2023-07-14 01:30:04
On the way to the fifth Arrasate Blues festival, where they perform this Saturday at 7:00 p.m. and with free admission, Slideboy Vegas & His Blues Buddies from Alicante have scratched off a couple of previous gigs with less budget but also with open doors: today Friday in Vitoria ( Café Azkena, 8 pm) and yesterday Thursday in Bilbao (Residence, 8 pm). They arrived in the Biscayan capital after playing the day before, on Wednesday, at a hotel in their area (it’s high tourist season there!), finishing at 2 in the morning and then, hardly sleeping, driving eating nuts until they reached at about 6 in the afternoon to Barrainkua street, as they were lucky enough to park on the same side of the Residence pub.
The trio is unquestionably led by the guitarist Slideboy Vegas, alias of Esteban Vegas, a resident of Altea, but born in Bilbao! In fact, the white emigrant bluesman from Bilbao had his mother, his aunt and his uncle at the Residence. And before an audience that filled the pub and always predisposed, whether for blood reasons or for the desire to have a good time, the Salao Slideboy Vegas & His Blues Buddies (His Blusero Colleagues: Alejandro Vázquez on drums and Humberto Corrales on double bass, a Humberto who performed twenty years ago at the Resi) reviewed 17 versions for 92 minutes.
Many of the songs were presented by the charlatan leader (two new patrons entered and he greeted them: “ongi etorri, I am a polyglot”; and a spectator commented: “he already knows more than me!”). And many others, easily recognizable because they are standards of the blues caton, even though the poster promised “blues-country-rock and roll” (there was a country theme, perhaps the most chanted of the set: ‘Move it on over’ by Hank Williams).
Besides, there was a bit of gospel (the closing with ‘When the saints go marchin’ in’, previously the ‘This Train is a Bound of Glory’ that the Travellin’ Brothers from Leioa have also done, who will be headlining the same Saturday 5º Arrasate Blues), but the nucleus of the repertoire was black blues, as old as or older than the two guitars of more than half a century, more than 70 years old that Slideboy used (“I restore them and sell them, seriously”). A blues intoned with fair voice by Vegas (it sounded dull, as if affected by air conditioning: was it due to the long trip?) and exposed through often hackneyed pieces like ‘Stormy Monday blues’ according to T-Bone Walker (“does anyone know him ?», he asked, and it seemed that nobody).
They also played Muddy Waters’ boogie ‘Rollin’ And Tumblin” (with added harmonica), Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Smokestack Lightning’, Arthur Big Boy Crudup’s ‘That’s all right mama’ (popularized by Elvis and which Esteban reviewed as if he played with the first Matchbox, those of ‘Rockabilly rebel’), BB King’s ‘Thrill is gone’ (the most outstanding and famous epigone of the aforementioned Little Walter, look where). We haven’t forgotten John Lee Hooker’s ‘Boom, boom’ (which was quite lysergic for them), and two classics by a great slide guitar player like Elmore James: ‘Shake your money maker’ and ‘The sky is crying’.
A correct gig, but why didn’t they play original songs? Total, if the majority of the public did not even know that they were reviewing covers of old songs by black bluesmen like Leadbelly (“he was in and out of jail,” said Vegas) or Big Boy Crudup (“poorer than us”).
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