Growing up on the South Side of Chicago, Nick Gravenites was a roly-poly Greek kid running around the family business, Candyland, a store that sold cigars and magazines along with the ice cream, candy, and flavored syrups that were made right in the back of the shop. Gravenites was born in 1938 to Greek immigrant parents who lived in Brighton Park, a southwest Chicago neighborhood that he later described in his column Bad Talkin’ Bluesman as a “white ghetto.”
Located at Thirty-Fifth Street and Archer Avenue, Candyland was a paradise of gleaming tile and mirrored walls, complete with a Rock-Ola jukebox. Nick Gravenites’s father, George, had turned it into a thriving concern, but he died when Nick was eleven years old. Nick went to work at the busy shop, and the young boy became aware of the gulf between the habits and aspirations of his parents and the glittering possibilities of American life in a huge city.
His early life paralleled Michael Bloomfield’s in many ways. When Gravenites turned thirteen, he became a discipline problem for his parents and teachers. Hanging out in the neighborhood streets, the stocky youngster began smoking cigarettes, participated in muggings, and stole from local warehouses. In 1951 he went to St. John’s Military Academy in Wisconsin, lasted three and a half years, and got himself expelled shortly before he was set to graduate. Gravenites wound up at the Central YMCA High School, the same educational institution that Michael Bloomfield and Barry Goldberg would attend a few years later. Impressed by his writing skill, an English teacher at Central had taken a special interest in Nick, and almost before Nick knew what had happened, he found he’d applied to—and been accepted by—the University of Chicago.
“The university was sort of a pocket of sanity in the midst of Chicago stick-’em-up,” Gravenites told me. “It was the only area besides the Near North Side where there was any interracial housing. It had a sort of a radical reputation, and it was sort of like an island.” It also had one of the first big campus folk scenes. Nick entered the University of Chicago in 1956, and he was immediately drawn to this bohemian, rebellious scene. It was huge and it was diverse. Some of the folkies were busy investigating the Appalachian folk tradition, playing banjos and reading about folklorists’ field trips. Others naturally went for the more commercial aspects like the Kingston Trio–style singers. Still others went for blues. The University of Chicago Folklore Society encouraged students to take an interest in all of it, and Gravenites was eager to learn.
“Folk music at that time, and particularly at the University of Chicago, was really a big deal,” Gravenites told me years later. “There were hundreds of people that came to these hootenannies. It was a huge organization, and everybody was listening to folk records at that time.” Folk fans in 1956 were listening to Harry Belafonte and to the Weavers, but they were also discovering the music of such blues performers as Leadbelly, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Josh White, and Big Bill Broonzy.
“When they held get-togethers, they’d have to hire the big hall to fit ’em all in,” Gravenites said about the Folklore Society’s hootenannies and wingdings. “During orientation week, thousands of people would show up to their activities. And there was a lot of interchange between Chicago and Ann Arbor and Madison, Wisconsin, too.
“We were some of the first people to start the folk revival, and we were the first to start playing electric music, electric blues, which was heresy to the folkies on the East Coast, something they still haven’t forgiven us for.”
Along the fringes of the folk scene were a bunch of people not too different from Gravenites’s old self. His thuggish, hoodlum impulses hadn’t been completely tamed by college life, and Gravenites roamed around Chicago, guitar case in hand. He met banjo players, dulcimer experts, and pool sharks. Along the way, he picked up basic guitar skills from a fellow University of Chicago student named Ed Gaines. Shooting pool at the University Club, Gravenites got to know the bootblack who worked at the club’s barbershop and held down a second job as a bouncer at a place called Frader’s Jukebox Lounge, which was located at 834 East Forty-Third Street on the South Side. Frader’s would become one of Gravenites’s regular hangouts, but he saw his first electric blues show at the 708 Club, at 708 East Forty-Seventh Street. One day in 1958 a friend of his, John Reiland, took Gravenites down to the club, and it was a revelation.
As Gravenites later said about the 708 Club, “Whites didn’t know about it, but blacks did.” What he and his friends saw at the 708 Club was nothing less than a battle of the bands between two great blues performers, Junior Parker and Otis Rush. Parker’s band had a horn section, while Rush played the kind of biting lead guitar that the young Michael Bloomfield was no doubt studying at the same time.
“It was the loudest music I had ever heard in my life,” Gravenites wrote three decades later in one of a brilliant series of columns for Blues Revue magazine. “After two sets, I was glad to get out of there.” Suitably impressed, Gravenites began catching the blues revues at Frader’s, which boasted its own live broadcasts and a sound truck that would blast out advertisements for the club as it rolled through the local streets. A typical evening would start out with a dancer performing in a skimpy outfit, and an array of singers would receive the expert backing of the house band, a drummer, and a Hammond organ player.
“I’d been basically a folk player,” Gravenites told me. “But I started hanging out in this club because, well, I drank heavily, smoked reefers, dropped bennies, wore shades at midnight. I was armed most of the time, and I was a little bit nuts, a beatnik hoodlum. That’s what I figured I had to be in order to do this thing. I think that’s what the blues scene was for a lot of us white guys, a lesson in race, in color, in externals; a lesson in going through prejudice and ignorance all the way through to the other side.
“It wasn’t a race relations type of thing; we were just funky people, that’s all. It was the music that got me. I’d go to Frader’s and smoke reefers in the back with the boys, drink, get fucked up, party and run around, and eventually I got to sit in, as a joke, like a comedy act. It was an all-black audience. So I’d get up there and do a couple of Lightnin’ Hopkins tunes, and people would laugh, like, ‘Look at this—a white boy singin’ blues!’ To them, it was welcome comedic relief.”
As Gravenites remembers, “Back in the old days, we used to read articles that asked, ‘Can whites play the blues?’ The folk music magazines pretty much discounted all white blues, just as a matter of policy.” So when Gravenites described hanging out in black blues clubs as something that went beyond race relations, he was pointing to a split between the way white fans of folk and blues perceived the music and the way its black practitioners lived it. In Gravenites’s philosophy, blues music was both a way of life and a musical aesthetic that blacks and whites had to work to master. Visiting a place like Frader’s was about being alert, staying cool, and developing a realistic, tolerant view of the less salutary aspects of human nature that were on display in the blues clubs.
“I was under the initial impression that the ghetto was dangerous to me and that blacks were trouble for me, but after my initiation into the blues culture I realized that I was the dangerous one, I was potential trouble, because I didn’t understand nothin’ about nothin’, living in a white man’s fantasy world,” Gravenites wrote in a 1995 Blues Revue column. “I didn’t understand about ‘woofin’,’ the boasting, the name-calling, the bluster and bluff, the verbal give-and-take of the black culture I was a guest in. Sure, there was a lot of violence in the bars, but a lot of it was hollerin’ and screaming, brandishing weapons, shootin’ guns in the floor and in the ceiling, getting a brick from the street, but rarely did anyone get killed.”
Eventually a small coterie from the University of Chicago began making the scene in these clubs. They were mostly folkies who, like Michael, woke up one day to the fact that the greatest blues being made at the time were being played just a few blocks from the university. There was Elvin Bishop, a National Merit Scholar from Oklahoma, who was beginning to play serious electric guitar, and Norman Dayron, a sociology teacher who had started at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1958. Born in the Bronx in 1940, Dayron had a strong interest in hi-fi, and he lugged tape recorders into the clubs and made some historic recordings.
Meanwhile, Paul Butterfield was another Chicago guy who had been investigating clubs on his own. A South Side kid who grew up near the university, Butterfield was a self-possessed young man with impeccable manners and a sure feel for the dynamics of complex social situations. He immediately ingratiated himself to the blues performers and audiences on the South Side.
“He wasn’t too good when I first noticed him,” Muddy Waters told me, “but he got good.”
Gravenites agreed. “He was another part of the comic relief in these blues revues, except that he was really good,” he said. “The black audiences loved this guy, and not even in an audience-and-performer way. It was an emotional thing. He was a nice kid, and he’d play shuffleboard and pinball with the regulars, and then when it got to be his turn, he’d get up there with his harp and really blow.”
These university blues fans discovered that bands held residencies at the blues clubs. Muddy Waters held down Pepper’s at 503 East Forty-Third Street, while Magic Sam could be found at the 620 Club at 620 East Sixty-Third Street. Earl Hooker and Junior Wells helped cement their reputations at Theresa’s Lounge at 4801 South Indiana Avenue, and Howlin’ Wolf ruled Silvio’s, owned by Silvio Corazza, at 3200 West Lake Street. There was no cover, just a security guard to get past at the door.
Of course, the residency rule wasn’t hard and fast. There were open clubs and there were often jams at clubs. And there was the time-honored tradition of “headhunting”: if a group had a good gig, another band would come along and try to take it from them. “Muddy Waters had established the precedent of headhunting,” Michael told me. “His band was called the Headhunters, and they would go out and find other bands and try and just ruin ’em, make ’em look so bad they’d never get hired there anymore.”
But the music that came out of all this could be exciting, and Michael, as much as the university crowd, was going to school in these clubs every chance he could get. Norman Dayron says that, unlike the crowd he hung with, which included Gravenites and Butterfield, Michael never bothered to carry a gun or to watch out for himself in any way. He was in it for the experience and was relaxed enough that nobody ever paid him any mind.
Nothing, it seemed, would stop Michael from investigating the blues. “For a while, it was sort of shocking,” Bloomfield told Dan McClosky. “And after a while, that’s just how it was and I didn’t even think about it no more. It was just how people were, you know. You played at a club where there were a lot of pimps and bad guys. Like, a bad guy was a guy who had a gun and would use it. You would call that cat a bad guy, because he would shoot you if you had trouble. You just got used to it. Everybody robbed from everybody else. Everybody was guilty, everybody was innocent. They were the poor innocent guilty children of messed-up ghetto society. I remember Wolf used to introduce me. He used to say, ‘I got some white friends from the suboibs down here tonight,’ and he’d introduce me. I’d be up there playing, and some dude would pull a gun on another dude, and another dude would pull a knife on another dude, and the whole band would hide.”
During his 1971 interview with Dan McClosky, Bloomfield told a story about South Side club life that gave McClosky pause. “Oh, man, I remember a time I was standing at a bar and a guy walked in, and he took a woman’s head and slammed it on the bar top, and he said, ‘Bartender, get this bitch a beer,’” Bloomfield said. “That freaked everybody out.”
McClosky asked, “How did she recover from it?”
“Her head—her severed head—was put on the bar,” Bloomfield clarified. “She wasn’t there; it was her head. See, you don’t understand the story. This guy cut off his old lady’s head in some horrible fight, and took her head, and slammed it down on top of the bar. What a scene that was. I was appalled.”
It’s a good story, but Bloomfield had a habit of embellishing the truth to keep himself and everyone around him interested. When he met his wife, Susan Smith, he told her the story of how he had once been a Mouseketeer. She later said that Michael “lied all the time, but it wasn’t lying . . . he liked to tell people what they wanted to hear. He would tell elaborate stories, and people would believe him. But I’ve never thought of him as a dishonest person.” Maybe he did see a man slam down a paper bag with his wife’s head in it and demand she be served a drink. But Charlie Musselwhite said he didn’t believe it. “That never happened,” he told writers Jan Mark Wolkin and Bill Keenom in 2000. “That’s a folk tale in Chicago. I’ve heard that over and over from different people—different versions of it, you know.”
For the most part, however, Michael kept to himself. The university clique had their own social thing going on, which included weekly twist parties, as they were called. These started out as Wednesday-night record parties in the student lounge, which was called the New Dorm, and moved to Ida Noyes Hall, the student union. When Paul Butterfield and Elvin Bishop began taking them over, they became dance parties featuring Butterfield, Bishop, and such South Side blues players as Little Walter, who sat in a few times with them in a group called the Southside Olympic Blues Team. They played to a racially mixed audience that included students and people from the surrounding neighborhood.
Michael’s scene was different. “I was doing three types of gigs,” he told me. “I was playing with fraternity bands from Northwestern, who were playing all these roadhouses and liquor joints in nowhere places like Highwood, an army base town, or DeKalb, Illinois—all these shit bars with us playing Top 40. Then, anytime I could get a gig with a black band, like at the Pride and Joy, I took that. I would play with the lowliest black guy just for the experience. Then I would do folk gigs by myself whenever I could, and then Sundays, I would play Jewtown, an open market in Maxwell Street, where anybody who could play music would come and play for whatever money people would put in the hat. I was making enough to stay alive, but no more than that.
“Then, when I was eighteen years old, I gave up the electric guitar. I thought there was no future in rock ’n’ roll. For three years, I played nothing but acoustic folk music. Not like the Weavers or Pete Seeger, but more like fingerpicking sessions with guys like Danny Kalb or Mitch Greenhill. I played with bluegrass bands and learned all those licks.”
During his folkie period, Bloomfield studied all manner of acoustic music, and the radio, again, provided him with part of his education. “Because of the atmospheric conditions around Chicago, he could pick up bluegrass stations like WWVA from Wheeling, West Virginia, where you could hear the Stanley Brothers or the Blue Sky Boys or the Delmore Brothers, as well as some of the more commercial things,” Norman Dayron recalled. “But I think you heard more of the pure stuff than the commercial stuff. You could hear Bill Monroe. You could hear Ralph and Carter Stanley.”
He collected records by Doc Watson, Merle Travis, and Chet Atkins, and listened hard to blues players such as Skip James, Robert Wilkins, and Blind Blake. There were a lot of great American guitarists to check out, and more being discovered (or rediscovered) every day, or so it seemed.
As part of the folkie scene, Michael took to hanging around the Fret Shop, the local folklore emporium. Located near the University of Chicago on Fifty-Seventh Street, it was a place where you could buy guitars, strings, and songbooks, and generally hang around picking and shooting the shit with the other folkniks of the period. Nick Gravenites met Michael there in 1960, and he remembered how impressed he was by Michael’s playing. “[He was] sittin’ there playing the guitar and his fingers just flying all over the fuckin’ fret-board, and I was jealous,” Gravenites told me. “He was younger than me, he was a smart-ass Jewish punk from the North Side, and . . . it wasn’t that he was particularly offensive, it’s just that he was so talented, it pissed you off.”
Dayron also first met Bloomfield at the Fret Shop—in the fall of 1960—and he had an experience similar to Gravenites’s. “I’m standing in the shop, and I hear this fantastic three-finger guitar playing—very fast, very clean,” he said. “I thought it was a record or something. I thought [owner] Pete [Leibundguth] was playing this very hip thing, so I turned around to see where this music was coming from, and I see this guy sitting on a metal chair, bent over one of his guitars that was in the store. . . . It was almost like he had this perfect tension between his fingers and the strings, and it was just tremendously alive music.”
During his folk period, Bloomfield continued to work at his Uncle Max’s pawnshop on Clark Street, and he was a conduit for guitars to the folkies. It was there, after he’d forsworn electric music, that a couple of girls came looking for a guitar in the spring of 1961. “It was a crummy kind of neighborhood,” Susan Smith told me. “But my friend decided she wanted a guitar, and that’s where you went to get a guitar. We went to his grandfather’s pawnshop, and I don’t think I ever would have met him otherwise.” There was something about Susan that attracted Michael immediately, although it certainly wasn’t mutual.
“The first date I canceled,” she said with a smile. “He was very aggressive. I’d never met anybody like him. He told me all kinds of crazy stories. And we lived so far apart. He was in Glencoe and I was at 8600 South, and I don’t know how many miles that was, but it was a lot. But we did finally have our first date, because we went to a movie that Frank Hamilton, whom I was taking banjo lessons from at the time, was in, and then we went to the Fickle Pickle coffeehouse, where he wanted to sit in with some guitar player. I had no idea who it was. He was lugging around his amplifier and some big black Gibson guitar. It was just part of him.”
The couple had plenty in common besides folk music. They both hated their home environments and felt stifled by their parents. They spent as much time as they could together, exploring Chicago, with Michael blowing Susan’s mind with his knowledge of the city. She introduced him to the Folklore Society at the university and the more organized aspects of the folk scene. She couldn’t have cared less that he was a musician, and even disasters like having to jump-start his car every time they wanted to drive somewhere seemed insignificant when compared with the fact that they had found each other, were in love, and were in the middle of a city whose every block seemed to hum with music and energy of one sort or another.
Bloomfield briefly attended Roosevelt University in 1961, and in early 1962 he played the University of Chicago Folk Festival, where he performed with blues singer Reverend Gary Davis. During the spring, he played electric guitar at the twist parties at Ida Noyes Hall. Then, that summer, Bloomfield and Fred Glaser took a Greyhound bus to Denver, Colorado. They needed to get out of town for a while—Glaser was trying to avoid marrying his girlfriend, whom he had gotten pregnant, and Bloomfield was ready for a vacation. They hung out in Five Points, a black neighborhood in Denver, and hitchhiked the forty miles north to Boulder.
Bloomfield played at the Sink in Boulder, and he recorded four blues guitar pieces in the kitchen of the coffeehouse across the street, the Attic. He was giving Judy Roderick, a Michigan-born folk and blues singer who was singing in Boulder and Denver clubs, some pointers on blues guitar styles.
After returning with Bloomfield to Chicago in the fall, Glaser acceded to the inevitable and got married. Soon after, Bloomfield and Susan Smith followed suit. Fred and Bobbie Glaser came along for the ride as best man and maid of honor when Bloomfield and Susan Smith went across the state line to New Buffalo, Michigan, to make it official on September 4, 1962.
The newlyweds kept their marriage secret for a couple of weeks, and they didn’t live together. When Michael’s and Susan’s families finally found out about it, they were opposed to the marriage—Susan wasn’t Jewish, for one thing—but it was Michael’s mother who rallied first. “I thought he was too young to get married, but once they did it, I threw a big cocktail party,” Dorothy told me. “My husband was opposed to it, but I threw the party, and I accepted Susan, and she’s been my friend ever since.”
Susan found employment with an insurance company, and Michael continued to play for whatever money he could make. They got a place to live in the Carl Sandburg Village apartments at 1360 Sandburg Terrace, and Bloomfield got deeper into his experiential blues research, with more and more of a scholarly tone coming into it. Susan fed Michael’s interest in acoustic folk music, and part of his fanaticism for the first generation of Chicago bluesmen is traceable to her influence.
Then he realized something: he could continue to research the blues, help the players themselves, and make money doing it! He approached Herman Fleishman, the owner of the Fickle Pickle club, located on Rush Street, and before long, he was the manager, booker, and hamburger chef.