Going Down

Freddie King was forty-two when his heart failed.

He never crossed over into the rock audience that would have made him rich, never got the mainstream recognition his contemporaries got. He played hard and he lived hard, and the second one cost him the first. That’s the frame around everything else here.

Don Nix wrote “Going Down.” Freddie King owned it from the first note. The opening riff is a descending cascade, and it became one of the most covered phrases in blues rock. Led Zeppelin borrowed from it. Stevie Ray Vaughan worshipped it. Jeff Beck made it a staple of his live shows. Nobody plays it like Freddie.

King was a different kind of blues player. Where B.B. King — no relation — was smooth and sophisticated, Freddie was a battering ram. The tone was thick and fuzzy. The attack was relentless. The vibrato was wide enough to drive a truck through. He didn’t ease into the blues. He went at them.

I got my big feet in the window. I got my head on the ground.

The lyrics are almost beside the point. This is three and a half minutes of King showing you why they called him the Texas Cannonball. Every phrase lands like a punch. The rhythm section struggles to keep up.

He didn’t get the long career. He didn’t get the crossover or the money. What he got was the riff, and the riff outran all of it — every guitarist who plugged a Les Paul into an amp and turned it up owes him for it, whether they know the name or not.

Some songs you listen to. This one runs you over. He only had forty-two years, and he spent them playing like a man who knew it.