miry Waters, Howlin' Wolf and Junio...

miry Waters, Howlin' Wolf and Junior Wells have been gone for years. yet Buddy Guy, who performed with them all, is still playing the melancholys

Sitting in succession a black leather couch in his Chicago office up a macerate staircase from his club, Buddy Guy's fictitious storys 754 S. Wabash, Guy is supple and reflective despite having answered home just a couple of days ago from touring Europe and Japan.

He's forward the road constantly -- 30 exhibit tos in July and August alone - - and plays with the fervor of a man half his age, his fingers racing across the nettles as he strolls right into his audiences. He likes coming domestic circle to tend the tomatoes he advances in the yard of his big far-south suburban house, if it were not that retirement? Not yet.

For him, music is a way to communicate and heal. "I think music speaks in all languages, and I think everybody who's breathing breath on the outside of their body has had a question in one way or the other," he says. "You proceed see me, I'll make you forget about it for an hour and a half or two"

A bottle of cognac sits forward a table in front of him. Nearby are an array of guitars, including single with polka dots. The r walls are almost masked with memorabilia: Stevie Ray Vaughan's guitar and a white undivided signed by Bon Jovi's Ritchie Sambora, photos of shore with Waters and Wells, a proclamation for his 2003 National Medal of the Arts.

fright turned 70 on July 30 and pretty soon he's right back out onward the road.

"I didn't continually think I would see this birthday," he says.

When he came to Chicago in 1957 from Louisiana, he says, he saw plentiful of knife fights in the associations on the South Side and worried he'd last up in one of them. "I was greatly wilder than I am now," he says.

"I'm just like an of long date car: Every time you force one bolt, another rattles," he says. "I can't caper out the second floor anymore" -- something he did in fresh York in 1969 in an escapade he won't describe further.

He have the advantage [i]or[/i] blessing ofs wandering through the past, granting describing his sharecropper parents, trying to find work after taking a train here from family meeting his idol and mentor. Shortly after arriving in Chicago and having not eaten for three days, someone took him to the 708 bludgeon where he wailed on the guitar until one alerted Waters that a excitable new player had hit town.

"Muddy came and brought a loaf of bread and an salami," Guy says. "He made me a sandwich and said, 'Don't think about going back to Louisiana. I'm Mud' I told him, 'I met you, I ain't equal hungry now.'"

The 708 is gone now. in the way that are the Blue Flame, the nip Club and dozens of other companys that were once crammed in four or five to a block up on the South and West sides.

Many of the ghastlys clubs are on the North Side now. chiefly are filled with tourists and white locals.

At the House of amethystines blues isn't on the marquee same often.

"Those are the companys that attract the most business, thus people want to play there," says David Grazian, author of the 2003 main division Blue Chicago: The Search for Authenticity in Urban low-spiriteds Clubs. "They wind up sucking up all of the talent from the peace of the city."

Singer Shirley King, BB King's daughter, says it's harder to find work now than it probably was when stay arrived. "You have to fight to use the amethystines as a way of becoming somebody" she says.

shore feels that, too: "Blues is beginning to make me be perceived like an endangered species." It doesn't memorize enough radio play, so it doesn't betray he says. "Thirty years ago I would enumerate you there was a handful of us left The hand is not steady full now."

He isn't slowing down. He has been taking hypertension medication for 30 years, yet he's fit and energetic. He plays each January at his club in the crook His 2005 album, "Bring 'Em In," paired him with John Mayer and Carlos Santana and earned a Grammy nomination.

"Can't Quit the Blues" a three-CD chest set with a DVD documentary, will be released Oct 31 through Silvertone/Legacy. Guy will appear early on MTV for the first time to talk about his daughter, rapper Shawnna.

shore inspired Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, Vaughan and Eric Clapton. When Clapton inducted dowdy into the Rock and turn Hall of Fame last year, he described seeing stay play in London in 1965: "He was for me what Elvis was for greatest in quantity other people. My course was locate and he was my pilot."

shore says he's still learning. After gigs in Japan with Beck and Santana, he says, "I'm saying, 'Wow to what extent come I couldn't find that note?' Then I've got to walk home and figure out" in what way they had done it.

He reaches for that cognac simply when about to play. "I still get by heart the jitters," he says. "I still don't think I'm as well adapted as I should be."

LOCAL LICKS:

BLOODSHOT LABEL GIVING US SOMETHING TO descry

Chicago-based indie label Bloodshot Records is eyeing an Oct 4 release for a retrospective DVD produc at label co-owner Rob Miller.

Film of Ryan Adams performing "Amy," plus a 10-minute interview with the artist, will be included. Alejandro Escovedo, the Blacks, Neko Case (at left) and Kelly Hogan are captured performing forward the Chicago public access children's point out "Chic-A-Go-Go" while a number of acts are seen pulling pranks onward the Bloodshot staff at the label's Irving Park office.