Michael
by Rob Hughes Bob Dylan isn’t usually one for banter between songs, but tonight is an exception. It’s November 15, 1980 at San Francisco’s Warfield Theatre and he’s relating a story about a guitarist he first met in a Chicago blues club two decades previously: a skinny teenage hotshot with a towering stack of black curly hair and a dizzying arsenal of licks copped from Big Bill Broonzy and Sonny Boy Williamson. “He just played circles around anything I could play,” marvels Dylan. “And I always remembered that.” Dylan goes on to explain that, some years later, he was recording in New York and needed a guitar player. So he called him up. “Anyway,” he concludes, “he played on Like A Rolling Stone and he’s here tonight. Give him a hand – Michael Bloomfield!” The crowd roars its approval as Bloomfield, 37 years old, ambles on stage in his bedroom slippers and starts ripping into the song in question. He stays for another, The Groom’s Still Waiting At The Altar, before leaving to deafening applause. It was to be the last gig of Mike Bloomfield’s life. Exactly three months later, on February 15, 1981, the man who Dylan cited as “the best guitar player I ever heard” was found dead in the front seat of his Chevrolet Impala. He’d succumbed to a drug overdose. At his peak, Bloomfield was arguably the most important guitarist of his generation. His burning intensity and fearless assimilation of rock’n’roll and black American blues helped define the emergent sound of the 60s. His session contributions to Highway 61 Revisited were one thing, but it was his tenure in the Butterfield Blues Band that cemented his reputation. A bunch of Chicagoans who lashed hard electric blues to the free-form digressions of the new counterculture, Bloomfield’s guitar was as crucial to their sound as the harmonica runs of gruff leader Paul Butterfield. As the group’s rhythm guitarist, Elvin Bishop, once declared: “No one was as good as Bloomfield. Technically he was a monster.” Bloomfield’s work with the Butterfield Blues Band, and later as the engine of soul-blues hybrid the Electric Flag, had a profound effect on those around him. Muddy Waters referred to Bloomfield as his “son”. Eric Clapton, who called him “music on two legs”, cited Bloomfield as a primary influence. “His way of thinking really shocked me the first time I met him and spoke to him,” Clapton told Rolling Stone. “I never met anyone with so many strong convictions.” Others, like Carlos Santana, Jorma Kaukonen and Jerry Garcia, saw him as the benchmark for expressionist guitar in the psychedelic era. “He was absolutely the best guitar player of his generation,” says Nick Gravenites, co-founder of the Electric Flag with Bloomfield. “Dylan thought he was. Hendrix thought he was. Clapton thought he was.” Friend and blues singer John Hammond Jr adds: “Michael could just about do anything. His talent was phenomenal. He had that instant ability to adapt to whatever he was playing and an instinct for what a song needed. He was an inspirational guy, just spectacular.” Yet, for all his abundant talent, Mike Bloomfield never felt comfortable in his chosen career. All he wanted to do was play guitar, to connect on a physical and emotional level without having to kowtow to the bullshit trappings of rock’n’roll. Factor in a mercurial personality, accentuated by a hyperactive mind and chronic insomnia, and it was clear that he and the music business were never going to get along. “I realised that it was the name that was being sold, the hype,” he once confessed in a radio interview. “That rock star mantle doesn’t rest easy on my shoulders.” Mike Bloomfield was always a rebel. Born into an affluent Jewish family on the North Side of Chicago, he turned his back on a career in the family business (his father Harold founded the restaurant supply empire Bloomfield Industries) and immersed himself in rock’n’roll. He received a transistor radio for his bar mitzvah and, soon after, a guitar. His earliest six-string heroes were Chuck Berry, Scotty Moore and Cliff Gallup, though the illicit pull of the blues soon captured his imagination. As a teenager he frequented the black clubs on the city’s South Side, hanging out at boozy sweatboxes like Silvio’s and Pepper’s Lounge, where he got to see blues icons up close: Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Otis Spann, Junior Wells and Magic Sam. These were places where few white people ventured. But Bloomfield was one of a small coterie of young players, alongside Paul Butterfield, Charlie Musselwhite, Nick Gravenites and Elvin Bishop, who found their spiritual calling on the South Side. Buddy Guy was one of those they encountered. “When we played the small blues clubs back then, you hardly saw a white face unless it was a policeman,” Guy recalls today. “So when Mike or Butterfield would sneak in, I’d tell my three-piece band to hide the wine because I thought two cops were in. But they were sittin’ there loving the music all night, so we couldn’t drink the wine until they left. I didn’t know they were just listenin’ to Wolf, Muddy and myself.” It wasn’t long before Bloomfield became part of the scene, joining his heroes on stage for impromptu jams. When John Hammond Jr first met him in Chicago in 1961, the young guitarist already knew everyone on the blues scene. “Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, they’d call him upon the dance stand to sit in,”says Hammond. “And bear in mind this was when Michael was 17. He was good. A lot of guitar players were very jealous of his incredible technique.” A deep thinker with a rapid-fire intellect, Bloomfield viewed blues as much more than a stylistic form. He devoured its folklore and soaked up influences like BB King, Albert King and Buddy Guy. But above all, the guitar was the conductor for his emotions, the intensity of his personality pouring through a flaming river of melodies and scales. He also drew parallels between his own upbringing and those of his mentors. “Black people suffer externally in this country,” he once said. “Jewish people suffer internally. The suffering’s the mutual fulcrum for the blues.” By 1963 Bloomfield had met and befriended many great acoustic bluesmen he admired, among them Sleepy John Estes and Big Joe Williams. He’d book the latter at local coffeehouse the Fickle Pickle, where he started regular blues nights. At the same time, Bloomfield and Musselwhite’s band, The Group, were attracting attention. Columbia staff producer and scout John Hammond, father of Bloomfield’s friend of the same name and the man who signed Billie Holiday and Dylan, was quick to jump in. He invited Bloomfield to audition in New York early the next year, and duly snapped him up. But despite his brilliance on guitar, it was apparent that Bloomfield was no singer. Enter Elektra producer Paul Rothchild, who suggested he join Butterfield’s band. Both parties were initially wary. Butterfield had a reputation as a taskmaster, running his troupe with the same exactitude as Howlin’ Wolf had with his players. “I didn’t like him,” Bloomfield admitted later. “He was just too hard a cat for me. It took all the persuading to get me to join.” “Paul Butterfield was a real egomaniac,” says Hammond Jr. “He didn’t want any other guitar player in his band. He already had Elvin Bishop, but Elektra insisted that Michael play electric guitar. Butterfield really bridled at that, but it worked out really well.” He privately admitted as much. In the summer of ’65, keyboardist Mark Naftalin, soon to join the Butterfield Blues Band, saw him before a gig in New York. “I went for a beer with Paul at the Bitter End, across the street from the Cafe Au Go Go,” he says. “That was when he told me that there was no blues guitarist in America that he’d rather have in his band than Michael Bloomfield.” Their common ground was blues. Both men deeply respected the other’s talents and appreciated the wider picture. Bloomfield later conceded it was the best group he’d played in. So much so that when Dylan offered him a place in his touring band he turned it down to stay with Butterfield. Fame and fortune meant little to Bloomfield, but devotion to the blues was everything. Dylan briefly met Bloomfield in Chicago’s Bear Club in the early 60s, although John Hammond Jr says he was the one who properly introduced them. “Bob and I were very good friends at one time,” he explains. “He used to come to my recording sessions and I used to go to his. So when I put Levon & The Hawks together, who later became The Band, Michael was in New York at the time and I invited him down to the session, along with Dylan. And Dylan flipped out over Michael. It was very fortuitous for everybody, I guess.” In the summer of 1965, Dylan invited Bloomfield to join sessions for his sixth studio album, Highway 61 Revisited, at CBS’s studios in Manhattan. Bloomfield’s first task was to figure what to bring to opening track Like A Rolling Stone. “I figured he wanted blues, string bending, because that’s what I do,” the guitarist recalled. “He said: ‘Hey, man, I don’t want any of that BB King stuff.’ So I really fell apart. What the heck does he want? We messed around with the song. I played the way that he dug, and he said it was groovy.” As well as the opening track, Bloomfield’s Telecaster runs added bite to feverish classics like Tombstone Blues and Desolation Row. He relied on instinct and exhaustive knowledge of style. “There was no concept,” he said. “No one knew what they wanted to play, no one knew what the music was supposed to sound like – other than Bob.” The results were spectacular, and Bloomfield backed Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival weeks later. That performance, in July 1965, was a watershed moment in Dylan’s career. Corralling the black Butterfield rhythm section in Jerome Arnold and Sam Lay, with Bloomfield on boisterous lead, he shocked folk purists by going electric. It was a stance the guitarist warmed to. “I would’ve plugged my guitar into Pete Seeger’s tuchus and put a fuzz tone on his peter,” Bloomfield quipped later. |