FOT Forum
FOT Community => General Discussion => Topic started by: johnnynovato on March 05, 2014, 02:41:42 PM
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True story:
Shortly after Tom proposed on air that B.B. King sucked and that the real blues heads knew it, I met an elderly former Mississippi sharecropper who used to run San Francisco's premier R&B record store. He likes B.B. King! So we went to go see him play the other night.
When the elderly bluesman took the stage, I was prepared for a night where he would blow away the audience and prove Tom mistaken. However, as the night progressed and B.B. played weird little licks that were not that high in the mix, I could not shake the suspicion that maybe Tom was right! It seemed like the band was working really hard to make B.B. sound good. B.B. still had a good voice and a lot of stage mojo but I was not enough of a blues guitar aficionado to shake my Best Show-based doubts about whether he was any good and whether he was even listening to the rest of the band. In fact, my friend the record store owner was more enthusiastic about the guitar playing of a guy in the band.
(Albert King was good though, right?)
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He's 175 years old, give him a break.
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he's supremely average as a guitar player but he's a great blues singer. Age has certainly caught up to him, too, because he tore it up when he was younger :)
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BB King - Johnny Winter - Blues, Interviews & Jam - 8 min (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4KxCIvmwhg#)
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I'm an unrepentant, unapologetic blues fan, but I can't say that I'm much of a B.B. King fan. He's a fine guitar player and he has a wonderful voice, but there's just something about his music that fails to draw me in.
Give me Albert King or Hound Dog Taylor instead.