Albert King

Live Wire / Blues Power captures Albert King on June 26 and 27, 1968 at Bill Graham's Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, playing to a new counterculture rock crowd that was just discovering what a left-handed Gibson Flying V in the hands of a master bluesman could do. Produced by Booker T. & The MG's drummer Al Jackson Jr., released that November, it was King's first album to hit the Billboard chart and quickly took its place alongside B.B. King's Live at the Regal as one of the defining live blues records of the era.

The setlist is short — six long songs in about forty minutes — but that's the point. One track runs past ten minutes, another stretches past eight. This was among the first blues records to let an extended guitar solo unfold the way rock audiences had started to expect from the San Francisco ballroom bands.

Cool stuff:

• Recorded at the Fillmore Auditorium on June 26–27, 1968, the two nights that also yielded tracks Stax would mine for two more live LPs later on.
• Among the first blues records with extended soloing One track runs past ten minutes, another past eight — unheard of on a blues record at the time.
• King's first charting album Live Wire / Blues Power was his first LP to land on the Billboard 200, in November 1968.
• Blues Hall of Fame The album was inducted into the Blues Foundation's Hall of Fame, recognizing it as an essential live document of the music.
• Produced by Al Jackson Jr. The Booker T. & The MG's drummer and Stax in-house hit-maker was behind the board.

Spin it for: Albert King at his most ferocious, in front of a San Francisco crowd that had never heard blues played with quite that much bend.

Standouts: "Watermelon Man" · "Blues Power" · "Night Stomp" · "Blues at Sunrise"

Sources: Wikipedia — Live Wire/Blues Power · Blues Foundation — Hall of Fame induction · Craft Recordings — Bluesville reissue · Americana Highways review