B. B. KING
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1949–2008 |
Blues |
3 O'Clock Blues (1951) |
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Compilation
released: Feb. 1957 |
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Tracks: 1) Please Love Me; 2) You Upset Me
Baby; 3) Everyday I Have The Blues; 4) Bad Luck; 5) 3 O’Clock Blues; 6) Blind
Love; 7) Woke Up This Morning; 8) You Know I Love You; 9) Sweet Little Angel;
10) Ten Long Years; 11) Did You Ever Love A Woman; 12) Crying Won’t Help You. |
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B. B. King’s
singles on RPM records started flowing as early as 1949, but since most of
his long and prolific career was LP-oriented, it makes sense to choose as our
point of departure this 1956 collection, which puts together the majority of
his best singles from 1951 to 1955 (a more comprehensive overview of the
early years can probably be found on some later anthologies, but, as far as I
am able to tell, there is no single collection that puts together all of his
early material). |
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Many of these
songs were huge hits on the blues and R&B charts — but, for some curious reason,
missed attracting white audiences, who were usually far more enthralled with
the likes of Muddy Waters and Elmore James in the 1950s. If you look up any
random biographies of blues/R&B-enthralled British Invaders, for
instance, you will rarely see B. B. mentioned as a serious influence — except
by just a few oddjobs such as Eric Clapton, and even then, usually in retrospect
rather than in any interviews from the 1960s. The reason? My best guess — too
clean. The thing is
that already from the very early days, B. B. King positioned himself as, or,
rather, was marketed as a sort of king of «Blues-de-Luxe»: clean, dazzling, respectable
playing for respectable gentlemen. Just take a look at the album cover: with that
big fat Gibson, that neat pin-striped suit and that handsome bowtie, he looks
much more like the black equivalent of Bill Haley than Muddy Waters’ lost
brother. The exact same association applies to the music: smooth, mid-tempo,
backed by professional jazz musicians with their big brass arrangements. And,
to make matters «worse», the guy puts as much emphasis on his singing
as he does on his playing — the album isn’t called Singin’, not Playin’ The
Blues for no reason — really, the most tasteless thing in blues music
since the day Lonnie Johnson sold out to all them ballad-lovin’ posh people! Then
again: what do you really expect
from a guy one of whose primary idols in life has been Frank Sinatra? Can
you even imagine Muddy or Elmore naming Frank as a major influence? All of this is
enough to explain precisely why B. B. King did not become a household name
among white audiences until the late Sixties — or maybe even the early
Seventies. It also explains why these early singles are not really the
«milestones» they are sometimes pronounced to be. Thus, for traditional blues
lovers, ‘Every Day I Have The Blues’ is one of the cornerstones of the genre,
but definitely not because of this original version, a measly 2:49 in
length and only featuring a simple, brief solo, thoroughly not outstanding in the context of all
the other great blues heroes of the time — it took King quite a long time, at
least ten years or so, to properly popularize it, along with a dozen other
big hits, in the live context. Indeed, Singin’ The Blues is no more of a milestone in the evolution of
electric blues than contemporary records by the other King (Albert) — or, for
that matter, even earlier records by T-Bone Walker. Most of the time, B. B. King
plays relatively standard, predictable licks which do not differ all that
much from the regular techniques of the epoch; more importantly, the compact
form of the 45"-tailored ditty does not allow him the slightest
opportunity to stretch out, improvise, or develop a theme. So in the end,
if there is one reason to listen to these singles at all, it is truly
and verily the singing. Unquestionably, at this point B. B. King was the most
vocally-endowed blues performer in the business (and would remain so until
the emergence of a strong competitor in Freddie King), and his manner of
phrasing and vocalizing owes much more to urban semi-crooners like Leroy
Carr and Lonnie Johnson, not to mention white lounge performers (to whom the
man must have lent quite a serious ear), than to hoarse growlers from the
Delta. This makes it hard to associate his music with the devil, who, as I
have heard, is gravely allergic to falsetto, and prefers to make serious
deals with the likes of John Lee Hooker. But, when dealing with B. B. King,
it is wise to remember that blues had been alternately serving as a genre of
lounge entertainment since the day it was born, and to try and approach him
from the same perspective one would approach Sinatra or Neil Diamond: prima
facie a respectable entertainer who will try to stir up — gracefully and
cautiously to some, blandly and boringly to others — the human parts
of your soul rather than the animal parts. In fact, I
think I «got» this record — and B. B.’s studio style in general — when I
thought of it as sort of a Clyde McPhatter album with the doo-wop harmonies
and strings replaced by soaring electric guitar. Many people, I think, would share
this dream: to hear Clyde McPhatter with an atmosphere of true bluesy grit
instead of sentimental sap. If so, you need not look further than the
original versions of ‘Three O’Clock Blues’ or ‘Did You Ever Love A Woman’ to
get what you want, except you gotta be prepared that most of the hooks will
be your average generic 12-bar blues. Not that this is the most tasteful
combination in the world, and, honestly, even after getting it I still much
prefer the period when B. B. properly reallocated the majority of his talent
to his guitar playing. But there is something to be said about the art of
«blues crooning» as well, though not much, and now that I’ve said it, we
might as well bring the review to a close. |
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Compilation
released: 1958 |
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Tracks: 1) Why Do Things Happen To Me; 2) Ruby Lee; 3) When My
Heart Beats Like A Hammer; 4) Past Day; 5) Boogie Woogie Woman; 6) Early In
The Morning; 7) I Want To Get Married; 8) That Ain’t The Way To Do It; 9)
Troubles, Troubles, Troubles; 10) Don’t You Want A Man Like Me; 11) You Know
I Go For You; 12) What Can I Do. |
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REVIEW Perhaps Crown
Records made a small marketing mistake when they placed the absolute majority
of King’s hit singles on one and the same LP: Singin’ The Blues did become the definitive sample of the man’s
1950s studio sound, but it also squeezed most of the golden eggs from the hen
in one go. And with the LP format steadily gaining in popularity, the Bihari
brothers, who were in charge of Modern Records and all its subsidiaries, had
no choice but to go back to the stockpiles and load the subsequent albums
with former commercial flops, obscure B-sides and generally stuff of uneven
quality — as usual, paying no attention whatsoever to proper chronological
sequencing and making us guess about the specific motives behind each single
inclusion. |
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Ironically,
this sweep across the vaults means that The
Blues ends up being somewhat more than just the blues — because while the
record-buying public knew very well what it wanted from B. B. King (scorching
electric blues leads), B. B. King himself did not particularly fancy the
status of a one-trick pony. With this selection, it is easier to see traces
of stylistic versatility and occasional adaptation to the times — a rather
far cry from the strictly hardcore blues, blues-de-luxe, and blues ballad
program on the debut LP. It’s not necessarily good adaptation, and you cannot always blame the public for
wanting to stick to the tried and true, but it is one thing to purchase a new
12-bar blues single every few months, and quite another to go through an
entire album of rigid 12-bar blues in one go, right? So, from as
early as 1950 we feature ‘Don’t You Want A Man Like Me’, with a danceable,
mambo-influenced, percussion-drenched rhythm which B. B. then skillfully
converts into jump-blues for the bridge section — an innovative as heck
approach for the time; but since the song does not even have a guitar solo,
letting the rhythm and the brass sections take over completely, nobody cared,
patiently waiting for the much more predictable, but much more guitar-ish ‘3
O’Clock Blues’ to bring the young showman his first bout of fame. Five years
later, in 1955, the B-side ‘Ruby Lee’ repeated the mambo trick with the same
change in tempo midway through the song — this time, the song had much more
guitar in it, but the public still did not want their boy going all Cuban on their
asses. Elsewhere, we
see B. B. try out the classic boogie sound: ‘Boogie Woogie Woman’, a B-side
from late 1952, also features no lead guitar, ceding its place to Amos
Milburn-style barrelhouse piano rolls and a loud sax solo. ‘That Ain’t The
Way To Do It’, which was actually the B-side to ‘3 O’Clock Blues’, is a bit
more agreeable, with King finally playing a rather laconic solo at the end of
the song, but here, too, the emphasis is clearly on getting the crowd up on
its feet and dancing, rather than admiring the guitar player’s nimble
fingers. By 1956, that
old-fashioned boogie sound is seen morphing into something more closely
resembling modern Chuck Berry-style rock’n’roll, specifically on ‘Early Every
Morning’ (sometimes titled ‘Early In The Morning’) — although the song is
still structured as a fast 12-bar blues, King’s licks on here have more
points of connection to Chuck Berry’s soloing style than before (of course,
Chuck’s guitar playing itself grew out of mastering blues licks); basically,
this is as rock’n’roll as the man would ever get in his life, which is not
saying much — B. B. King was always too conservative and laid-back to allow
the true fires of rock’n’roll to contaminate his spirit — but there is something to be appreciated about
the god of blues de-luxe speeding up and showering you with a flurry of
happy-agitated notes. These solos certainly kick less ass than Chuck, but
this is mainly because they are far more complex and disciplined, and that
can at least be respected. ‘Early In The
Morning’ was actually an A-side, but it did not chart. In order to chart, a
B. B. King song had to be a slow blues, so the only classic-commercial hit on
The Blues is, understandably, the
very slow blues-de-luxe ‘When My Heart Beats Like A Hammer’ (from 1954), a
classic King number which is simply not too interesting in its original
three-minute studio version; seek out various live performances to see which
ways it could go when properly let out of the bottle. Two more slightly less famous
chart successes are from 1957: ‘I Want To Get Married’ has a beautifully
sharp and wobbly guitar tone, the exact kind that Eric Clapton would be
elevating further around 1965, and ‘Troubles, Troubles, Troubles’ opens with
a funny New Orleanian blast of brass which makes me wonder if this recording
could in any way influence Elvis’ own ‘Trouble’ (a vastly different song
altogether) in King Creole one
year later. (This would require Leiber and Stoller listening to B. B. King,
but why the hell not?). On the whole,
however, do not expect too many strong surprises: even the «different» styles
that I tried to describe are really just subtle nuances. Given, however, just
how many songs here feature next to no lead guitar, I would think that the
titles of Singin’ The Blues and The Blues should probably have been
reversed — I mean, B. B. King in his younger days always had as strong
aspirations about being an expressive singer as about being a guitar player, but
it is only on this LP that you begin to understand just how important that
aspect of his showmanship was to his blossoming ego. |
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Album
released: October 1959 |
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Tracks: 1) Precious Lord; 2) Save A Seat
For Me; 3) Ole Time Religion; 4) Sweet Chariot; 5) Servant’s Prayer; 6) Jesus
Gave Me Water; 7) I Never Heard A Man; 8) Army Of The Lord; 9) I Am Willing
To Run All The Way; 10) I’m Working On The Building; 11*) A Lonely Lover’s
Plea; 12*) I Am; 13*) The Key To My Kingdom; 14*) Story From My Heart And
Soul; 15*) In The Middle Of An Island; 16*) Sixteen Tons. |
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REVIEW I kind of like
(and still mostly agree with) my old, short, crude, irreverent review of this
album (from 2015 – seems like a lifetime ago already), so let me first
reproduce it here with minimal edits, then I’ll throw in a few extra comments
on the Old-and-Wise side of the story. |
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«Far be it from
us to say that B. B. King is a poor singer — he has a nice, endearing,
sometimes almost silky tone that never grates or annoys. Further be it
from us to say that B. B. King is not a spiritually sensible man — regardless
of how much money he has made and how much of it he has not given away to the
poor, there is little reason to doubt his sincere faith in the Lord (who has,
among other things, provided him with all that money). Still further
be it from us to say that B. B. King has no right, or reason, or business
recording an entire album of gospel tunes if he feels like it — especially
considering that, every once in a while, everyone deserves at least a brief
change from the 12-bar mold, and going into gospel is nowhere near as
cringeworthy as, say, going into crooning. And be it as
furthest of the furthest from us as possible to say that B. B. King Sings Spirituals is a proverbially bad album. If you
have not suffered priest abuse, be it Catholic or Protestant; if you have no
19th century-style racial prejudices; and if you can stand a little musical
take on «ol’ time religion» propelled by good singing and good organ playing,
the record cannot be put down on its own merits. None of which,
however, prevents me from stating the obvious: I cannot think of a reason why
anyone would want to hear, much less own, a B. B. King album with no guitar
on it whatsoever. B. B. King is a guitar player, period. If he does not want
to play his guitar, let him not play his guitar in front of his parents, his
children, his close friends, or his mirror. In this life, B. B. King has one
and only one social purpose (that matters, anyway), and that is playing his
guitar. I can understand that he did not want to be pigeonholed. But I can do
nothing about it — I want to
pigeonhole him, and I will
pigeonhole him.» Now for some
moments of saving grace. From a historical perspective, Sings Spirituals has some importance. As a conceptual project, it
was B. B. King’s very first album to be released as an album rather than a randomized collection of singles — all the
recordings were freshly produced over one session in April 1959. It was also
his first and last album that very
explicitly paid tribute to the old musical tradition of spirituals on which
he was born and raised — certainly not the only time that King so explicitly
acknowledged his racial and social roots, but the only time he focused entirely on the matter. And finally,
it was one of the first, if not the
first time ever in the world of the blues, when an entertainer primarily
known and revered for one certain skill (guitar playing), would defiantly and
single-mindedly attempt to reinvent himself as a major practicioner of a
different skill. It’s kind of in-yer-face here: "You only want me to
shut up and play my guitar? Well, this time you have no choice whatsoever but
to accept me as a singer!" Which makes this a completely different move
from Nat King Cole, for instance — whose gradual transition from piano
playing to crooning was clearly motivated by factors of fan response and
popularity. All of this
provides ground for respect rather than ridicule; yet even after a few
additional listens to the record I am unable to convert that formal respect
to genuine emotional impression. Technically, B. B. King, particularly in his
younger days, had a solid singing voice, with decent range and capable of
nuanced overtones, but it didn’t really have enough depth and power for this
kind of material, not even reaching the level of an Elvis, let alone a
Mahalia Jackson. Nor do you ever get the feeling of all this spirituality
flowing through the heart of a «troubled man» — this is more like the
spirituality of a content, generally satisfied person, reverent and cautious
enough so as to not forget to regularly thank the Lord for his well-being. It
might, in fact, have worked better if he’d come up with this idea in his
later years rather than in his youth; maybe then all the accumulated baggage
of old age and «troubles I’ve seen» would have automatically added an extra
layer of depth and authenticity. Here, even the more personal and intimate
prayer-type spirituals such as ‘Save A Seat For Me’ and ‘I Am Willing To Run
All The Way’ fail to rally me to the Lord’s rewarding side. It is certainly
telling that among the bonus tracks on the 2006 CD reissue, even if most of
them naturally belong to the same category of spirituals, one finds embedded
a loud, exuberant, brass-heavy, and utterly corny cover of Tony Bennett’s ‘In
The Middle Of An Island’ — I am not entirely sure if this was recorded during
the exact same period, yet it does not feel like it’s totally out of place on an album like this, cozily nestled in
between ‘Story From My Heart And Soul’ and ‘Sixteen Tons’. With his
blues-de-luxe approach to everything he ever did, B. B. King managed to
cross-breed cotton fields and Las Vegas time and time again; I’m sure his Jesus always paid sufficient
attention to his silk suit and black tie before giving his servant water,
’cause every bluesman crazy ’bout a sharp-dressed Lord and suchlike. Even so, I bear
no instinctive or intellectually synthesized hatred towards the record; all
of these considerations merely try to explain why B. B. King, no matter how
deeply he may have wanted to, is never really counted among the great gospel
singers of our time. But it does add at least a formally interesting page to
his story, explicitly reminding us of the influences that were quite
important not just to his singing, but to his playing as well — think of it
as his equivalent of David Bowie’s Pin-Ups
or The Band’s Moondog Matinee, albums
that very few people would list among their favorites but do a good job of
reminding us that individual artistry does not simply appear out of nothing
within a vacuum. |
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Tracks: 1) Sweet Thing; 2) I’ve Got Papers
On You, Baby; 3) Tomorrow Is Another Day; 4) Come By Here; 5) The Fool; 6) I
Love You So; 7) The Woman I Love (Moonshine Woman Blues); 8) We Can’t Make It;
9) Treat Me Right; 10) Time To Say Goodbye. |
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The first of
several LPs credited to «B. B. King And His Orchestra», B. B. King Wails could easily get lost in the altogether
overwhelming pool of King’s interchangeable LPs released in the Crown years,
but there are at least two significant nuances. One: this is his first record, not counting the made-to-be-different
experiment of Sings Spirituals, to
have been released as a proper album, not a mish-mash of contemporary and
obsolete singles. Some of the songs were indeed released as singles at about
the same time as the LP, and some, like ‘Sweet Thing’, would continue to be
released as singles years later, but none of this is relevant: B. B. King Wails is the man’s first
attempt to prove that he is capable of building up and releasing a 26-minute
dissertation on the blues in a single sitting, after a decade of thriving on
tiny singles. |
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Two: the «His Orchestra» thing is no joke, as this
session does indeed feature B. B. King at his brassiest, with a huge big band
sound — huger than ever before, for sure — supporting his playing and singing.
The difference from the earlier years is, of course, mainly one of scope,
since King had always favored a big mess of pianos, horns, and (to a lesser
extent) strings behind his back, but this time he clearly wants to establish
himself as some sort of spiritual competitor for both Count Basie and Tommy Dorsey, with both of whose
orchestras he also cut several recordings that year, available as bonus
tracks on the album’s expanded CD edition. What can we say? «One of the most
polished Negro entertainers in the business», as he is called in Bill
Parker’s original liner notes[1],
really loved for his grit and jagged edges to be counterbalanced by glitz and
flash, the more the merrier. The problem is, the glitzier it gets, the less
convincing it becomes — for the most part, King continues to stick to the
classic vibe and feel of post-war electric blues, while His Orchestra, at the
very same time, tries to take him into a completely different direction. Incindentally,
the contrast begins already on the very first track, ‘Sweet Thing’, which
opens as a dialog between King’s blues phrasing and a lively, blasting
response from his brass section. Like most of the tracks here, it ends up
sounding like «Big Joe Turner with Virtuoso Blues Guitar On Top», not
necessarily a great combination. When it comes to the soloing part, you’d
think the horns might step back a bit, but they actually get louder
simultaneously with the guitar, muffling its sharpness and smoothing out the
edges. The two approaches simply do not mesh all that well, which is
altogether not surprising considering that what we’re hearing is «Mississippi
Country Boy Going Vegas». It gets even
less convincing on the second track (‘I’ve Got Papers On You, Baby’), where
the «Orchestra» does most of the work — this time, there’s a part of the
horns responsible for rhythm work and another part responsible for lead
melody — and B. B. King starts to feel like a guest star on his own
recording, playing a short, nicely flowing solo that is immediately lost in
the surrounding sea of brass. Maybe he just wanted it to be different; maybe
he was sensing his own limitations and thought that a big band like that
would be a nice way to overcome them — but I suspect that’s taking the art of
positive thinking onto a level where it simply does not belong. Far more
likely, he just wanted to put on a show. Which he did, but at the expense of
nearly dissolving his own personality inside it. Amusingly,
there is one track on the album
with a wholly different feel from the rest — you can sense some slightly
inferior production quality on ‘The Woman I Love’ (the guitar almost seems
like it’s coming from an adjoining room), and, indeed, this is a B-side from
1954 that somehow ended up here. There’s a brass section on it, too, but a
small one, acting as modest support to the lead guitar and the rhythm
section, and King’s exuberant falsetto makes a great love duet with the lead
melody, as the artist bends, vibrates, and stings like a man possessed. It
just feels like such a natural style for him. Returning to
the gone-glitzin’ modern era, B. B.
King Wails, in addition to regular slow and mid-tempo blues, also offers
a couple of overtly sentimental blues ballads, such as ‘The Fool’, and even
an exercise in old-fashioned doo-wop (‘I Love You So’), as well as a crude
secularization of ‘Kumbaya’, retitled ‘Come By Here’ and turned into a
celebration of lust, love, and traditional family values. Considering that
for B. B. King, the most traditional of all family values was playing his
guitar (the second was making lots of babies), we probably have little
interest in hearing him «wail» his way through the minimal vocal requirements
of "come by here, baby, come by here" without once touching the
strings, while His Orchestra is just pumping away monotonously for two minutes
and fifteen seconds. The later-day
expanded editions of the album throw
in a couple more salvageable tracks, like a relatively vicious take on a song
called ‘You’ve Been An Angel’, or the original take on King’s «confessional»
number ‘Why I Sing The Blues’, or, most importantly, his collaboration with
the Count Basie Orchestra on a five-minute long slowed-down version of
‘Everyday I Have The Blues’ — again, King prefers to simply sing here without
touching his guitar, but at least he gets to see what a truly tasteful jazz orchestra sounds like:
graceful, giving ample space to individual players while never trying to
drown out the singer and keeping the flash’n’glitz factor to a minimum.
Perhaps if he’d recorded the entire album with Count Basie rather than his own «orchestra», things would be
different. As it is, this period in B. B.’s career seems more important from
a purely historical perspective than in terms of general enjoyment. |
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Album
released: March 1960 |
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Tracks: 1) I’ve Got A Right To Love My
Baby; 2) What Way To Go; 3) Long Nights; 4) Feel Like A Million; 5) I’ll
Survive; 6) Good Man Gone Bad; 7) If I Lost You; 8) You’re On The Top; 9)
Partin’ Time; 10) I’m King. |
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REVIEW Not to be confused with the sprawling 4-CD anthology of
the same title, spanning B. B. King’s entire career from 1949 to 1991 that
MCA released in the 1990s, King Of The
Blues is originally just another of the many, generally interchangeable,
LPs from the man’s Crown catalog. Just like B. B. King Wails, it was also released as a proper album, largely consisting of takes
from fresh recording sessions — and although the album as such is no longer
officially credited to «B. B. King And His Orchestra», the large brass band
presence is still carried over from previous sessions. Other than that, it is
hard to find any general features that would somehow distinguish this particular collection from its
surroundings, so instead I’ll just offer a few observations on individual
songs. |
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‘I’ve Got A
Right To Love My Baby’, opening the album, would also become the first single
to be taken off it; I do believe that the pompously «winding» brass riff of
the intro (it also regularly announces the transition to a new verse
throughout) makes it instantaneously more memorable than anything else on
here — but I am not quite as sure if, mood-wise, it really fits the standard
12-bar blues pattern of the number. Few songs in B. B.’s catalog have this
«Vegas fanfare» and «Chicago blues» idioms coming together in a more explicit
fashion — and maybe this is
precisely because the result feels a little clumsy, as if that brass
department were trying to hijack the song and turn it into a different
direction from the will of the vocals and the sharp-as-usual guitar solo.
Still, with all of King’s songwriting limitations, even an odd fit of a brass
riff is enough to give a song of his extra personality, something that he
always finds himself in need of. Conversely,
although ‘Long Nights (The Feeling They Call The Blues)’ is nothing special
in terms of structure, it is one of King’s most soulful early performances —
no, still nowhere near the Otis Rush level of emotion, but with just enough
wobbling and trepidation in the voice to suggest that here, B. B. goes
slightly beyond formula and really, really
tries to convey the "feeling they call the blues" to the listener. It
also contains one of his most expressive solo breaks to date, where he rises
to new heights in the art of sustaining his blue notes as he slowly, but
steadily tries to expand the lexicon of his «talking guitar». It’s all just
transitional, really, from the earlier, dryer style of the 1950s to the
development of the super-smooth B. B. King guitar idiom in the late 1960s,
but if you just go through this particular period album by album, life itself
will eventually teach you to notice all those subtlest of nuances. Arguably the
most important song on the album in terms of King’s overall career is ‘I’ll
Survive’, a relaxed and confident blues, generally based on the old pattern
of ‘Sittin’ On Top Of The World’ — not coincidentally, the lyrics in this
one, too, are all about coming to terms with a painful breakup and convincing
oneself that life still goes on, at least as long as your favorite burger
joint on the corner is still open. This one seems to be such an important
mission statement for King that he even reduces his guitar playing to a
minimum number of licks, letting the piano player do most of the instrumental
work as he gets busy convincing the woman who walked out on him that
"I’ve got too much pride, but I’ll survive". Compared to ‘Sittin’
On Top Of The World’, a song all about the masking of one’s true feelings
with fake bravado, ‘I’ll Survive’ shows more soul and vulnerability, but the
end result is more smooth and optimistic — the thing is, for B. B. King the
blues is actually a bitter medicine for survival, a seance of personal
psychotherapy to get you back on your feet, and most of his big anthems, be
it ‘I’ll Survive’ or ‘The Thrill Is Gone’, are supposed to leave you uplifted
in the end. Hey, no wonder the guy ended up living a good life of 90 years. One might, in
fact, argue that B. B. King has his own definition of the «blues», as seen
from the final track on the album, the aptly titled ‘I’m King’: "I’ve
been around the world, seen everything / And if it’s love you want baby just
give me a ring / I can’t lose with the stuff I use / I’m the king of the
blues" (sung to pretty much the same melody as ‘I’ll Survive’). Judging
by this logic, «to have the blues» = «to move from one woman to another», a
practice to which Mr. King has indeed held true for most of his life, and not
feeling any particular guilt about it, which makes guys like Don Giovanni and
Casanova into arguably the greatest bluesmen of them all. (Unless, of course, the actual
implication is that B. B. King simply uses his Level 80+ blues-playing skills
— "I can’t lose with the stuff I use" — to win over the ladies,
which should make us doubt his moral qualities even more). But we are not
here to judge, certainly not situations of which we know fairly little; we
are here to take or leave B. B. King’s conception of «smooth blues», and my
main problem with it is that it seems to go down much better with a healthy
meal than a broken heart. Which is why B. B. King will probably never be my
best friend in times when I’m in trouble — but when I’m in a fairly upbeat
mood, an album like this is a good reminder that you always have to be ready
to whack that bit of upcoming trouble on the corner on the head with a nice,
juicy cheeseburger. Technical fact:
be aware that the album, with a slightly different track list (‘Partin’ Time’
replaced by ‘That Evil Child’), would later be reissued on the Kent label in
1971 as Better Than Ever (not
really!), and that there are even occasional CD versions of it floating
around. Also, B. B. seems to remember the record rather fondly, since no
fewer than three numbers off it (‘I’ll Survive’, ‘If I Lost You’, and ‘Good
Man Gone Bad’) would later be re-recorded for his Blues On The Bayou album, as late as 1998 — in similar, but
longer and more guitar-heavy versions, making the earlier takes only
preferable if you really enjoy the man’s younger, less croaky voice. |
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Tracks: 1) Sweet
Sixteen; 2) I’m Gonna Quit My Baby; 3) I Was Blind; 4) Just Sing The
Blues (What Can I Do); 5) Someday Baby (Some Day Somewhere); 6) Sneakin’
Around; 7) I Had A Woman (Ten Long Years); 8) Be Careful With A Fool; 9)
Whole Lot Of Lovin’ (Whole Lotta’ Love); 10) Days Of Old. |
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This one may
actually have been released earlier than King
Of The Blues — sources are somewhat conflicting and contradictory — but
arranging all those Crown releases in strict chronological order is a
time-wasting affair even for the diehard B. B. King fan, because the songs on
them are always taken from a messy mix of sessions, sometimes stretching
across half a decade or more. If there is anything that does matter, it is the chronological sequencing of King’s singles
— and understanding which of the more recent ones serve as the pivot of this
or that particular LP. The rest were, in fact, so hastily selected from the
backlog that Crown executives sometimes put the same song on more than one
LP by mistake, and often messed up the titles as well (for instance, ‘Ten
Long Years’ was titled ‘I Had A Woman’ on the original issue, and ‘What Can I
Do’ was titled ‘Just Sing The Blues’ — apparently, some of the guys were just
listening to the lyrics and figuring out for themselves what could be the
best title for song so-and-so, just like us Soviet kids in happy innocent
times when we could lay our hands on an un-annotated second-hand cassette
recording of some US or UK LP and had to invent our own titles...). |
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Anyway, at
least for The Great B. B. King the
situation is clear: this LP was built up from the ground around B. B. King’s
biggest R&B hit in six years — the two-part ‘Sweet Sixteen’, released in
January 1960 and making it all the way to #2. This was not the first time
King had split a single song across both sides of the single: the first such
endeavor dates back to May 1956, with the upbeat jump-blues ‘Dark Is The
Night’ — however, in that particular case the two parts were actually
separate recordings, with a decisive coda to each of the two. ‘Sweet
Sixteen’, on the other hand, is a slow, ponderous six-minute blues that
originally faded away at the end of Side A and faded back in at the beginning
of Side B — signalizing that this was indeed the first time when King thought
so much of one of his songs that he insisted it would be given the
full-length treatment. (Of course, there are no fade-outs on the LP itself). Not that ‘Sweet
Sixteen’ was really one of his songs;
it had first been made into a hit by Big Joe Turner
as early as 1952, and for many, it is Big Joe’s version on the Atlantic label
that remains the definitive one. B. B. does not stray too far away from the
original tempo or arrangement (although he does throw in a couple of extra
verses), and, surprisingly, after the short instrumental introduction there
is not a single guitar solo break during the song’s six minutes — the only
lead guitar work is supplied in between B. B.’s vocal lines. Clearly, the
song meant a lot to him (it would also become a regular element of his concert
setlists), and he does turn in a great vocal performance, even if that line
about how "my brother, he’s in
Korea" probably did not resonate as deeply with audiences in 1960 as
it did back in 1952. (I do wonder a little about the implications of the
follow-up of "and my sister, she’s
down in New Orleans" — is this supposed to be a veiled reference to
the House Of The Rising Sun? because otherwise, what harm could there be in
the protagonist’s sister ending up down in New Orleans?). When it gets to the
grand finale of "baby I wonder,
yes I wonder, baby I wonder... what in the world is gonna happen to me?",
B. B. really proves his worth as a singer, almost exploding in an orgasm of
delirious self-pity toward which he’d been steadily building up for all of
those six minutes. And thus, The Great B. B. King is really just
‘Sweet Sixteen’ and... all those other
songs. Oh no, they’re not half bad: it’s just that the most chronologically
recent of those dates back to July 1958 (‘Days Of Old’ indeed!), and the one
that is the most chronologically distant is ‘Some Day Somewhere’ from July
1952. Basically, the label people just went through their archives and
stuffed the album full of songs they hadn’t previously put on LPs —
naturally, they made at least two mistakes, because ‘What Can I Do?’ had
already been released on The Blues,
and ‘Ten Long Years’ was originally included on Singin’ The Blues, but who’s gonna remember that, right? If they
don’t remember it on B. B. King’s own record label, surely all those people
who bought the album two years ago won’t remember it, either. Anyway, just
some brief observations on some of these numbers to boost their individuality
just a little. ‘Whole Lotta’ Love’, the B-side to ‘You Upset Me Baby’ from
October 1954 — funny how the song begins with the ‘Dust My Broom’ riff, as if
B. B. King is telling us that he can out-Elmore James the real Elmore James
like a little kid, and he doesn’t even need to come back to the ‘Dust My
Broom’ riff in the mid-song instrumental break like the real Elmore James
always does. Unfortunately, the difference is that B. B. King still sounds
bowtie-suave, where Elmore James always sounded down-to-earth. ‘Sneakin’
Around’, the B-side to ‘Every Day I Have The Blues’ from December 1954 — it’s
incredible how sleazy this guy can sound when crooning about his covert love
affair with an (apparently) married woman. At the end of the song, he just
melts away in a doo-woppy falsetto, with such pervy delicacy that it is highly likely all the hearts of all
the married women in the audience would be his by this point. If you listen deep and hard enough to this performance, it’s difficult not to walk away
feeling a little... dirty. Yet the immaculate bowtie still stays on for the
entire duration of the suave blues ballad. Finally, ‘Days
Of Old’, released in July 1958, actually sounds like a very retro-oriented
jump-blues number — I am not sure if it is actually an outtake from a much
earlier recording session or was deliberately recorded to evoke the feeling
of a late 1940s night club with Wynonie Harris at the wheel. In any case, the
song’s message — "there’s no use
to break the rules because every man is some woman’s fool" — is one
of those classic bits of pseudo-wisdom that can have a feministic or a
misogynistic interpretation depending on which side of the bed you got out of
this morning, and it’s nice to have the album finish on a fast number after
way too many slow blues and ballads. (If you own the
Rhino re-release of the record with all of the bonus tracks, the fastest
number is actually ‘Bim
Bam’, a very odd B-side from mid-’56 on which B. B. King seems to imitate
a hybrid of Little Richard and LaVern Baker, singing a non-sensical kiddie
rock’n’roll melody at breakneck speed. It’s technically fun, but it also
makes clear that the one genre that B. B. King has absolutely no voice for is
high-tempo rock’n’roll — he feels stilted and embarrassed, almost afraid to
truly «let it all hang out» as if the worst thing that could happen would be
for him to be taken for a «teenage idol»). |
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Tracks: 1) You Done Lost Your Good Thing
Now; 2) Mr. Pawn Broker; 3) Understand; 4) Someday Baby; 5) Driving Wheel; 6)
Walking Dr. Bill; 7) My Own Fault, Baby; 8) Cat Fish Blues; 9) Hold That
Train; 10) Please Set The Date. |
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REVIEW
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Anyway, if you
had been pining all this time for a 30 minute-long set of just B. B. King and
his blues guitar — no strings, no horns, no mushy ballads, no spirituals,
just raw blues — this record is certainly for you. And given its title, we
must suppose that it must have been for B. B. as well, although this
immediately begs the question — are all those strings and horns on all those
other records supposed to be mere commercial bait for B. B. King’s polite
middle-class audiences, then? Probably not. My guess is that B. B. just likes
to play the king-of-the-mountain game, and the more people you can get into
the studio or onto the stage with him, the more impressive of an impression
he can give. It’s one thing when your mountain is just you and a small rhythm
section, and an entirely different one when there’s a trumpet or a violin
player standing on each slope; then, when you crank up the volume on Lucille,
you can truly feel like the head of the Pantheon. The downside is
that there is very little to be said about the individual tracks on the
album. It’s just ten cuts of solid, decent 12-bar blues, well played, well
sung, and mostly interchangeable. Like The
Great B. B. King, this record also kicks off with an extended cut — the
five minute-long ‘You Done Lost Your Good Thing Now’ — but it fails to
produce the same effect of a serious personal confession that ‘Sweet Sixteen’
did, and although the guitar-piano duet in the middle section is pleasant to
the ear, there is nothing in King’s tone or phrasing here that we have not
already heard dozens of times. That much of the record passes by in the same way — as tasteful, but
forgettable background music — is all the more sad to realize, given a
certain conceptual angle to the album: most of the songs are covers by a
variety of King’s predecessors and contemporaries, all the way from Roosevelt
Sykes (‘Driving Wheel’), Sleepy John Estes (‘Someday Baby’), and Memphis
Minnie (‘Please Set A Date’, misspelled here with the definite rather than indefinite
article) to Muddy Waters (‘My Own Fault’) and lesser known figures like Peter
Joe Clayton (‘Walking Dr. Bill’). With most of these covers originally
recorded in the 1930s and 1940s, My
Kind Of Blues is sort of an early predecessor to Eric Clapton’s From The Cradle — but where Eric
would at least ensure a certain degree of variety in his styles and moods, B.
B. King here just puts everything through the same B. B. King grinder. Most
of those songs were set to the same two or three melodies anyway, and the
only thing that made them distinct was their relative performer’s personality
— but no matter whether it is the legacy of Memphis Minnie or Peter Joe
Clayton that is being processed, the end result is always predictable. Some of these numbers would end up firmly wedged in King’s live sets
(both ‘My Own Fault’ and ‘You Done Lost Your Good Thing Now’ ended up on Live At The Regal), but that’s more
because they are decent landing pads from where he could lift off into the
realm of musical improvisation and verbal ad-libbing. As it is, the only song
from here I could perhaps recommend as a song
is ‘Understand’ — which is not really ‘Understand’ (again, some Crown
executive probably thought it a waste of his time to ask the artist for a
proper name), but Cecil Gant’s ‘I’m A Good Man But A Poor
Man’, which King performs with minimal emphasis on the guitar and maximum
on the piano, as per the original; his natural charisma helps him make the
line "I’m a good man, but a poor
man, understand" quite believable, even if there is hardly any doubt
in my mind that it is only in a most relative way that B. B. King could call
himself «poor» back in 1960. The bonus tracks on the CD re-issue, selected by Ace Records executives
in 2003, prolong the experience but do not really enhance it — just a few
more (mostly previously unissued) generic blues performances from the same
sessions, including well-known titles like ‘Blues At Sunrise’ and ‘Drifting
Blues’ that all follow the same musical formula. Only a deep, nuanced
aficionado of electric blues could be wooed by the challenge of
differentiating between all these interchangeable solos; to me, it’s just B.
B. King in generic workaholic mode, and the most impressive thing about it is
to realize that he would eventually
rise to the challenge of making his Lucille speak with a whole new voice in
the coming decades. Had he forever remained at this stuck-in-the-Fifties level, what would be the chances of B.
B. King Blues Club & Grill opening in Times Square? (Sure it closed down
in 2018, but eighteen years of first-rate catfish and jambalaya are nothing
to shake a stick at!) |
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Tracks: 1) Bad Case Of Love; 2) Get Out Of
Here; 3) Bad Luck Soul; 4) Shut Your Mouth; 5) Baby Look At You; 6) You’re
Breaking My Heart; 7) My Reward; 8) Don’t Cry Anymore; 9) Blues For Me; 10)
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REVIEW By the end of
1961, B. B. King was finally fed up with what he saw as the Bihari Brothers’
disdain for his talents — the singles were not promoted, the albums were
intentionally designed as bargain bin fodder, and the recording sessions had
largely turned into repetitive routine with little chance of artistic
development. Not that, admittedly, «artistic development» was a major concern
for Mr. King — for the most part, he just loved to play his guitar, sing the
blues, and be admired for both of those qualities — but still, there’s only
so much even an artistically unambitious person can take before he feels it
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I do not think that this particular LP, released in the fall of 1961 and
originally titled More B. B. King
(later rebranded as the only marginally more exciting Blues For Me), exactly counts as the «last straw»: it is no
better and no worse than the «average» B. B. King album on Kent Records, containing
a little bit of everything — some small-combo blues, some big-band blues,
some ballads, some dancey numbers, some strings, etc. — and adding absolutely
nothing to what we already knew about King. Oddly enough, it did not include
B. B.’s most successful single from 1961, the double-sided ‘Peace Of Mind’ /
‘Someday’, which went all the way to #7 on the charts — his highest position
since ‘Sweet Sixteen’, though I am not exactly sure why; I have a serious
suspicion that the opening Disney-esque strings of ‘Peace Of Mind’ were so en vogue around 1961 that they alone
triggered the buying stimulus. ‘Someday’ adds a nice guitar solo to the
strings, but is just as conventional in its basic structure — that said,
King’s vocal performance on ‘Peace Of Mind’ is indeed one of his strongest
from that entire period, and somehow he almost manages to sound believable
when delivering the message of "I’ve
had everything that money can buy / But still I’m so unhappy darling that I
could cry", even if neither
of these lines was probably very true back in 1961 — at that point, with the Bihari
Brothers to blame at least partially, B. B. definitely did not yet have everything that money could buy, but
neither was he really so unhappy that he could cry. In fact, it takes quite a
bit of imagination to picture B. B. King so unhappy that he could really cry,
even though his personal life hasn’t exactly been a smooth train ride all the
time. Most of the other singles from 1961 are
on this record, though. In approximate chronological order, these are: ‘Get Out
Of Here’, a solid mid-tempo dialog between Lucille and the horn section with
a beautifully clear and clean guitar solo, as slowly but steadily B. B. King
is beginning to get rewarded with the benefits of modern production values; and
‘Bad Case Of Love’, a generic and already deeply clichéd (even for
1961) love-as-disease metaphor which is, however, set to a danceable beat and
tempo, so that the guitar break, when it comes in, almost ends up being
playful in a Chuck Berry way — well, for a few bars, at least, before it
reverts to the usual blues paradigm. (King would record a much longer version
on 1998’s Blues On The Bayou, but I
prefer the short original without all the excessive soloing). The B-side to ‘Bad
Case Of Love’ was ‘You’re Breaking My Heart’, a long, slow ‘Five Long Years’-style
blues dirge that does not stand out particularly well in the catalog but
certainly stands out on this generally more upbeat and «body-oriented»
record. It is a little odd that songs tend to be grouped together «thematically»,
particularly on the second side of the LP: after ‘You’re Breaking My Heart’ (the
only piece of slow angry blues on the record), we suddenly find two
orchestrated pop ballads in a row — ‘My Reward’ opens with a string flourish
that would be right up the alley of Atlantic R&B in those years, but I do
admit that both on that song and on the following ‘Don’t Cry Anymore’, the
string melodies are fairly creative and engage in cool dialog with King’s
vocals. King himself seems to feel quite happy about it, too, since he does
not even pick up his guitar while the sweet violins lift our big guy up in
the clouds. And then, right after these two, come two instrumentals: ‘Blues For Me’ (later
re-used as a new title for the entire LP) is a quirky mix between John Lee Hooker
and hot Latin dance music, while ‘Just Like A Woman’ is a wordless (apart from
faraway backing vocals chanting the title) recreation of the classic Louis Jordan
jump blues number. Both are mainly just vehicles for more soloing, but their
placement next to the string ballads is like a veiled advertisement: «Look! This
guy can do anything, and he’s got
mad organizational skills, too!» Well, yes — throw in two more crackly,
croaky outtakes from the mid-1950s (‘Shut Your Mouth’ and ‘Baby, Look At You’
on Side A), with a seriously different guitar sound from 1961, and More B. B. King emerges as an
unintentionally apt celebration of the man’s diversity. As long as it’s got a
nominal blues vibe to it, B. B. King can do pretty much everything. Unfortunately, diversity alone cannot hide the fact that there is not a
single truly outstanding number here, though there is not one openly
embarrassing or tasteless cut, either. Somewhat to B. B.’s honor, in the year
when it was all about softness, sap, and sentiment, he did not emerge with a More Mantovani For Me kind of record — sure, the man loved glitz,
romance, and fan adoration, but not to the extent of drowning out his
personality or betraying his trust to Lucille. (Well, "give or take a night or two", as Leonard
Cohen would say, given the inclusion of those two string ballads so as to pay
proper tribute to the world of Ben E. King and Jackie Wilson in which most black
performers were living in 1961.) In this case, though, the stern conservatism
does not pay off, at least not for future generations who wouldn’t really
give a damn about trying to listen to the album in the overall imaginary
context of the early Sixties. |
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[1] On a predictably
«modern» note, the latest re-release of the LP, claiming to reproduce Original
Liner Notes, politely replaces ‘Negro’ with ‘African-American’. I do
appreciate the sentiment, but couldn’t they at least have filed this under Not
Quite Original Liner Notes?
