Feels Like Rain : Buddy Guy : Review : Rolling Stone

Eric Clapton has called Buddy Guy "the best guitar player alive," and though this is debatable, Guy reigns supreme among flashy, high-energy blues guitarists for sure. His flamboyant, multinote solos tend to wail flat-out from the start, and there is an expressive intensity and superb command of blues nuances in his playing as well. When Guy hooked up with British producer John Porter for his first Silvertone album and most successful recording to date, Damn Right, I've Got the Blues (1991), it was probably inevitable that the likes of Clapton, Jeff Beck and Mark Knopfler would show up to do guest bits.

Feels Like Rain is the Guy-Porter team's second outing, and the two men have retained what worked best on the earlier album while experimenting in other areas. The good stuff they held on to includes the rhythm section of former Little Feat drummer Richie Hayward and bassist Greg Rzab, which would be hard to improve on, and Porter's canny and fruitful production approach. Porter understands that in this kind of music, nothing can beat players in a top-notch band striking sparks off one another in real time, and a bit of distortion is preferable to squeaky-clean tracking.

Both the song choices and Guy's guitar work on Feels Like Rain are more of a stretch than on the earlier disc. On Guy's "She's a Stone Superstar" and the charged-up "I Could Cry," a guitar-driven collaboration with John Mayall, Guy edges closer to the expanded sonic range of another of his fervent admirers, Jimi Hendrix. And while songwriting credits for John Fogerty and John Hiatt might make some hard-core blues fans cringe, these songs sound tailor-made for Guy's heated, gospelish vocal turns. On Hiatt's title tune, Bonnie Raitt contributes country-soul slide guitar while otherwise, and wisely, letting Guy walk away with the track. The album's cover tunes, including songs by James Brown and Marvin Gaye as well as Muddy Waters and Guitar Slim, round out the menu.

If there's a problem with this otherwise exemplary approach to transgeneric blues recording, it's the parade of guests, who are mostly singers rather than pickers this time out. Paul Rodgers's bit seems superfluous. Travis Tritt is more to the point, but Guy doesn't need any of it musically or, one suspects, commercially. With this producer and crew of musicians (including welcome additions Ian McLagan and Bill Payne on keyboards and Johnny Lee Schell on rhythm guitar), Guy could easily have carried the album without any outside help.