B.B. King’s "Live at the Regal"

The Recording of a Classic Blues Album

B.B. King worked audiences the same way he worked the guitar he’d nicknamed “Lucille.” He teased them, tickled them, and then jolted them with the lyrics he sang and the notes he played. “Usually when I’m up there onstage,” he explained, “I try and do like an electric eel and throw my little shock through the whole audience. And usually the reaction comes back double-force and pulls me out of it, because the people can help you entertain. They become part of it. It’s something like radar: You send out a beam, and it hits and comes back with more energy.” Nowhere is this better exemplified than on King’s Live at the Regal album, widely considered one of the finest blues performances on record.

Opened in 1928 at 4719 South Parkway in the heart of Chicago’s “Bronzeville” district, the Regal Theatre was one of the nation’s most prestigious Black venues. For decades, the elegant 3500-seater showed films in between musical performances by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Dizzy Gillespie. During the early 1960s it hosted R&B stars such as Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, Nat “King” Cole, Ray Charles, and Aretha Franklin. In 1962, Little Stevie Wonder, performing with the Motortown Revue, recorded his first #1 single there, Fingertips – Pt. 2.  

With its plush carpeting, leather seats, velvet drapes, suspended dome roof, and brightly colored Moorish, Spanish, and Far-Eastern motifs, the theater’s sumptuous auditorium dazzled well-dressed ticket holders. At the time Live at the Regal was recorded, the venue was staffed by 36 employees and provided non-stop entertainment from 1:30 PM until midnight. In his autobiographical Blues All Around Me, King recalled that he had already played the Regal “hundreds of times before. Johnny Pate, a wonderful arranger and producer who’d been hired by ABC, wanted to record the concert. I said fine.”

Born in Chicago Heights in 1923, John W. Pate, Sr., was two years older than B.B. King. During the 1940s he’d played tuba and upright bass in a U.S. Army jazz orchestra. After gigging alongside Stuff Smith, Red Allen, and other jazz musicians in New York, he returned home and became an arranger for the Regal Theatre and a house bassist for the Blue Note label. As ABC Paramount’s newly appointed A&R director, Pate had recently orchestrated and produced several of the Impressions’ most beloved songs, notably the Curtis Mayfield-fronted It’s All Right, I’m So Proud, Keep on Pushing, Amen, People Get Ready, and Woman’s Got Soul. “All of a sudden,” Pate recalled decades later, “I’m doing rhythm and blues things that I’m picking up [royalty] checks for that look like telephone numbers, and I wasn’t getting these kinds of checks in jazz!”

For B.B. King, signing with ABC Records was a godsend. “I was very lucky in the late ’50s,” he reported. “Practically everything I made was considered a hit by the standards of an independent company. The people I was with before I joined ABC told me I had never sold less then fifty thousand of anything. The biggest-selling album I ever had was the spirituals [1960’s B.B. King Sings Spirituals, on Crown]. But I didn’t benefit too much from the sales of albums until I started to make what I’d call legitimately priced albums for ABC. Crown and Kent, the labels I was formerly on, were made for rack-jobbers and mostly sold for ninety-nine cents.” King was reportedly the first R&B artist signed to ABC. “What ABC was trying to do,” Pate explained, “was to get in on the rhythm and blues, because of the success of Motown, Chess and Stax, and some others. There was pressure on me to get a B.B. King album out. When B.B. and I talked, we figured the quickest way to do this would be to do a live performance instead of trying to sit down and figure out a studio concept and so forth. I was based in Chicago at that time, so I discussed the idea with the Regal’s manager, Ken Bluett.”

The musicians backing B.B. King for the November 1964 Regal concerts had all recorded together two years earlier, at a Maxwell Davis-produced Kent session in Los Angeles. (Blues Shadows, Ain’t Nobody’s Business, Eyesight to the Blind, and other tracks from this date were featured on King’s 1967 The Jungle LP.) Trumpeter Kenny Sands, electric bassist Leo Lauchie, drummer Sonny Freeman, organist Duke Jethro, and tenor saxophonist Bobby Forte, praised by King as “one of my all-time great sidemen,” were current members of King’s road band. By special request, King’s former sideman Johnny Board came in specifically for the Regal shows. “He was a very excellent tenor saxophonist,” Pate recalled, “and I had used him on many studio dates. So when B.B. mentioned that he wanted to use Johnny Board, it was something I amen’d right away.”