To download a free MP3 of J.B. Kline's, "Caress Me Baby," click here!
J.B. Kline is one of those guitarists who has spent the last 30 years out of the limelight but still very much in the center of it all—playing the music that he loves and sharing stages with artists like Chuck Berry, the Drifters, Solomon Burke, Fats Domino, Bo Diddley, and many others.
“For me, it’s more important to squeeze a pound of soul into one note than to play 250 notes,” Kline explains. “When I’m on top of my game, I use this philosophy: ‘Don’t go to the next note ’til you’ve squeezed every bit of soul out of the note you’re already on.’ I think the audience can tell when you do that. A guy came up to me after our last show [sharing a bill with Johnny Winter and Rick Derringer] and said to me, ‘Man, you can really tell you’re feeling it when you’re playing.’ That meant a lot to me.”
The venerable Kline has just released the acoustic-tinged Music Mountain—his long overdue first album—and its eleven tracks capture the emotional brand of R&B and blues-based music that’s his calling card—and plenty familiar to his Garden State fans. It features his Les Paul on the CD’s lead track, “Caress Me Baby,” and Kline employed a borrowed Gibson acoustic on tunes like “What a Price,” “That’s How Strong My Love Is,” and “Long Way from Home.”
Kline can talk guitars (and other instruments) with the best of them, and not by accident. His Lambertville, New Jersey, music store, J.B. Kline & Sons is one of the most extensive East Coast instrument shops of its kind. It’s the kind of place you might wander into and find Kline with one of his favorite axes—a vintage ES-175, a guitar with a great history and an instrument Kline likes to use when playing duo gigs with harmonica man Steve Guyger.
“I bought it from a guy 14 years ago so I could get that old, cool blues, T-Bone Walker-type sound,” Kline says. “But I had to use the mortgage money to buy it, and my wife—soon to be my ex-wife—was gonna kill me! I had to sell it later so that we could have the money to send my daughter on a trip to Australia. I always told everybody that it was the one guitar I wished I could have back. It was in mint condition! Well, just a few weeks ago, a guy walked into my place in Lambertville with a brown case. And guess what was inside? I couldn’t believe it! And it was still in great shape. He said I had told him that whenever he wanted to sell the 175 that he should contact me first—and he did!”
When Kline’s 175 came home, it took its place alongside several other Gibsons in his stash—including a recently-acquired Les Paul Special that he uses to play slide; a ’60s Les Paul Junior; and a double-neck steel model with two eight-string necks. (“Man,” Kline says, “that things looks and sounds cool. But I’ve yet to master it to where I’ll play it in front of anybody.”)
For every vintage guitar that magically reappears, however, there are sadly too many others that seem to be lost forever. Consider the case of Kline’s circa-1950 J-50 acoustic. “It was the best-sounding acoustic I ever had,” he says. “You could feel every note in your chest, and the tone would just about make you cry! When I was young, I answered the door one morning—naked and hungover—to find a local antique dealer standing there. He demanded that I sell it to him. I had offered it to him earlier because I was broke, but I didn’t want to sell it that morning. But he insisted. He said I had promised, and I was young and stupid, so I sold it to him for $150! Man, I wish I had that back.”
Guitar stories (both magic and tragic) aside, there’s no denying that Kline’s decades of slugging it out have started to pay dividends. One watershed moment took place just after Thanksgiving, when he shared a bill with Johnny Winter and Rick Derringer at the historic Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank, New Jersey.
“It was very thrilling, and a little scary, opening up for Winter and Derringer,” he says. “I mean, these guys were my idols when I was getting started. I haven’t really been playing slide that long, and to be playing on the same stage as Johnny Winter, one of the electric slide masters—I’ve gotta tell you, when I woke up the morning of the show, I was a bit nervous. But as the day progressed I dealt with it!”