Legacy
By September, Bloomfield was back in the studio with Butterfield, recording their debut album. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band was a voluminous blast that hipped the white college crowd to the electric roar of black America. Waspish covers of Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters and Elmore James jostled for space with Bloomfield originals like Screamin’ and Our Love Is Drifting. Their moment of glory arrived the following year. The band caused a stir at San Francisco’s Fillmore in March ’66, where they unleashed jazz-like improvisations such as Nat Adderley’s Work Song and an epic Bloomfield that wrote with Nick Gravenites, East-West. The latter, a raga-blues with piercing solos and free-form guitar, became the title track and cenpiece of their second album that August. “Mike used to come by my house and Elvin Bishop used to sleep on my floor when they first came to Boston,” recalls ex-J. Geils Band singer Peter Wolf, who was then fronting The Hallucinations. “Mike really was something else. He was just this constant ball of energy. We were pretty friendly with the Butterfield Blues Band, so they asked if they could come up to our loft for rehearsals. They put the entire East-West album together there. Mike told me that the inspiration for the melody of East-West came from a Chico Hamilton song called Passin’ Thru.” Bloomfield also immersed himself in John Coltrane and Ravi Shankar, paying attention to their modal qualities. “East-West was strictly Bloomfield’s influence,” asserts Elvin Bishop. “It’s like a hippie raga superimposed on a blues tune. Jerome [Arnold] and Sammy [Lay] were playing an exotic-sounding groove from the blues revue shows in Chicago, where you’d play behind a chick who danced with a snake. It was like a blues form of striptease. Then Bloomfield had been taking acid and listening to Ravi Shankar.” On stage too, East-West was an event. Bloomfield, for reasons known only to himself, would breathe fire whenever they played it. “Mike had a thing like a kettledrum mallet,” Bishop explains, “and would pour lighter fluid on it. He said it was no problem as long as you didn’t inhale. The fire-eating was extremely effective on a crowd of LSD trippers.” The Butterfield records never sold in great numbers, but Bloomfield’s reputation was growing apace. Young West Coast players like Carlos Santana and Jorma Kaukonen were influenced by his style. Santana has likened him to “a salmon going against the current. He came from BB King, but he went somewhere else.” Yet the demands of touring, coupled with nagging insomnia, were taking effect. “I admired Michael more than I can say, but he’d just go crazy on the road,” recalls John Hammond Jr. “He didn’t have an inner balance to keep him grounded. He had a problem with being out there with other maniacs, so it became hard for him. He’d take pills to go to sleep, but he didn’t sleep very much. He’d hang out and play all night at parties. He didn’t take care of the basics and ended up losing it a little.” In February ’67, Bloomfield quit the Butterfield Blues Band and moved to San Francisco. There he formed a new outfit, to reflect his love of American music and “prove that white boys have soul”, called the Electric Flag. With old friend Nick Gravenites sharing vocals with drummer Buddy Miles, Harvey Brooks on bass, pianist Barry Goldberg and robust horn section Marcus Doubleday and Peter Strazza, the band made their live debut at the Monterey Pop Festival. Their brew of brassy R&B and zestful blues was an instant success, even landing them an appearance in Peter Fonda/Roger Corman flick The Trip, for which they provided the soundtrack. But Bloomfield wasn’t satisfied. Personality clashes with Miles and widespread heroin use within the group destabilised things. The adrenalin rush of Monterey must have seemed a distant memory by the time the Electric Flag’s debut, A Long Time Comin’, lived up to its title by arriving in March ’68. Despite such prime guitar mastery as You Don’t Realise and a freak-blues extrapolation of Ron Polte’s Another Country, Bloomfield left by mutual consent come summer. The atmosphere surrounding the Electric Flag was just too divisive. “We never had time to mature as a band, dialectically, or even as people,” he bemoaned later. Not that he was short of offers. At the end of May, Bloomfield took one up from old mate Al Kooper, who he first met at the Dylan sessions, to take part in a two-day jam in LA. Convinced that the guitarist’s best work had never been captured, Kooper brought in Brooks, Goldberg and drummer Eddie Hoh to allow him to let fly in the studio. Nine hours later they had some extraordinary music. This was Bloomfield in his raw state, unhindered by squabbling egos or label protocol. He excelled on Albert King tribute Albert’s Shuffle, and brought funk-soul licks to Mort Shuman’s Stop. Best of all was the seven-minute His Holy Modal Majesty, a Coltrane-like trip with pulsing echoes of East-West. “When he shook that string it just went right through you,” Goldberg marvelled later. “The intensity in his playing was like no one I’ve ever played with – including Jimi Hendrix.” After the party retired following a fruitful day’s play, Bloomfield never returned. Kooper found a scribbled note in his room: “Alan, couldn’t sleep. Went back home to San Francisco. Sorry, thanks, and good luck. MB.” With one side of an album done, Kooper started ringing around for a replacement. (Stephen Stills came to the rescue.) Released in July ’68, Super Session was a hit, just shy of the Billboard Top 10, and went gold. Bloomfield reunited with Kooper a couple of months later for six shows at the Fillmore West (issued as The Live Adventures Of Mike Bloomfield And Al Kooper), though the guitarist again bailed halfway through due to insomnia. The rest of the year found him playing with Janis Joplin, Otis Rush, Albert King, Canned Heat, and Mother Earth led by Tracy Nelson, an acquaintance from his Chicago days. “I told him that I’d love to have him play on an old Memphis Slim tune [Mother Earth] for our album Living With The Animals,” recalls Nelson. “He was signed to Columbia at the time and they wouldn’t give him a release, so he was credited as Makel Blumfeld. To this day, whenever I hear Michael’s solo I’m just blown away. Every note he played was the right note. And nothing less. He was just jaw-dropping.” Bloomfield’s 60s ended with an uneven solo album, It’s Not Killing Me. It’s tempting to decode that title as a desperate rally against forces slowly conspiring to snuff him out. Not only had record companies cooled on him, his lifestyle wasn’t helping either. Al Kooper remembered him checking in to an asylum because he hadn’t slept for a week. Tracy Nelson describes his extended demise as “absolutely heartbreaking. Michael simply had a lot of demons and dealt with them in a harmful way. My understanding is that he got into some bad habits.” Those close to him now suspect he was bipolar, using drugs to self-medicate. As Nick Gravenites notes in the documentary Sweet Blues, part of the Bloomfield box set From His Head To His Heart To His Hands: “His awareness, his consciousness, was elevated a lot. His brain was going all the time. That’s why he took heroin, that’s why he took downers.” The 70s found him evermore reclusive. He played sporadically in San Francisco with old buddies Gravenites and Naftalin. There was an ill-advised Electric Flag reunion, a short-lived band called KGB and, bizarrely, scores for porn movies like Hot Nazis and Rampaging Dental Assistants. In among all this were flickers of his 60s brilliance, namely an instructional guitar album (If You Love These Blues, Play ’Em As You Please) and 1973’s three-way collaboration with John Hammond Jr and Dr. John, Triumvirate. “A couple of years after we’d released the Triumvirate album, he was really out there,” Hammond remembers. “I knew that he’d fooled around with taking anything and everything, but I didn’t know that he was into it quite like that.” By the end of the decade, Bloomfield was playing a Bay Area bar called the Old Waldorf, or occasionally recording with newcomers like Woody Harris. His guitar work still sparkled, although his behaviour was erratic. When Dylan sought him out for the Warfield Theatre gig in November 1980, he found him at home in his slippers, where he presented Bob with his grandmother’s Bible. “I figure you might as well have it,” said Bloomfield. “You can make better use of it than me.” The circumstances of Bloomfield’s death remain hazy. What testimony there is suggests he accidentally OD’d at a San Francisco party, then was driven in his car to a nearby location by persons unknown and simply left there. It was a tragic end to a too-brief life. But his legacy continues to exert extraordinary power on those he knew. “He was like a guy who’d just taken 30 cups of coffee, just going 99 miles an hour,” offers Peter Wolf. “And it was all music. He was playing in a way that so many guitarists got into later, but Mike was one of the first ones to be really able to nail it as a young white player.” “There were a lot of people in San Francisco who alleged to be blues players,” recalls Tracy Nelson. “People like Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Grateful Dead were listening to Michael and calling themselves blues bands, but they just played nonsense. Jerry Garcia has been quoted as saying he was really influenced by him, but he didn’t learn well enough. Michael was the next generation from the old blues guys. He’d absolutely sat with them and learned from them. He played a little more modern than they did, but it still had that essence, that soul of the music. That’s what made him stand apart from any of the others who alleged to play the blues at that time.” Perhaps the ultimate compliment comes from a Bloomfield hero, Buddy Guy: “Every once in a while some journalist would look at me and say: ‘Y’know, I don’t think a white person can play the blues, because they haven’t lived through that.’ And I’d say: ‘Man, that’s a learnin’ experience. Mike Bloomfield is playin’ more blues than I am. If you listened to people like that, you’d stop askin’ stupid questions about whether they can play the blues or not.’ Mike was the tops, one of the very best.” |