Most blues fans can name the “Three Kings,” guitarists B.B. King, Albert King and Freddie King. Having said that, Freddie King is perhaps the least-known of the three, despite being a players’ favorite. Guitarist Popa Chubby has set out to change that with I Love Freddie King, a tribute album featuring some of the biggest stars in the blues world, among them Joe Bonamassa, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, Albert Castiglia, Mike Zito and Eric Gales. The album will be released on March 28.
Speaking via Zoom from his home in New York, Chubby recalls the moment that he first heard Freddie King’s playing. “I was 18, and I was into a lot of diverse shit. Obviously, the usual suspects like Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix and lot of other stuff. And this older cat in the neighborhood, who was like the guy, said, ‘You’ve got to listen to Freddie King.’ And he played me the Just Pickin’ record, and my life was changed for-ev-er. And the guy said to me, ‘This guy doesn’t play notes, he plays phrases. He plays the guitar the way he sings.’ And that was a revelation for me.”
King, an imposing man who came to be known as “The Texas Cannonball,” was born in Gilmer, a town in the Texas piney woods which also gave the world Johnny Mathis and Don Henley, in 1934. He was a serious road dog, playing gigs most nights of each year. King charted multiple songs during the ‘60s and early ‘70s, including the classic instrumental “Hide Away,” the blues standards “Have You Ever Loved a Woman” and “I’m Tore Down,” along with the guitar jam favorite “Going Down.”
He was name checked by tour mates Grand Funk in the band’s 1973 song “We’re an American Band” (“Up all night with Freddie King / I’ve got to tell you, poker’s his thing”). Gee, wonder how much money he made playing cards with those guys? “He probably took it all,” Chubby says. “The stories…I mean, he burned it hard, man. Those guys were doing, like, 300 dates a year, and a poker game and heavy drinking after every show. It’s a blues band, man! Drinking, smoking and womanizing. What do you do?”
King died in 1976, suffering from stomach ulcers and pancreatitis. His life was short, but in his 42 years, King exerted a profound influence on the blues. He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1982 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012.
Through canny management, King’s profile was raised when he was put in front of young, white rock audiences after spending the early part of his career exclusively on the blues circuit. Leon Russell recruited him for Shelter Records, producing and playing on the albums Getting Ready…, Texas Cannonball and Woman Across the River between 1971 and 1973. In 1975, King recorded Burglar with legendary producer Tom Dowd (Allman Brothers, Eric Clapton, Lynyrd Skynyrd). Chubby’s enthusiasm is evident when he discusses this run of records.
“Getting Ready was my go-to, aesthetically, for the next two decades,” Chubby declares. “Everything I did, everything I recorded, I wanted to have that purity and honesty and brilliance. Because that’s what it is. Leon Russell was obviously producing Freddie for the sheer love of Freddie King. I got into the Burglar record, which completely rearranged my chromosomes forever. Talk about the funkiest record ever made!”
Chubby makes a case for King being the blues artist who most effectively bridged the gap between blues and rock and roll. “Only Freddie could have done that,” he says. “Only Freddie – with those licks and that look and that pompadour and that shark skin suit – could have pulled that off.
“Missing link? Yes. Pure, unmitigated genius? Yes. People like Freddie and Jimi and Miles [Davis] and Carlos [Santana], they don’t play the [instrument], they express their souls when they play. And we don’t see that so much anymore. Especially in the guitar world. The current crop of ‘guitar gods,’ they play a lot of notes. There’s a lot of shit going down, a lot of shit. I can’t keep up with that. I can’t play like that. I let my friends do it.”
Though Chubby had long wanted to pay tribute to King, it took a while for the new album to come together. “I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. A lot of tribute records get made, and I didn’t want this to just be another tribute record. I wanted it to be a celebration. A lot of it came together because of the current band I’m playing with, which is really stellar – Mike Merritt on bass, Andrei Koribanics on drums, Mike DiMeo on keyboards.
“A couple of years ago, I made a double live record that Mike Zito put out on Gulf Coast Records, and it did really well. Mike called me up and said, ‘I’d really love for you to do another record for me.’ And I said, ‘I want to do a Freddie King record, and I want to have special guests on it.’ And Mike said, ‘Great, let’s do it. Send me a wish list.’”
When recording material from an earlier era, a producer must decide where the sound of the record will sit, on a continuum between the sound of the original recording and the current state of the audio art. Chubby leans more toward the former extreme. “The way the drums were recorded was so integral to those tracks, so we tried to recreate that,” Chubby says. “I’m a big one on trying to get those old drum sounds, so we used what they call the ‘crotch mic,’ which was one mic, which goes around where the drummer’s, er, crotch is. And you have to place the mic just right! And of course I’m working with engineers who are 30 years younger than me, who went to engineering school, so you’ve got to straighten them out a little bit. ‘No, that will not work. Get outa here, don’t do that again.’”
The journey to finishing I Love Freddie King was a long one, due to the logistics involved in scheduling recording time for the various guitarists involved, all of whom had their own careers and touring commitments to work around. Additionally, Chubby had to undergo surgery to correct a spinal condition which sidelined him for a while.
“When I got out of the hospital, I couldn’t even lift my arms to get on a computer,” he recalls. Chubby estimates that “90 per cent of the album was done,” so he enlisted the help of some musical friends to help complete the final production work. Fortunately, Chubby has since recovered and is now performing again.
To say that he is pleased with the new album would be an understatement. “The whole thing came together, and before you know it, I had, under my little fingertips, majesty. As an artist and someone who really cares about this shit, I had gold. I’m listening to this stuff, and I’m saying, ‘This is good, this is really good.’ And it’s not me. It’s not me that’s making it good. It’s the record, it’s the songs, it’s the other people who contributed. And I really feel like I’m part of a collective of energies that came together on this record, and I’m very happy.”
For more on I Love Freddie King, visit gulfcoastrecords.net.
For more on Popa Chubby, visit popachubby.com.
For more on Freddie King, visit tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/king-freddie.
