B.B. King - It's My Own Fault
I hope everyone's ready to feel old, because we have a superstar centenary of someone it's hard to believe would have been 100 today.
Obviously anyone culturally literate enough to read a street sign knows who B.B. King was, so I am not gonna bother telling all about Live At the Regal or whatever. If you don't know, well that's why Baby Jesus invented Google.
To put it simply, the roads he paved are all Sky Bluesways now, with trillions of travelers traversing their way to exit 1-4-5 as if it was always this way.
It wasn't. It took visionaries such as he to make it all so take-for-grantable for us entitled masses.
I mean, if you really wanna get into it, it says a lot that we can have the sort of mammoth expectations of excellence we have, when The Blues itself -- really the root of all American music -- is at its fundament just the expression, in sound and vibration, of the human misery and deprivation that's the baseline reality of the American experience for most citizens, once the faketooth veneer of phony, gold plated nothingness is peeled away.
Think about that: the basis of the music of the United States, that's taken hold in various forms all over the world, is essentially songs of terminal woe, all about My Baby Left Me Because I Spent The Half the Rent We Had On Bourbon and Poker.
Oh well, leave it me to spoil the birthday party with the overwrought cynicism of a dissatisfied native, who knows that the place in which he was born is likely gonna burn, and soon, with flames visible from other dimensions, or at the least other galaxies.
Meanwhile, back at this centennial fit for a King, let's have me shut the eff up and get us all living the Life of Riley.
This little 94 minute slab of Regal delicacy comes from way, way back in the day. Just two days, in fact, after the father -- really he was the last MF who could have made sense of this heaping pile of illiterate, failed client state -- of the current stone-cold, brainwormed nutjob defunding the CDC for his billionaire masters was blasted into infinity by... wait for it... NO NOT A TRANSPERSON, you big dummeh. The CIA and the Mossad, just like always.
This also comes from the antediluvian epochs when Wolfgang's House Of Theft I'll Blame Bootleggers For Later On had lossless files for totally illegitimate, non-copyrighted sale, too.
Thankfully I was able to procure and fix up these bad boys without having to swear a loyalty oath, at least not yet. And we wonder why, every day, we have The Blues.
B.B. King
Winterland
San Francisco, California USA
6.8.1968
CD1: early show
01 Up, Up and Away
02 It's Gonna Work Out Fine
03 Every Day I Have the Blues
04 How Blue Can You Get?
05 Please Love Me
06 Confessin' the Blues
07 Woke Up This Morning (My Baby's Gone)
08 unidentified instrumental
09 Sweet Sixteen
CD2: late show
01 Song for My Father
02 Ode to Billie Joe
03 Help the Poor
04 I Got a Mind to Give Up Living
05 A Whole Lot of Lovin'
06 Need Your Love So Bad
07 It's My Own Fault
08 Don't Answer the Door
09 Night Life
10 Paying the Cost to Be the Boss
Total time: 1:34:48
B.B. King - guitar & vocals
James Toney - organ
Wilbur Freeman - bass
Sonny Freeman - drums
Pat Williams - trumpet
Lee Gatman - tenor saxophone
Albert King - guitar (CD1, Tracks 08 & 09)
original 24/44k files from the first, lossless iteration of Wolfgang's Vault
converted to 16/44 CD Audio -- with dropouts and between-track gaps repaired -- and slightly retracked by EN, September 2025
449 MB FLAC/direct link
449 MB FLAC/direct link
It will come as little surprise that this pair of sets is a major 11 on the scale of Incendiary 1 to 10s. Fellow icon Albert King even gets up to jam at the close of the first half, to duel with the Birthday Boy like they're Jack Palance vs. Franco Nero in the bullring in 1968's Il Mercenario, only the Kings have pentatonia for pistols and the Winterland stage as the arena.
It isn't that distracting, but there's some tape damage audible in a couple of tunes in the first set, probably from B.B. burning the tape recorder, using only Lucille as a flamethrower. I left it be because ROIOs of folks like this, whose every note is a commodity to the people running the world now, are few and far between amid the reissues of every instance of them tapping their foot or frying a breakfast egg.
I shall return soon with yes, the third centennial celebration (!!!) of this month. But there was no way I was gonna let such a big birthday go by for one of the modern architects of The Blues, without chiming in with some party presentations to help outperform the puerile performances of the pitiful profit pundits.--J.
9.16.1925 - 5.14.2015