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My First Encounter With B.B.King
By Mihar Dias
(C) Copyright September 2021.
When we entered the Hofheinz Pavillion, a multi-purpose hall, now known as Fertitta Center, at the University of Houston, on the night of May 8th, 1970, it was thick with smoke. But I suspected it was no ordinary smoke because my nostrils were beginning to irritate.
I am a non-smoker and was a naive college-junior visiting Houston for the first time in my life. I found the environment overwhelming and the air suffocating.
But my suspicion was later confirmed that the smoke was no ordinary cigarette smoke. I took a deep breath and it went straight to my lung. It made me cough. The smell was awful and foul. I asked Jack, my college buddy, who accompanied me to a student unions conference in Houston. “What’s in the air?”
“Marijuana! Man. Marijuana! Haven’t you been exposed to it? Take a whiff and enjoy a free high!” He replied.
Jack was a clean-cut senior and not a habitual smoker or marijuana user. But he had been on campus for three years, ahead of me and he knew enough to distinguish the smell of marijuana from ordinary cigarette smoke.
Come to think of it, I too did pass by some students who were smoking “pot” as they called it then, on our campus, when I first enrolled as an undergraduate somewhere outside New York City. But never had I been exposed to a whole stadium of more than seven thousand young students all blowing out marijuana smoke at the same time. It was mind-blowing, to say the least.
We were there to watch B.B.King perform at the invitation of conference organisers. I had no idea who he was. I had never of him when I was back home in Alor Setar, Kedah.
“Who’s B. B. King?” I asked Jack.
Jack was my team leader. I always assumed he knew everything. I was a naive foreign student, in my second year in the United States, then. I was not expected to know everything.
“What? You don’t know B.B. King? Everybody knows King. B.B. King! Where have you been, my man?” Jack replied laughing out loud. He was being his impossible self mocking me for being naive yet again. He had already made fun of me earlier in the day when I went out to buy a ten gallon. He laughed when I said the hat was not ten gallons. The ten-gallon was not that size at all.
He dropped whatever was in his hands, took a bow and pretended to strum an imaginary guitar with his hands. Then, at the top of his voice, he yelled out,
“Blues man. He’s the King of Blues”. His two hands went up in the air. “You’ll love B.B. King, my good man!”
However, in the smoke-filled hall and the crowded pavilion I could not enjoy B.B. King. But later in the solitude of my room back on campus, I played the newly minted records by B.B. King that Jack bought for me as a present, almost daily. I had very few records but B.B. King was one that I truly treasured, until today. I still have the original vinyl in the storeroom that I plan to frame one day soon.
Jack was right, I do love B.B. King, the king of blues although my introduction to him was bewildering, overwhelming and mind-blowing in the Houston pavilion that night in May 1970.
Mihar Dias is a content writer under Headliner by Newswav, a programme where content creators get to tell their unique stories through articles and at the same time monetize their content within the Newswav app.
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