Bye Bye B B

The first time I saw BB King was at the old Loew's Theatre in Waterbury, Connecticut on a double bill with Malo, which was an offshoot of Santana, an incredibly strange combination, especially since Malo disappeared off the radar shortly after the concert. BB was a match for downtown Waterbury, his blue collar blues catching the working class mood, interspersed with classics like "Lucille" and "The Thrill Is Gone", the tune that every newscast in the country used for background when they announced King's passing at the age of 89 in Las Vegas,

The second time I saw him was as the closing act at the Newport Jazz Festival in - I think - 1985. By then, I realized just how much stature he brought to the blues, making his mark in Memphis as a dee jay first before embarking on his long long career. I also knew by then that BB was always dressed to a "T" , super polite, and capable of spinning off the smoothest riffs matched by a mournful vocal. I was familiar with "Every Day I Have The Blues", "How Blue Can You Get?". "Paying The Cost To Be The Boss" and all the other standards that were part of his permanent repetoire. The only problem was I had dragged my poor pregnant wife to the Festival to see Miles Davis, so her incredible patience was gone by the time BB got onstage,  so we stayed for maybe two tunes.

The last time I saw him was a little over a year ago in Providence. This time his band came out and warmed up the crowd - who seemed to spend more time getting selfies than listening to the blues (As I explained in a previous blog !) - before the King himself made a grandiose entrance in a wheelchair. I can't really say he was resting on his laurels, but BB seemed more intent on interacting with the audience, in between choruses of "You are my SUN-shine - my only SUN-shine" but eventually breaking into "Thrill" and "Everyday"  as a kind of musical tapestry. He was led off at the end by a dude with the King's coat and hat a la James Brown.

I guess I witnessed the three stages of BB King , as well as playing his music on the radio, truly the last of the Mississippi Delta masters. He was fortunate enough to live long enough to see himself crowned "King of the Blues." .

Blurred Verdict ?

The recent court decision awarding Marvin Gaye's heirs over $7 million in damages from Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke over the "substantial similarities" between "Blurred Lines" and Gaye's classic "Got To Give It Up" was, at first, music to my ears, since I already blogged strongly in Marvin's favor, with all those noble thoughts about originality and integrity. But then I started thinking about the nature of music.

Is it possible that Gaye was ripped off? Yes. But you also have to take into account that someone somewhere might just come up with a similar beat at random that just happens coincidentally to sound similar.The nature of music - especially popular music - has always involved borrowing tunes, especially in the case of an idiom like the blues, which incorporates similar standard riffs over and over again. The crux of the matter revolves around copyright law and a famous term known as "fair use". Simply put, fair use refers to the nature and use of a copyrighted work in another context, such as education or training, with legal limits on what is permissible. Court decisions have been all over the road, the most bizarre being a decision favoring the Rolling Stones over an orchestral riff that was actually written and performed by the London Symphony Orchestra.

The only really convincing "substantial similarity" case as far as I'm concerned is the Led Zeppelin - Spirit controversy, which claims that Page, Plant et al stole a riff from a Spirit tune and then used it as the theme for Stairway To Heaven. I actually had a copy of Spirit's album back in the day-they were out of California. The two tunes sound almost exactly alike, so keep your ears open for another court action.

It is not out of the realm of possibility that artists do come up with similar ideas at different points in time in a general sense, but, when so-called original music sounds EXACTLY like someone's else's , you have to wonder where that inspiration came from.