Albert King was one of the three kings of blues, B.B. King, Freddie King, Albert King. He was 6 ft 4 in tall and he played a Flying V guitar left-handed and upside down, a technique so specific to him that no one who tried to copy it ever quite got it right. He had a tone that came from nowhere else, deep, stinging, the specific voice of a guitar that sounds like it is singing a complaint only it knows how to make.
Eric Clapton learned from Albert King. Jimi Hendrix learned from him. Stevie Ray Vaughan called him the single greatest influence on his playing. Albert King had a specific opinion about Janis Joplin. He called her the queen, not as a compliment, as a title, as the accurate name for what she was. And he told the story of one specific night at the Fillmore West with Jimi Hendrix with her little glass to Stevie Ray Vaughan in 1983, 15 years after it happened.
15 years after she died, God rest her soul, he said. This is that story, March 8th, 1968, the Fillmore East opened in New York City. Bill Graham’s East Coast operation, the venue that would become the church of rock and roll for the next 3 years, 3,600 seats. The bills that would come through that stage, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, The Who, The Allman Brothers, John Lennon, would define what a concert could be.
The opening night bill was Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin, Tim Buckley, Albert King. He was there for the opening. Backstage before the show, Peter Albin, the bassist for Big Brother, documented something he remembered 50 years later. Albert King came on to Janis in the dressing room, not with hostility, not with condescension, with the specific attention of a blues musician who had just been in the presence of something he recognized.
He recognized what she was. You wanted to be near it. The opening night of the Fillmore East was the first official meeting of two forces that would circle each other, perform on the same stages, and share a mutual recognition that the music world around them was slow to articulate. Albert King called her the queen.
She was 25 years old. The story Albert King told Stevie Ray Vaughan was about a different night, a night at the Fillmore West in San Francisco, sometime in 1968. Albert King was backstage. Jimi Hendrix was also backstage. The specific atmosphere of the Fillmore West in 1968 was the specific atmosphere of the most important musical ecosystem in America.
A place where the greatest musicians of the era existed in proximity, where the conversations in the wings were as important as the performances on the stage. Hendrix looked at Albert King, and he said, “Let’s play some blues.” Albert King looked back at him. He said, “Not without the queen. That’s Janis.” Read that again.
Jimi Hendrix, the most gifted guitarist alive, the man who had redefined what an electric guitar could do, the musician that every other musician of his era acknowledged as something beyond comparison, said, “Let’s play some blues.” And Albert King, one of the three kings of the form, the man Hendrix himself had learned from, said, “Not without the queen.
” He was not willing to play blues with Jimi Hendrix without Janis Joplin, because she was the queen, because the blues that King was talking about required her specific quality of voice, her specific honesty, the thing she brought to a room that he recognized as essential. They sent for her. Someone went to find Janis Joplin and tell her that Albert King and Jimi Hendrix were ready to play blues and they needed her to come down.
Albert King described what happened when she arrived. He told Stevie Ray Vaughan, she came down with her little glass. She always had her little glass. God rest her soul. She said, “What’s happening?” I said, “We’re going to do some blues. We want you to start it off, honey.” She said, “Cool.” She came down with her little glass.
She said, “What’s happening?” She said, “Cool.” And then she started the blues with Albert King and Jimi Hendrix at the Fillmore West in 1968 on a night that was not recorded, not documented in any footage, not preserved in any official archive, only in Albert King’s memory, which he gave to Stevie Ray Vaughan in a recording studio in 1983, and which Vaughan received with the expression of someone being handed something precious.
Albert King played the Fillmore West and the Fillmore East on multiple occasions between 1967 and 1970. His relationship with Bill Graham’s venues was part of Graham’s specific mission to bring blues musicians to young white audiences who had been raised on rock and roll that had been built from the blues without always knowing it.
Janis Joplin was one of those young people. She had grown up on Bessie Smith and Big Mama Thornton. She had been absorbing the tradition since Port Arthur. She knew exactly where the music she sang came from. Albert King knew she knew. That is why he called her the queen, not because she was famous. Cheap Thrills had gone to number one in 1968, but that is not what the title was about.
Blues musicians do not give titles based on chart positions. He gave her the title because she understood the tradition, because when she sang, it sounded like someone who had been inside the music her whole life, who had listened to it not as an outsider admiring a foreign form, but as someone who had found the music that expressed what she already knew.
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She came down with her little glass, God rest her soul. She said, “What’s happening?” She said, “Cool.” And she started it off. Albert King died in 1992. He was 69 years old. Jimi Hendrix died in September 1970. He was 27. Janis Joplin died in October 1970. She was 27. The three of them shared the Fillmore stages in 1967 and 1968.
The three of them existed at the same moment in the same city, in the same musical world. And on one night, a night that is now known only because Albert King told it to Stevie Ray Vaughan, they played blues together. The queen started it off. She said, “Cool.” Albert King told the story to Stevie Ray Vaughan.
He pointed at Stevie and said, “You look just like Jimmy did that night.” He told Stevie to play Jimmy’s part. He talked about the music they made together, the three of them in the Fillmore West in 1968. And then he said, “God rest her soul.” The tenderness in those four words, from a man who stood 6 feet 4 inches tall and played a Flying V guitar upside down, and had one of the most authoritative in American music, is the whole story.
He loved her, not romantically necessarily, though he came on to her at the Fillmore East, and the warmth was clearly real. He loved what she was. He loved the queen. He loved the specific thing she brought to a room that made him unwilling to play blues without her. God rest her soul. She came down with her little glass. She said, “Cool.
” And she started the blues. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you before.
