Mary Had a Little Lamb

The performance is almost mythological at this point — Guy on the Fillmore stage in 1968, backed by Jack Bruce and Buddy Miles, taking a children's nursery rhyme and bending it into something that reshapes what an electric guitar is capable of doing. The sound is enormous, with Bruce's bass providing a near-orchestral bottom while Miles drives with the force of someone playing to a crowd that doesn't yet know what it's witnessing. But it's Guy's guitar that commands everything — feedback singing at the edge of control, dive bombs that sound like physical objects falling from great heights, tones he pulls from the instrument that don't seem like they should be available from wood and wire and electricity. The vocal treatment turns the familiar text into something absurdist and confrontational, the innocence of the lyric contrasting with the sheer sonic violence surrounding it, creating an unsettling comedy that is simultaneously a serious demonstration of technique. This is blues as avant-garde theater, as the moment when the tradition announces that its vocabulary includes everything — including the subversion of itself. You listen to this when you want to understand what guitar playing looked like in the moment it became unlimited, when one player made the entire genre take a step back and reconsider its own boundaries.