Eclectic Company: Nothing But The Blues

The first time I saw B.B. King live, I was 16, and it was the Tuesday before Woodstock. My boyfriend Jonathan and I bused up to Lenox, Massachusetts to see B.B. open for The Jefferson Airplane and The Who as they warmed up for their Woodstock shows. I was pretty stoked, sitting outdoors in the ninth row among a crowd of what I thought of as the grownups, but B.B. King was the one act I didn’t already know, and I hadn’t gotten into the habit of taking notes of songs and solos, which means I remember very little about the set I heard apart from “Every Day I Have The Blues,” though my overall impression is one of rapt disbelief and extraordinary luck.

In 1972 I was 20 years old, living, working and studying on Kibbutz Hefzibah at the foot of Mount Gilboa in the Jezreel Valley, near the Jordan border and the Arab town of Afula. My Israeli boyfriend Yossi was a sound engineer for Kol Yisroel, the government-operated radio station, and as a side gig, he ran a concert sound system around the country for major touring acts. That year, 47-year-old Riley (better known as “B.B.” for Blues Boy) King was the act he worked on. Yossi and I trailed along with the show like camp followers, wide-eyed and respectful, from big city concert halls to big kibbutzim stages plus a brief visit to soldiers in the Sinai and back. I was in seventh heaven listening to the band as B.B. and Lucille (the name by which he refers to all his guitars) paced daily through the same set, same patter, same solos; but if I was disappointed at the lack of surprises, even then, green as I was, I knew I was watching a hardworking entertainer making it look deceptively simple.

Flash forward to an evening paddleboat concert my old NY audio engineering pal Steve Rathe was recording for public radio during the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival one night late in the 1980s, where B.B. opened!?! for Stevie Ray Vaughan. Vaughan’s hunching and grimacing, and his constant references to himself in third person (“What does little Stevie Ray say?”), were a pose too far, which for me went down in flames under the onslaught of B.B.’s classy expressions and masterful single line bended-note solos and left-hand vibratos flying effortlessly through his fingers as precise counterpoints to his mellow bellow on “The Thrill Is Gone,” a minor-key blues hit written by Roy Hawkins and Rick Darnell in the 1950s and released by B.B. on his 1969 LP, Completely Well. Along with “Every Day I Have The Blues,” written by Peter “Memphis Slim” Chatman, “Thrill” is a signature song not written by B.B. that’s been stamped so surely with the B.B. King sound, other versions are compared not to the original by the writer, but to those of the King of the Blues.

Nevertheless, for many years after traveling with the Israel shows, I sought out little or no B.B. King, having learned that my taste runs to grittier, sloppier soloing, and musicians who might not have B.B.’s skill honed through decades of 250+ days of touring per year, but who just might offer up something unexpected and raw even when ploughing well-worn terrain. (Sometime earlier in the 1980s I had gone to Oxford, Mississippi to see a man about the blues, and there, still uncatalogued, I met B.B.’s personal record collection, filled with Beatles and Frank Sinatra, who B.B. has lauded as his favorite singer — clear evidence that B.B.’s smooth control and professionalism were well planned and well cultivated.) So I was pleasantly surprised to find B.B.’s commercial, with American Idol contestant Crystal Bowersox, joking about Diabetes testing. Somehow their sweet banter held a kernel of spontaneity and genuine affection, and made me eager to share one more night of B.B.’s blues.

L’Auberge du Lac gave me that chance last week, when they brought Mister B.B. and a rock solid octet of old familiar faces led by trumpet and flugelhorn player and bandleader James Bolden, and featuring B.B.’s nephew Walter Riley King on tenor saxophone (“He’s the first member of our family to finish college,” B.B. announced proudly), to their relatively intimate 1,500-seat theater. Over about 70 minutes, after the band had stoked the fires with two lengthy soloing numbers that earned every member well-deserved applause, B.B. was helped to a chair, where he sat, dressed to the impeccable nines, cradling and stroking a black solid-body Gibson Lucille — the B.B. King 80th Birthday Edition of the ES-335 — and playing and singing some of the same songs I first heard in 1969 and 1972. The big hands and fingers are tired now and have lost much of their cunning, the big voice has lost much of its power (though not its timbre), the band intro and other lengthy monologues trail off without quite making it to their punch lines. For many in the audience, just B.B.’s presence was enough of a thrill, as they showed from their opening standing ovation and attention through many meanderings.

But when I sat down to write this, I thought I was going to go down the sad road maundering about time passing. After all, while I was out of town meeting my POSSLQ’s son and granddaughter in southeast Texas last week, clarinetist, conductor, and Temple Sinai Sunday School Principal Bill Kushner had died here in town, just three days short of his 88th birthday, on which day he was buried, which was also the day before my 59th birthday. But as I thought back over my lifetime of B.B. King sightings, I realized that for me, despite his decline, the show had come full circle. I don’t know for sure, but I’m willing to bet that the set list and asides to the band, and the references to his great age that seemed so spontaneous at the time, actually come each night in the same places, and that the band’s licks and riffs and solos that flesh out B.B.’s contribution are as scripted as his were in those shows I heard him play with a different band in Israel 40 years ago. If you check his website, you’ll see that a grueling schedule of one-night stands is underway. So be it. With the help of his band, his staff and his coterie, Mr. B.B. King clearly intends to make new fans but keep the old for as long as he can put hand to frets and strings. Not many others can say the same. So is the thrill gone? Looking at it that way — the man controlling what he can as long as he can, and dictating the terms of his gradual surrender — what I see is a great artist passing on with dignity. And that’s the way I will always remember him