ALBERT KING: LIVE '69 (1969; 2003)
1) Introduction; 2) Why Are
You So Mean To Me; 3) As The Years Go Passing By; 4) Please Come Back To Me; 5)
Crosscut Saw; 6) Personal Manager.
For those who just can't get enough of
«prime-time era» King, this relatively recent archival release from Tomato's
vaults will temporarily quench their thirst. Unlike the Fillmore sets, this
show was recorded on May 29, 1969 at a small club in Wisconsin, offering a
chance to assess Albert in a somewhat more intimate and informal setting rather
than Bill Graham's «kingly» environment. The sound and mix quality is not
perfect, but decent enough not to pay it a lot of attention — at least, the
guitar was properly miked, and whenever the big guy gets to solo (which,
predictably, occupies about 80% of the running time), his wailing rises high
and above everything else, including the horns section (which he'd only added
recently — not that it matters a lot, since the horns are actually quite poorly
miked, and never add much to the overall sound).
The setlist is short and far from perfect: at
the center of the album sits ʽPlease Come Back To Meʼ, a completely generic
piece of 12-bar blues stretched out to a 17-minute running time. Albert puts in
as much fire as he can, but even he cannot help repeating all of his trademark
licks and bends for at least several times over those seventeen minutes, and if
you already know them by heart from the Fillmore days, you won't be
particularly happy having to go through them all over again. On the other hand,
this is at least partially compensated by the only (I think) officially released live version of ʽAs The Years Go
Passing Byʼ from the Sixties — sung and played beautifully, with a couple
soul-probing solos where «every note counts», and with the guitar so high in
the mix and the club acoustics so pressing in on you that the experience can be
quite mind-blowing.
For serious fans, I think, the inclusion of
that song alone is well worth the price; most of the others would probably be
happier if some of the jamming were cut to make way for a ʽBorn Under A Bad
Signʼ or, at least, for more contemporary material (from Years Gone By, for instance) — represented here only by a brief
instrumental snippet of ʽYou Don't Love Meʼ in the introduction. On the other
hand, Live '69 is as good a first
introduction into the live blues power of Albert King as anything else. Also,
the basic guitar tone is thicker and lower here than the thin, shrill tone we
hear on the Fillmore records — probably a different set of amps, since the man
seems to be playing the same Flying-V model as usual. So if you like your King
«plumper» rather than «leaner», this record might even have a small edge on the
classic Fillmore stuff, from that
aspect at least.
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