POP MUSIC REVIEWS : CHICAGO BLUES IS ALIVE ‘N’ WELLS, GUY

The question is not so much what got into Buddy Guy and Junior Wells on Thursday night at the Palomino, but what doesn’t get into the veteran bluesmen’s performance every night. Maybe it was the rain. Maybe it was the sold-out first show. Maybe it was the “ co -ney-ac” Buddy ordered from the stage between guitar solos the likes of which these days are rarely heard outside of old Jimmy Page bootlegs.

Maybe it was having a back-up band good enough to allow riff-slinger/vocalist Guy, 50, and harmonicat/vocalist Wells, 52, to play free and loose with the blues format, doing anything that came into their heads and stamping--make that stomping-- it with the mark of their own Chi-town hustlers’ personalities.

The communication between the two, who’ve been playing together for more than 20 years, is near telepathic, even if most of the audience was too, uh, lubed to appreciate the subtleties of Guy’s spidery fills or Wells’ beautifully phrased, almost wordless vocals and crushing use of silence in his harp solos.

Sorry about that boogie-mad crowd, gentlemen. You two, of course, don’t have to apologize for anything, least of all the best local blues show in the last five years. Just be sure and play your souls--you cats have a reputation for doggin’ it, ya know--next time you blow though town. We promise to have the roof back on the Palomino.