Scott Holt learned from the best: inspired by Hendrix, mentored by Buddy Guy

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Scott Holt learned from the best: inspired by Hendrix, mentored by Buddy Guy
January 8, 2011
Greg Kot
Chicago Tribune

One of Buddy Guy’s most memorable performances is on the song “First Time I Met the Blues.” It’s a life-changing supernatural being in Guy’s telling, as scary as it is inspiring.

Scott Holt, who will play Jan. 21 at Buddy Guy’s Legends, can relate. In his late teens while growing up in Tennessee, he became obsessed with the guitar and Jimi Hendrix. After six months of playing all day, every day, he saw Hendrix’s inspiration, Buddy Guy, in concert. When he met Guy later that night, Holt couldn’t even speak.

“My father took me to his show and afterward he was talking to Buddy, explaining my music obsession to him; he had to do all the talking because I was just starstruck,” Holt recalls with a laugh. “But Buddy invites me to his hotel room the next day, and there we were sitting across from each other playing guitars and him telling me stories about Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson, Muddy Waters. I didn’t understand the depths of what was happening, but it was the beginning of what has been a 20-year friendship.”

The best was yet to come. After that fateful meeting, Holt began sitting in with Guy whenever the guitarist played near Nashville. Then Guy invited the young guitarist to join the blues legend’s band. It was 1989, and Guy was on the verge of a major comeback, poised to finally establish himself in the pantheon of blues greats after being virtually ignored for decades because of his sporadic recording output.

“I went from zero to 60 in that phone call,” Holt says. “I had never been in a band before, and yet the next day I’ve got a one-way ticket to Chicago to play with Buddy Guy. I don’t even ask him how much I’m going to be paid, or even if I’m getting paid. He picks me up at the airport, cooks me dinner at his house, then we go to his club, I meet the rest of the band, and we climb into a van and head to Canada to start a tour.”

Within a couple of years, Guy’s legend expanded as he began recording steadily and the band was playing amphitheaters and staying in four-star hotels. Holt was at Guy’s side throughout, a guitar slinger who Guy showcased with increasing frequency at his concerts. Though Guy has a reputation for being tough on his band members, Holt says he experienced only generosity and friendship.

“I was horrified getting on stage initially, just trying not to screw up,” Holt recalls. “I don’t know what Buddy saw in me, or why he did what he did. But he gave me room to grow and time to figure it out. If I tried something and it didn’t work, he didn’t chastise me. Before shows, I’d get him to show me licks he played on a certain record, or I’d remind him of songs he hadn’t played in a while. We’d go to lunch and I’d pick his brain about the blues.”

Holt spent the ‘90s in Guy’s band, developing a bold tone and audacious attack on the guitar that earned him plenty of attention as a young blues-rock gunslinger. It was inevitable that Holt eventually would recruit a band and begin recording solo album.

“It was a natural evolution – when you grow up as a kid there comes a point where you gotta move out of your parents’ house,” Holt says. “The entire time I was with Buddy he always talked about when I would get my own band. He probably talked about it more than I did.”

The protégé has learned his lessons well. Holt has been playing more than 200 shows a year for the last decade with his band and released seven albums, the latest of which is “Kudzu,” which balances his explosive guitar playing with better-developed songs.

“I made six records based on the premise that it’s all about the guitar,” Holt says. “With this record, we went in the opposite direction. My producer, Tim O’Brien, told me, ‘You’re going to be a singer on this record.’ It used to be all about getting the guitar sounds and tones just right, and throwing something around it. But I need to offer something more than just being a hotshot guitar player, because there are million better players out there.”

Holt says that his progression as an artist remains informed by what he learned from Guy.

“The thing that sticks out most for me was not something expressed verbally, but just an observation,” Holt says of his blues apprenticeship with Guy. “The message was ‘always be true to yourself.’ He was never anything but Buddy Guy – the guy you saw on stage was the same guy in the bus or in his house or on the street. He was more of an entertainer on stage, projecting that personality outward, but it was always him. Being true to yourself in that way gives you tremendous freedom, because it’s not an act.”