June 9 of a summer several years ago, a warm evening after a hot day of blues at the Concord Pavilion.

B.B. King and his wonderful band have already had us dancing in our seats, B.B. and his guitar, Lucille, are in our blood streams and the music and the excitement are pumping back and forth across the distance to the stage.

Organ player James Toney starts a dramatic slow blues with a major-seventh turn-around. King steps in with a full-band break and it turns into the scariest guitar solo we've ever heard. At least as scary as Modest Moussorgsky's ``Night On Bald Mountain.'' Lucille, a black Gibson, overflowed with rich, full-tone screams as our blood ran cold. Sitting on the edges of our seats, we heard B.B.'s first words, every bit as macabre as the music:

I've got a good mind to give up living,

(We all shuddered)

And go shopping instead.

(We all laughed, enormously relieved.)

Oh, I say I've got a good mind to give up living

And go shopping instead

And pick out me a tombstone -- oh! -- and be pronounced dead

-- B. B. King and C. Adams

It is blues showmanship at its best, and it led to the photograph at the top of this page.

This is B.B. King. With his arms open wide to receive the love of his audience and and with his heart uncovered to beam it right back to them.

At a B.B. King show, the audience is as much a part of the music as the guys in the band. The blues bounces back and forth between stage and seats like light in a laser until the intensity is so strong that we are all transformed and uplifted, taken away from our lives and made a part of something that reaches back through history to the combined births of agony and ecstasy, the human condition.

When the show is over we walk out with a buzz, the adrenalin still running.

We carry the memory of how to touch and sooth our hearts when sad.

There is no better performer in the blues.

A signature of B.B. King is that he always listens to as much music as he can, and what he likes he incorporates into his own blues sound. He started playing spiritual music on an $8 guitar, but was captivated when he heard an electric guitar the first time.

``It was T-Bone Walker doing `Stormy Monday,''' he recalls, ``and that was the prettiest sound I think I ever heard in my life. that's what started me wanting to play the blues.''

He was a leader in bringing horns to blues music. He was the first to really effectively use radio as a promotion tool for the blues (and that's how Riley B. King became the Beale Street Blues Boy and then, eventually, B.B.).

And he continues to listen and adopt and adapt. Witness his stunning cover of Bono's ``When Love Comes to Town,'' on his album, ``B.B. King Live at the Apollo.''

Wherever he is, he practices the guitar every day -- unusual among blues musicians -- and when at home he uses a computer to perform different band parts for him to practice by.

``My ambition is to be one of the greatest blues singers there have ever been,'' he told writer Pete Welding. ``I've had a lot of things in my favor. I'm trying my best to get people who don't like the blues not to hate them. You may not like something, but you can still respect it. Maybe I'm defending what I'm doing, but when I stand on the stage and sing and sing, and people don't understand what I'm doing, I almost cry ...

"The blues are almost sacred to some people, but others don't understand, and when I can't make them understand, it makes me feel bad, because they mean so much to me.''

B. B. King is the greatest performer in the blues. I've seen almost all the people who have been big deals in blues music over the last few decades, and there is air space between any of them and B.B. King.

Albert King, Eric Clapton, Steve Ray Vaughn, John Lee Hooker, many others; they each have or had their own greatness, but B.B. is the greatest performer of them all.

I want to say this: Three times I have seen grandeur on stages: The first time was Artur Rubinstein, playing with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the baton of Zubin Mehta; the second was Zero Mostel as Tevya in "Fiddler on the Roof" at the Shubert in Los Angeles; the third was B.B. King at the Concord Pavilion.

The great sad irony is that so many people have only seen B.B. King on TV, performing "The Thrill is Gone" with the house orchestra for some TV show or another. The one that sticks out in my mind is Carol Burnett sitting on a chair a few feet away, nodding her head approvingly as B.B. played with her show band. It was nice, but it was not B.B.

It was not B.B. King the way we all should see him: live with his own band, at almost any kind of venue. Blues fest, fairgrounds, theater in the round or a night club. See B.B. with his own band. You'll thank me later.

I recently got his autobiography, "Blues All Around Me," which I recommend, and must quote a chunk here for you, before I send you on to read the other stuff I have collected here for you. Read the following quote, please, knowing that I have shaken B.B. King's hand, he has smiled at me and invited me into his dressing room. I like the man. He is very, very charming.

"My friendliness might fool you. Come into my dressing room and I'll shake your hand, pose for a picture, make polite small talk. I'll be as nice as I can, hoping you'll be nice to me. I'm genuinely happy to meet you and exchange a little warmth. I have pleasant acquaintancea with thousands of people the world over. But few, if any, really know me. And that includes my own family. I'ts not that they don't want to; it's because I keep my feelings to myself. If you hurt me, chances are I won't tell you. I'll just move on. Moving on is my method of healing my hurt and, man, I've been moving on all my life."

A review of a show at Concord Amphitheatre on June 9, 1991

By John Orr

Reviewers aren't allowed to say "the best," "the greatest," "the most." Somewhere on planet Earth, the thinking goes, there may be somebody better, greater or more.

That makes it tough to talk about B.B. King's show Sunday night at the Concord Pavilion. But I'll just say that if there is somebody in the blues who puts on a better show, who is a greater performer or who makes the audience have more fun than King, I haven't seen or heard them.

King's guitar playing was magnificent. A few songs into his set, after he'd already "Let the Good Times Roll" and jump- swinged through "Paying the Cost to be the Boss," he laid back to let organ player James Tony start a dramatic blues with a major-seventh turn-around.

King stepped in with one of his band's famous breaks into a slower blues, dominated by the scariest guitar solo I've ever heard; blood ran cold as King's "Lucille" Gibson overflowed with rich, full-toned screams that sounded like the messenger of death itself.

And, after a few bars of scaring the audience silly, King sang: "I've got a good mind to give up living, and go shopping instead."

Yeah, it's funny stuff. If it was good enough for Shakespeare to mix dramatic fear with comedy, it's good enough for B.B. King.

The usual dynamic and wonderful show was all there. Trumpet player James Bolden whipped his head around while dancing until I feared it would fly off his shoulders and roll into the audience. The entire horn section danced back like a miniature marching band to get out of the audience's way when it wasn't playing.

"The Thrill is Gone," "When Loves Comes to Town" were heard.

The new stuff was in improvisations. Sunday was a very hot night for King's playing and for his band. King went through a series of instrumental duets with Mike Doster on bass and Tony on keyboards that taught everyone there something about the blues, and King even played, as an encore, a number that would have to be considered a country-western blues. "I don't even know your name," he sang, "but I love you just the same." Lucille's solo was one of the most flowery I've ever heard King play.

It was a blues barbecue afternoon and evening at Concord, with people standing in line in a hot tent for tasty ribs and beef.

Cabaret blues pianist Charles Brown was the opening act, with a 10-song set that was like a time machine to the late 1940s. It was a mix of New Orleans barrelhouse, Kansas City stride, New York slick and the kind of music that happened in the 1950s, when bebop starting beating up on the blues. All of it with Brown's mellow but undistinguished voice poured over it like thick syrup. It didn't belong in the light of day, but in a dark cabaret somewhere.

John Lee Hooker and Coast-to-Coast Blues Band got the joint jumping with one of the better shows I've seen these Bay Area regulars put on.

When Hooker took the stage the audience got a lesson in his unique, inimitable guitar playing. Starting with a Gibson 335, playing with that hot, tinny sound that no one else uses, he hit licks that combine left-hand trills and bends with a right- hand picking style that, frankly, mystifies other guitar players.

Looking bad in sunglasses and a black suit under a cream- colored fedora, Hooker sat down and dished up that "Same Old Blues."

Then Hooker brought singer Vala Cupp on stage for a hot duet on his sexy classic, "Crawlin' King Snake," that had the audience howling. "I'm gonna wrap myself around your pretty body, baby," Hooker sang, and the audience screamed with delight.

Top picture: B.B. King at the Concord Pavilion on June 9, 1991. Above: King is the eye of a hurricane at a birthday party in his honor, Sept. 15, 1991 at the San Francisco Blues Festival.

B.B. King takes care of a little business before an interview, September of 1991. The young woman was a staffer for the San Francisco Blues Festival. The gent hanging in the doorway was B.B.'s valet.

B.B. King chats with publicists, fans and reporters at the Tuscan Inn, San Francisco, in September of 1991.

An interview with B.B. King

By John Orr

Written for publication on Sept. 13, 1991

When God was handing out charm, B.B. King must have gone back for seconds.

Maybe that's why his performances are so delightful -- it's more than just his peerless guitar playing, great blues singing and fabulous band.

When B.B. King takes the stage, you're right there with him, even if you're in the last row at the Concord Pavilion, or way back on the hill under a tree at the San Francisco Blues Festival, where King headlines on Sunday.

Meet the man in person and the effect is even stronger.

Monday morning at the Tuscan Inn in San Francisco, B.B. King was the calm eye in a hurricane of publicists, factotums and photographers, making everyone feel in touch with him. He flirted with the ladies, shared smiles and handshakes with the men and handed out his ``B.B. King'' guitar lapel pins.

He very quickly makes people feel like they are his friends and he would do anything for them.

Maybe that's why it's so hard to get to him.

Two years of phone calls, talks with his road manager, Sherman Darby, his office in New York and publicists at venues all over California made the protective layer around this man obvious. Other newspapers have met with the same armor.

``Oh, we've mostly been busy, working a lot,'' King explained.

``But I'm always happy when someone is interested in what I have to say.''

But even with all the work -- 250 shows a year and countless other obligations -- the feeling rises that King's people form a shield around him to protect him from his own generousity.

Otherwise maybe he'd just give away the store.

The reason he's playing his 15th ``Lucille'' guitar, for instance, is because Joe Louis Walker wanted No. 14.

Walker, a Bay Area guitarist who was the first name King mentioned when asked ``Who's coming up in the blues world?'' saw King backstage at Concord Pavilion in June, and he wanted King's Gibson ES 355. He got it.

``But I'll get him back,'' King laughed, bouncing around in his chair with a sparkle in his eye. ``I'll wait until he has a guitar someday that he really likes, then I'll make him give it to me. It'll be a trade.''

King doesn't hold back his emotions. They become his focus as soon as they surface, as they did often in the one-on-one, 30-minute interview that stretched to 45 minutes.

Such as when I asked if a rumor I'd heard was true; that in the old days he wouldn't hire white players for his band.

``Who said that?'' he demanded, a burst of anger filling his face. ``I've never thought like that. I've always tried to be a role model.

``I'm a Virgo, and I have to tell the truth,'' King said. ``You accuse me of lying and it's like whipping me. I can't stand for it.''

In the '40s and '50s, especially in the segregated South where he made his start, King notes, it just wasn't possible for a blues band to have white players (if, indeed, any could be found at that time). And by the time white blues players starting popping up, ``I wouldn't fire someone just to hire someone. But my band has been integrated for a long while.''

The blues, and King personally, have played a part in the integration of this nation.

``I almost got bombed,'' King remembered, ``One time when they were trying to bomb Dr. (Martin Luther) King. ``I almost got blown up with him.

``And it still goes on ... five years ago, in Mississippi, my home state, we stopped one time at a Gulf service station, and some of the fellas in the band, you know, they went inside to get some cigarettes and little things, you know, that they like to get, and they told them, `We don't serve blacks.'''

King laughs, remembering it with glee, ``And the fellas told them, `And we don't eat them, either.''' King laughs again, but shifts into a very serious mien. ``And the fellas went in there and bought what they wanted anyway. We didn't stay around too long, though.''

King likes what is becoming a tradition in his home town, Indianola, Mississippi, where about 10 years ago a white lady invited him back for a tea -- a new concept for the man who used to run tractors in the area.

``She invited what I called about 150 Archie Bunkers, and about 150 Redd Foxx's,'' King recalled. ``Socially, she was very interested to see what would happen. And instead of them forming two groups that stayed away from each other, they all mixed together and it was a very good time.''

He's gone back every year since to repeat the experience.

King will turn 66 on Monday, so a few dozen friends have been invited to a birthday party for him backstage -- and festival organizers hope some of the party will spill out onto the stage at Fort Mason Park.

Among the invited: Bonnie Raitt, Robert Cray, Carlos Santana, Bobby ``Blue'' Bland, Boz Scaggs, Bobby McFerrin, Ruth Brown, Whoopi Goldberg, Robin Williams, Art Agnos and King's old friend, John Lee Hooker, with whom King used to trade guitar licks and whiskey in the early '50s.

``He's the president of the Society of Dirty Old Men,'' King laughs about Hooker, ``But I want to take his place.''

When it was time to finish the interview, King reached in his pocket and gave me a guitar pick that said ``B:B: King,'' and said, ``You owe me one, now'' -- just like Walker owes him a guitar -- ``You owe me one.''

I reached in my pocket and gave him a pick that said ``Gibson USA H.''

The great man laughed, and put it in his pocket.

A review of the 1991 San Francisco Blues Festival.

By John Orr

Originally published Sept. 16, 1991

Today is B.B. King's birthday, and he's at home in Las Vegas, taking it easy after a long run on the road.

But Sunday was different. Sunday more than 10,000 well- wishers at the San Francisco Blues Festival wished him a happy birthday, and even the sun broke through the fog to put a bright start on the 66th year of the blues' reigning royalty.

King worked hard for his birthday money.

Almost anybody who knew anybody even remotely related to blues music anywhere in the Bay Area was invited backstage for a birthday party that started an hour before King was due to perform. They all loved him, they all wanted to touch him, they all crushed in on him to get his autograph, and he wanted to make everybody happy. On the way to the birthday tent, he stopped often to sign autographs, shake hands, buss cheeks. "He's like a god," said a photographer stunned by the worshiping crowd. "He's like royalty."

Inside the tent it was ridiculous, with television camera operators, photographers and autograph hounds shoving through the guests and everybody crowding in on the grass floor until the air was as muggy and close as a hot August nightmare.

But King put on his Seagram's cap, thanked everybody for everything, smiled like the sun and even -- we're pretty sure about this -- enjoyed it.

This is a nice, nice man we're talking about here. A gracious man.

On stage, after all that fuss and more, he strapped on Lucille, his Gibson ES 355 guitar, and played a great set that was a variation on his standard tour show.

For one thing, there were all these extra people on stage for part of the show -- Robert Cray, Narada Michael Walden, Bobby McFerrin, Boz Scaggs and King's daughter Claudette, who sang a very funky "Happy birthday, B.B."

King didn't sing his way through his story-telling medley that is usually a part of his show, but did settle into a very hot cutting session with his band.

Last week in an interview with the Mercury News, with a gleam in his eye, he said his band keeps him sharp as a guitar player because they are "mean guys" -- he singled out bass player Michael Doster, keyboard player James Toney and guitarist Leon Warren. And those "mean guys" were put to the test by King on Sunday, when he turned his back to the audience and wrung Lucille's neck with a hot musical workout that even got Doster -- who is usually dead serious at all times on stage -- to start grinning.

The Sunday show was King's first appearance at the San Francisco festival, and the first time it has sold out in advance.

Lots of people showed up after the ticket-holders were let in, and just sat outside on the lawns to hear the show, even if they couldn't see it.

Lots of folks were mindful that the board of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area has threatened to kick the festival out of Fort Mason, where it has taken place the last nine years.

The longest lines both days in fact, weren't for T- shirts, Louisiana Cajun Lady crayfish, New Orleans deep- fried fritters or Coney Island hot potato knishes -- the longest line was for the KFOG booth, to sign the petition in support of keeping the festival at Fort Mason. Mayor Art Agnos -- one of an army of politicians who've lined up in support of keeping the festival where it is -- showed up to give the key to San Francisco to King, and said "We want you right back here to celebrate the blues."

Later, King told the crowd, "I haven't had a drink for a while, but I like to think if I did, and went out and got in trouble, got put in jail, that key would get me out!"

The Sunday show, started, as always, with a gospel group -- this year the Paramount Singers -- greeting the early arrivals at 11 a.m.

Highlights included a burning hot slice of blues from the William Clarke Band, including two songs featuring singer and guitarist John Marx.

Other Sunday acts included pianist-singer Imam Omar Sharriff, singer-guitarist Rory Block (who performed the day's only encore), Queen Ida's hot zydeco set, Otis Clay and the Chicago Fire, and Snooky Pryor and John Nicholas, who combined for a harp/guitar duet of country blues.

The sun never came out Saturday. The fog just kept rolling in from the Golden Gate, driven by winds that played havoc with the sound back there by that nice new statute of the late Congressman Phillip Burton, who was instrumental in forming the Golden Gate Recreational Area.

Saturday's closer was the inimitable Etta James, who has gained enough weight that -- dressed in a black skirt over black leotard and tights, and topped with a beautiful black cape with gold epaulets -- she looked like a small, black Volkswagen beetle.

All that weight is part of the show. She does not hide it from her fans, or pretend it's not there, or apologize for it in any way, but flaunts it aggressively, pushing out and swinging her bosom to the music, wagging her tush at the crowd and generally enjoying every ounce God and life has given her. And she sings great.

"I feel likebreakin' up somebody's home," she sang, and she could do it.

John Hammond was joined in his set by John Lee Hooker, and they performed the two songs they recorded for Hooker's new "Mr. Lucky" album, "Highway 13" and "My Father Was a Jockey." It was a surprise and a treat to hear a third duet, "Bottle Up and Go."

Guitar Sims & the Fillmore Rockers opened the festival, followed by Alvin Youngblood Hart and the Joanna Connor Band. Connor is a very impressive young singer and guitar player.