It was close to 11:00 p.m. when Buddy Guy came onto the stage of Buddy Guy’s Legends, his blues club on south Wabash in Chicago. He’s quite the showman and crowd-pleaser—and they ate it up (as did I). He sang some songs with a little innuendo to titillate the suburbanites and tourists in the crowd. He played free form with one song morphing into another. It was sometimes hard to see his playing because of the angle at which he stood and where I was sitting, but I enjoyed watching him. His outstanding band included drums, bass and rhythm guitars and keyboards. The downside of his set was that it was too often punishingly loud.
Guy uses a wireless system for his guitar (a Fender Stratocaster, of course), so he isn’t connected to his amplifier by a cable. While he continued to play, he walked out through the audience. It was another crowd-pleasing moment and people were firing away with their cameras. Buddy’s final piece of showbiz was throwing guitar picks from the stage into the audience or handing them out to those up front. I confess I would have liked to have gotten one if I could.