Interview by Bob Goldman

You can tell just the way he talks, how much he loves to play and always has a nice word about all other guitarists. He has to be one of the biggest influences on all rock and blues guitar players. The feel that he has for the instrument is something most of us will never get. He gets everything out of each note. Anyone who ever wants to play a solo, should be required to listen to him. The art of bending a note and the vibrato is being lost to speed, but if you listen to the greatest solos of rock, most of them are all about sound and not speed. We all owe BB King a big thanks for showing us the right way to play a solo. Remember to make each note count like it is the most important note.

BG: You like the clean sound?
BB: Well I prefer the clean sound, but some of the guys like it dirty which is all right with me, but Fender is like we used to talk about Fords and Chevrolets. A Ford you bang it up, beat it up, and it still runs good. Generally a Fender amp is solid like that. The Lab System, I carry the one I got all over the world and I rarely have problems with it, but it does happen once in a while, but I always have in my contract that they have a Fender Twin Reverb as a standby, always. Anywhere in the world that I go. Because I do know that it is a good amp.

BG: Do you have he TP-6 tailpiece or the Stop tailpiece?
BB: I like the Stop when they set them well. A lot of people handle my guitar nightly. They take it off the bus. My guitarist that has been with me for about 14 years checks it every night. Generally my son or my grandson or one of them takes it so it gets a lot of handling too and when weather changes. The older I get, I think my ears, I don't know what it is, I don't have a perfect pitch, but any bit out of tune worries the heck out of me. Oh man I go crazy on the stage. When my guitar seems out of tune, everything seems out of tune. Even the keyboards seem out of tune.

BG: I have to ask you about your vibrato. How would you suggest someone should try to do it?
BB: Well I think most people go about it the wrong way. I noticed a lot of young players, they push and push. I don't do that. I'll tell you how I started off doing it. It was nothing planned. In the beginning I was always crazy about the steel guitar. The country guys they just killed me the way they played the slide.

BG: Like the laptops?
BB: Well some of them do it on the regular guitar.

BG: The Nationals, Tri-Cones?
BB: I got one at home and I can't do nothing because I can't use the slide. But the Hawaiian people would get the same sound. I could never do that and my cousin Booker White and a lot of the other guys I know used the bottle neck and Earl Hooker and my favorite today is Bonnie Raitt. The way I started it, I would still hear Earl Hooker, I heard these Nashville guys
play that slide, oh man, I used to be crazy about it and I still am. A guy named Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, had a big orchestra, but he featured violins and they played western swing music. He had a guy that he called Leon that played the slide and he would say, "Go Leon!" so I started trying to play. Since I couldn't use the bottle neck, I would trill my hand on the string and my ears would seem to say that sounds something like a bottle neck.

BG: Is it in the wrist or the forearm?
BB: It's from here to here (As he points from his wrist to his forearm) and I noticed guys, especially younger players when they start playing they shake the guitar neck.

BG: So the guitar should stay still and just the hand moves?
BB: The hand moves, not the guitar neck. I can do it with any finger. That's because I love that sound and it is because every time I pick up a guitar I would do that. So now it's hard to keep from doing it. When I would pick up a guitar now, you would have to tie my hand to keep me from doing that because that's the way I play all the time. That's how I got started doing that.

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