B.B. King was an international, and Las Vegas, treasure

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Erik Kabik/Retna/www.erikkabikphoto.com

B.B. King performs at B.B. King’s Blues Club at The Mirage on Aug. 17, 2010.

Published Fri, May 15, 2015 (10:37 a.m.)

Updated Fri, May 15, 2015 (12:22 p.m.)

B.B. King at The Mirage

B.B. King performs at B.B. King's Blues Club at The Mirage on Aug. 16, 2010. Launch slideshow »

B.B. King at The Mirage: Day 2

B.B. King performs at B.B. King's Blues Club at The Mirage on Aug. 17, 2010. Launch slideshow »

B.B. King lived in Las Vegas in a way that was not so apparent.

“I don’t think most people in Vegas know that I live there. I never do hear anything about B.B. King living in Las Vegas,” King said in a lengthy phone interview in August 2010. “I see where a lot of other people live in Las Vegas. I check the paper, I read about who lives there. But I see where people talk about who they see here, but I’ve only seen that about myself a couple of times in 30 years.”

King died Thursday at his Las Vegas home at age 89. He had been under hospice care for two weeks.

He was at once an international legend, an American treasure and one of Las Vegas’ most prominent residents.

King’s fellow Las Vegan and guitar legend Carlos Santana, who headlines at House of Blues in Mandalay Bay, often mentions King when talking of the artists who have inspired his own career. In a statement this morning, Santana said:

“I am deeply saddened by the passing of ‘The Chairman of the Board,’ B.B. King. He is now on the other side with Bob Marley, John Coltrane, Miles Davis and many others. His one-of-a-kind sound was an inspiration to an entire generation of musicians, including myself. He will be missed by millions of fans and by countless musicians. I would like to extend my sincerest condolences to the King family. May he rest in eternal peace.”

Neal Schon, a band member in Journey, which is completing a residency at the Joint in the Hard Rock Hotel, also praised King.

"I had the unbelievable experience of meeting and playing with B.B. King for the first time when I was just 14 years old," Schon said. "Elvin Bishop took me to the Fillmore West and introduced me to him. I went on later that night to play with him. We played together after that as well in Chicago and the Fairmont in San Francisco. He was a huge influence on my playing and a total gentleman; he will be missed by all of us. 'The Thrill' will never be gone or forgotten."

The event of our most recent conversation was his appearance at the since-closed B.B. King’s Blues Club at the Mirage. That performance, in which King simply sat on a chair and let his hands dance across his guitar, was one of two shows I saw King perform. The other was a few years earlier at Cox Pavilion, where King sported a purple satin jacket and smiled his way through a sold-out concert.

At the time of the interview in 2010, one of King’s custom Gibson “Lucille” guitars (Lucille No. 15 of 16 he owned) had been stolen from his home in Spanish Oaks.

“Oh, yeah, somebody stole one of them, and I just got it back about a month ago. Someone stole one of my Lucille guitars, can you believe that?” King said. The famous instrument, easily recognizable for the “Lucille” and “B.B. King” scripted across its body, was found hanging in a Las Vegas pawnshop.

“This went in a roundabout route — the guy that stole it let a guy that he knew pawn it, so the pawnshop guy didn’t know who he was or what was going on,” King said. “But, to be honest, they couldn’t miss it! It has my name on it, I mean made in it, from the factory. So, anybody who saw it would have to know it’s mine.”

Through the years, King quit two ruinous habits: gambling and smoking.

Of his love for games of chance, he said, “I liked keno and blackjack, those were my games. But when I moved (to Las Vegas), it cut my habit. I go home now. The way I tell my friends, when you’re single, you’re always looking for girls. But when you get married, you don’t need to look for girls anymore. With me, before I moved there, whenever you’d go to a casino, you’d gamble and would never go to bed. Just stay at the tables. That’s the way I was then, but now, I live there, and it’s like being married. I don’t need it.”

He gave up smoking because it was interfering with his craft.

“I haven’t smoked in 40 years. I don’t care for smoke now,” he said. “When the surgeon general said smoking was hazardous to your health, I stopped smoking. Smoking got in the way of performing. So what would I rather do: Smoke or perform? I’d rather perform. It wasn’t a hard decision.”

King was forever coy about his aptitude on the guitar. When I asked about how he calibrated the sound in his own club or other venues, he said, “Musically, I’ve never been — who’s the great pianist who lived in Las Vegas? Liberace. I’ve never been one of them, who knows about the, shall we say, the sound of a room and all of that. He understood the acoustics and studied that. Now, there have been some places I’d rather not go back to because of the sound, but I didn’t know exactly what was causing the sound to be what it was.”

At the performance at his club three nights later, King closed with “The Thrill Is Gone.” But it was not gone, not by a long shot, as King introduced the song by saying, “I’m gonna do this until the day I die, folks!”

That’s how we remember him, under the hot lights, bringing life to that room with the beautiful Lucille.

Follow John Katsilometes on Twitter at Twitter.com/JohnnyKats. Also, follow “Kats With the Dish” at Twitter.com/KatsWiththeDish.

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