About

Recorded at San Francisco's legendary Fillmore Auditorium in June of 1968 during Albert King's first engagement there as a headliner, Live Wire/Blues Power ranks with B.B. King's Live at the Regal as one of the greatest and most influential live blues albums of all time. Features six tunes, only two of which he'd recorded previously.

“Here is just one man's reworking of a classic format to make an intensely personal statement, invoking all the cliches without becoming for one second a cliche itself. Just the unadulterated pure and simple blues, "'the old country blues" as he calls them, home base for the thousand variations of a hundred musicians. If this sort of direct, unvarnished blues didn't already exist, it would have been necessary for Butterfield, Clapton & Co. to have invented it.

Of course, Albert King is not that old-time sharecropper but an extremely flexible and effective contemporary musician, as his playing on his first Stax album, Born Under a Bad Sign, and on the other cuts here clearly shows. But "Blues at Sunrise" is played absolutely straight; even in his guitar solo, a stone set-up for showboating, he uses no tricks or frills, not letting the electrified instrument play itself, and remains alone with the blues.” - Rolling Stone

Item description: