Buddy Guy's Legends

Buddy Guy’s Legends is a 500-capacity Chicago blues club with café tables and standing-room space. Its distinguishing feature is a bar backed by guitars given to Buddy Guy by B.B. King, Carlos Santana, Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan, part of a larger in-house collection of records, photographs, artwork and blues artifacts. The effect is part concert room, part evidence locker for the music the club presents.

A club rebuilt one block away

Buddy Guy opened Legends in June 1989 at 754 South Wabash, after his earlier Checkerboard Lounge partnership. The original site faced a long relocation after its leased building was donated to Columbia College in 1999. Guy eventually bought the building at 700 South Wabash, and the club moved there in June 2010; the new venue took over 16,000 square feet across two floors, giving Guy ownership of both the room and its building.

One durable entry in the club’s lore came in November 1994, when Eric Clapton played three sold-out shows. During those performances, Clapton brought Otis Rush onstage to jam, while Pete Townshend attended as a spectator. That night captures the room’s appeal: a house band tradition and a small-scale setting able to turn a concert into a meeting point for blues players and visiting rock musicians.

The room today

Legends books blues artists exclusively, with local, national and international performers on its calendar, plus a weekly Wednesday open blues jam at 9 p.m.; players bring their own instruments and join after the host band’s opening set. Shows are general admission, with first-come seating. The current space has two stages, an upgraded sound system and the original blue-and-white checkerboard floor, giving the room a clubby, lived-in visual identity alongside its polished memorabilia display.