The Night I Didn’t Know I Was Watching History
by Christopher Sopher
Valley of the Sun Press
December 5, 2025
I saw a headline this morning that hit me harder than expected.
Buddy Guy: “I’m the last old man playing the blues.”
Eighty-nine years old. The final living bridge to the era that shaped every guitarist who ever meant anything.
And just like that, something long buried lit up inside me, a night from 1989 I hadn’t thought about in decades.
I was twenty, living at Roosevelt University’s Herman Crown Center even though I was a Columbia College student. Back then, that whole stretch of downtown was a creative collision zone. Columbia kids. Roosevelt kids. DePaul kids. Harold Washington College kids. Art Institute kids. All mixed together in this wild blend of photographers, guitar players, filmmakers, painters, poets, and people drifting through Chicago trying to figure out who they were going to become.
My roommate was a classical guitar student, a real one. The kind who always had an SG plugged into a tiny amp, the kind whose fingers were always stained from endless practice. He kept a poster of Eric Clapton on our dorm window, right from Clapton’s Journeyman era. Back then, “Pretending” was everywhere. MTV. The radio. Guitar shops. College dorms. If you were a young guitarist in 1989, Clapton was carved into your brain.
One night, cold and windy, the kind of night Chicago hands you without apology, our phone rang. His friend said something that felt both impossible and totally believable in that downtown melting pot.
“Get down to Buddy Guy’s Legends right now. We’re playing pool with Buddy and Eric Clapton.”
The phone clicked.
We were already out the door.
We walked south on Wabash, from 425 to 700, heads down against the wind. I didn’t know who Buddy Guy was. I didn’t know Legends had just opened a few months earlier. I didn’t know I was walking straight into a moment that would burn itself into memory even as I failed to understand it.
I remember stepping inside. The room didn’t feel big. It didn’t feel crowded. It felt alive, a small, intimate space with people packed close enough to catch the vibration of the music before the sound even reached your ears.
And then Buddy Guy got on stage.
Just for one number.
One song.
One lightning strike.
The place erupted.
Not loud, not stadium cheering, but real.
People calling out to him, clapping, cheering with a kind of urgency like they were witnessing something they knew they’d remember forever.
Buddy wasn’t performing. He was summoning something.
A Fender Stratocaster in his hands, low-neck bends, those pentatonic cries that hit you in a place you didn’t even know music could reach. It was raw. It was intimate. It was Chicago blues in its purest form. The room felt alive in a way I still can’t fully explain. He laid down vocals unlike anything I had ever heard in my life, the kind that felt like a sound blanket wrapped around my soul.
Funny thing, back then I always carried my Pentax K1000 with me, loaded with black-and-white film, a 35mm lens ready for whatever walked into my day.
But not that night.
That night I had nothing but my eyes and my ears.
Maybe that’s why the memory feels so sharp, because there’s no photograph to dull it.
I don’t know if Clapton was ever there. Maybe he slipped out. Maybe the rumor was just the kind of story musicians tell each other for fun. It doesn’t matter. Buddy Guy was there, and he lit that room up like he was playing to the entire world.
A few weeks later, my roommate got a Christmas gift, the “Pretending” single fresh off Clapton’s Journeyman album. He played it nonstop. And that’s when the dots started connecting. Buddy Guy. Clapton. The blues roots. The lineage I had unknowingly stepped into on that cold night on Wabash.
And now, in 2025, Buddy Guy sits at eighty-nine years old, saying he’s the last old man playing the blues.
Hearing him say that hit me in the gut.
Because I remember him young, powerful, explosive, in a room that wasn’t even full, on a stage he had barely begun to call his own.
I wasn’t there to witness history.
I was just a kid.
A photography student from Peoria, now living in Phoenix, walking down a freezing street because a phone call said, “Get down here now.”
But now I know the truth.
I saw Buddy Guy when the world still had more bluesmen alive.
I saw him before the legends thinned out.
I saw him before he became the last one left.
And that night, that sound, that electricity,
it never left me.
Some fires burn quietly for years.
Some memories don’t arrive until you’re ready for them.
This one waited thirty-six.
A link to the Rolling Stone article that triggered my memory of the night I didn’t know I was watching history:
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/buddy-guy-sinners-aint-done-with-the-blues-grammys-1235468084/
