Both King and Bland had successful music careers going back to the 1940s. While doing some Googling for this write-up, I was surprised to read that they actually were in an informal band together as far back as 1949, called the Beale Streeters. Starting in the mid-1970s, they often performed together. This resulted in the joint albums "Together for the First Time... Live" in 1974 and "Together Again... Live" in 1976. Apparently, they continued to sometimes tour together well into the 1980s, until Bland's health became poor. (However, he didn't die until 2013, while King died in 2015.)
That said, note that for most of this concert, King and Bland largely performed separately. King starts with two songs, then Bland does five, then King performs three more, before the finale, where they play two songs together.
This concert could well have been recorded in late 1976. (With these Soundstage shows, I often don't know if a date is the broadcast date or the actual recording date, and the broadcasts usually happened months after the recording.) However, the songs on this album and their 1976 live album are almost entirely different, with only "Let the Good Times Roll," "Call It Stormy Monday," and "The Thrill Is Gone" appearing on both.
In the mid-1970s, Bland had a commercial resurgence, with the R&B hits "Ain't No Love in the Heart of the City" and "I Wouldn't Treat a Dog." Unfortunately, neither of those songs are here. Also unfortunately in my opinion, by this time, Bland developed an annoying vocal technique that he heavily leaned on for the rest of his music career. I found a review for the "Together for the First Time... Live" album that describes this better than I could:
"Bland's tremendously irritating later-period singing tic is in full flower: what I refer to as his 'Gollum' sound. That deep, guttural throat sound when he's particularly ripping into a lyric that's as if Bland has a goiter or is trying to hack up the world's largest fur ball. Gollum - I mean Bland - lets loose with this annoying sound with stunning frequency."
Luckily, for this concert, Bland went relatively light on his Gollum sound. I was pleasantly surprised. You'll hear it from time to time, but he certainly did it less than on either of the two live albums mentioned above.
The last song has "[Edit]" in the title due to announcer voiceover while the song was playing. As I usually do, I used the UVR5 program to get rid of that talking while keeping the underlying music, but there was some damage for about half a minute near the end of the song.
This album is 58 minutes long. It is unreleased. It also was very difficult for me to find in full, so I'm glad to make it easily available again.
01 Let the Good Times Roll (B.B. King)
02 How Blue Can You Get (B.B. King)
03 Ain't That Loving You (Bobby 'Blue' Bland)
04 Today I Started Loving You Again (Bobby 'Blue' Bland)
05 The Feeling Is Gone (Bobby 'Blue' Bland)
06 Call It Stormy Monday (Bobby 'Blue' Bland)
07 Drifting Blues (Bobby 'Blue' Bland)
08 I Like to Live the Love (B.B. King)
09 I Got Some Outside Help [I Don't Really Need] (B.B. King)
10 Lie a Little (B.B. King)
11 The Thrill Is Gone (B.B. King & Bobby 'Blue' Bland)
12 It's My Own Fault [Edit] (B.B. King & Bobby 'Blue' Bland)
https://pixeldrain.com/u/t2rxBREC
alternate:
https://bestfile.io/en/JRM17UecqZnByNl/file
The cover image is from a screenshot I took of a video of this exact concert. The quality was low-res, so I used the Krea AI program to improve it.
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