Sounds like a blues song. But, it's true. It's all Buddy Guy's fault - that old rascal with the devil in his guitar fingers. The concert last night filled my head with blues and even now, the morning after, it goes through my head: gypsy woman told my mamma way before I was born - you got a boy-child coming, gonna be a son of a gun...
As I sip the first coffee of the day, while my darling still lays in bed, felled by the late night with almost too much blues, my fingers remember it all, memorize it on the keyboard for the diary. The bad seats, way up on the highest level of the Massey Hall and so much to the side that we could see only half of the stage. The unruly crowd, dropping in almost an hour after the concert started, fidgeting, coming out frequently of the narrow seat row - and making the whole row stand up - to go to pee, or grab another beer. The 14-year-old guitar god Quinn Sullivan who opened for the man of the night. The blonde woman so stoned, she almost fell over the railing - oh, and she propped herself on Margo's head while stumbling over the stairs to go to the loo. And with all that, we enjoyed the show. More than that - we loved it.
Buddy Guy is a guitar virtuoso in his own right, a thing I didn't know about the man, having heard of him for the first time when we were in his blues restaurant in Chicago last October. He sang one song then, and didn't play the guitar. We googled him afterward to figure out who was that old geezer who so obviously enjoyed himself on the stage. It was quite a humbling surprise to find out he's a legend, to see his pictures performing with Clapton, the Stones, B.B. King and many others. Of course we couldn't let him pass through Toronto without seeing him again. And he didn't disappoint. He played the guitar, and he played with it. He played it with his fingers, rubbed it on his shirt, strummed it with the drummer's stick. He sang, he teased the crowd, he joked. He rocked, and he bluesed. He rose us all to our feet, and he left us standing when he was gone, without an encore. He filled the night, our hearts and our heads with blues.
Walking to the car, our bums numb from the hard wooden seats which must have been designed for torture instead of pleasant viewing of the show, we realized we paid the price for being too cheap. Next time there will be higher priced tickets with softer seats and the straight view of the whole stage.
