The Fillmore

B.B. King on when he began to sense a change.

By the early 1960s, with the rising tide of the Civil Rights movement, the young black audience that had once been BB King’s constituency had begun to turn their backs on the blues, with all its associations with hard times and oppression. At the same time, rough-and-tumble urban bluesmen such as Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker were finding a new audience of young whites in coffee houses and folk festivals, lionised for their Rousseau-like authenticity. King, in his words, 'fell between the cracks’. While his spare, precise, single-note guitar playing – like a fretboard being caressed with a velvet-covered ice-pick – was to prove enormously influential on a generation of young rock guitarists, not least Eric Clapton, King had never played for a white audience until 1967, when he was booked to appear at the Fillmore West in San Francisco, a dance hall in the black section of town that had been taken over by the impresario Bill Graham and become the focal point of the burgeoning hippie scene.

'I’d played the Fillmore when it was a black theatre, but this time when we pulled up I saw all these long-haired kids outside. I thought, my agent’s made a mistake. See, once in a while I’d meet a white person who might say, “Boy, you sure is good,” but I wasn’t aware that a lot of these kids had been listening to me.

'So I sent my road-manager in to get the promoter. And sure enough, Bill Graham came out and he said, “No, B, this is the right place.” I was like a cat with seven dogs around him! And when we get inside – no tables. Just kids sitting on the floor! Took me up to the dressing-room, same old dressing-room we used to go; the same old sofa, with slashes in, like somebody had cut it with a knife. Now I was nervous because I’d never played to people like this before. So I told Bill, I’ve got to have a drink. He sent out and got me the smallest half pint of liquor I’ve ever seen. I’ve taken a sip of it or so and try to get my mind off what I’m doing. Then finally we get on stage, and Bill said, “Ladies and gentlemen” – and it got so quiet you could hear a pin fall on the floor – “I bring you the chairman of the board, BB King.” That’s the shortest intro, and the best one, I ever had in my life. They all stood up and they yelled. I guess I had a 45-minute set, and they must have stood up three or four times. That’s the night I saw the difference.’