreams: The Anthology” sitting on my desk for months. Actually, it’s one my brother left behind, before he was Alabammy bound.

Anyway, it’s been sitting there for months and I finally ripped most of the tracks to my hard drive. I left out the curiosity tracks that were from a never-released album produced by Charlie Daniels because, they sound like the decision that someone made to not release it was a correct one.

That’s one of the problems with the digital wonderland, the crap you did is going to exist right alongside the quality stuff you did long after you are gone.

When people discuss Roy Buchanan they inevitably bring up the technique, the speed, the harmonics, the volume swells but, they miss the point. Roy’s music had emotional content and spontaneity. For a musician, the spontaneous moment is tough to capture. The recording process takes away from spontaneity. To get even a bit of it truly documented, a musician has to live the spontaneous ethic, has to exercise the improvisational skills, take those skills out for regular walks. It’s hard sometimes, to find the other team members to go along for that ride. This is from an interview with singer Billy Price, who worked with Roy for a time, and is on some of the tracks I’ve been listening to.

In Buchanan’s band, I was the young guy (about 23, in around 1972) with a bunch of guys in their 30s, and after leading my own band and doing things my way, it was a difficult adjustment. Roy did things a little differently. You probably saw from my show in Peer that tightness and precision are important musical values to me, which I learned from guys like James Brown, Bobby Bland, and Otis Clay. In contrast, my very first gig with Roy was a major network TV show, and I just went on stage and sang “I Hear You Knockin’” and “Johnny B. Goode” without ever having rehearsed with Roy and the band before the cameras began rolling! But I did get to travel throughout the U.S. and Canada with Roy and play in impressive venues such as Carnegie Hall in New York, the Roxy in Los Angeles, and several large arenas and stadiums. So the experience I gained during those years was valuable.

Q:So you joined Buchanan’s band and were thrown into the deep with the unrehearsed television show. You were used to sing the best of soul songs with a very tight band, now you had to sing the “I hear you knocking/Johnny B. Goode” - repertoire… How did that make you feel?

I was not crazy about that way of doing things. I had certainly participated in lots of informal jam sessions as a singer–gotten on stage with musicians I didn’t know well and had never rehearsed with–and sometimes those situations do result in some exciting music. But that kind of thing was Roy’s standard operating procedure. By my standards, he was a little bit looser about performance than I was comfortable with. But I guess when you could play guitar with the facility that he could, there didn’t seem to be much need for advance planning.

Roy felt both edges of the sword of hype. All the talk of chops, “best unknown guitarist in the world”, “the guy who turned down the Stones”, “raised by wolves” whether true or not, self advanced or huckster driven are the things that he spent a career having to address. But, also allowed that career. More from Price.

Buchanan, Jay (Reich), the record company, and other friends and advisors who surrounded Buchanan at that time believed that he was on the verge of breaking out as a major recording artist, and they were urging him to stretch beyond the things he did well–play simple, supportive guitar on country and blues songs–and remake himself into some sort of bluesy rock guitarist. Roy was a great admirer of Jimi Hendrix, so this was not as implausible as it might sound. To my mind, Jay gave Roy all the wrong advice in the studio. For example, Roy would cut a clean, economical, tasteful solo in the studio, and Jay would urge him to try another take and “throw in more bullshit for the kids,” which meant to make his fingers move fast and perform flashy gymnastics on the guitar.

Roy never was a “major recording artist”. The major labels, in fact, viewed him as a failure. Mark Mathis once told me this; “I used to tell people here in Nashville, you have to go see this guy. He’s a guitar player that sells 200,000 every time out. Nobody was selling that many guitar albums but Roy was doing it every time.” At the time, the ’70s, Nashville would have maybe seen the value in a guy that put up that kind of numbers but, it didn’t impress the cats in N.Y. and L.A. enough.

And, the records were spotty, there are certainly examples of the kind of “throw in more bullshit for the kids,” stuff that Price describes throughout the discography. But, there is a lot of living in the moment captured on tape as well. It is evident, from the records, that Roy Buchanan was a complex personality. There are glimpses of a tortured soul, a gentle soul, humor, violence, sadness, funky sex and pure joy. All of those things live in the sound of the guitar.

When Roy is at his best, the technique, the chops are merely used to convey all of the complex character and emotion, in the moment. The chops aren’t the reason to listen. And, there are a lot of examples. A lot of times, even on a sub-par track, Roy will up the ante for a few moments and send shivers.

If I had to single out one track, for the uninitiated, it would be, the first track from his first record, “Sweet Dreams”. The theme is familiar, even if you aren’t familiar with the Don Gibson original that is structurally closer to Roy’s version than the Patsy Cline one, you will recognize the tune. And, the arrangement is one that Roy had been playing with his band long before they hit the studio. So, it isn’t in any way a free-form jam. Roy is playing variations on a theme and, blowing effortlessly through the chord changes. The volume swells, the harmonics and a few lightning runs are there but all seem perfectly placed but, not in a contrived way. More the way a person talking with a lot of passion will use their hands to emphasize a point. The tortured soul, the gentle soul, the sadness, the humor, the hope of a uncloudy day, the triumph of the spirit; the stuff of life, is all right there, before the fade at 3:30 of an instrumental, a musical performance for the ages.

Like I said, if I had to point to one, that would be it. But, as great as “Sweet Dreams” is, it doesn’t cover the whole story and none of them do.

There is another track on this anthology that gives some rare insight. Let me say this first; musicians, a lot of them, have some basic misunderstandings about the recording process. If you want to make a good recording, you have to start with good signal. You have to set the recording level of whatever you are recording to get the full potential of the performance. If you set the level then, the performer starts playing or singing louder, it could be a great performance but, useless. If you set the level, and the performer start singing or playing softer, it’s unusable. So, when engineering, you say: “I’m just setting levels so, play the way you’re going to play on the track”. With a pro, it’s a simple process. With most, it’s an ordeal that lasts beyond the point of productivity.

Anyway, there is this track, “Dual Soliloquy”, that isn’t something that would interest a lot of people. If you are a guitar player or, you like to hear a guitar player just playing solo, free forming it, you will be interested. “Dual Soliloquy” is Roy Buchanan in the studio, by himself, just the old Tele and some Fender amp, setting levels.

The track starts with the voice of a engineer through the studio, talk back mic.; “Whatever you want, you got a half hour of tape in front of you”. So, it’s Roy in there and he’s going to play a few things and probably listen back to see how some things sound on tape. Now, most guitar players, in this situation, would go wonk, wonk, wonk, chunk, chunk, chunk, diddle, diddle, wee, wee, wee, screech, whammy. But Roy was a guy who lived night after night by making the stream of consciousness into comprehensible blues symphonies. Give him a go sign and he goes. And, of course Roy has an endless trick bag so, he’s going to run through it a bit to see how it fares under the microscope, fearlessly.

He starts in dropped D, plays a few sweet sounding chords, a little bass counterpoint then a flamenco, rasgueado that is impossible to do on an electric guitar but, no it’s not impossible, it’s right there on tape sounding like a thousand doves, released from a cage, flying off into a pastel sunset. Then a few slick bends, more nice chords and some tremolo picking, mandolin type things, a few bits of finger picking some folky kind of things that morph into a jaunty, Chet Atkins, country stroll and then, turns into the swamp D, funk thing, all while dead thumbing the low D. Tunes up to E, while picking, and gets funky, bluesy for a while. Then, he executes a few pedal steel licks. A modal blues drifts into minor key Bach. Then, some Guraldi chords, more Bach. Clicking on the middle position of the pickup selector, another rasgueado becomes a demented banjo. Then on to the neck pickup for a few seconds of a country funk blast and, he’s had his fill.

All in all, it’s 12:19 of whatever ran through Roy’s brain but, it’s all musical. I mean, it’s just a guy noodling around but, for that, it’s insanely musical. And, it’s all recorded well. It’s like sitting in the corner of the room, unnoticed while a master plugs in, and checks out the room and the rig.

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Tags: Billy Price, Blues, digital wonderland, Guitar, Mark Mathis, Music, Roy Buchanan