16

RECORDS FOR MONEY, RECORDS FOR FUN

I had been trying to see Michael play as often as I could. Because I lived in the Bay Area, there were plenty of opportunities, but I missed a lot of them, including the dates Bloomfield and Gravenites had played with Sunnyland Slim in area clubs in late 1972 and early 1973. I did get to see Naftalin, Bloomfield, and Gravenites—the old Chicago crew—do a series of shows that were almost always good and very often great. Bassist and singer Roger Troy had joined the Friends in 1973 and the new incarnation of the Electric Flag shortly after.

Troy brought a lot to every situation, but getting the Flag together again had been a distasteful experience for almost everyone involved. With the record going nowhere, they played dates through the first couple of months of 1975. Gravenites said later that Buddy Miles was going through “absolute insanity” during 1974. Everyone was either crazy or in it for the money.

It’s typical of Bloomfield’s career that in 1976 he released what he considered his best record, If You Love These Blues, Play ’Em as You Please, and what may be his most derided effort, KGB’s KGB. The latter was a misguided attempt to capitalize on the supergroup concept that Al Kooper had created for Bloomfield in 1968. At Toby Byron’s suggestion, he and Barry Goldberg took Bloomfield to meet manager Elliot Roberts, who owned a company called Lookout Management, in his L.A. office. Roberts, with David Geffen, had managed Joni Mitchell and Neil Young before starting Asylum Records in 1970. “The guy looked across the table and said, ‘Boys, let’s put a super group together,’” Bloomfield said. “I told him he was crazy. Al Kooper had invented the term—super group, super session—and it was a pure scam. It was filthy lucre.”

On paper, the group had its merits: singer Ray Kennedy had written lyrics for “Sail on Sailor” with Beach Boys head Brian Wilson; Brooklyn-born drummer Carmine Appice had played with Vanilla Fudge, a rock-soul group, and with guitarist Jeff Beck; and Ric Grech played bass for British avant-garde blues band Family and for supergroup Blind Faith before he joined Traffic in the early 1970s.

Before he joined the newly created firm of Kennedy, Goldberg, and Bloomfield, Appice had played drums on the sessions for Beck’s 1975 album Blow by Blow, only to have his parts replaced by Richard Bailey’s. Appice had wanted equal billing with Beck, but the guitarist demurred. “I was hangin’ out with Ric Grech, thinking that if [the Jeff Beck record] didn’t happen, I might need to do something else,” Appice says. “My lawyer told me about this band, and he said they’re looking for a bass player and a drummer. When we met Michael, they played, and it sounded good and all.”

Elliot Roberts put forward the initial offer for the right to record KGB, which started a bidding war for the band. They signed with MCA and prepared to cut the record. Lookout even arranged for the band to perform at a Hollywood showcase for record label executives, and MCA threw a party for them featuring waiters dressed like Russian Cossacks. “We went into the Village Recorders to record, on Santa Monica, and Michael just said he wasn’t coming,” Appice says. “So we hadda get a session guy to play guitar on the basic tracks, and then we had to take it up to San Francisco so he could put his parts on. He couldn’t sleep. I don’t know if he could sleep anywhere else, but we had to do the tracks without him.”

Appice also noted some of Bloomfield’s other eccentricities. “He was like a schizophrenic guy,” he says. “I can just visualize him, the way he’d walk around with his head sort of down. He never stood straight up. He was quickly walking around and changing directions, with a white T-shirt on.” The condition of Bloomfield’s car and house impressed Appice as well. “His car musta had a foot high of trash on the floor,” he says. “You couldn’t get in the backseat and sit there with your feet on the floor, because of all this trash in there.” But he thought Bloomfield played superbly.

The record could have done well, but Bloomfield sabotaged the release from the beginning. “We were the number-one most added record on the radio, a big push comin’ on and everything,” Appice says. “We all did interviews, and Mike did an interview with Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times. He told Robert Hilburn that no way would he have ever played with a band like this, and that this was just put together by the big management company just to get big money from the record company. It totally blew the whole thing.”

Bloomfield left the band, and Grech soon followed suit. Talking to BAM magazine’s Terry Marshall in 1976, Bloomfield explained what had happened. The record was a “completely fabricated bullshit trip for a lot of money, where everybody was sort of burned,” he said. During the interview, he described currently popular guitarist Peter Frampton as a “junior Eric Clapton or junior Michael Bloomfield.”

Appice would later assist Bloomfield on the soundtrack for the Mitchell Brothers’ Sodom and Gomorrah, and he and Michael attended the film’s San Francisco premiere. He never worked with Bloomfield again.

Bloomfield believed his best work was on an instructional record for other guitarists, and indeed, If You Love These Blues, Play ’Em as You Please, recorded in 1976 for Guitar Player magazine, has plenty of merit and earned him his only Grammy nomination. He may even have been right, because If You Love These Blues is a very listenable record, right down to Bloomfield’s vocals, which at their best do approach the level of Ry Cooder’s similar efforts. The album is both a document that students can take as a lesson book and a record a nonplayer can enjoy without reservation.

The album reflected Bloomfield’s new approach to performing. As he told Tom Yates and Kate Hayes in 1981, he had developed a new method of guitar playing. “I had worked out a style of guitar playing that was as much country-blues style that you play with your fingers, the sort of orchestral, one-man-band sound, that was mixed with as much hot-licks lead guitar,” he said. “It was just an equal mixture of it, and I’d also learned how to sing by then. From that period, which was around ’76, ’77, from then on, it’s just been a progressively hot period for me. I’m still in the middle of it.” Despite the common perception that he never again played as well as he had in 1967 and 1968, Bloomfield plays about as fluently as he ever did on the track “WDIA,” the record’s tribute to, or lesson about, B. B. King’s Kent Records style. He sounds like he’s earned the right to sing about what the blues has done to him.

The Electric Flag and KGB experiences had given backbone to Bloomfield’s resolve to reinvent himself. After he unburdened himself to the press in early 1976 about the machinations of the KGB deal, Bloomfield composed a remarkable letter to Elliot Roberts. “Elliot, BANDS are individuals grouped or bonded together for a common purpose, a common aesthetic, more than just the dollars,” he wrote. “ELLIOT MAN, you have no idea what I DO as a musician or entertainer, and it’s plenty weird.” He explained to Roberts that he was like Ry Cooder, Jesse Ed Davis, and Leon Redbone—artists who could make a living by staying faithful to their aesthetic and by playing music that remained true to an idiom that pop music could only imitate. “I was wrong to take the money. I was wrong not to walk out of your office the first or second time I met you and you referred to me as a loser and those people I play with as losers,” he wrote. He was sorry to negate their investment in him, but he had to back out.

Meanwhile, Bloomfield continued a long-distance relationship with Christie Svane. She had left California to go to college in Vermont, and she would conduct her romance with Bloomfield from afar for most of the decade. Susan made a change as well, moving out of the Reed Street house in 1976 to live with Bonner Beuhler. “When I married Bonner, part of me was scared that I had given up my family, which was Michael and his family,” she said. “It was pretty scary there for a little bit.”

After he completed If You Love These Blues, Play ’Em as You Please, which had been financed by Guitar Player magazine through their books and records division, Bloomfield began recording with Norman Dayron. Bloomfield’s work with Dayron documents a rich period in the guitarist’s anti-career. Far from being a diminished performer in his last five years of his life, Bloomfield exhibited a very high level of mastery of the guitar. And on such late-1970s recordings as “I’m Glad I’m Jewish” and his 1977 live version of Randy Newman’s “Uncle Bob’s Midnight Blues,” he fleshes out his guitar skills with a newly discovered flair for singing.

What comes through in the recordings that Dayron made of Bloomfield from 1976 until his death is Bloomfield’s outsized—and wonderful—sense of humor. Bloomfield wrote a number of songs in a country-music style in the 1970s. Demo versions exist of such potential Nashville classics as “Soaping Dolly Down” and “Do It with Jerry Lee.” In his live performances Bloomfield covered Tom T. Hall’s “That’s How I Got to Memphis” and Wayne Kemp’s “The Image of Me,” a 1968 hit for Conway Twitty.

Dayron’s work with Bloomfield has its detractors. One of them is Nick Gravenites, who thought Dayron encouraged Bloomfield’s disdain for music business thieves to little effect. “Maybe Norman didn’t feed on Michael’s cynicism, but he reinforced it,” Gravenites said later. “And there’s a big difference between knowing someone is a thief and doing something about it. . . . Norman contributed activism—actually going out and fucking the record companies. The result was, probably, that they felt good about doing it. But it resulted in a lot of schlock product, a lot of stuff that didn’t really represent Michael’s best interests.”

Al Kooper agreed, but thought that Bloomfield had abdicated control. “I don’t think Michael gave a fuck,” he said. “Going to put out another record—great, like that. I don’t think he cared very much about them.”

Dayron defended the albums he made with Bloomfield. “For Michael, the truth is that those albums were a natural self-expression of what he wanted to do,” he said. “He didn’t feel there was any market for what he really wanted to do. . . . Maybe they are controversial, but they are incredibly valuable, because Michael put his whole heart and soul into them.” In Dayron’s view, Kooper and the other critics of Bloomfield’s later work simply missed the point: that was what Michael wanted to do.

An enthusiastic piano player himself, Bloomfield worked with a series of estimable keyboardists that included Al Kooper, Barry Goldberg, and Mark Naftalin. If Kooper attempted to provide a producer’s context for Bloomfield on Super Session, Goldberg brought songwriting chops and soul music sensibility to his collaboration with Bloomfield. A superb blues accompanist, Naftalin dueted effectively with Bloomfield during the 1970s. Bloomfield enjoyed his collaborations with such versatile musicians, producers, and songwriters, but he did what he wanted to, as Dayron said. Goldberg also remembered Bloomfield’s self-willed approach. “He was so charismatic that everybody just wanted to hang out with him,” said Goldberg. “He opened up a lot of doors for musicians that maybe weren’t really at the top of their game.”

Norman Dayron recalled how Bloomfield allowed pianist Jon Cramer to play on the 1980 sessions for Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’. “He had Jon Cramer play the piano, and they did this song, ‘Snowblind,’ about cocaine,” Dayron said. “Cramer was interesting. He was another one from Chicago, from a wealthy family. . . . But as a producer this was a horrible experience, because here was something that was, in my view, so difficult and so lame and so painful I didn’t want it on the album.” As their careers demonstrated, Kooper, Naftalin, and Goldberg were first-rate musicians. Bloomfield’s generosity toward his friends sometimes caused him to lower his standards, but it also demonstrated his humanity.

From 1976 on, Bloomfield mostly played live around the Bay Area, with occasional trips to New York, where he was a big draw at the Bottom Line. He also made a few trips to Canada and Europe. One of his favorite working situations was playing acoustic guitar with Mark Naftalin in emulation of the great piano-and-guitar duets that were the rage in blues during the 1930s, when Big Maceo and Tampa Red, Scrapper Blackwell and Leroy Carr, and Cripple Clarence Lofton and Big Bill Broonzy recorded in that style.

“I felt that Mike and I were a guitar-and-piano team that could hold its own with the greats,” Naftalin told me. “Not to compare myself with the greats as a piano player—nobody speaks with the true blues voice like one who comes from the true blues background. But we were a remarkable combination. I think there’s plenty of evidence of that.” Naftalin would perform with Bloomfield until close to the end.