If you can recall the final shot in Martin Scorsese’s 2006 Irish mob movie The Departed, then you’ve experienced the genius of Roy Buchanan. Moments after Mark Wahlberg’s Massachusetts State Police Sergeant Dignam guns down Matt Damon’s mob mole Colin Sullivan, the camera pans round to capture a rat scurrying along the balcony rail of Sullivan’s apartment. As the gnawing rodent reaches centre frame, Roy Buchanan’s blues-fuelled instrumental version of the country standard Sweet Dreams bursts into life.
Sweet Dreams, released in 1972, remains the finest moment in the career of the man who was damned with the accolade ‘the guitarist’s guitarist’. Lauded by the likes of Jeff Beck, Gary Moore (who covered the blues-rock thriller The Messiah Will Come Again) and, more recently, Joe Bonamassa, Buchanan never attained any real fame or fortune during his lifetime. These days he’s as infamous for apparently turning down an offer to join the Rolling Stones and his mysterious death in a Virginia jail cell in 1988 as he is for his music. Yet Buchanan’s legacy as a guitarist punches way above that of many of the rock stars who held him in such high regard.
