Nov. 11, 1977 feature: Blues guitar master Albert King
A few minutes on the bus with a musical master.
Nov.
11, 1977
Albert King’s Blues Still Lookin’ Good
The blues are alive and well and
touring out of
A big, affable bear of a man, he’s 53,
but looks 10 years younger in his dark blue leisure suit, hat and photogray
lenses. He returns power handshakes and thumbs-up greetings as enthusiastically
as his young white listeners offer them.
“I take the month of January off,” he
says as he turns on the heater in the bus. “Other than that, I keep running.
But I don’t mind it because I enjoy playing for the kids. I get a kick out of
that.”
King does clubs and he does concerts.
This week he’s on a blues show in
King’s band is a saxophone short
(there’s two saxes and a trumpet) and it’s the first gig for the new drummer,
who occasionally gets mid-course corrections from King or his son, Philip, on rhythm
guitar. Philip is a second-generation bluesman in more ways than one. He plays
the old music with all the lightning licks and special effects rock guitarists
introduced over the past 10 years. The cheers he gets rival his father’s.
King himself is an immaculate
guitarist, given to cleanly eloquent solos where the notes bend like wheat in a
wind. The horns underline the rhythm riff and stand ready to soothe or
supercharge him. He plays his arrow-shaped Gibson the way he picked up his
first guitar – strings backwards – but it makes no difference. He’s done it
that way since the late ‘40s, when he started his first band – the In the
Groove Boys in
“We kept on until ’54, ’55, when I
left and moved to
About a year ago, he started touring
with what was his son’s band. The group comes out first to deliver jazzy
renditions of “Mr. Bojangles” and “This Masquerade.” When King appears, though,
the blues are in force.
“If you got a woman who likes to
flirt,” he sings, “better call the doctor, ‘cuz you might get hurt.”
There’s “Blues at
“Wolf, Sonny Boy, some Muddy, old man
T-Bone,” he says with a fond chuckle. “I’ve been knowing Ike Turner since
before we left
Though he hasn’t seen the acclaim of
some of his contemporaries, he’s one of the few that are still reaching out and
looking around. The man whose ‘60s records include Booker T & the MG’s and
the Bar-Kays is still recording. His newest is on the specialty-oriented Tomato
label. He’s looking forward to writing his first new songs in years. And he’s
not averse to borrowing a modern rhythm on record.
“I’m supposed to play to suit the
people,” he says. “The people come first, then me. I like to keep up with
what’s happening today. I like to be where I can relate to the old and the
young. You can be up-to-date and still have the blues feeling. Tonight, I
figure like this – if the kids wanted to fall asleep, they would’ve stayed
home. They do like that get-up-and-go stuff.”
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IN
THE PHOTO: Albert King and his Flying V guitar.
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FOOTNOTE:
Albert King was hugely influential on everyone from Eric Clapton to Stevie Ray
Vaughan, but his career was in a bit of a slump in 1977. Stax Records, where he
had his greatest successes, went bankrupt and his albums after that sold
poorly. So did that first release for Tomato Records, “New Orleans Heat,” which
was produced by Allen Toussaint.
He rebounded in the 1980s with a pair
of albums that were nominated for Grammy Awards and he was inducted into the
Blues Hall of Fame in 1983. He pressed on through health problems until just before Christmas in 1992, when he died of a heart attack at his home in
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