Remembering Mike Bloomfield (July 28, 1943 – February 15, 1981)

Remembering Mike Bloomfield (July 28, 1943 – February 15, 1981)

While Eric Clapton has won the praise and glory for his chops when he first appeared on American record stands in 1966 as the featured player on John Mayall’s Blues Breakers album, Bloomfield was already turning heads with this spiky fretwork on Dylan’s 1965 effort Highway 61 Revisited. Dylan had abandoned folk for rock, and Bloomfield was instrumental in creating a new kind of music; it was nothing anyone had heard before. Later that same year, he was featured on the first Paul Butterfield Blues Band record, an integrated band out of Chicago that brought Black blues back into the spotlight.

Combined with Butterfield’s serpentine harmonica work, it was an unbeatable combination, as Bloomfield’s fluid, biting style dominated the disc; audiences and reviewers raved and wrote about the guitarist, not the band leader. Bloomfield was the marvel, the toast among fans and critics, a white Jewish kid from the Chicago suburbs who’d learned his trade from the masters. It’s an old story; somewhat stale as you approach it in order to create a narrative, but it has the benefit of being true in large measure. Bloomfield was that good a musician; he was that important an innovator, his blend of blues-raga-jazz-and traditional was that far ahead of its time. It was a fast rise to the top, a sequence of memorable albums and live dates and then a long slide into a comparable obscurity. Ed Ward makes the case in his book "Michael Bloomfield: The Rise and Fall of an American Guitar Hero" that Mike Bloomfield is an artist whose influence is still very much felt today although his name is not often mentioned.

Article by Ted Burke

Shake Your Moneymaker - The Paul Butterfield Blues Band

another in the series Album bought when they came out!

I loved this album  (still do!) it is the sound my teenage was filled with . . . . . Paul and Michael here . . . 

Guitar: Elvin Bishop

Bass Guitar: Jerome Arnold

Organ: Mark Naftalin

Guitar: Mike Bloomfield

Vocals: Paul Butterfield

Drums: Sam Lay

Got My Mojo Working - The Paul Butterfield Blues Band

All Hallows Eve 31st Oct - 1 November Samhain [or Sauin] Must be the Season of the Witch!

 Incredible String Band - Witches Hat

Incredible String Band - Witches Hat (1968)

Certainly, the children have seen them,
In quiet places where the moss grows green.
Colored, shells, jangle, together,
The wind is cold, the year is old
The trees whisper together, and bend in the wind, they lean……

Donovan Season of The Witch

Julie Driscoll and Brian Auger Trinity - Season Of The Witch

Bloomfield Kooper Stills - Supersession : Season of The Witch

Track of the Day GUESS I’M DUMB presents CHUCK BERRY - IT WASN’T ME! (I think it prolly was Chuck!)

 

• Track Name

  It Wasn't Me

• Artist

  Chuck Berry

Chuck Berry - It Wasn’t Me (1966)

From Chuck Berry’s 9th LP for Chess, accompanied by Mike Bloomfield and Paul Butterfield.

Yes, a shrewd young whipper snapper love to run and play
But the draft board got him, they inducted him today 

Remembering Michael Bloomfield (July 28, 1943 – February 15, 1981)

 

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.”

By Rob Hughes / Classic rock

Photo: Sony Archives

Don's Tunes

The funny thing about Super Session, the 1968 album put together by keyboardist/singer Al Kooper, featuring guitarist Mike Bloomfield on its first side and Stephen Stills on its second, is that it was such a huge success, going gold and making it well into the top 20. Funny because, Kooper once said in an interview with a publication called Bloomfield Notes, “That was the last thing on our minds, that that was going to be a successful record. I was trying to emulate the Blue Note jazz records of the ’50s in concept,” he said, “put a bunch of guys that can really play in a room and let ’em jam. Make rock ’n’ roll more of an art form, comparing it to those jazz records. And it turned out to be the most successful record of our careers.”

Kooper recalled in his book Backstage Passes And Backstabbing Bastards: “Bloomfield commenced to play some of the most incredible guitar I’d ever heard… And he was just warming up! I was in over my head. I embarrassedly unplugged, packed up, went into the control room, and sat there pretending to be a reporter from Sing Out! magazine.” Kooper still seized his chance to be part of the recording, by playing the Hammond – the first time in his life he’d ever sat behind the instrument. The pair were in also in Dylan’s band for his electrified 1965 Newport Folk Festival set.

Like a Rolling Stone - Bob and Mike on guitar (Newport)

Mike Bloomfield: The Bluesman (28 July 1943 - 15 February 1981) - URBANASPIRINES

 

"On 15 February 1981, Michael Bloomfield's lifeless body was found locked inside a car on a side street in San Fransisco.His mysterious drug related death ended the troubled life of a world class Bluesman who had influenced an entire generation of music lovers and guitar players. He was 37."

Nice piece this morning over at Urbanaspirines in their profile on the legend that was Mike Bloomfield who was significant to me ( and all of us?) for a number of projects not least perhaps my favourite blues tracks of all time with Paul Butterfield Blues Band (Shake Your Money Maker, Got My Mojo Working?) his work with Bob Dylan (early electric debut, Highway 61 Revisited!) and his jam sessions with the likes of Al Kooper and Steve Stills (Season of The Witch?) to later projects with Nick Gravesites, Dr John and John Hammond (Triumviate) and ore besides.

This fine article references some 10+ albums and all are worth a listen. 

MIKE BLOOMFIELD - BLUESMAN - Urbanaspirines

mock linocut (sic?) digital art by artist unknown if you know who this is by please let me know so I may credit them?

Paul Butterfield and Mike Bloomfield 

Paul Butterfield feat Mike Bloomfield (Shake Your Money Maker)

Paul Butterfield Blues Band feat Mike - Born in Chicago (and he was!)

Bobby on Bloomfield . . . . 

Bought when it came out, this and Money maker BLEW me away!

Mike Bloomfield and his guitars

 

Mike Bloomfield: "In my own head, I’m a bluesman, because that’s what I play the best and that’s what I dig the most and can play the most authoritatively. I think finally, at last, I’ve reached an understanding about and with my guitar. I just know all about it now. I finally know all about it. As a music form and as a social scene, man I just know it, it’s in my heart. But yeah, I am a rock and roll star."

His old pal and frequent collaborator, Nick Gravenites:

“He wanted people to sit there and love the music and get involved in it and not get all hero worshipped. He didn’t like that part of the music scene. Thought it was ridiculous. Never catered to it at all. God, he turned down Dylan! Turned down Dylan! I mean, this is the kind of guy he was,”

March 1976 in San Francisco, CA. ( Photo by Jon Sievert)

SEASON OF THE WITCH!

For your Halloween entertainment . . . . . we don't or didn't really do Halloween over here and I always feel that we adopted it because of our American cousins who go ape over it. However it is really ancient and based around Samhain a pre-Christian European celebration of the time of the seasons changing and has really very little to do with America per se.
So here's a spooky song for ya!

Donovan – Season of The Witch

live on tele

I first came across this song by the supergroup Al Kooper, Steve Stills and Mike Bloomfield

and didn't even know it had been written by Donovan . . . . I also like to play it on the guitar too!



Enjoy!

for Halloween 



a favourite song, although first heard by me by the supergroup (so called) of Stephen Stills, Al Kooper, Mike Bloomfield 'Super Session' of '68