11

“MIKE BLOOMFIELD PLUGS IN HIS GUITAR AND HIS FLAG”

Few bands in the history of rock ’n’ roll were anticipated quite so eagerly as was the Electric Flag. The reasons are largely historical. During the period that the Butterfield Band was making its impact, the nature of American pop music changed radically. As late as 1966, the records being bought were pop tunes in which the entire package—arrangement, melody, lyric, production—were of a piece, but the music that Michael Bloomfield and his cohorts were playing sacrificed novelty of arrangement and presentation for a jazz-like emphasis on soloing and improvisation. Pop records had previously been danceable three-minute pieces of fluff, but they were now, thanks in part to Bob Dylan, worthy of being listened to, and listened into, for their lyrical and improvisational complexities.

It was turning into an era of guitar players, virtuoso guitar players at that, and this was a brand-new development. Of course, the technology available to amplified guitarists had never been as conducive to virtuosity as it now had become, but that hadn’t stopped bands like the Ventures and Johnny and the Hurricanes and six dozen or so surf bands from playing primitive guitar instrumentals. No, the turnaround to the focus on the guitarist, the fans putting the guitar player in the spotlight, must be laid to the incredible influence that Michael Bloomfield’s work with the Butterfield Band—and with Dylan—had on musicians and the musically aware public.

Before Michael, there were lead guitarists in bands, but you never heard people discussing the fabulous solos of Keith Richards, George Harrison, or even Eric Clapton of the Yardbirds. It was the music that the Butterfield Band made that pushed bands like Cream, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and, later, dozens of white American and British blues bands like Canned Heat, the Steve Miller Blues Band, Chicken Shack, Fleetwood Mac, Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, and the Siegel-Schwall Band into looking beyond the hit single and the three-minute pop tune.

The man who started it all, the very first bona fide American guitar hero, had given up the job that had made him famous and was putting together his own band. The fans waited with bated breath, not quite knowing what to expect.

A few weeks after everybody got settled in on Wellesley Court, Albert Grossman appeared in San Francisco to sign the contracts, and Gravenites got to see up close how persuasive he could be. “He came out with contracts,” Gravenites remembered. “He had a recording contract. He had a personal management contract. He had publishing contracts. I was perfectly willing to sign the recording contract and the personal management contract, but then he told me I had to sign over my publishing to him, too.” Grossman threatened expulsion from the band, and Gravenites relented. “The contracts didn’t exist for the things I was supposed to be getting paid on,” he said. “It was a huge mistake.”

The new band’s first recordings were done for producer Roger Corman’s 1967 film The Trip, an exploitation movie about the effects of LSD and anomie on a young Los Angeles television-commercial director played by Peter Fonda. Written by Jack Nicholson, the film also starred Susan Strasberg, Bruce Dern, and Dennis Hopper. The group traveled to Los Angeles in April to rehearse their new material, and they used a house that Gram Parsons, a Florida-born folk and country singer who was working with a group called the International Submarine Band, was occupying. Bloomfield had gotten to know the band’s guitarist, John Nuese, during his Butterfield Band days, and it was from Nuese that Bloomfield had acquired his Gibson Les Paul goldtop guitar in a trade for his 1964 Telecaster. The International Submarine Band had signed with Corman to do the soundtrack for The Trip, but their Bakersfield-style country-rock seems to have been deemed insufficiently atmospheric, and Bloomfield’s group got the job.

Albert Grossman decided the band should make their debut in June at the Monterey Pop Festival, a showcase for new rock bands that producers Lou Adler and John Phillips had organized. Right up until it was time to play the festival, Bloomfield’s group called themselves An American Music Band. It was Gravenites’s cohort Ron Polte who provided them with the sobriquet that they thought suited their concept: “Ron Polte had this flag that started waving when you plugged it into the wall,” Goldberg remembered. “It was an electric flag. And he actually gave us that name: the Electric Flag. That’s where that came from.”

For the Electric Flag, Monterey was going to be a big deal. Short of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, every group that mattered would be there. The Who, fresh off their North American debut at Murray the K’s “Music from the Fifth Dimension,” was going to play. Jimi Hendrix was bringing his British band, the Experience, to the festival, and Janis Joplin, the exciting Texas-born blues singer who fronted one of San Francisco’s most popular bands, Big Brother and the Holding Company, was going to sing. And Stax Records star Otis Redding would meet “the love crowd,” as he put it, from the stage.

Another thing about the Monterey Pop Festival was best summed up by an insider who once told me, “People think that the action at Monterey was on the stage. Wrong. The action was in the bar, where every record executive in the United States was making deals with the bands that were playing.” At long last, it appeared that the record business was going to pay attention to the incredible explosion of mutated pop music that America’s youth was performing and dancing to, and the executives who gathered at Monterey weren’t going to leave until they had scored, preferably big.

Grossman invited both Atlantic Records’ Jerry Wexler and Columbia Records’ Clive Davis to the festival. Davis had recently become the president of Columbia, and he was looking for new rock ’n’ roll bands for the label, as was Wexler for Atlantic. In retrospect, it seems reasonable to suggest that the Electric Flag might have better served themselves by signing with Atlantic instead of with Columbia, since Atlantic executives Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun’s savvy business sense and sure musical instincts had helped to create some of the soul music that the band was attempting to take in new directions with material like “You Don’t Realize,” Bloomfield and Goldberg’s homage to Steve Cropper and Otis Redding.

“For my part, I was impressed enough with the idea of Bloomfield’s Electric Flag to pitch them,” Wexler wrote in his autobiography. “Bloomfield, who had a wide-eyed and simplistic manner, was enthusiastic, and said he’d been raised on Atlantic artists. All he had to do was mention my interest to his agent, the inscrutable, eccentric, infamous Albert Grossman.” Bloomfield came back to Wexler with Grossman’s answer. “I was certain that he’d be interested in having Bloomfield on our label, but I was wrong,” Wexler wrote. “‘Grossman says we can’t go with you because Atlantic steals from the niggers’ is what Mike said to me the next day, naively quoting his manager.” Grossman and the Electric Flag signed with Davis. It was his first acquisition of a rock band, and he paid $50,000 for them, high dollar at the time.

Bloomfield liked to talk about his Monterey experience as a watershed in the evolution of his already skewed relationship to the idea of stardom. Striving to become revered and famous was fine for some people, but Bloomfield thought of himself as a great musician who was good at organizing other musicians, and he had a very well-developed sense of the way fans tended to miss what was truly important when they naively compared pop musicians’ intentions with their actual accomplishments. The Flag’s Monterey reception reinforced his notion that the mass audience tended toward the kind of blind, unhearing idolatry that made Bloomfield extremely uncomfortable. “We played abominably, and they loved us,” Bloomfield told Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner in a February 1968 interview the magazine planned to run over two issues in April to mark the release of the Flag’s first album. “I couldn’t understand, man, how could a band play that shitty and have everyone dig them?” he said. “I said, ‘Well, it’s festival madness.’ Monterey will remain a straight, jive pop phenomenon. You know, if we’d gone on first, we would have bombed. We went on last.”

Peter Strazza believed that the band had gotten sidetracked by jumping from San Francisco to Los Angeles to finish their work for Corman, and there was all the rock ’n’ roll action around Gram Parsons and his scene, which included visits from Nico, a former model who was now singing with a band Tom Wilson had been producing for Verve Records, the Velvet Underground. Nico faithfully piloted the Electric Flag’s van from the Hollywood Hills to the United Artists studio on Santa Monica Boulevard and back again every day. “The Trip—well, that’s good, because we had full control of it,” Strazza said. “We didn’t have anyone else meddling. Mike produced it and mixed it, because that’s before we were signed with Columbia, so Mike got what he wanted on it.” Strazza thought the band was underrehearsed for Monterey. “We were ready—but not for 50,000 people,” he said. “We didn’t have everything down the way we should have, because we were messing around with The Trip too much.”

For Harvey Brooks, Monterey was a new experience, and he enjoyed it. “You looked around, and you saw people smiling and having a nice time,” he said. Meanwhile, Goldberg thought it was an average set: “It was definitely better than most of the bands that were there, Quicksilver or any of that stuff. The people loved it, which amazed me, because I didn’t think it would go over that well. Michael was terribly nervous. A lot of that might have been nervous energy, insecurity and not getting a good monitor.”

Bloomfield was indeed nervous at Monterey, as you could tell from the overly sincere way he introduced the band’s first number, but his lack of showbiz patter was endearing. “Dig yourselves, ’cause it’s really groovy, man,” he told the bemused crowd. The group kicked into “Over-Lovin’ You,” and they turned in a crisp performance that showed off Miles’s vocal chops. Jerry Wexler must have noted the way the audience grooved on their version of Stick McGhee’s old Atlantic hit, “Drinkin’ Wine, Spo-Dee-O-Dee.” Maybe Bloomfield just couldn’t bring himself to believe that the rock audience was capable of appreciating a man like Stick for who he was.

“All of a sudden there’s a lot of drugs,” Harvey Brooks said about the period right after Monterey. “Reefer was like cigarettes. There’s a lot of heroin. The heroin seemed to be coming from the horn players. That seemed to be where it generated from, because that sort of materialized when they materialized.” In fact, Marcus Doubleday, who had gotten the trumpet slot at the recommendation of guitarist Larry Coryell—they had played together in a Seattle instrumental band called the Dynamics—had come into the band with a heroin habit. Strazza and Goldberg soon followed suit.

“Marcus Doubleday was a junkie, which they hadn’t known, and Barry Goldberg had had trouble with dope for years off and on,” Susan told me. “I remember that Michael didn’t know about Marcus, and he’d say, ‘Gee, that new guy sure sleeps a lot.’ He was just the new guy. Then Barry brought Peter Strazza, who was heavily into dope, and a bum from Chicago—a nice guy, but still a bum—named Ronnie Minsky, to act as road manager. By the time they got to L.A., between Minsky—who was pushing it—and Doubleday and Peter, I don’t know if Peter got strung out first, or Barry, but the dope was there. And then they got to L.A., and there was Owsley and his acid.”

Heroin split the Electric Flag in half even before it got going. Susan confirmed that Michael used to tell her he had infrequently used heroin since around 1964. Whatever the reason, his wife noticed a change, as did his friends. “When he started getting into heroin, he lost himself,” Michael’s friend Ira Kamin said. “He never really came out of that. It’s true that he was an insomniac, but it’s kind of like a vicious circle.” Looking back later, Susan said much the same thing: “Drugs were Michael’s downfall. Back then, I never would have said what I believe now, which is that drugs change people, and drugs make people do things they normally wouldn’t do.” The drugs seemed unavoidable, and Michael had always been a thrill seeker, but the Electric Flag had other problems that also became obvious from the beginning.

For Harvey Brooks, the drugs were a big problem, but the Electric Flag’s inability to get it together was also partly a consequence of the way Bloomfield pitted his loud, aggressive sound against the other elements of the band. “The horn players were great players, but I think that we had serious tuning problems,” he said. “Michael had a tuning problem. We didn’t have electronic tuners then, and I think the tuning problems drove the horn players completely nuts.” As Brooks noted, Bloomfield wasn’t inclined to change his strings every day, and his setup wasn’t ideally suited to the demands of a big band. He played at extremely high volume through a Fender Twin amplifier, and sometimes daisy-chained it and a Super Reverb together for extra power. Brooks thought the band never really established a good balance in their live performances.

When it came time to begin recording in July, the same kind of technical issues got in the way. The producer Columbia had gone with was John Court, a business associate of Grossman’s who was half of the entity known as GrosCourt and whose previous credits included albums by Peter, Paul and Mary, Gordon Lightfoot, and Richie Havens. Bloomfield found him lacking, as he told Jann Wenner in 1968. “No, he’s not that hip to rock for all those years,” he said. “The sound is not as good as it could be for all those records, not as good as a Stones record, as good as a Beatles record, as good as a Motown or Stax record.” Bloomfield had better taste than Columbia Records, as he explained to Wenner: “I would like to be personally produced by Jerry Ragovoy in New York. He’s one of the greatest soul producers I’ve ever heard. . . . I think Jim Stewart, if not better, would be just as good. Or perhaps Jerry Wexler would be groovier.”

The first product of the band’s recording efforts was a single released with a picture sleeve that featured a black-and-white photograph of the Electric Flag. I remember getting my copy of “Groovin’ Is Easy” / “Over-Lovin’ You” soon after it appeared in late October 1967, and I remember my amazement at the sheer physical size of the musicians in the photograph—there was the massive Buddy Miles, who was grinning with a Siamese cat in his arms. Behind him stood Bloomfield, who held a flag at a slightly disrespectful angle and looked every bit the leader of the band. Authorship of the A-side song was credited to Ron Polte, who had given the Electric Flag their name.

“Groovin’” featured a superb Gravenites vocal, Cass Elliot and Buddy Miles’s background harmonies, and a brief instrumental interlude that contained a Bloomfield riff that he played in a sort of raga-meets-Celtic mode, but it sounded like somebody’s twisted idea of a three-minute pop song. Goldberg and Bloomfield’s “Over-Lovin’ You,” the B-side, was a soul tune that sounded like a slightly more ornate version of the records Arthur Conley and Wilson Pickett were currently cutting in Memphis and Muscle Shoals, Alabama. The single went nowhere on the charts, but it was a worthy first try.

As production proceeded on the band’s first album, A Long Time Comin’, Bloomfield spent time at Columbia’s San Francisco studio trying to get Court and the Columbia engineers to listen to Sam Phillips’s Sun productions, Beatles records, anything to shake them loose. It was to no avail. Later, Bloomfield credited Columbia’s Roy Segal, who mixed A Long Time Comin’ and allowed Bloomfield to make suggestions, with helping him implement some of his production ideas.

Still, the album expressed Bloomfield’s vision, even if the production made it sound more like a pastiche of soul styles than it really was. THE ELECTRIC FLAG IS AN AMERICAN MUSIC BAND, read the headline on his short liner notes. “American music is not necessarily music directly from America. I think of it as the music you hear in the air, on the air, and in the streets; blues, soul, country, rock, religious music, traffic, crowds, street sounds and field sounds, the sound of people and silence.”

As for how representative an album of American music it really was, that’s open to speculation. Certainly there wasn’t any country music on it, nor any country blues, but there was plenty of America, 1967 turning into 1968, and in living stereo. The band’s romp through “Drinkin’ Wine, Spo-Dee-O-Dee” effectively revived the song for every bar band in the country, while Bloomfield played a great solo on “Texas.” The album also included the San Francisco Sound of Barry Goldberg’s “Sittin’ in Circles” and a psychedelic workout, complete with the dubbed-in voice of Lyndon Baines Johnson, called “Another Country.” In fact, the solemn voice of the thirty-sixth president of the United States introduced A Long Time Comin’: “I speak tonight for the dignity of man,” Johnson began, but his speech was cut off by the sounds of a raucous party and the band’s kick-ass version of Howlin’ Wolf’s “Killing Floor,” on which Gravenites set a vocal standard he’s rarely surpassed.

Goldberg and Bloomfield’s nod to Cropper and Redding, “You Don’t Realize,” took the Stax Records style into territory that the average pop fan could appreciate. The music on A Long Time Comin’ may have represented soul more than it did any other American style, but its attempt to take that style into supersonic, modern territory was as American as you can get.

For many, the album’s highlight was a tiny fifty-second throwaway tacked on to the record’s end—Michael and his electric guitar, peacefully picking away on “Easy Rider.” Some think it is his finest recorded moment, and it definitely fits in with the best he ever did. Gravenites always said that the best music Bloomfield played with the Electric Flag was done after hours, when no one was listening.

The sound of the album is the sound of a band, but that is actually the magic of electronics. When the band was recording the album, they all moved into different houses around Mill Valley. Susan remembered the first three or four months as close to ideal, where the worst problem was Buddy Miles parking the Continental he’d insisted upon when he joined up, disappearing with the keys, and blocking the hilly driveway to the band’s house. “He was just a sweet little kid,” Susan told me. “He liked shrimp, and he’d take a whole bologna and a jar of mayonnaise and dip the bologna into it and eat it.”

With the album done, it was time to take the band—volatile egos, drug problems, and all—on the road. “Our record wasn’t a giant hit, wasn’t a million-seller,” Gravenites said. “We weren’t at the upper echelon, Sonny & Cher or Three Dog Night. We were stuck at that middle rhythm-and-blues level, you know, and we were doing a lot of marginal gigs.”

Grossman dispatched an associate of his named Ronnie Lyons to act as one of the Flag’s tour managers. A native of the Bronx, Lyons had previously gone on the road with the Butterfield Band and with another Grossman act, the Paupers, a Canadian rock band led by Skip Prokop. The Paupers had played at Monterey, but they hadn’t made much of an impression. The Electric Flag didn’t travel in high style in late 1967, as Lyons remembers. “We had what you could call a schlepper moving in the truck all the equipment, and I would drive the guys in a station wagon,” he says. “Albert told me to go to the Flag because he was afraid of the horn players. I wouldn’t stay in the same hotel with them.”

When the band played the Fillmore in late August 1967 on a bill with Cream, which was making its West Coast debut, Lyons witnessed an example of Bloomfield’s indifference to the niceties of show business. “They were headlining, and Cream was [on] the bill,” Lyons says. “Michael runs up onstage and tells the audience about Eric Clapton: ‘This is the greatest guitarist you’ll ever hear.’ And Michael was the great guitarist, you know, and he goes up and says how great Eric Clapton is before the Flag even took the stage. It infuriated me.”

A month later in Huntington Beach, California, Brooks, Goldberg, Bloomfield, and Gravenites were arrested on narcotics charges (pot, not heroin) at their motel. They had been getting high in their motel room and playing records late one night, and they attracted attention from their fellow guests. Goldberg got probation, and police dropped charges against the other three.

Shaken, Goldberg left the band in early December. An Ontario musician whom Goldberg knew, Mike Fonfara, took his place, but he proceeded to get busted while the band was finishing up the album. Fonfara was replaced by Herbie Rich, who had been there from the beginning. Rich doubled on saxophone and organ until Stemzie Hunter was hired at the beginning of 1968.

Grossman called an emergency meeting of the band in spring 1968 to discuss firing Strazza and Doubleday. Drug dealers had held up Strazza at gunpoint in Detroit after a show in March, and Grossman had endured enough. Strazza and Doubleday stayed on, because bookers wanted the full band, but Grossman had lost faith in them. Another factor in the band’s demise was the gulf between Buddy Miles’s desire to clown around onstage as the band’s soul music showman and Bloomfield’s need to abjure virtually all show business concessions. In the end, it turned out that Miles had lied about his age when he signed Grossman’s contracts. He had been nineteen when Brooks, Goldberg, and Bloomfield pulled him away from the force field of Wilson Pickett. Miles went to court and got out of the agreements, and Bloomfield left the band after their June 8 show at Bill Graham’s recently opened New York City venue, the Fillmore East.

Gravenites chalked it up to the drugs, the pace, and the band’s tenuous sense of identity, and to the fact that Bloomfield and Miles had such different views of how to present the band’s music. Buddy loved being a star, but Bloomfield despised the very idea of being adored as a star and not as a musician. The situation also had something to do with Bloomfield’s state of mind. His relationship with Susan had been deteriorating since they moved to California, if not before.