“I started playing the guitar when I was thirteen years old, and I was very bad for two or three years, and when I was about fifteen and a half, I got great.” It was with this characteristically immodest statement that Michael Bloomfield started telling me his life’s story when I interviewed him in 1974. It’s the sort of statement that one takes with the proverbial grain of salt, except, in this case, he just happened to be telling the truth.
Michael never denied that Tony Carmen gave him a solid basis for learning on his own. Inspired by what he learned in Carmen’s guitar lessons, he plowed through fake books, which were large, usually illegal volumes of transcriptions of standard songs that provided basic chords and melody lines for bands to use when they needed to play a request. He worked and worked on his fake books, late into the night. “He practiced very quietly and he never used an amp in the house,” his mother told me. “Everything was done in his room, quietly. Every day he’d work. He’d practice his riffs and runs, keep his fingers limber. When he was in his room alone, that was the part of his life that was his. It had nothing to do with us.”
In 1957 Bloomfield and his friend Roy Ruby went with Bloomfield’s maid, Mary Williams, to see Josh White, a folk-blues singer who had started recording in Chicago in the late 1920s, and a major draw. Williams knew White, and she made arrangements to take the boys to see him perform at the Gate of Horn, a folk venue on the Near North Side. Located in the basement of the Rice Hotel at 755 North Dearborn Street, the Gate of Horn was the brainchild of Chicago-born club owner Albert Grossman.
When Bloomfield was beginning to explore the guitar, he also met Horace Cathcart, a bassist from Lake Forest, Illinois, at a private party at a house on the city’s North Shore. Eager to learn bass, Bloomfield began playing with Cathcart at parties and folk clubs along the North Shore. About a year later, Bloomfield put together a band called Mr. Lonely and the Twisters, and the group played dances at New Trier High School.
By the time Michael was fifteen, he was performing publicly with, as he told me, “crazy bands with clarinets, polka bands,” and the like. He would play anywhere people would let him, and he would try to see as many other guitar players as he could. He was also picking up tricks from radio and records. The first blues tune Bloomfield mastered was Texas guitarist T-Bone Walker’s version of Bernice Carter’s “Glamour Girl.” He and Roy Ruby also marveled at the weird, spidery guitar licks Chuck Berry played on Berry’s 1957 instrumental “Deep Feeling.” As a budding teenage guitar hero, Bloomfield was entranced by the work of Scotty Moore, who played the simple, indelible solos on early Elvis Presley records. He was also listening closely to the work of Cliff Gallup, the guitarist on many of Gene Vincent’s rock ’n’ roll numbers. As he told Tom Yates and Kate Hayes, the guitar solo on Vincent’s 1957 song “Blues Stay Away from Me” was a major influence on him, and Bloomfield also thrilled to Gallup’s work on “Who Slapped John,” recorded the year before. Already, Bloomfield was a musical omnivore who had developed his lifelong habit of close listening to records: “I liked Bo Diddley records even though there was no solo guitar. His guitar was so strange sounding,” he told Yates and Hayes.
Michael remained a discipline problem at New Trier, and his obvious intelligence still wasn’t being directed into his studies. All he wanted to do was master the guitar and perform. In 1959, when he was a sophomore, Bloomfield and his classmate Roy Jespersen put together a group they called the Hurricanes, after Johnny and the Hurricanes, an Ohio rock ’n’ roll group who had hit the charts that year with the instrumental tunes “Red River Rock” and “Beatnik Fly.” Jespersen played drums, while Roy Ruby played rhythm guitar. Bloomfield played a Gibson archtop electric guitar.
The group played dances around the North Shore, with Michael’s father driving them to gigs. As Jespersen remembered it, Harold Bloomfield gave the boys some sage advice one evening: get paid up front. The quartet, which also included a friend of theirs named Craig Sherman on upright bass, got a chance to play a talent show at New Trier in 1959. For almost anyone else, playing a high school talent show would seem an innocuous pastime, but the budding rocker had a trick up his sleeve.
For their turn in the talent show, the Hurricanes had worked up a Chet Atkins–style instrumental. They had been told in no uncertain terms by the school’s dean that the band was to take no encore, and they were certainly not welcome to play any rock ’n’roll.
The group finished their first number, and sure enough, the band of rock ’n’ roll rebels launched into their encore, a rendition of “Hurricane,” a raucous number Bloomfield had come up with. As he later described it to Dan McClosky, “Hurricane” was an “E chord—a simple version of [Link Wray’s] ‘Rumble.’” It was too much for the school’s authorities, who had already observed how uncannily the awkward boy moved through the school employing brazen stratagems designed to drive the teachers crazy, such as disrupting classes by citing works he had read outside the curriculum. New Trier High School expelled Michael Bloomfield, which was no small accomplishment, since the school did try to do its best to accommodate a respectable number of suburban weirdos and misfits.
His parents dispatched him to Cornwall Academy, a prep school in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. “It was terrible on him,” his mother remembered. “That was the worst thing my husband could have done, because Michael was a free soul.”
But one result of his banishment was to introduce Michael to drugs and radical intellectual ideas even faster than would have happened back in Chicago. Roy Ruby had also been sent away to a prep school, the Windsor Mountain School, in Lenox, Massachusetts, not far from Great Barrington, and the two exiles played music together, hung out, and broadened their intellectual and social horizons.
In the summer of 1959, Bloomfield sat in with guitarist Luther “Guitar Junior” Johnson at a Chicago club called the Place, at Sixty-Third Street and St. Lawrence Avenue, in a totally black area of town. A native of Itta Bena, Mississippi, Johnson had moved to Chicago in 1955. This was the first time Bloomfield played in a South Side club. By some stroke of luck, these barely postpubescent Jewish kids from Glencoe, way up north, were not only allowed in but received the privilege of sitting at a front table. Astonishingly, it was an audition night, and Michael got a taste of the electric blues, Chicago style.
“Do you remember what it sounded like, coming down the street, hearing the music before you got in the club?” Michael asked Roy Ruby during their 1971 interview with Dan McClosky. “The excitement you would feel hearing that blues coming out the doorway, halfway down the block?”
“I was afraid,” Ruby replied. “I was in a strange place and you presumably knew where we were, vaguely, and you had heard about this place.” Welcome to blues culture: the band included a mean-looking bassist who played with a thumb pick and a fat female saxophonist who wore a red dress. She decided that this kid was worth having fun with, and she walked over to the front table and engaged Ruby in a surrealistic question-and-answer session:
“She said, ‘You got it?’ ‘Got what? What do you mean?’ ‘You got it? What you got? You’ve got it, don’t you?’ Now everyone is laughing; the whole place is breaking up; people are falling all over [themselves]. There are two fourteen-year-old white kids sitting in the middle of this place. I mean, this is before the blues movement started, and these people were friendly. They didn’t know about white people. They were just friendly. Everyone’s cracking up. She said, ‘You’ve got it, don’t you?’ I said, ‘What do you mean? What do I have?’ This goes on about twenty-five minutes. I’m completely embarrassed, crawling under the table, don’t know what is going on. It’s like being in Africa or something. And they’re like, you know, ‘What’s the password?’ When I finally gave up and was about to slink out the door, finally she blasts out the answer. She turns around, takes the saxophone from her mouth, spreads her arms wide, spreads her legs, leans backward, looks at the ceiling and screams, ‘You’ve got your ass, don’t you?’”
Years later, the story still had the power to reduce Ruby and Bloomfield to giggling idiots.
That was a historic evening. Not only did they discover how easygoing black clubs could be, but they were gratified to discover that the Place’s patrons enjoyed the way Michael was playing the blues.
“I’d come home from boarding school, and Michael has now graduated from playing with little bands around New Trier,” Ruby told Dan McClosky. “We drove around Chicago in the back of a truck playing acoustic instruments. We stopped once at an empty storefront in downtown Chicago. We got out of the truck, loaded our instruments into the storefront, plugged them in, and began playing the one song that we knew how to play. We played this one song for about a year, ‘Hurricane.’ We played it loud until the police came. Somebody came and threw us out of there.”
Michael lasted less than a year at Cornwall. Fred Glaser remembered that the duo came home in 1960 with quantities of marijuana in their pockets. Michael tried to reenroll in New Trier, but he wasn’t allowed to graduate. He ended up going to Central YMCA High School in the Loop, where Nick Gravenites, who was five years older than Michael, had already done a stint. “[It] was where they all go after they’ve been thrown out of the public schools . . . full of junior hoodlums and hoodlumettes,” Gravenites told me. At Central, Michael reconnected with another troublemaker who had gotten thrown out of high school. Barry Goldberg knew about Michael, who had gained a reputation as one of the hottest guitarists on the North Side. They had run into each other while leading rival teenage rock ’n’ roll groups on the North Side, and Goldberg had played piano in the house band at a club called Teenland, where he built up his chops by backing up such visiting artists as Johnny Tillotson and Ral Donner.
Most of Michael’s playing would be done on the North Side, in rock ’n’ roll bands playing Top 40 hits and wearing uniforms while the all-white crowd jitterbugged on the floor. But his hanging out—every moment he could spare away from paying gigs—was done on the South Side. One of the first places they went was Pepper’s, the bar that was Muddy Waters’s domain. Because they were underage, they were forced to stand on the sidewalk while Muddy played inside, though he did come out to shake their hands in between sets. Muddy was the unquestioned godfather of the Chicago blues scene, the source of the Chicago sound, and the man who had gone from Stovall’s plantation in Mississippi to become the king of the South Side.
“I would go down the street, man, and from two blocks away I’d hear that harmonica come out of the club, I’d hear that harp,” Michael told Dan McClosky. “And I’d hear Muddy‘s slide. I’d be trembling. I’d be like a dog in heat. I didn’t know what to do. I’d get near that place, man, and I’d be all aquiver. . . . I heard Elmore James,” he told Dan McClosky. “I heard Sonny Boy, Little Walter, Wolf, Muddy, Albert King, way before they were known anywhere but the ghetto. Lowell Fulson, and many of the smaller, more obscure cats: [J. B.] Hutto, Jimmy Rogers, Eddie Taylor, this guy named Little Mack [Simmons]. Endless guys. By the time I was around seventeen, I was interested in it from a musicological standpoint. . . . I would go down there thinking I was really some hot stuff, you know, ’cause I had some fast fingers and I had plenty of licks, but I didn’t have no soul or nothing. All I had was that speed and some brash Jewboy confidence. I would go down there, and I wouldn’t know what the hell made my music different. Why couldn’t I really sound like them other cats sounded?” He later brushed off the experience by saying, “Well, you got to fuck up there.” But he’d had his taste and he wanted more.