by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “feature” was a show KPBS aired between 11 p.m.
and midnight — a woefully late time slot that I’m now stuck with given the
change in our cable-TV service that makes my DVD recorders totally inoperative
and means I can watch a show exactly when it airs, and at no other time (unless
I want to try the ordeal of viewing it online — which, judging from past
experience, means about two seconds of signal followed by five minutes of
“buffering,” whatever that means, ad
nauseam until I get fed up with the
experience and quit) — an American Masters episode on B. B. King, directed by Jon Brewer (I can’t find an online
listing for the rest of the cast and crew, either on PBS’s Web site or
imdb.com, though the PBS site said the program first aired February 12, 2016).
King’s was one of the biggest deaths in the musical world last year, though
since he was 89 and had long since become old, rich and famous playing the
blues (quite remarkable given the usual trajectory of a blues musician’s
career; even more than jazz or rock, blues is littered with musicians who died
young, often of tuberculosis or some other relatively treatable condition they
didn’t have the money to get medical attention for until it was too late, and
even the ones who survived to an old age generally developed reputations only
among the cognoscenti and died in
obscurity and penury).
Since the show was only an hour long, there were certain
things they couldn’t do — like actually show B. B. King play a whole song,
start to finish — and others they chose not to (like King’s recording contracts
— in one sequence label scans from his early records on Jim Bulleit’s Bullet
label and the Bihari brothers’ R.P.M. are shown, but there’s no account of
King’s history as a recording artist: he signed with the Bihari brothers,
founders of the L.A.-based Modern Records, released mostly on their Kent label
and would have stayed there indefinitely until the Biharis decided to release
all their LP’s on a super-budget label called Crown; in 1961 King jumped to ABC
Records, which at first marketed him only as a singer, covering songs like
Jesse Belvin’s “Guess Who,” but eventually realized what they had as a singer
and guitarist and, after the crossover success of his 1964 album Live
at the Regal, started an entirely new
imprint, Bluesway Records, to record him and the other blues artists they were
attracting in the wake of King’s success, including such veterans of the 1940’s
and 1950’s rhythm-and-blues scene as T-Bone Walker and the amazing Roy Brown;
since then ABC has been absorbed by MCA and since spun off as Universal Music,
but King remained under contract to them and continued to record until he
died). But what they did do was
tell B. B. King’s life story mostly in interviews with King himself (from
various points in his career, as you can tell from the changes in his
appearance as he got visibly older and heavier, and also because some of the
clips are in black-and-white and some are in color) as well as musicians who
either worked with him or were influenced by him: Rolling Stones Mick Jagger,
Keith Richards, Mick Taylor and Bill Wyman; John Mayall; Eric Clapton; Bonnie
Raitt; Dr. John; Ringo Starr (who recorded with King on the quite lovely 1971
album B. B. King in London, with
MCA capitalizing on a fad Chess Records had begun with the Fathers
and Sons album in 1969 by pairing Black
blues musicians with the white players they had influenced) and record producer
Bill Szymczyk, who’s best known for his work with the Eagles but did King’s
albums even before he hooked up with the Eagles and was behind the boards for
King’s all-time biggest hit, “The Thrill Is Gone” from his 1969 album Completely
Well.
What comes off most strongly in this
documentary is King’s incredible modesty; he recalls his journey from plantation
life with his family in Indianola, Mississippi (one of his albums was called Indianola
Mississippi Seeds and the cover was a half
of a watermelon, equipped with a fretboard and strings to make it look like a
guitar, plugged into an amp) to Memphis, Tennessee (as our friend Garry Hobbs
pointed out, Elvis Presley also began in Mississippi and moved to Memphis, but
Elvis was brought to Memphis by his family when he was still a kid while King
emigrated there as a young adult), where he was overwhelmed by the blues talent
he heard. Among the biggest influences on King was his cousin Bukka White (the
first name was short for “Booker” and the full name on his birth certificate
was Booker T. Washington White), who was a master at slide guitar and tried to
teach it to King. King admits that he never learned slide, but in order to simulate slide guitar he developed the killer finger vibrato
style he called “twanging” and which became his trademark. Clapton and quite a
few of the other interviewees are quoted as saying you can recognize B. B. King
just by hearing one note, and it’s the heavy “twanging” vibrato he used when he
fretted that made him so instantly recognizable. King also admitted he couldn’t
strum chords — there’s a sequence from U2’s film Rattle and Hum showing Bono teaching King the song they’d written
for him, “When Love Comes to Town,” and trying to teach him the chords. “I
don’t know from chords,” King said, and proceeded to play a beautiful
“twanging” solo on the song (maybe he couldn’t have played rhythm guitar to
save his life, but he could pick up the changes by ear and improvise on them)
and sing an impassioned vocal — and he said the experience of recording an
album with Clapton was great except for Clapton’s attempt to get him to play
acoustic guitar. (Like a later musician, Jimi Hendrix, King’s style was
dependent on the sustaining quality of the electric guitar.) The show mentioned
some of the quirkier influences on King as well as the more expected ones; in
addition to T-Bone Walker (who came up in Oklahoma City and studied jazz guitar
with the young Charlie Christian, then decided that playing blues would pay
better than playing jazz, and developed a lot of the stage fireworks, including
playing with the guitar behind his back and picking the strings with his teeth,
that Jimi Hendrix, who saw Walker when he was in bands that opened for him on
the chitlin’ circuit, later copied and which became his trademarks) there was Django Reinhardt, the
French-Belgian Gypsy guitarist from the 1930’s and 1940’s who, along with Eddie
Lang and Charlie Christian, was one of the founding fathers of jazz guitar but
whose incredible style also influenced people like King and Willie Nelson who
weren’t jazz artists.
Over and over again in the interview clips King adopts an
aw-shucks, I’m-not-that-great
attitude that’s quite a lot more appealing than the braggadocio all too many musicians fall into — and King’s music
reflects that part of his personality; instead of being assertive and ballsy
the way Howlin’ Wolf was, King’s music slyly sneaks up on you. You can listen
to him and hear a quite good singer backing himself up with a decent but
unspectacular-sounding guitar — he wasn’t a virtuoso the way Walker and Hendrix
were — and then he’ll hurl out a vocal line or play a phrase on the guitar that
spins you around and makes you ask, “What the hell was that?” B. B. King is the sort of artist you mourn but
aren’t necessarily that sad to
see go — he had a very long life
and achieved pretty much all he wanted to, though as this show dramatizes the
price of becoming old, rich and famous singing the blues was almost constant
touring. His marriages broke up because he was literally never home — one year he actually played 365 days! —
and he rather laconically said that the life of a touring musician was not
conducive to having a wife and family. (That’s why a lot of the best musicians
in the 1950’s and 1960’s went into studio work; maybe no one would ever hear of
them again because they’d be anonymous, but at least they got to live in one
place and come home once in a while to their spouses and children.) The American
Masters episode on King was a pleasant
surprise — though a full two hours that actually ran long enough to show him
play some songs complete, start to finish, might have been better — and
director Brewer, who worked with the B. B. King museum in Indianola and
apparently had the full cooperation of King himself during the last two years
of his life, adopted a low-keyed approach just right for the low-keyed but
still impassioned art of his subject.
