King Packs Emotion And the House

How about that--a display of stage smoke that actually signified something.

The big white puff that billowed up at the Coach House on Friday night emanated not from some cursed fog machine, but from the trademark pipe of 67-year-old blues man Albert King.

When King lit up toward the end of his last pre-encore song, the gesture was akin to former Boston Celtics coach Red Auerbach firing up his customary stogie to celebrate the final seconds until another victory.

King could relax and savor a smoke while his four-man band stretched out on “Blues Power” because the evening had clearly been won. The bulky guitarist, who says he is retiring from the road after his current tour, had given us another definitively emotive display of blues power before an ecstatic, packed house.

King stuck to time-tested staples of his repertoire during a show that lasted nearly two hours, and the humorous spoken raps he interjected into some of his lighter numbers were word-for-word replicas of versions he committed to vinyl long ago. But there wasn’t a hint of dullness or rote response in the delivery. King’s standards stood as a classic framework within which he was able to search out enduring emotional truths with moment-to-moment immediacy.

After warming up with a Hendrixian rock-riff number (it served as a reminder of King’s “godfather” relationship to blues-rockers such as Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan), King got down to the real business of sifting for emotional quicksilver. He found it repeatedly in a long sequence that took the audience from the most dire depths of the blues (Elmore James’ “Sky Is Crying” and King’s blues apocalypse, “Floodin’ in California”) to the joyfulness of a full-bore, finger-flashing rock-out on “Crosscut Saw.”

For any Laker fans offended by the above reference to the despised Celtics, let’s just say that if this is indeed King’s retirement tour, he’s doing it like Kareem and going out a winner.