17

LOVE AND DEATH

“I’m sorry,” Mark Naftalin said when I interviewed him at his San Rafael house on a cold, rainy night in 1981. “But when I think of Michael, all I think of is the pain that was in him, and that is in me residually.” That was the refrain I heard from Michael’s friends when I asked them about the last years of his life.

Always adept at devising new ways to avoid going out of the house, Bloomfield in the late 1970s had become even more unreliable about making shows than in 1969, when he had tried to leave Chicago rather than attend the second day of Dayron’s Fathers and Sons sessions at Chess. Gravenites, Naftalin, Bob Jones, and Steve Gordon, who operated the Savoy nightclub in San Francisco, had also been the victims of his dilatory mode of creation.

For Naftalin, who had faithfully and sensitively accompanied Bloomfield during the 1970s, it wasn’t a matter of Bloomfield’s seriousness as an artist. “But he didn’t want to stay on a path,” Naftalin said. “He wanted to retreat. And he did it again and again.” They would get on a roll, Bloomfield would play beautifully, and then Bloomfield’s phone calls would cease. For Jones, whom Bloomfield had instantly won over ten years earlier at their first meeting in San Francisco—as he strode into the room where Jones was rehearsing with his current group, the Tits & Ass Rhythm & Blues Band, Bloomfield had exclaimed, what am I hearing, Otis Redding singing and Al Jackson on drums?—it was the same. The last years with Bloomfield were a struggle. “He would get to the day in the week where you’d have to catch the plane to the gig, and he would be in various stages of denial,” Jones said. “I would go to his house early. Whatever condition he was in, I would find his equipment and throw him in the van and off we’d go, either to the gig, if it was local, or to the airport to catch a plane.” It grew even worse in 1978, Jones said, but once Bloomfield was safely onstage, he almost always hit the music hard, just as he’d always done.

Throughout his life Bloomfield had devoted a good deal of time to visiting doctors, trying to find ways to calm his insomnia, and there had also been emergency calls on the road in the 1960s and during the later years he lived on Reed Street. The local paramedics knew their way up the hill. He went to the Stanford Sleep Center in the mid-1970s and, according to Norman Dayron, used this and other opportunities to charm his doctors into giving him downers and sleep medication. “They were his fans, these doctors,” Dayron said. Norman remembered Chicago days, when he took Bloomfield to the University of Chicago hospital after Michael underwent a particularly severe bout of sleeplessness. Bloomfield had a certain relationship with medical practitioners that Dayron believed was, in some bizarre way, actually creative.

Allen Bloomfield took the view that Michael had, when all was said and done, a divided consciousness—a set of impulses that he remained unaware of. “He did not know that they were operating within him,” Allen said about these motivations. Their father had suffered from long bouts of severe depression, and the family had a history of suicide. Allen had been diagnosed with manic depression when he was fourteen. In Allen’s estimation, Michael saw what should have been therapeutic as a game to be played.

“He unfortunately gave credence to the fact that he was a very bright, very on-top-of-it individual, in that he felt that he knew more than the doctors did,” he said. Allen thought that Michael’s famed indifference to material possessions and the niceties of the music business were products of his vexed relationship with their father. If Harold Bloomfield was immersed in the world of measurability—coffeemakers, salt shakers, ketchup dispensers, money—Michael measured time by the music he played, the records he heard, and the teetering stacks of novels he had already read. Bloomfield read everything: novels by Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Bruce Jay Friedman, medical books, and the odd science-fiction paperback. Allen couldn’t think of one material object Michael really cared about, except maybe some trinket B. B. King had once given him. One of Michael’s friends said that all of his cars looked like they had been rolled down a hill with the doors open.

“My father would have been more disappointed that Michael didn’t maximize his financial benefits,” Allen said. “For one reason or another, he didn’t take that to be the most serious part of it. Michael rejected, to some extent, the hard, logical business application that would have had to have been done to negotiate properly his fair share. Trying to watch somebody who was letting it run through his fingertips isn’t something that my father could appreciate.”

Christie Svane had moved to New York, where she did some modeling for Arnie Levin, the New Yorker cartoonist, and she reconnected with Michael in October 1978 during his two-day stint at the Bottom Line. After one of his sets, Bloomfield took Christie to his hotel room, where she told him that she had gotten pregnant with his child when she was seventeen and had had an abortion. They realized they were in love, even though each of them was involved in another relationship at the time. Bloomfield returned to San Francisco, where he began receiving postcards from Svane that described their beautiful relationship. Bloomfield’s current girlfriend read them as well, and she moved out of Michael’s house. Svane spent time in 1979 at Naropa, a Buddhist college in Boulder whose instructors included Allen Ginsberg, before she made the decision to go to Mill Valley to take care of Michael.

By 1979 Bloomfield had developed an addiction to Placidyl, a powerful hypnotic that was commonly prescribed in the 1970s. It produced dizziness and other side effects when it was taken over a long time. He entered a state mental hospital for a month that fall to get off the drug. While he was recuperating, Christie visited him. After recovering from his addiction, Bloomfield started drinking, a turn of events that distressed Christie and his friends, who knew that Bloomfield had always preferred weed to alcohol. Christie moved back to New York in the winter of 1979, and Bloomfield followed her there, only to return home two months later.

Woody Harris had met Bloomfield during one of Michael’s Bay Area shows. Harris was a classical guitarist who recorded an album titled American Guitar Solos for Chris Strachwitz’s Arhoolie label in 1976. He and his wife, cellist Maggie Edmondson, began playing shows with Bloomfield in 1979, and Michael and Woody recorded an album of gospel music duets that year, Bloomfield/Harris, at Norman Dayron’s house. The following year, through his New York agent, Harris booked the trio into a late-summer tour of Italy and Sweden. With Christie along to help Michael, they left for Italy in early September 1980. On the flight over, Harris noticed the way Bloomfield deftly snatched the small bottles of gin from the tray the flight attendants would wheel by at regular intervals.

“The trip to Italy was a beautiful trip,” Svane told me later. The sunlight and the ruins were inspirational. She remembered that he played in top form. This was also the point at which Michael intensified his assault on her resistance to marrying him. He’d already proposed once, and she’d turned him down, since she was still involved with a man in her dance troupe. But he continued. “It was in Pisa on a Saturday night,” she remembered, “and he said, ‘Look, in two hours it’s gonna be sunrise. We’re in Italy. There are thousands of Catholic churches in every alley down there. Let’s go downstairs right now and get married. Come on, don’t tell anyone, just get up, get dressed, and let’s go.’ And all the time I was grilling him. ‘What happened between you and Susan? Why didn’t that work out?’ And his answer was ‘I wasn’t a man then, I wasn’t a man.’” (How two Americans, one Jewish, would have been able to figure out how to get married on a Sunday morning in Italy, though, is something Michael never considered.)

But Bloomfield also drank steadily, insisting on taking part in contests with his Italian fans to see who could drink the most grappa. The Italian fans wanted Super Session, and Svane remembered how they threw bottles and yelled for “Albert’s Shuffle.” She left the tour before it continued on to Sweden. There, Harris said, Bloomfield “drank himself absolutely wild.” They were backed by pickup groups on some dates, and their repertoire included Paul Siebel’s “Louise” and James Taylor’s “Bartender’s Blues,” a song that George Jones had cut in 1978.

They returned to New York in late September, and Harris said Bloomfield simply abandoned his guitars at the airport to take a $300 cab ride to visit people he knew in Connecticut. Bloomfield, Edmondson, and Harris continued to play dates together, including a December 11 show at the Childe Harold in Washington, DC, at which Bloomfield dedicated “Amazing Grace” to John Lennon, who had been murdered three days before.

Three weeks earlier, Bloomfield sat in at a Bob Dylan show at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco. The engagement came about after Maria Muldaur, who had known Dylan since 1962 and had also heard reports that Bloomfield wasn’t doing well, invited Dylan and his band, which included bassist Tim Drummond and guitarist Fred Tackett, to her house in Mill Valley for a home-cooked meal. “Dylan was very nervously sitting aside from everybody,” Muldaur said later. “He kept looking around, and finally he said, ‘Bloomfield, Michael Bloomfield, lives around here in Mill Valley, doesn’t he? Can we call him up? I’d love to go see him.’”

Muldaur and Dylan got into their car, and Muldaur directed the driver to Reed Street. The television was on inside the house. Maria Muldaur stood on tiptoe in front of a window to assess the situation. Bloomfield was in his bathrobe, watching an old movie. She and Dylan entered the house, actually crawling through a window to get in, and Bloomfield did a double take and turned down the television. They talked for a half hour. “Bob said, ‘You’ve got to come down and sit in with us, man,’” Muldaur recalled. “‘Maria came down, and Jerry Garcia came down.’ Mike said, ‘Oh, I don’t know. I’m not playing much these days.’” Dylan invited him to catch Etta James that night in San Francisco, but Bloomfield begged off, said he was in for the night. He wanted to get back to watching the movie. Bloomfield promised he would go down and play, and Dylan rose to leave.

Before Dylan could get to the door, Michael handed him a gift. It was a thick, square Bible with a filigreed cover, and it had been in Bloomfield’s family for generations. “On the way into the city, Bob was looking at the Bible and going, ‘Wow, man, look at this book,’” Muldaur said. “He was really touched that Michael would just, out of the blue, give him his family Bible. He seemed to really appreciate it.”

Bloomfield made his last major appearance at Dylan’s November 15 show. Bob Johnston, who had produced Highway 61 Revisited, was there. According to Greil Marcus, who wrote about the event in his 2005 book Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, Bloomfield approached Johnston. “Can you help me?” he asked Johnston. “No one will talk to me.” Bloomfield had showed up at the Warfield with Norman Dayron, who helped him find his way to the box office. “Michael was wearing tattered blue jeans,” Dayron said. “You could see his knees through them. . . . And he’s wearing house slippers, those old brown slippers that you just slip on.”

They finally got someone’s attention, and they went to the dressing room. “Dylan gave him about a five-minute introduction onstage, because he knew his audience didn’t know who he was, though this was San Francisco—and they didn’t,” Dayron told me later. “So he gave this tremendous introduction, and here was Michael by the side of the stage, holding on to some guitar, wearing his bedroom slippers and a black leather jacket, and he shuffled on to the stage, plugged in, and just brought the house down.”

That night he played “Like a Rolling Stone” and “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar,” a song Dylan would include on his 1981 Shot of Love album. “When Michael started playing, the music came alive like nothing you’ve ever heard,” Dayron recalled. “I mean, it was just like that killer slide guitar on the Highway 61 album—only it was louder and cleaner and more mature and more thoughtful, faster and cleverer. It was really quite a job he did, and it surprised the hell out of me, because he was not in great shape that night.

“Afterwards, Dylan was so happy. He said, ‘Man, I had no idea how much I’ve missed hearing you in my music, those notes that ring, that guitar style!’ He begged Michael to come back the next night, and I think we all knew it wasn’t going to happen, that Michael wasn’t capable of recreating that magic, that it would spoil the occasion.”

While they were traveling in Italy with Woody Harris, Bloomfield had made a confession to Christie Svane: Norman Dayron had told him, he said, that the only way to win her back was to get back to work and become a performer again. “He kept saying the most frightening things to me, expressions of love like, ‘Give me a reason to live,’” she said later. “‘Give me an occasion to rise to. Let’s have a kid. Nothing matters to me now. I’ve been to the top.’” After playing with Dylan on November 15, Bloomfield called her in New York. Svane was preparing to go on a three-month European teaching and performing tour, and he offered to pay her to cancel it. She declined—she would see him after she got back.

Near the end of 1980, Bloomfield asked Norman Dayron to drive him into San Francisco. As Dayron remembered it, Michael lay on the backseat, making commentary from a position where he could see nothing. Dayron had noticed that Bloomfield was recently in even more distress than usual—drinking endless bottles of gin, passing out, fouling himself. Norman found it uncomfortable to be with him. As he said later, “I couldn’t stand it, and I felt very guilty about it, because I felt as his friend I should take care of him. But he wouldn’t let anybody take care of him.” Dayron thought that Michael was hanging around hard characters and was proud of it. “It was like playing with fire, because the guy was an armed robber and a dope dealer,” Dayron said of one of Michael’s new friends. “I believe he was a dope dealer who didn’t use dope, which was kind of dangerous, because he never knew what he was selling.”

Bloomfield played his last show, an acoustic set, at the student union at San Francisco State College on February 7, 1981. He had come full circle from his days at the University of Chicago’s twist parties at Ida Noyes Hall. Six days later, Tom Yates and Kate Hayes walked through the tunnel of foliage that covered the walkway leading to the house on Reed Street and knocked on the door. Michael gave them his final interview.

At 11:00 AM on February 15, Ted Ray, a reporter who lived at 572 Dewey Street in San Francisco, saw a man slumped over in a banged-up 1971 Mercury Marquis. Ray went back to his place and called the cops and the paramedics. The car doors were locked, so the ambulance steward had to reach in through one of the windows, which was partly rolled down, to open the door. The keys were in the ignition. The corpse carried no identification. Michael Bloomfield was registered as John Doe #15 for the year, and his body was taken downtown to the medical examiner’s office.

Susan Buehler identified the body. Then she made the call to Allen Bloomfield. Allen notified his mother and father, who came to the Bay Area with their current spouses. (Harold and Dorothy had divorced many years earlier.) “My mother proceeded to pass out,” Allen said later. “Her new husband was understandably shocked by this. My father did not falter and navigated the situation in a detached manner.”

Christie Svane received the news in Paris, where she had just seen a troupe of dancing bears be put through their routine by the Moscow circus. She said later that she finally understood what Michael had endured in Italy.

The pathologist ruled the cause of death as cocaine and methamphetamine poisoning. There was also a drug called benzoylecgonine and a slight trace of a morphine-type alkaloid found in Bloomfield’s system.

What on earth had happened? Michael had never used cocaine; he didn’t like the drug. Would a lifelong insomniac be intentionally taking not only that but also methamphetamine—two drugs that keep you awake? In addition, nobody knew whom he’d been visiting there in San Francisco. The place where he was found wasn’t near any of his known associates. Had he been looking for heroin and mistakenly taken the wrong drug? But then, why would he have wanted heroin when he’d been off it for so long? Once he’d made the mistake, did his tired body just short-circuit, and, thinking he just needed to ride it out, did his unknown companions walk him to his car and hope he’d wake up and drive back to Mill Valley?

We’ll never know the answer to these questions. All we know is that Michael Bloomfield found sleep for the last time and, perhaps, as he left this earth, heard the hellhounds’ baying receding into the darkness.