Happy birthday to the Velvet Bulldozer, Albert King, my introduction to live blues.
I first saw Albert live when I was seventeen, when everything was new to me. A couple of weeks before I saw Albert I had gone to my first real rock concert, a Byrds show at Seattle’s Eagles Auditorium. Eagles was a revelation. An old fraternal hall in the middle of downtown, it boasted a cavernous auditorium up on the third floor that a local rock promoter was using every weekend to showcase the latest rock acts. There were no chairs, just a hardwood floor. We were teenagers from the suburbs and we learned the Eagles drill at that first concert. You stood in line to pay your $3.00 and then you went in and claimed your spot on the floor by unrolling your Army surplus cotton sleeping bag, inside of which you had smuggled in a gallon of cheap wine, some kind of food stash, and a bag of cheap Mexican weed. There were always three bands: a local group as the opener, an up-and-coming national act, and then the headliner. All three bands would then play a complete second set, so the music went on from 8 pm until the wee hours. I remember seeing an occasional fire department official at those Eagles shows, but the police were conveniently absent. Seattle was still a very conservative town in those days, so those weekend nights at Eagles were a picture window into another world. My friends and I thought we had died and gone to heaven.
I had already been listening to Paul Butterfield and Muddy Waters, but when I walked into Albert’s show that night I was a live-blues virgin. Albert was touring behind his latest record, a live recording from the Fillmore in San Francisco called “Livewire Blues Power,” and he pretty much replicated that killer set the night I saw him.
The band opened up with an up-tempo, funky version of “Watermelon Man,” and after a few minutes of groove Albert strode onstage, plugged into a monstrous amplifier, and turned to face us. He was a sight to behold—a huge man in a gorgeous, maroon pinstripe suit with a red Flying V strapped to his massive chest and a pipe clenched between his teeth. He was a lefty like me and played guitar upside down. And what a player! King had more than enough volume to satisfy the deafest rock fans, but he wasn’t serving up the psychedelic wash of masturbatory sonic slurry favored by most of the guitar idols of that day. Albert stung and squeezed and dropped bombs and whispered. He built up unbearable musical tension and then released it and then built it back up again. One verse of King’s guitar playing held more raw emotion than I had gotten from listening to all of those rock and roll albums. And he had a gorgeous, supremely soulful singing voice, too.
I pushed my way through the standing-room-only crowd until I was near the front of the six-foot-high stage. The only person between me and Albert was a stoned twenty-something who was ecstatically convulsing to the music. King broke a string and the music stopped briefly while Albert put on a new one. All the gyrating stoner knew was that someone had suddenly pulled the plug on his musical magic carpet ride, and he became hysterical. I carefully made some extra room between us as I watched him beat his forehead against the stage, shouting “Music! Don’t stop! Music! Don’t stop!” This blues stuff, whatever it was, was clearly something else--it had the power to drive men mad. What a blues baptism Albert gave me that night!
Many years later I did a gig at Jazz Alley in Seattle with some horn players I had never met. During the break I chatted with the trumpet player, and somehow that Albert King show at Eagles came up.
“Man, I was on that show!” he told me. “Albert used a pick-up horn section on that gig and I got hired. Those were the days, man. I dropped acid that night. The first set was pretty wild. We were reading charts with no rehearsal and I slipped up a time or two, but I was feeling no pain, you understand. We were all in the back room between shows having a sweet time when the door slammed open and there was Albert. Albert was a big dude, man—he filled up the entire doorway. He looked really mad. The party stopped and everything got really quiet. Albert looked around, spotted me, and went right for me. He grabbed me by the front of my shirt and just slid me two feet up the wall and pinned me there. My feet were just dangling, man. Remember, I’m on acid. ‘You’re fucking up my show,’ he said, 'and that’s gonna stop.’”
I asked him if he had been scared.
“Scared?” he answered. “I almost swallowed my own heart, man!”