14

TERMINALLY MELLOW

What happened to Michael Bloomfield over the final half-decade of his life was partly or perhaps even mostly a matter of the drugs, as Susan and Ira Kamin and almost everyone else thought, but that was almost too obvious to mention, and anyway, his situation had to do with a number of other things that they realized Michael wasn’t very adept at managing and that may have in fact eluded the grasp of the most fastidious careerist. Some of his difficulty obviously had to do with his relationship to his parents and to his money. His bohemianism and disregard for mere objects was an understandable result of that, but it seemed a bit excessive, even for a folkie who was also a rock star. His habits would land him, for example, in serious tax trouble in 1974, when Susan discovered that he hadn’t filed returns of any kind between 1968 and 1972, his prime years as an earner.

Harold Bloomfield bailed him out of that mess, and Susan spent two years with Michael’s accountant, a very nice lady, before they got it all straightened out. It transpired that Michael wasn’t amassing any mountain of money through the largesse of the Bloomfield family, because he and Allen and his two cousins received income from the trust their fraternal grandmother had set up: proceeds from the interest on Michael’s 25 percent, about $50,000 a year. That wasn’t insubstantial in 1974 terms, but Michael had to pay tax on it, and he had needed more in 1971 to buy his house on Reed Street in Mill Valley. His father arranged for that, because Michael needed a house. So there was access, and that certainly must have been in the back of his mind.

As for the career, Gravenites said that the reason for its decline was also obvious but, again, a function of Bloomfield’s vexed relationship to simple things that a musician of his seriousness could hardly be expected to willingly attend to. “He never took care of his business,” Gravenites said. “He never followed up on stuff.” When it came to the music, Bloomfield was usually all there—as Gravenites said, he tended to be the last person to leave the rehearsal, and he worked harder on getting the music right than anyone. Bloomfield’s experiences with Dylan and Bobby Neuwirth and the other members of Dylan’s entourage, and the brutal way some of them had all put down the formerly hip folk stars, like Phil Ochs and David Blue, who had fallen by the wayside as Dylan reinvented songwriting in the 1960s, reinforced his already advanced notion of the way the music business and fame got in the way of everything, especially friendship. As a deep musical thinker and consummate guitarist, Bloomfield inspired his fellow musicians, but he himself needed inspiration, a little competition, a compatriot who could keep him honest, more than most musicians do. I asked Allen Bloomfield point-blank if he thought Michael deliberately picked musicians who were somewhat beneath his level, meaning some of the nonplayers he sometimes used from the Group days to his 1970s work with Norman Dayron in nowhere studios with never-could-be sidemen. Many of the musicians Bloomfield worked with, from Mark Naftalin to Bob Jones to Nick Gravenites and Harvey Brooks and Marcus Doubleday, were very excellent players and singers, but Allen understood the question. “If he were put on a stage with Robbie Robertson or B. B. King or Albert King, it would possibly be too anxiety-provoking for him, and he gets real nervous,” he said. “He surrounded himself with a comfortable group of players that he could pretty much direct. In some way, it took away the pressure and the challenge that he would’ve had to have risen up to.”

Bloomfield was candid about most aspects of his life, but he’d lie when it came to junk. In interview after interview during the 1970s, he’d talk about how glad he was to be off junk, and then go right back to doing it. He could be very articulate about it, as he told Tom Wheeler in their 1979 interview. “Heroin gave me pimples,” he said. “And I put the guitar down, didn’t touch it. See, a junkie’s life is totally, chronically fucked. You either eat and move and be productive, or else you’re a junkie. There’s no choice. Or at least there wasn’t for me.” According to Toby Byron, Bloomfield also exaggerated his drug use in the name of good storytelling. Byron said that, aside from sleep issues, Bloomfield was healthy and off drugs in the first half of the 1970s. For example, Michael would put orange juice, banana, raw egg, and Tiger’s Milk into a blender for breakfast, and he also did a lot of swimming.