James Cotton was playing harmonica with Muddy Waters the first time he saw white faces at Smitty’s Corner. “Muddy thought they were the tax people,” said Cotton. “He owed some taxes, said, ‘Goddamn, they’ve come to get me. That’s got to be them.’ Muddy hid in the office between sets.” Turned out that one of the white guys was Paul Butterfield; before long, Michael Bloomfield also arrived at the clubs on the South Side of Chicago. “Muddy Waters, he was like a god to me,” said Bloomfield, the subject of a new 3-CD boxed set, From His Head To His Heart To His Hands. “Well, if he was a god, B.B. King was a deity where I couldn’t even imagine ever knowing someone of his magnitude and greatness. But Muddy was in Chicago.”
Butterfield’s harmonica and Bloomfield’s guitar would soon be the instrumental catalysts of the highly influential Butterfield Blues Band, and in 1965, the group turned heads when it played the Newport Folk. Here’s a brief, tantalizing clip from an afternoon workshop that drew an unusually large crowd.
“To
me, the Butterfield Blues Band was the most important thing to happen at
Newport in 1965,” said Geoff Muldaur, who performed at the festival as a member
of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band. “Not Dylan going electric, which people have
milked for so many years (Bloomfield also performed at Newport with Dylan,
after having played on his Highway 61 Revisited). The thing that happened that changed the world map
of music was that an integrated band came in from Chicago and played real
Chicago blues. Sure, that model was based on guys like Muddy Waters, but the
fact was that this white guy was so good, and had a band that could pull it off
and hold their own among the kings, which they did. In the blink of an eye,
there would be two hundred thousand blues bands in the world based on that
model.”
Influential songs by the
Butterfield Band featuring Bloomfield are included in this chronicle of the
career of one of the rock era’s original guitar heroes. One of them is the
epic, raga-inspired title tune of the bands second album, East-West. “The future of rock guitar was in ‘East-West,’” said
[Blasters guitarist] Dave Alvin. “At one point or another you’re hearing what
would become the Grateful Dead, Santana, the Allman Brothers, Crazy Horse,
Television, and the Tedeschi Trucks Band.” Dig this live version of “Work
Song,” another East-West
instrumental that’s not included in the new set.
Bloomfield soon left the
Butterfield and formed the Electric Flag, which made its high-profile debut at
1967’s Monterey International Pop Festival. The original band released just one
album, and broke up soon thereafter, and while Bloomfield himself panned the
Monterey appearance, it’s easy to see the excitement he could create when
curled around his sunburst Les Paul.
The last truly memorable
music of Bloomfield’s career was when he spent a day recording half of 1968’s Super
Session with keyboardist-singer Al
Kooper, who produced the new collection, and is rightly proud that he captured
some of the best-sounding playing of Bloomfield’s career on tracks like
“Albert’s Shuffle” and “His Holy Modal Majesty.” More albums (mostly live) would follow, but sadly, the rest of Bloomfield’s career was less than
super. He was brought down by show-biz angst, insomnia, heroin, booze, and
insecurities rooted in the disapproval of a wealthy businessman father who
never approved of his son's musical pursuits, let alone its roots on the black side of town.
Once, in the 1970s,
Bloomfield’s mother approached B.B. King after a Chicago performance and asked
him to reach out to her troubled son. King, who like many other bluesmen had
received a valuable career boost when Bloomfield encouraged Bill Graham to book
them at the two Fillmores, wrote a letter to the guitarist encouraging him to
keep those hands in shape. On “Carmelita’s Skiffle,” my favorite unreleased jam
from the set’s third disc, Last Licks,
it’s clear that while Bloomfield could channel the sound of a variety of
players, his style was most intimately inspired by King. Bloomfield’s blues ultimately
ended on a February morning in 1981 when he was found dead from a drug overdose
in the front seat of a locked, banged-up Mercury.
Perhaps there’s a clue to
Bloomfield’s troubled relationship to his art in the very title From His
Head To His Heart To His Hands.
Bloomfield’s music-loving heart was in the right place, and his hands rarely
failed him. Demons, though, lived in his head, keeping him up all night, and
ultimately, putting him in a premature grave. The new collection, which
includes a DVD documentary light on music and heavy on talking heads, is a fitting, albeit
expensive tribute to an extraordinary musician. For about 20-bucks less, one
could buy the four essential albums of Bloomfield’s career: The Butterfield
Blues Band, East-West, A Long Time Comin’ by the Electric Flag, and Super Session. The portrait of Bloomfield that tops this post is by
Margie Greve, and is from our book, Crossroads: How the Blues Shaped Rock ‘n’
Roll (and Rock Saved the Blues).