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

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)