Albert King — Live Wire/Blues Power (2024 Bluesville reissue)
Qobuz reissue review (Sept. 2024)
By 1968, Albert King had somehow resuscitated a career that had already died a couple of times, and in the process, hit a creative and commercial peak. After leaving the South in the early ’50s, King spent the rest of the decade working in Gary, Indiana, and St. Louis. He would find middling success as a sideman during that time, and released a handful of non-charting singles on tiny labels, as well as his first moderate hit, 1961’s “Don’t Throw Your Love Away.” But he never achieved anything approaching success, and eventually moved to Memphis and somehow convinced Stax to sign him. The label cautiously allowed King to cut a handful of singles throughout 1966 and 1967, and it was with those singles — “Born Under A Bad Sign,” “Cold Feet,” “Crosscut Saw” — that King not only found success, but he also found his groove. By merging his singular approach to electric blues guitar — slow changes, upside-down string bends — with the dirty funk of Booker T. & the M.G.’s, King achieved a sound at Stax that was as revolutionary as it was unique. His unorthodox approach to the blues was what rock audiences in the late ’60s wanted to hear after the very conventional approach of the blues revival of the early and mid-’60s. So it wasn’t too surprising that King was tapped by Bill Graham to play a few nights at the Fillmore Auditorium in June 1968, and even less surprising that Stax recorded those shows for release. Live Wire / Blues Power is compiled of highlights from those shows, and it showcases the very best of King’s iconoclastic sound. Reveling in the contrast of King’s piercing guitar tone cutting through the molasses-thick groove of his band, these six cuts are master classes in modern electric blues. The set starts off with a take on “Watermelon Man,” but instead of some futuristic funk or piano-based soul-jazz, King and his band turn Herbie Hancock’s classic into a grizzled piece of southern-fried roadhouse blues, stretching it out in places it had never been stretched before. Similarly, originals like “Blues at Sunrise” and “Blues Power” get expansively reworked into eight- and ten-minute jams. “Look Out” is the highest-energy cut here, and it closes the album out with the band giving King plenty of room to solo all around them, a final display of fireworks to close out an album filled with funky pyrotechnics.
