Review: B. B. King - More B. B. King (1961)

Tracks: 1) Bad Case Of Love; 2) Get Out Of Here; 3) Bad Luck Soul; 4) Shut Your Mouth; 5) Baby Look At You; 6) You’re Breaking My Heart; 7) My Reward; 8) Don’t Cry Anymore; 9) Blues For Me; 10) Just Like A Woman.

REVIEW

By the end of 1961, B. B. King was finally fed up with what he saw as the Bihari Brothers’ disdain for his talents — the singles were not promoted, the albums were intentionally designed as bargain bin fodder, and the recording sessions had largely turned into repetitive routine with little chance of artistic development. Not that, admittedly, «artistic development» was a major concern for Mr. King — for the most part, he just loved to play his guitar, sing the blues, and be admired for both of those qualities — but still, there’s only so much even an artistically unambitious person can take before he feels it might be time for a change.

I do not think that this particular LP, released in the fall of 1961 and originally titled More B. B. King (later rebranded as the only marginally more exciting Blues For Me), exactly counts as the «last straw»: it is no better and no worse than the «average» B. B. King album on Kent Records, containing a little bit of everything — some small-combo blues, some big-band blues, some ballads, some dancey numbers, some strings, etc. — and adding absolutely nothing to what we already knew about King. Oddly enough, it did not include B. B.’s most successful single from 1961, the double-sided ‘Peace Of Mind’ / ‘Someday’, which went all the way to #7 on the charts — his highest position since ‘Sweet Sixteen’, though I am not exactly sure why; I have a serious suspicion that the opening Disney-esque strings of ‘Peace Of Mind’ were so en vogue around 1961 that they alone triggered the buying stimulus. ‘Someday’ adds a nice guitar solo to the strings, but is just as conventional in its basic structure — that said, King’s vocal performance on ‘Peace Of Mind’ is indeed one of his strongest from that entire period, and somehow he almost manages to sound believable when delivering the message of "I’ve had everything that money can buy / But still I’m so unhappy darling that I could cry", even if neither of these lines was probably very true back in 1961 — at that point, with the Bihari Brothers to blame at least partially, B. B. definitely did not yet have everything that money could buy, but neither was he really so unhappy that he could cry. In fact, it takes quite a bit of imagination to picture B. B. King so unhappy that he could really cry, even though his personal life hasn’t exactly been a smooth train ride all the time.

Most of the other singles from 1961 are on this record, though. In approximate chronological order, these are: ‘Get Out Of Here’, a solid mid-tempo dialog between Lucille and the horn section with a beautifully clear and clean guitar solo, as slowly but steadily B. B. King is beginning to get rewarded with the benefits of modern production values; and ‘Bad Case Of Love’, a generic and already deeply clichéd (even for 1961) love-as-disease metaphor which is, however, set to a danceable beat and tempo, so that the guitar break, when it comes in, almost ends up being playful in a Chuck Berry way — well, for a few bars, at least, before it reverts to the usual blues paradigm. (King would record a much longer version on 1998’s Blues On The Bayou, but I prefer the short original without all the excessive soloing). The B-side to ‘Bad Case Of Love’ was ‘You’re Breaking My Heart’, a long, slow ‘Five Long Years’-style blues dirge that does not stand out particularly well in the catalog but certainly stands out on this generally more upbeat and «body-oriented» record.

It is a little odd that songs tend to be grouped together «thematically», particularly on the second side of the LP: after ‘You’re Breaking My Heart’ (the only piece of slow angry blues on the record), we suddenly find two orchestrated pop ballads in a row — ‘My Reward’ opens with a string flourish that would be right up the alley of Atlantic R&B in those years, but I do admit that both on that song and on the following ‘Don’t Cry Anymore’, the string melodies are fairly creative and engage in cool dialog with King’s vocals. King himself seems to feel quite happy about it, too, since he does not even pick up his guitar while the sweet violins lift our big guy up in the clouds.

And then, right after these two, come two instrumentals: ‘Blues For Me’ (later re-used as a new title for the entire LP) is a quirky mix between John Lee Hooker and hot Latin dance music, while ‘Just Like A Woman’ is a wordless (apart from faraway backing vocals chanting the title) recreation of the classic Louis Jordan jump blues number. Both are mainly just vehicles for more soloing, but their placement next to the string ballads is like a veiled advertisement: «Look! This guy can do anything, and he’s got mad organizational skills, too!» Well, yes — throw in two more crackly, croaky outtakes from the mid-1950s (‘Shut Your Mouth’ and ‘Baby, Look At You’ on Side A), with a seriously different guitar sound from 1961, and More B. B. King emerges as an unintentionally apt celebration of the man’s diversity. As long as it’s got a nominal blues vibe to it, B. B. King can do pretty much everything.

Unfortunately, diversity alone cannot hide the fact that there is not a single truly outstanding number here, though there is not one openly embarrassing or tasteless cut, either. Somewhat to B. B.’s honor, in the year when it was all about softness, sap, and sentiment, he did not emerge with a More Mantovani For Me kind of record — sure, the man loved glitz, romance, and fan adoration, but not to the extent of drowning out his personality or betraying his trust to Lucille. (Well, "give or take a night or two", as Leonard Cohen would say, given the inclusion of those two string ballads so as to pay proper tribute to the world of Ben E. King and Jackie Wilson in which most black performers were living in 1961.) In this case, though, the stern conservatism does not pay off, at least not for future generations who wouldn’t really give a damn about trying to listen to the album in the overall imaginary context of the early Sixties.

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