{"id":7287,"date":"2015-05-15T16:40:01","date_gmt":"2015-05-15T22:40:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=7287"},"modified":"2015-05-15T16:40:01","modified_gmt":"2015-05-15T22:40:01","slug":"friday-evening-videos-better-not-look-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2015\/05\/15\/friday-evening-videos-better-not-look-down\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday Evening Videos: “Better Not Look Down”"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I read<\/a> this morning that the legendary master of the blues guitar, Mr. B.B. King, had passed away overnight at the age of 89, I found myself trying to recall when and where I first became acquainted with his work. Not surprisingly, for me anyhow, it was in a movie.<\/p>\n

Now, I had some<\/em> familiarity with blues music by my early twenties. Like a lot of people — maybe even most<\/em> people — of my general age, I was introduced to the form by John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd, first with their Blues Brothers sketches on Saturday Night Live<\/em>, and then through the feature film spun off from those. And I’d had an epiphany at some point that much of the rock music I enjoyed was heavily rooted in the blues. (Led Zeppelin took on a whole new dimension for me once I understood that a huge chunk of the oeuvre was simply blues cranked up to 11.) But somehow I remained only vaguely aware of actual<\/em> blues music.<\/p>\n

And then in 1991, I bought the soundtrack for Thelma & Louise, <\/em>the Susan Sarandon\/Geena Davis buddy-adventure movie that had turned out to be an unexpected hit… and unexpectedly controversial. (I never did fully get the gender-based controversy surrounding that film, personally; in spite of what a lot of people were saying, I<\/em> didn’t think it was hostile to men. On the contrary, I loved it… it remains one of my favorites from that era.) Whatever else you might think of that movie, though, it had a great<\/em> soundtrack… and one of my favorite tracks on it was “Better Not Look Down” by the King of the Blues himself, B.B. King. I liked it so well, I started exploring the rest of B.B. King’s oeuvre, as well as the rest of the blues genre. And while rock will always be my first love, I soon learned the dividing line between the two is very thin, and there’s a lot of listening pleasure to be found in the blues as well.<\/p>\n

This song isn’t what you probably imagine when you think of “the blues.” It’s upbeat and relentlessly optimistic in outlook, without any mention of cheatin’ women or hard times… but I soon learned that there’s a lot more to the blues than just those cliched cries of pain. It is possible to play “happy blues,” for lack of a better word. B.B. King could play both kinds — any<\/em> kind — with equal grace and mastery.<\/p>\n

This version of the song isn’t the exact one that appeared in the film, which I assume was an album track. Instead, this is a live performance from 1983, and while it doesn’t feature much in the way of guitar pyrotechnics, it does show how effortless B.B. made it look, and what a warm, gentlemanly presence he had on stage:<\/p>\n