Completely Well
B.B. King
1969
1969?! This is not the first time I had this reaction in this column to the place on the timeline that the album occupies. I have definitely written about this before, but A Year of Blind Spots is ending after eight more albums, so it bears repeating one last time: I am fucking terrible at understanding when music happened. Had you asked me when B.B. King was making music, I would've guessed the '50s. And I suppose he was? I'm looking at the discography now. 1957 was his first album. How did I end up here, at this specific album? It's hard to remember (made this list of album over two years ago at this point), but I assume I looked up "best B.B. King albums" and this was an answer.
I'm probably just being racist or something. "An older Black legend" and "master of a genre that has historical roots" are two concepts that make me think "old music," even if that's not true, and that this album was released after the Beatles broke up. I also get mixed up because there are two reasons why a particular album from half a century ago might be known to a plugged-in-but-still-learning musiophile like me: commercial success and critical appeal. Those two are not necessarily linked, and the latter is not necessarily static, so it gets complicated.
In this case, it feels like Completely Well is (presumably) noted by some as one of King's best albums because his critical appeal was relatively constant across his career, and this was just his commercial breakthrough. Is it actually better than, say, 1960's My Kind of Blues? If it is, then it's not by a significant margin, and if it's not better, then we're here because more people know Completely Well. And more people know the sound of this thing! Maybe it's more polished, ya know? A decade can do a lot to a sound, both internally (the artist grows) and externally (the scene changes).
I spent a lot of time while listening to this (great) album how the sounds on here intersect with the sounds you hear on The Last Waltz. This is probably because we are twelve days away from Thanksgiving, a.k.a. prime Last Waltz season. That concert was filmed seven years after Completely Well came out. There's no actual intersection of the artists involved, but I hear some of the same sounds. The horn arrangements are similar, Robbie Robertson almost assuredly listened to B.B. King and learned from him, there's a level of cool confidence in both of the sounds. The Band did a lot but one of the genres you can comfortably place them in is roots rock, which by definition has blues elements. So the Band played music that was a half-step from here, a half-step that was easily traversable.
I'll also cop to the idea that I might need to refer to a crib sheet to distinguish between B.B. King and Muddy Waters, the latter who was a guest performer at The Last Waltz. But that's more of my ignorance with the blues than anything else. Looking it up now, we can say that King, on this album at least, is trafficking in electric blues, whereas Muddy Waters was a pioneer in Delta blues. Obviously there's overlap there, but it's a different feel, a different tempo (literally and emotionally). Electric blues is a more modern take on the genre (modern for 1969, of course). Probably more accessible, if I'm being honest.
So was this a matter of B.B. King starting to modernize his sound as he got older, or what? No, it doesn't seem so. I'm reading an obituary now (a pretty helpful tip to all you enterprising bloggers with a column about discovering older music) and he was playing the electric blues all the way back in the '40s. When Completely Well is described as a "commercial breakthrough," that's a reference to the pop charts, and how he was recognized as popular (in both senses of the word) artist from this point forward. A couple things happened. One, the British bands like the Stones et al. started hyping B.B. King up as an influence, which boosted his commercial stature. Two, the music press got to the point where they started distinguishing genres and covering all of them, and B.B. King became a sort of "ambassador" of the blues genre (like, if Sesame Street is gonna do a blues-style segment, then King is gonna be there).
And what I presume happened is that King was at a point in 1969 that he had the means and the cultural status about him finally to really make a push to make his cleanest, most muscly, most coherent and artistic and commercially appealing album of his career so far. And that's how you get something like Completely Well. It's one big loop: he does the work, he's appreciated by those he influenced, those he influenced become popular, they boost the guy who influenced them, the influencer does something even bolder that continues to influence. Repeat that cycle enough times, and you get a legend.
Or you can just scale it back all the way and say: yo, you've heard this name before, right? B.B. King? Of course you have. Well, I think it's time to check out some music. It's exactly what you're expecting, and that's by design. Here it is.
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