>> [music] >> b.b. king: i look at an audience kind oflike meeting my in-laws for the first time. you want to be yourself, but you still wantto be somebody that they like. when i go on the stage each night, i try mybest to outguess my audience. i like to feel in most cases like i'm a bigguy with long rubber arms that i can reach around my audience and swingand sway with them. move them with me. many nights i can't. many nights i can't, but you do like a good manager do with a baseball team: you keep pulling pitchers. >> joe smith: keep trying.
>> b.b. king: yeah, keep trying. [laughter] >> [music: b.b. king “lucilleâ€] >> joe smith: how did that guitar gets itsname? >> b.b. king: i used to play a place in twist, arkansas. still there, twist, arkansas. they used to have a little nightclub therethat we played quite often. it used to get quite cold in twist.they used to take something looked like a big garbage pail and set it in the middle of the floor, half fill it with kerosene, and would lightthat fuel and that's what we used for heat. generally, the people would dance around itand they wouldn't disturb this container.
this particular night, two guys started tofighting and one of them knocked the other one over on this container. >> b.b. king: when they did, it spilled onthe floor. now it was already burning, so when it spilled,it looked like a river of fire. everybody ran for the front door includingyours truly. but when i got on the outside, then i realized that i'd left my guitar inside. i went back for it. the building was a wooden buildingand it was burning so fast when i got my guitar, it started to collapse around me.so i almost lost my life trying to save the guitar. well the next morning we found that these two guys was fighting about a lady.
i never did meet the lady but i learned that her name was lucille. so i named my guitar lucille to remind menot to do a thing like that again. [laughs] >> [music: b.b. king “lucille"] >> b.b. king: the early years when i was starting, if you were a blues player, you wasn't always welcome in a lot of the other places. people usually have preconceived ideas aboutblues music. they always feel that it's depressing and that it's just something that a guy sitout on a stool, grab a guitar, and just start singing or mumbling or whatever. >> joe smith: you came out of relatively hardtimes, a lot of blues players did.
is it necessary to have hard times to reflectthat music? >> b.b. king: no, it's not. it helps though.[laughs] >> b.b. king: hard times don't necessarilymean being poor all the time. i've known people that was a part of a family and always feel that the family likes everybody else but them. that hurts and that's as deep a hurt as you can possibly get. i've known people that would have problems with their love life. this is kind of how blues began, out of feeling misused, mistreated, feeling like they had nobody to turn to. blues don't necessarily have to be sung bya person that came from mississippi as i did
because there are people having problems allover the world. >> b.b. king: i don't like to feel that iowe anything. i like to feel that i pay my own way, no free lunch. when people give me all these great compliments, i thank them, but still go back to my roomand practice. a lot of times i say to myself, "i wished i could be worthy of all the compliments that people give me sometimes." i'm not inventing anything that's going to stop cancer or muscular dystrophy or anything, but i like to feel that my time and talent is always there for the people that need it. when someone do say something negative,
most times i think about it, but it don't botherme that much. >> joe smith: you know who you are. >> b.b. king: i like to think that i do. >> b.b. king: some of my friends would tellme from time to time, eric clapton said this, or jimi hendrix said this. i spoke with john lennon once after i had seen in, i believe it was life magazine,where people were asking questions, "say, what is it you would like to do?"one of his things was to play guitar like b.b.king. that's when i started to find that a lot of the young musicians had been listening to me. i didn't know and, for the life of me, sometimesstill wonder why.
i've had my feelings of doubt, i think, inmusic, but to think that there are people, that learnedto play by listening to my music, those dark days wasn't dark after all.
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