#33: B.B. King - Live at the Regal

When I hear about classic live albums, all I ever tend to hear about are The Ramones' It's Alive, James Brown's Live at the Apollo, and B.B. King's Live at the Regal.

I used to be addicted to live recordings. I had Metallica's Live Shit box set, Nine Inch Nails' And All That Could Have Been, and Tool's Salival. While those are still floating around my collection somewhere, I have really gotten out of the habit of enjoying live albums. I used to go out of my way to get the special edition of a record of there were additional live cuts tacked on, and looked forward to new live albums as much as studio ones. But after I got burned out on S&M and Phil Anselmo's uneven delivery on Pantera's Official Live (Hell, I even used to own a Rammstein live album. Think about how useless that is. Both the audio AND video versions.), I got pretty burned out on the whole "crowd noise mixed with songs you already know" thing.

But blues is really one of the genres that needs live records. With the shrieks of the crowd, the improvisation, and the attitude that can only come when there are stage lights beating down and the pressure of cutting it live, blues is a live beast. I'd say it's even more accommodating to the live arena that jazz albums, since jazz improvisation can grow to masturbatory proportions when let loose live, whereas blues really seems to rein things in.

Live at the Regal was cut in 1964, back when King was still standing up and before Clapton came along and co-opted him. The live quality really shines through, and it gives all of the songs an added punch that wouldn't have come in a sterile studio recording. The howling crowd, offering up advice like, "No, don't do it!" after King sings the line, "Baby, I'd much rather be dead." His chatter is pretty great, too - not at Bo Diddley caliber, of course - but it's nice to see that at one point, someone could get away with lines like, "Don't go upside her head, it'll only do one thing - it'll make her smarter, and she won't let you catch her next time."

Song-wise, the most powerful track is "How Blue Can You Get?" which has some of King's most searing vocals ever and an excellent call and response section between the vocals and the horns that builds up to the album's biggest climax, and the crowd goes absolutely apeshit. Really though, it's the horns that caught me a bit off guard here. I pretend to know a fair bit about blues music, but I tend to think of it more in the 'man and his guitar' way rather than 'guy with a full band,' even though there's really nothing that rare about it. A more stripped-down song, like "Worry, Worry," is more what I had in mind, but I'll come around on the brassiness of it all.

So I guess everyone was right. Live at the Regal is pretty damn smokin'. Now if only I could find a good copy of Townes Van Zandt's Live at the Old Quarter, I'd be in business.

"How Blue Can You Get?"



"You Done Lost Your Good Thing Now" live...on The Bill Cosby Show