10
FLYING THE FLAG
The Butterfield Band returned to the Fillmore in October, just before they were set to travel to England to play two weeks of dates with a troupe of English blues singers that included Georgie Fame, Eric Burdon, and Chris Farlowe. Their equipment hadn’t arrived when they landed in London, so they had to make do with borrowed instruments for the first week. Albert Lee, who held down the guitar chair in Farlowe’s band, lent Bloomfield his Gibson 355 until the band’s gear showed up.
Bloomfield had listened hard to the sound Eric Clapton had gotten on John Mayall’s Blues Breakers album with an instrument that Bloomfield’s New York friend John Sebastian was also using at the time. It was the Gibson Les Paul Standard, a guitar that Gibson had discontinued manufacturing in 1961 because jazz guitarists found it too heavy and expensive. Sebastian’s band, the Lovin’ Spoonful, kept a rehearsal space at the Albert Hotel, where the Butterfield Band roomed while they were in town. Lee attempted to locate one for Bloomfield during the Butterfield Band’s monthlong stay in England, but he wasn’t successful. After their equipment arrived, Bloomfield continued to use the 1956 Gibson Les Paul goldtop he had bought earlier that year.
The band jammed with Cream on October 19, and Bloomfield met Eric Clapton again at a club in Leeds a few days later. Joe Boyd, whom Jac Holzman had appointed head of Elektra’s new London office, escorted Bloomfield and the Butterfield group to the Marquee Club for a performance by the Move, a brilliant Birmingham, England, pop-soul-psychedelic band who drew upon the harmony-rich, guitar-laden West Coast pop of the Byrds, Moby Grape, and Buffalo Springfield. Then, after the Fame tour ended, the Butterfield Band played a series of dates on their own.
They did an interview with the International Times’ Simon Barley on November 14 at Edmonton’s Cooks Ferry Inn. The exchange between Barley and the band was particularly lively. “The blues is basically a Negro form,” Barley said. “Can the white man really play it?” Naftalin replied, “You have ears, don’t you? You heard Paul play.” As usual, Bloomfield was opinionated and very quotable. Barley asked him about the Chicago blues scene, and Bloomfield described the way audiences had begun to favor the likes of B. B. King, Junior Parker, and Bobby Bland over the old, Delta-style musicians the Butterfield Band had studied under. “The blues scene in Chicago is dying, getting less and less every day,” he said. “It’s getting throttled because the cats can’t make any money. . . . I’m telling you, man, blues is dying among the Negroes of Chicago.”
Barley’s International Times piece did a remarkably good job for any publication in 1966 of analyzing, however inadvertently, the way white fans and musicians still tended to look at blues as a purely folk process that was untouched by commercial aspirations. It gave Bloomfield ample room to speculate about the future of the blues. “How will the blues fit the evolutionary process of pop music,” Barley wondered. “Will pop be more influenced by the blues now?” Bloomfield had an answer: “Blues will become like hillbilly music. There will be a centre for it, devotees and blues radio stations just like there are for folk music now. Blues won’t get any bigger than it is now because the majority of the white people are not hip to the social reasons that predominate to make blues.”
On November 18 they gave a superb performance of “Droppin’ Out” on the Ready, Steady, Go television program—one of the great, neglected pop-blues moments of the mid-1960s. Butterfield gives a suavely exuberant vocal performance, Billy Davenport rolls through the song’s triplet rhythms, and Bloomfield rips off a fluid solo that ranks with the best playing he ever did. It stands with the best work the psychedelicized English blues-pop musicians were doing at the time. The Butterfield Band flew home a couple of days later.
Bloomfield’s English visit gave him a chance to hear—and meet—some of the country’s finest blues-influenced rock musicians, and he appreciated their imaginative recastings of American blues and soul, as he told Hit Parader’s Jim Delehant shortly after he returned to the United States. “I’ve heard English cats who are extremely talented,” Michael said in Delehant’s excellent January 1967 piece on Bloomfield. “Jeff Beck of the Yardbirds, the kid with the Spencer Davis Group, Steve Winwood—he’s unbelievable. There’s another kid—he’s on that Elektra What’s Shakin’ album we’re on—Eric Clapton.” Michael amplified this statement in 1981 for Tom Yates and Kate Hayes. “I heard [Clapton] on the Mayall Blues Breakers record. I knew that he couldn’t play the far-out way like on ‘East-West’ and stuff like that, I knew his mind wasn’t anywhere into that at all. But as far as straight blues, he was as good as they got, he was right there with B. B. King and Albert King.”
Bloomfield told Yates and Hayes that he admired Clapton’s work on the Blues Breakers track “Have You Heard” and on 1970’s The London Howlin’ Wolf Sessions, which Norman Dayron produced. According to Bloomfield, Clapton regarded his playing on “Have You Heard” as his best on record to that date: “[Eric] once told me, ‘Man, I’ll never top this. I mean, no one will ever top this. It’s as bad as it gets. You can just play B. B. King records all day; this is just up there with him.’ Eric told me that once, and he was right.” But Bloomfield didn’t like Clapton’s work with Duane Allman on the 1970 album Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs. “I think Derek and the Dominos is shit. I think ‘Layla’ is shit. I don’t like it. I don’t know who’s Eric and who’s Duane, I don’t know which one’s playing which.”
Bill Graham, who was booking acts into his Fillmore Auditorium, had met Bloomfield and the rest of the Butterfield Band in 1966. Graham was a tough, intelligent, detail-obsessed businessman who Bloomfield felt was hilariously out of place in peace-loving San Francisco. He’d given fellow rock promoters Chet Helms and John Carpenter, who had brought the Butterfield Band to the Fillmore for its first San Francisco date, a lesson in practical business that Harold Bloomfield would have appreciated. Seeing how positively the San Francisco rock audience had reacted to the Butterfield Band’s opening night at the Fillmore, Graham got on the phone early enough the next morning to catch Albert Grossman in New York, and Grossman granted him the options on the next couple of years of their Bay Area performances.
“They hit it off like two long-lost brothers,” Gravenites said. “I mean, they loved each other. And they were respectful of each other.” Like Michael Bloomfield, Graham was a funky, speed-rapping Jew. He had endured the privations and terrors of World War II in his native Germany before arriving at Ellis Island in 1941. As the two men traded street wisdom and got to know each other, Graham began to ask Bloomfield about the origins of his guitar style. Graham was a Latin music fan who knew next to nothing about rock ’n’ roll and blues. In particular, Bloomfield talked in glowing terms about B. B. King, who in 1967 was virtually unknown to white audiences. Taking Bloomfield at his word, Graham booked King into the Fillmore in February on a bill that included the Steve Miller Blues Band and Moby Grape. Along with Otis Rush, Howlin’ Wolf, and Muddy Waters, all of whom played the Fillmore that year, King would introduce young listeners to the glories of electric blues.
Bloomfield quit the Butterfield Band on February 25, the day before King was to make his Fillmore debut. Someone had overbooked them into three shows that day in Boston and Cambridge, and that was too much for the sleep-deprived Bloomfield to take.
The band had already walked out on Butterfield during a Los Angeles engagement. According to Bloomfield, the reason was simply Butterfield’s reluctance to pay them what they felt they deserved. Ira Kamin, a friend of Bloomfield’s since their teenage days in Chicago, had been studying the band’s interactions from up close, and he thought the source of the disagreement had something to do with Butterfield’s bad temper—he said that Butterfield had physically abused both Elvin Bishop and Bloomfield—and with Bloomfield’s musical ambition. Naftalin, meanwhile, thought that Bloomfield wanted to give Bishop an opportunity to display his talents. Whatever the reason, Bloomfield quit, and that was that.
“I think he was probably sick of it,” Susan told me later. “I think he was trapped in the Butterfield Band. I think he wanted something else, maybe a different kind of music. I remember everyone was really shocked.”
Butterfield blamed the traveling and the relationship between Bloomfield and Bishop. “One thing was that the traveling was getting to him,” he told me about Bloomfield. “In his own mind, he wanted to start a thing on his own. . . . He didn’t leave in any kind of huff. I mean, I don’t think he enjoyed playing with Elvin very much, partially because Elvin, at the time, had a bad problem keeping time. The rivalry was more from Elvin’s side, anyway.”
Although he said he left the band to give Elvin more space, Michael knew that wasn’t the reason. One thing was that touring developed into a full-fledged nemesis, and there was also his desire to grow musically. “I wanted a band with horns,” Michael told me. “By that time I was like a professional musicologist. I was really into studying American music, and I found that the kind of blues and music in general that I loved best was this kind of horn music. It was Kansas City jump music. It was Texas shuffle music, or whatever. I wanted a band with horns. I wanted Elvin to play lead, and he wanted to play lead. It couldn’t go the way it was anymore. We weren’t smart enough to think like [the Allman Brothers Band’s] Dicky Betts and Duane Allman, that you could really just split it down the middle. I don’t think Elvin was quite up to doing that then, anyway, although God knows he got better later.”
Immediately after the split, Michael retired to his Christopher Street apartment in Greenwich Village, but he couldn’t sit still. He started to play sessions wherever he could get them, and with his reputation, he could get any sessions he wanted. Mitch Ryder decided he wanted Bloomfield on his 1967 What Now My Love album after hanging out with him at the Highway 61 Revisited sessions. “[Producer] Bob Crewe told me he wanted the best guitar player, so I told him I’d got one,” Ryder told me. “I guess he was good, but what I mainly remember is that he played so damn loud! He kind of had to be pushed into playing, but he got it done.” Ryder remains a fan to this day.
Bloomfield had also played on Peter, Paul and Mary’s 1965 Album, and he contributed slide guitar to the Chicago Loop’s 1966 single, “(When She Wants Good Lovin’) My Baby Comes to Me,” a Crewe production that made Number 37 on the Billboard chart that fall. The keyboard player on the record was his friend from Central YMCA High School, Barry Goldberg.
Goldberg was born in Chicago on Christmas Day in 1942, and his family moved when he was six months old from the city’s Albany Park neighborhood to the Edgewater district on the far North Side. Like Harold Bloomfield, Goldberg’s father had benefited from World War II. “During the war, he made a lot of money making the straps for the walkie-talkies for the U.S. government,” Goldberg remembered. His mother had been a child actress and was an avid pianist. “She turned me onto the boogie-woogie style. The first song I remember was ‘Chattanooga Shoe Shine Boy’ by Red Foley, and we had a housekeeper that would play gospel music a lot.”
A fan of Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry, Goldberg got his initiation into folk music and blues from Bloomfield, who invited him to perform at the Fickle Pickle one night. “I said, ‘I don’t know that much about folk music,’” he said. “‘All I know is “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.”’ Michael said, ‘Well, you can play that in a boogie version, and you can play a straight version.’ So I went down there and I played this song in about twenty different styles, and nobody knew the difference.” With Bloomfield leading the way, Goldberg sat in with Howlin’ Wolf’s band at Silvio’s in the early 1960s, playing piano with Hubert Sumlin and drummer Fred Below. By 1963 Goldberg was playing cover versions of James Brown and Jackie Wilson songs at a Rush Street club called the Rumpus Room with Robby and the Troubadours, a band led by singer Robert Vidone.
By the time Bloomfield left the Butterfield Band, Goldberg had become a seasoned musician. Hanging out at the Albert Hotel one evening in early 1967 after they played a Mitch Ryder studio date—Goldberg had been on the session that produced Ryder’s 1966 “Devil with a Blue Dress On” single—Bloomfield broached an idea for a new band to Goldberg. As Goldberg told me, “He said, ‘I have this incredible idea of an all-American music band playing every conceivable type of American music with American roots—rock ’n’ roll to blues to Stax to Spector—all the elements of American music in a band.’ I said, ‘Well, it sounds like a dream come true.’”
“They were in New York, and I was in Chicago, and they came back all excited about this fabulous band they were going to put together, and I didn’t want to go,” Susan told me. “I was sick of the music business, but they talked me into going to California.” The music on the cutting edge was happening in San Francisco, and the Electric Flag, their new all-American band, would be the cutting edge of San Francisco music.
With money provided by Albert Grossman, who had committed himself to financing the band’s move west, Nick Gravenites rented a house for the group on Wellesley Court in Mill Valley, a quiet town nestled at the base of Mount Tamalpais across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. Gravenites had been managing a nightclub in Chicago, the Burning Bush, and working on a case of incipient alcoholism. His business partner, Jeff Spitz, had been killed in a motorcycle accident, and the Burning Bush had money problems that some people Gravenites preferred not to work with wanted to fix. He had left in 1966 for Mill Valley, where his Chicago friend Ron Polte now lived as he managed the Quicksilver Messenger Service, Marin County’s top band. In California, Gravenites told me, he “didn’t have to work or do nothing. If I needed cash they’d give it to me. I could just take it easy and do what I wanted to do. And then I got a call from Bloomfield, who said he was quitting Butterfield’s band. He said he was gonna form a new band, and did I want to be the lead singer, and I said sure. So he told me to rent a house we could all live in and started shipping musicians out west.”
Back in New York, Michael had enlisted bassist Harvey Brooks, who had worked with Al Kooper in New York before playing on some of the Highway 61 Revisited sessions. The group also welcomed saxophonist Peter Strazza, with whom Goldberg had played in Robby and the Troubadours. Then Bloomfield and Goldberg began looking for a drummer. Their original choice was Billy Mundi, who had been playing with the Mothers of Invention. It was Harvey Brooks who took Bloomfield and Goldberg to their future drummer, Buddy Miles, at a Wilson Pickett performance during one of disc jockey and promoter Murray the K’s “Music in the Fifth Dimension” shows at Manhattan’s RKO 58th Street Theatre in late March. The weeklong extravaganza featured the Blues Project, the Young Rascals, and the Blues Magoos, along with Cream and the Who, both of whom were making their North American debuts. The headliner was Mitch Ryder. Murray Kaufman’s wife, Jackie the K, was in charge of directing the fashion shows that filled in the gaps between acts. Back at the Albert Hotel after the show, Bloomfield and Goldberg fed Miles Oreo cookies while they talked up the attributes of the young girls in San Francisco. They immediately agreed that Miles fit their concept perfectly: “Our plan was that he could be the star of San Francisco and have anything he wanted—which is basically what happened,” Goldberg said. Pickett took exception to the poaching, but Buddy was the kind of guy who needed to be a star.
The musicians began arriving in California. “Then these people started showing up,” Gravenites told me. “I remember when I met Buddy Miles. Christ! He was like Baby Huey! Buttons popping off his overcoat, weighed about 300 pounds. Oh, my God! Then I met Harvey Brooks, a huge, huge Jew from New York, a 250-pounder. Where did he get ’em? And the trumpet player, he was like six foot three, weighed 195. All together, we looked like the Fearsome Four, all of us big, big guys.”
Actually, Nick may have been the second choice for the Electric Flag’s vocalist, because Mitch Ryder remembered Goldberg and Bloomfield trying to talk him into leaving the Detroit Wheels. He tactfully declined because he wanted to stick with them, but the thought of Ryder being in the Flag is a fascinating one.
The musicians settled into the comfortable ranch-style house on Wellesley Court and began working on their new songs. “The first tune we worked out was ‘Groovin’ Is Easy,’” Michael told Dan McClosky. “Nick wrote it, and we worked it out. We worked all the parts out but we never played it as a band until we had every part worked out. And all of a sudden, I said, ‘OK, man, now we’re gonna play this tune from beginning to end,’ and the sound just blew our minds. All of a sudden, we knew we had a dynamite band, and man, it was just a fantastic feeling then.”