Live at the Regal, Chicago, November 1964
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.
What distinguishes the night is showmanship that never loses the blues. This is not a festival pickup or a stadium spectacle. It is Saturday craft in a Black theatre: sharp clothes, a tight horn line, and a singer who can make a complaint feel like a shared joke and then take the joke back before it gets too comfortable. The Regal crowd had been rehearsing with him for years. That familiarity is the event.
The band around Lucille was a working unit. 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.
Against studio blues of the period, King’s guitar here is not a torrent. 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. 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. The interpretation is control with warmth: entertainer in the full sense, not a museum piece.
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)
The ambience is close and electric: a theatre that answers. When the crowd screams on cue, the relationship is call-and-response earned over hundreds of nights, not manufactured for tape. A stranger cannot fake it. This audience had the timing already.
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. 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 answering this tape. The question was settled on a November night in Chicago, by a man whose organist was pretending, and whose audience was not.
