Customer Reviews

That's What I Am Here For - no obi

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Roy Buchanan played a bold and brazen guitar style that went as far as to get him the reputation of "The greatest guitar player you never heard of." I was lucky enough to live in the Maryland suburbs where Roy gigged mainly in the early years, and was one of his "underground" fans whose duty in life, it seemed occasionally, was to turn people on to this music phenom. This was the 1st Roy album I heard and I was enthralled by it. Roy takes "Hey Joe" to places Jimi Hendrix never dreamed. He does a wonderful Lynyrd Skynyrd-like tune called "Home Is Where I Lost Her". Ok, there is a couple throw aways like "Voices", but overall this is an album with greatness in it!

I am actually a big fan of Roy Buchanan, but I was quite disappointed with this album. He is an astounding guitar player, but his career output is uneven. I have always had this sense of searching for the perfect Roy Buchanan album, and this one is further from it than most.

As always, there are moments on this album when you will shake your head with amazement at his technical brilliance, but the playing is oddly disconnected from the context of the songs. Several of the songs just aren't very good songs. Also, the vocals are problematic. The guest vocalists here are unimpressive to me. Roy himself, of course, could not sing as such, and luckily he rarely pressed himself beyond a kind of spoken delivery. His vocals range from the occasionally touching, to the indifferent (his vocals on this album mostly fit that category), to the awkward, to the cringe-inducing. His guitar is the voice you want to hear.

One must applaud Buchanan's attempts at stylistic range, but some of the musical hats he tried on clearly did not fit. Overall, this album has the feel of putting out a product that was unnatural to him.

I remember... standing about 10 feet from the stage at SJ's Spartan Stadium when he played a free concert there way back, and at a few points bursting out in laughter at what I can only call amazing guitar virtuosity - how can he be doing what I'm hearing?! Amazement. Not studio - live and in my face. If you were there or weren't, one song on this album says so much about this guitar master, titled - "That's what I am here for". Pay$d to see him a few days later in the city - also amazing... Think what else was being done at the time - and where guitar masters were headed (mainly to the bank and fashion consultants) and consider this fellow. I feel that the title song says and plays as he did - and speaks the language of the time. Sure the album is uneven, but I feel that way about the Stones, Beatles, Tull, and most others too - so what? Not like your bar bands can even attempt most of this axe work - fact is you won't hear this stuff being played - unless you're with Roy, looking at the stars from the other side. For the title song alone this one deserves 5 stars.

I have 9 Roy Buchanan albums, but most of them leave me wondering: where's the passion? Okay, many of his recordings are technically more accomplished, have a nicer, "cleaner" sound, but they seem to me to be lacking fire in the belly. This one moves me in my soul. The others (with the exception of "Livestock") seem more like an exercise in how many notes per square inch can you squeeze into a song; an intellectual exercise in how many squeaks, wails, wah-wahs you can get out of a Telecaster; how technically brilliant one get get.

But where's the soul? One gets the impression that Buchanan "lost his soul to the devil," musically speaking, on his later (more acclaimed) recordings. Okay, so no one else can approach the pyrotechnics of the later albums... but, once again, where's the soul? No one questions that Roy had soul, perhaps too much soul for his own good, but it doesn't come through on most of his recordings. Give me early Buchanan any time over the excesses of the later stuff, breathtaking though it might be to those guitarists and fans who prefer technique over art.

In my humble opinion, all the songs on side A of this recording capture the best that Buchanan had in him, and that was a helluva lot. Buy this record and hear music so passionate and soulful that it's hard to listen to without shedding a few tears.

Next to Jimi Hendrix, Roy Buchanan is arguably as good. Stevie
Ray Vaughn and Robin Trower are in the same category but not
as versatile. Roy Buchanan was a virtuoso.