E-Mail This Article to a Friend The King At 80, B.B. reigns alone atop the blues pantheon BY TED DROZDOWSKI
	The King and his court All-star match ups have been winners for B.B. King. He reached a new generation in 1989 when he cut "When Love Comes to Town" with U2, caught the notice of diehard country fans by recording with Willie Nelson, and made his first collaborative album, 1993’s Blues Summit (MCA), with a host of fellow blues luminaries including Buddy Guy and John Lee Hooker. A few years later he followed with Deuces Wild (MCA), pairing with the Rolling Stones, Bonnie Raitt, and other rock and roots artists. But 2000’s Riding with the King (Reprise) with Eric Clapton was his big late-career bonanza — his first #1 album and platinum-seller after more than 50 years as a working musician. All-star match ups have been winners for B.B. King. He reached a new generation in 1989 when he cut "When Love Comes to Town" with U2, caught the notice of diehard country fans by recording with Willie Nelson, and made his first collaborative album, 1993’s Blues Summit (MCA), with a host of fellow blues luminaries including Buddy Guy and John Lee Hooker. A few years later he followed with Deuces Wild (MCA), pairing with the Rolling Stones, Bonnie Raitt, and other rock and roots artists. But 2000’s Riding with the King (Reprise) with Eric Clapton was his big late-career bonanza — his first #1 album and platinum-seller after more than 50 years as a working musician. His new B.B. King & Friends — 80 (Geffen/Chronicles/Universal) taps all schools of rock. There are some unlikely partners, like Elton John, Roger Daltrey, and Gloria Estefan, but the results are generally good, and his voice and playing continue to resist aging. The dozen tunes come from throughout his career. Clapton shares King’s signature "The Thrill Is Gone," which sounds like an extension of their earlier CD. The best cut is "All Over Again," where King lets his big soaring voice roam the tune’s emotional turf while Mark Knopfler plays beautiful counterpoint on guitar. Daryl Hall also cuts loose on the Howard Tate classic "Ain’t Nobody Home," scoring the most soulful vocal duet. Plus there’s a flip "Tired of Your Jive" with Billy Gibbons and plenty of camaraderie in an "Early in the Morning" shared by Van Morrison. Leon Russell’s "Hummingbird" was a minor entry in King’s catalogue, but the master and John Mayer bring the tune’s melodic qualities to the fore. And Estefan proves a more colorful partner on the blues prayer "There Must Be a Better World Somewhere" than Sheryl Crow on "Need Your Love So Bad." King also delivers a down-home version of Nelson’s "Ain’t It Funny How Time Slips Away" with his musical peer Bobby Bland, but the rest — "Never Make Your Move Too Soon" with Daltrey, "Rock This House" with John, "Drivin’ Wheel" with Glenn Frey — is slight. This album won’t satisfy King’s fans, who wish he’d get a young band to push his still estimable chops, but — like the man himself at 80 — it has a mellow, burnished soulful style at its core. _TD Related Links B.B. King's official Web site B.B. King comes to Harvard and Ted Drozdowski writes about it (2004). Ted Drozdowski goes to B.B. King’s annual Blues Festival Tour at Fleet Pavillion (2002). Ted Drozdowski reviews B.B. King at the annual W.C. Handy Blues Awards ceremony on May 23 at the Orpheum Theatre (2002). Ted Drozdowski on Martin Scorsese’s PBS series ‘The Blues.’

There’s a moment in almost every B.B. King concert when "the note" appears — a vibrato-soaked tone, round and full as King himself, that ends one of his instantly recognizable guitar phrases by hanging in the air like dew on a misty spider web. The pure beauty of that note hypnotizes the audience into silence, and just for that moment, time seems to stand still.

Some fans moan that King — the most influential guitarist of the 20th century — has been coasting for years, playing the same repertoire with his band of road warriors about 160 times annually around the world and making albums that draw on the past or lean on the star power of others. But as long as he can play "the note," working a magic that only the greatest musicians possess, that’s nitpicking.

King, who turned 80 last summer, and who comes to Lowell Auditorium this Saturday, remains a vital part of America’s musical legacy. He’s a historic figure with a career that goes back to the 1940s and gospel groups in the Mississippi Delta, a career that’s spanned the jazz age, the invention of multi-track recording, the birth of rock and roll and television, and the civil-rights struggle. He is friendly and generous and imperfect. He was an absentee father to his 15 children by various mothers, yet he’ll pay for the education of any of his grandchildren. He refuses to sleep in the dark, still experiencing the fear he felt as an orphaned, hungry 10-year-old living alone in the pre-electrified Delta, where the nights were black as anthracite.

And all these decades later, he feels the sting of his mother Nora Ella’s death. "I still do miss her," he told me, with an audible hitch in his voice, the first time we met almost a decade ago. "She was a very lovin’ person." And it’s left a hollow space in him that he’s tried to fill with his music. He loves the people who come to hear him play, and he needs them to love him back.

Although King’s playing and singing are rooted deep in the blues (Lonnie Johnson is his favorite artist), he’s composed tunes on his computer since the early ’90s, and he has an MP3 player loaded with 5000 songs he’s ripped himself. That’s helped him stay engaged during the half a year he spends traveling between gigs in the tricked-out bus that’s his home away from his Las Vegas home.

With John Lee Hooker gone and the likes of Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters now ghosts of the music’s past for many listeners, King is now the undisputed King of the Blues. For most people, his name is synonymous with the style he’s played and adored for well over half a century.

"Knowing that makes me feel good," he says. "It also makes me aware that I should continue to do the best that I can." And as he moves on past 80, he’s not letting diabetes or knees ravaged by arthritis stop him. So happy birthday, B.B., and long may you reign.

B.B. KING | Lowell Memorial Auditorium, 50 East Merrimack St, Lowell | Nov 26 |8 pm | 800.279.4444

B.B. BOOKED

The B.B. King Treasures: Photos, Mementos & Music from B.B. King’s Collection (Bulfinch Press; 160 pages) is more than an oral history told by King and a variety of cronies ranging from disc jockeys to promoters to producers to peers like Little Milton and acolytes like Bonnie Raitt and Eric Clapton. It’s also, thanks in part to co-author Dick Waterman, a work of art, with a luxurious hardcover design that puts a premium on historic photos and re-creations of mementos from King’s career: vintage concert posters and tickets, his accounting sheet from a Mississippi cotton plantation, one of his concert contract riders.

But when the visual feast is over, it’s photographer/journalist Waterman’s well-paced chronology — based on dozens of interviews — that gives the book its life. Waterman and King have an association going back to Boston in the 1960s, when Waterman, then a manager of historic country bluesmen, tapped King to play a Fenway Park rally for presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy.

"McCarthy gave a very boring stump speech, but B.B. was magnificent," says Waterman. As for King, he felt that the rally propelled him from Boston’s African-American club scene into the midst of a new white audience. A bond formed between the two men.

Those who’ve read King’s 1996 autobiography with David Ritz, Blues All Around Me (Avon), won’t learn anything new here from King himself, who’s always been unsparing with the details of his life. But there are insightful observations about the importance of crossover from Little Milton, and Steve Miller recounts King’s emergence in San Francisco’s psychedelic scene, illuminating one of the most important periods in King’s 40-year battle for the mainstream. Bobby Rush, Calvin Newborn, and King’s long-time manager, Sid Seidenberg, also make vital contributions, sharing their takes on King and his art.

"I think B.B.’s absolutely made of Teflon," Waterman says of the blues master today. He points to the apparent conflict of King’s work for civil rights and his concert appearances for both Bush dynasties. "During the last inauguration, he was making a ton of money all over DC playing for various conservative groups and nobody cared. With B.B., it’s okay.

"And B.B. really wants to be liked. He feels that every performance he does is an audition — that somebody in the crowd is going to be seeing him for the only time, and he wants them to come away with a positive impression."

_TD