A theatre that knew the jokes
The Regal Theater, Chicago, 21 November 1964. B.B. King had played the room, by his own later count, hundreds of times. This night a tape was running, for what would come out in 1965 as Live at the Regal, produced by Johnny Pate. The organ had broken. Duke Jethro, who was supposed to play it, said he did not really play piano. King told him to sit there and pretend, which is what, King added, he did most of the time anyway. The piano is on the record. So is the laugh underneath the order. A perfect live album often starts with a small disaster that the band is too professional to advertise.
The band around Lucille was a working unit, not a festival pickup. Leo Lauchie on bass, Sonny Freeman on drums, Johnny Board and Bobby Forte on tenor, Kenneth Sands on trumpet, Jethro wherever the keyboard had ended up. They knew the cues the way a good room knows a comic. Every Day I Have the Blues opens the door. Sweet Little Angel lets the voice climb. How Blue Can You Get is the one where the theatre becomes a second instrument: he feeds them a line, they answer before he has finished asking. I gave you seven children. The scream arrives on time. That timing is the whole art. A stranger cannot fake it. This audience had been rehearsing with him for years.
King’s guitar, on this night, is not the torrent people expect from the later legend. It is placement. A note, a bend, a silence in which the horn section looks expensive. His voice moves between a shout and something almost private, sometimes inside the same verse. The Library of Congress put the album in the National Recording Registry in 2005. Rolling Stone has kept it on the long list of records that are not allowed to disappear. Those honours are late. The Regal crowd awarded theirs in the moment, which is the only review a live record ought to need, and which this one happens to have on tape.
Well, just sit there and pretend. That’s what you do most of the time anyway.
(B.B. King to Duke Jethro, Regal Theater, 1964)
What the album teaches, if you let it, is that blues in a Black theatre in 1964 was not a museum. It was Saturday craft: sharp clothes, a tight horn line, a singer who can make a complaint feel like a shared joke and then take the joke back before it gets too comfortable. King is an entertainer in the full sense. He talks, he sets the next song up, he lets the room be funnier than he is. Then Lucille says the sentence nobody in the seats was going to get to first.
Put it next to the stadiums and it looks small. Thirty-five minutes, one theatre, no ship descending. It is the other classic concert, the one that proves scale is not the same thing as event. Everyone who has tried to play blues in a hall since has been, whether they know it or not, answering this tape. The answers vary. The question was settled on a November night in Chicago, by a man whose organist was pretending, and whose audience was not.
