18

AFTERMATH

Country Joe McDonald and Bill Graham were among the friends who attended Bloomfield’s memorial service on February 18, 1981, at San Francisco’s Sinai Chapel. Bloomfield was laid to rest two days later at Hillside Memorial Park in Culver City. Barry Goldberg gave the eulogy.

Kurt Loder’s obituary for Michael appeared in Rolling Stone on April 2. “According to friends, he still had the old instrumental fire whenever he chose to flash it,” Loder wrote. “Two weeks before his death, for example, he sat in with the Sir Douglas Quintet at the Catalyst, a club in Santa Cruz, California. ‘We just plugged him in,’ said Doug Sahm. ‘He said, “Let’s play some blues,” and man, he got up that night and played more damn blues—I mean, he sounded like the old Michael. I couldn’t believe it.’”

Bloomfield did indeed make great music in the last five years of his life, but most of it was in live performances, not on the records he made for Denny Bruce’s Takoma label or the other small labels he and Norman Dayron signed with. Like many of his later records, Bloomfield’s last album, the posthumously released Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’, indicates a decline that may have had as much to do with a paucity of musical conception as with Bloomfield’s technical execution or the acuity of his ear. In his later years, Bloomfield was a musician out of time—a singer, guitarist, scholar, and song junkie who would have fit perfectly into what became known as Americana music in the first decade of the twenty-first century. If he had outlived his era, he would almost certainly have matched up with another one.

Nick Gravenites gets the last word: an epigram for musicians and listeners who want to ponder the relationship between people who need to make music and the people who want them to, at any cost. “That’s the way life is, and that’s the way all real things are,” Gravenites told Jan Mark Wolkin and Bill Keenom. “They have their ups and downs and middles. Everything else is show business.”

The Paul Butterfield Blues Band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in April 2015. Mark Naftalin, Sam Lay, and Elvin Bishop were on hand. Gabriel Butterfield accepted the award for his father, who died in 1987. Tom Morello, Zac Brown, and Kim Wilson performed “Born in Chicago,” and the ceremony included a screening of film clips of the Butterfield Band in the 1960s. J. Geils Band singer Peter Wolf remembered seeing them at Club 47 in 1966. “They played every night like it was their last night on Earth,” he said. Mark Naftalin thanked Paul Butterfield for inducting him into his band, and Elvin Bishop summed it up: “That was a butt-kickin’ band, and we helped blues cross over to the regular public.” Michael’s niece, Nicole, accepted on his behalf. Born in 1978, Nicole spent time with her uncle in 1980, when Allen Bloomfield and his family were living in Scarsdale, New York. Allen recalled how gently Michael cradled her in his arms during his visit.

Nicole ended her remarks by quoting the prescient observation Michael made to Tom Yates and Kate Hayes in 1981: “The music you listen to becomes the soundtrack of your life. It may be the first music you made love to or got high to or went through your adolescence to, went through poignant times of your life—well, that music is going to mean a lot to you. It’s going to take on much more import than just the sound of the notes, because it’s the background track for your existence.”