Music of the Week — December 31, 2006

Roy Buchanan: Sweet Dreams: The Anthology (disc 2)

The second disc of this set may be better than the first, overall. It leans toward live tracks, including a few songs that take a bit of nerve to cover because the originals are so very well known: Neil Young’s “Down By The River,” Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe” (yeah, I know, his isn’t the original, but it’s the best known), Booker T. and the MGs’ “Green Onions.” The last of these in particular is about as perfect an example of blues-rock as could be dreamed of—one of the greatest guitarists ever soloing over one of the greatest riffs ever—and even though it’s eight minutes long it doesn’t get boring for me. “Down By The River” doesn’t have the same scruffy melancholy as Young’s version, but, as I would hope Young would be the first to admit, Buchanan is in another class as a guitarist and gives it a different level of musical intensity.

“I’m A Ram” is a tiresome song redeemed by great guitar work. “I’m Evil,” a braggadocio blues, is probably the most unconvincing vocal in a song of this sort that I’ve ever heard, at least from a professional musician: it’s Buchanan himself, whose singing voice is just a semi-spoken monotone. But his playing supplies all the missing authority. I could do without the slightly funkified take on Hendrix’s “If Six Was Nine,” partly because it uses a particular sort of quacky-growly keyboard sound that was popular in the ‘70s and that I always disliked. I’m not sure why “Good God Have Mercy” was included—it isn’t that good a song, and there isn’t that much guitar work on it. But it’s an unhappy look back at growing up poor in the South, and maybe it had personal meaning for Buchanan.

There’s a beautiful and affecting surprise at the end of “Hey Joe.” The twelve-minute apparently improvised guitar solo “Dual Soliloquy” is impressive although not very satisfying, a series of brief workouts in different styles, a tantalizing glimpse of a side of Buchanan not heard much on record: he probably could have made a name for himself as a folky sort of soloist, somewhat in the manner of some of the artists who recorded for Windham Hill in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.

I just looked at the reviews of this set on Amazon.com and find opinions all over the place as to which tracks are terrific and which are disposable, but only one or two think it isn’t a great set overall. I find it hard to imagine that anyone who likes electric guitar wouldn’t like at least half or two-thirds of it.

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