Nothing but the Blues : Since the ‘60s, when he scoffed at the Beatles, singer and harmonica player James Harman’s love of a musical form has shaped his life.

There’s something altogether fitting about blues man James Harman gig Saturday aB. King’s Blues Club. Back in the ‘60s, Harman was just another white youngster playing blues classics, although talented and fortunate enough to find himself touring as the opening act for B. B. King.

One day backstage, while they listened to tapes together, King suggested that Harman focus on singing his own material. “Where would I be if I only did T-Bone Walker songs?” Harman remembers King telling him. “I never would have become B. B. “

That was advice the young singer and harmonica player immediately accepted. Now 48, Harman spends an average of 250 nights a year performing passionate blues numbers he’s written himself, though deeply influenced by such masters as Walker, Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley and others.

Harman, who lives in Huntington Beach, has also adopted King’s habit of encouraging new talent. His band’s new guitar player is 19-year-old Robby Eason, nicknamed “Sugar Boy.” He was discovered one night by Harman two years ago during a gig at the Belly Up in Solana Beach, when Eason (accompanied by his mother) climbed the stage during a jam session and stunned the bandleader with his passionate playing.

“I said this is the next guy,” Harman says. “I didn’t even audition anybody else.”

Other notable Los Angeles music figures have passed through Harman’s band, from the late Hollywood Fats to a group of eager young players who later became the Blasters. Before that band of players--Dave and Phil Alvin, Bill Bateman and John Bazz--were signed to Slash Records, and became major cult figures on the local club scene, Harman helped them record 22 songs on his tape machine.

“I don’t know if you call it producing,” Harman says. “I turned on the tape machine, moved the microphones around, and we all just stood around.”

Harman’s own musical life began early, with piano lessons by the time he was 4 and singing in the church choir soon after. By 1962, he’d left his native Alabama for Panama City, Fla., where he painted on a mustache to persuade club owners that he was old enough to play.

He had discovered the blues. “When you turn on the radio and hear Perry Como singing, you know that’s not it. I luckily flipped that dial one more notch and got Muddy Waters.”

In subsequent years, other styles of music arrived, but Harman was unmoved. “By the time ’64 and the Beatles came around, they were like a joke to me,” Harman says. “It sounded like an amateur garage band. I was never reached by the hippie music scene at all.”

He still laughs over his memories of the Byrds, for whom he opened once in the South, and their suede outfits. “These guys were dressed like some kind of supernatural characters.” Byrd member David Crosby, he says, once demanded a pencil so he could scratch his head without mussing his styled hair.

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But the ‘60s were largely a good time to be playing the blues, with such British bands as the Rolling Stones, Cream and others embracing the American musical style and incorporating it into their own sound. “We thought that was funny, these British guys with long hair playing the blues. But we could tell that they didn’t just listen to the records, they heard them.

“A lot of white kids got turned on to the blues through these groups, so it was very beneficial.”

The next decade was a less hospitable time, as disco and the “urban cowboy” phase of country music distracted listeners. Paying gigs were fewer, and it became harder for Harman and his ilk to make a living.

Before the ‘70s were over, he had divorced and found himself in the hospital with a drinking problem and bleeding ulcers.

“I almost died,” he said.

These days, Harman is healthy and he and his band are busy, on the road and recording regularly for the Black Top blues label.

He’s released nearly a dozen albums thus far, and enjoyed some regional hits. And one of his songs, “Kiss of Fire,” was used in the Academy Award-winning film “The Accused.”

But he stays close to home during the winter months, no longer willing to risk the icy roads of the East Coast. “This is when I make my records, this is when I play my home games,” he says of his months in California. “All I ever wanted to do was sing songs that I made up and get the best guys I could to play it.”

Where and When

Who: James Harman and his band.

Location: B. B. King’s Blues Club, Universal CityWalk, 1000 Universal Center Drive.

Hours: 9 p.m. Saturday.

Price: $10.

Call: (818) 622-5480.