It was a garden party at a villa in the hills above Nice, during the jazz festival, some time in the mid-1980s. The weather was hot and most of the guests were in some kind of deshabille, ranging from shorts to virtually nothing. In such circumstances, it was impossible to ignore the portly figure in a brown three-piece suit, complete with tie and highly polished shoes. That’s how I met BB King.
“But, aren’t you hot?” I asked.
“Ev’body’s hot,” he replied with an avuncular smile. “Difference is, I don’t waste time worryin’ about it and getting myself even hotter changing clothes every few minutes. Best thing is just take it easy.” As if to demonstrate the point, he stretched luxuriously on the sun-lounger and emitted a contented sigh.
He was then at the height of his career and playing more than 250 dates a year. Only Louis Armstrong had been busier for longer. During our conversation he was keen to point out that if he didn’t cultivate the art of taking it easy, and didn’t love what he was doing, he’d never survive. He had to keep earning, he said, to pay all the people who depended on him – not just the band and the road crew, but a small army of domestic staff back home in Nevada. It struck me that Riley B King, the son of a Mississippi sharecropper, had risen to such eminence that he was now stuck with noblesse oblige.
He certainly bore himself with the simple grace of a true aristocrat, and this simplicity carried through into his performances on stage, contrasting oddly with all the surrounding flim-flam. His appearance that night at the festival began with the usual showbiz windup. After a few numbers from the band, BB’s bandleader, Calvin Owens, stepped forward and announced: “He’s comin’!” Wild applause. “He can’t hear ya!” Wilder applause. “He still can’t hear ya!” Mayhem, Gallic whistling and random objects tossed in the air.
At the climax of all this, the man himself strolled – and I mean strolled – on stage with his guitar, called Lucille, and began to sing and play the blues. He sang a line and Lucille answered. No power chords, no extravagant gestures, no show at all really – just a blues conversation between man and guitar. He was a true artist and true artists don’t show off.
I heard BB King in person many times, and never heard him play or sing a clumsy or unsubtle phrase. And he always did it smartly dressed in a suit and tie.
