5
THE FICKLE PICKLE, BIG JOE, AND BIG JOHN’S
Charlie Musselwhite, a harmonica player who had come to Chicago from Memphis in 1962 looking for a factory job and stayed to play the blues, described the Fickle Pickle to me as “a coffee place, where you could get cider, coffee, and stuff like that. This was before sprouts, although they would’ve had ’em if they’d known about ’em, and they’d let you smoke in there.” It was a basement club that seated about one hundred patrons, where beatnik comics and folkies mingled with blues fanatics.
It was the perfect place for Michael Bloomfield to indulge what he admitted was becoming an increasingly musicological interest in the blues. He had begun to read what books there were at the time on the history of the blues, and probably pored over Samuel Charters’s 1959 book The Country Blues and Paul Oliver’s 1960 volume Blues Fell This Morning, two pioneering studies of the subject. He discovered that the musicians he’d seen on the South Side, like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, represented the second wave of black immigrants from the South, and that the Chicago blues scene had actually started in the 1930s, when people like Memphis Minnie, Tampa Red, and Big Bill Broonzy found out there was money to be made, people to play for, and even records to be cut, largely for RCA Victor’s Chicago-based Bluebird label. Lonnie Johnson had played his first Chicago date in 1930, and Big Maceo Merriweather, Johnny Shines, Washboard Sam, and John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson had performed in South Side Chicago clubs in the 1930s and ’40s. This revelation drove the musicologist in Michael crazy, and he spent a great deal of time seeking out the survivors of that long-ago time.
“Some of these old guys had died, but a lot of them were still working, and they were getting the dregs of the gigs because nobody wanted to see them,” he told me. “The people who had gone to see them were getting too old to go to bars anymore, and they were all on welfare and couldn’t get around and whatnot. The younger crowd all wanted to see people like Magic Sam and Otis Rush and the even younger, more R&B-influenced guys like Ricky Allen, Lee ‘Shot’ Williams, Eddie King, and Bobby King.”
Norman Dayron described to me a visit to a Chicago blues club that occurred in 1962 or 1963. “One time we went to a bar called the Pride and Joy on West Ogden Avenue, the roughest bar that exists in the world,” Dayron said. “The minute we came in, a shotgun came out, and the bartender started giving us this spiel about how he’d pulled the shotgun not because of us, but because this guy was coming down with a shotgun to blow his wife’s lover away, and he was going to blow this guy away the minute he walked through the door. And that’s just what happened! But Michael was there to play.”
And it’s understandable, from Michael’s point of view, because he remembered that day as being a jam. “The band consisted of Chuck Berry, me, Little Walter, Sam Lay, Sunnyland Slim on organ, and some putz on bass,” he told me. “I think Charlie Musselwhite played on that gig, too, and our theme was ‘Canadian Sunset.’”
Bloomfield’s research also led him to the Jazz Record Mart at 7 West Grand Avenue in Chicago, a place most blues fans found sooner or later. It was run by an eccentric named Bob Koester who operated a record label, Delmark, which recorded many of the old and new blues crowd, as well as the earliest efforts by the important Chicago avant-garde jazz scene. The Jazz Record Mart was a haven for rare records, occasional concerts, and often the artists themselves, who lived in the basement when they couldn’t find other accommodations. Nobody actually seems to have gotten along with Koester, but everybody admitted that it was his love for the blues that rescued from premature obscurity such important performers as Sleepy John Estes.
Koester, who had come to Chicago after starting Delmark in St. Louis in the 1950s, had been booking blues concerts at a bar called the Blind Pig. By the time Bloomfield and the other University of Chicago blues enthusiasts met Koester, Musselwhite was sleeping on a cot in the basement of the Jazz Record Mart. Another guest at Koester’s was guitarist and singer Big Joe Williams, who would exert a tremendous influence on Bloomfield and his friends.
The nineteen-year-old Musselwhite had an easygoing personality, but his relationship with Koester was often tense. As Bloomfield told Dan McClosky about Musselwhite, “People just naturally loved him. They loved him ’cause he was just country—country to the toes.” Williams had a more irascible personality, though. Born in Crawford, Mississippi, in 1903, Williams had worked in medicine shows in the South after World War I and had recorded for the Paramount and Okeh labels in the 1930s. Known for his songwriting ability and his nine-string guitar, Williams had more recently played Chicago’s Gate of Horn and Limelight Cafe.
By all accounts, Williams often clashed with Koester, who took umbrage at the blues singer’s drinking and erratic behavior. Talking to Dan McClosky in 1971, Bloomfield described one incident involving the two men: “We bought [Williams] beer, and Koester got on the phone and called the police, and said, ‘There’s a large, irate Negro here, and he has to be removed,’ and Joe hit him with the telephone.”
In early 1963 Koester recorded Bloomfield with Williams, guitarist Sleepy John Estes, mandolinist Yank Rachell, and harmonica player Hammie Nixon. The music on the resulting album, Mandolin Blues, is rough-and-ready acoustic blues, with Nixon’s harmonica squeaking above Rachell’s acid mandolin licks and Bloomfield’s rhythm guitar.
Seeing the success Koester was having with his blues concerts at the Blind Pig, Bloomfield instituted a regular Tuesday-night blues gig at the Fickle Pickle. “We presented just about every blues singer that was alive in Chicago at that time,” he said proudly. And the shows attracted blues fanatics from everywhere. Michael remembered meeting Texas guitarist Johnny Winter at the Fickle Pickle in 1963.
Unlike Koester, Bloomfield had just the kind of outgoing, enthusiastic personality the Fickle Pickle needed to draw customers. Bloomfield began booking Tuesday-night shows in June 1963 with the help of Pete Welding, a Chicago writer he had gotten to know, and a young Florida-born blues fan named George Mitchell. Mitchell had come to Chicago earlier that year and had gone to work for Koester at the record shop. He was already an old hand at discovering blues musicians, having traveled to Memphis, Mississippi, and Atlanta as a teenager in 1961 and 1962 to record the likes of Will Shade, Furry Lewis, and fife player Othar Turner.
Mitchell and Bloomfield became fast friends, and the two began bringing in local talent. “We found people who hadn’t played in ages anywhere, like Washboard Sam, Jazz Gillum, Lazy Lester, and Sunnyland Slim,” Mitchell remembers. “Sunnyland was the main one who took me around findin’ the people.”
No one was making a lot of money booking blues acts into the Fickle Pickle, as Mitchell remembers. “We had to pay [owner Herman Fleishman’s] waitress, and the only money we got was at the door. And it was cheap,” he says. The cover charge was one dollar, and Mitchell and Bloomfield made between twenty and forty dollars a week. The coffeehouse didn’t have a liquor license, but Fleishman also owned a nearby package store called Larry’s Lounge; and once Michael began booking Fickle Pickle shows, he would make a habit of emptying the cash drawer after each set and taking the money down the street to Larry’s, where he could buy beer and whiskey for his friends.
To draw people into the Fickle Pickle, Bloomfield resorted to some innovative show-business tactics. “It was hilarious. He had on dark glasses, and had a tin can and a cane, like he was blind,” remembers Mitchell. “He’d be sittin’ on the sidewalk with his tin cup, making his pitch.”
As the club became better known, Big Joe Williams began to play there on Monday nights. Bloomfield and Mitchell also relied on Williams and his seemingly endless connections to guide them to old-time Chicago blues players. He took them around Chicago to meet such blues performers as Kokomo Arnold, Jazz Gillum, and Tommy McLennan, who lay dying from tuberculosis in Cook County Hospital.
Many of the old bluesmen were acoustic players, and not only were they attractive to the Pickle’s crowd, but the folkies on the University of Chicago campus liked them, too. “We became friends with those old guys,” Susan told me. “We’d take them to the university for concerts, and once we took Big Joe Williams to Grinnell, Iowa, for a concert. We both felt that this was a very important thing for us to be doing, that we were really helping out and doing something historically valid, even apart from the fact that we really liked them.
“They never actually came to live in our apartment, but it was crazy because they were alien. They lived in these crazy places on Maxwell Street where you’d never want to go. I learned so much. I remember this one old guy, I can’t remember his name, but we all had ice creams, and this guy spilled ice cream on his pants and he was so upset. I thought that was pretty odd, but when I mentioned it to Michael later, he said, ‘Well, that’s probably the only pair of pants he had.’ That had just never occurred to me.”
While Bloomfield was cultivating the company of Chicago bluesmen, he continued to play folk music. Norman Dayron recorded Bloomfield playing solo acoustic guitar in Chicago in early 1964, and the performances he captured suggest that Bloomfield had been absorbing ragtime-style guitar. Bloomfield’s rendition of his original composition “Bullet Rag” displays prodigious technique. Meanwhile, the traditional folk tune “J.P. Morgan” gives Bloomfield a chance to show off his sense of humor and sardonic, if amateurish, vocal style. As he would be in his later career, Bloomfield was a song collector as much as he was a guitarist—his technique was tempered by a feel for what the lyrics of songs could convey, and he was listening to the Nashville recordings of George Jones, Faron Young, and Ray Price during the early 1960s. He would later include Jack Clement’s well-known country tune “Just Someone I Used to Know” in his live sets.
Of all the musicians who were around the scene, it was Big Joe Williams who wound up being Michael Bloomfield’s good friend. Essentially a country blues musician, Williams had adapted to the times and played his tunes on an amplified nine-string Silvertone guitar. When Bloomfield and his crowd met him, Williams had been traveling for at least forty of his sixty years, selling himself on the basis of having written the blues classic “Baby Please Don’t Go.” He’d covered the South and Midwest, the Eastern Seaboard, anywhere his talents could earn him a warm bed and, perhaps even more important, a jug of whiskey. If there was a bluesman alive whom Williams didn’t know, and know how to reach, that bluesman probably wasn’t such a big deal.
Publicizing them like crazy, Michael tossed plenty of Fickle Pickle gigs Williams’s way, and a sort of friendship grew up between this odd couple of the blues. Big Joe began to trust Michael enough to want to introduce him to his world, and Michael, in turn, introduced his friends to Joe’s world. One incident involving Michael’s friend Roy Ruby is a good illustration of how this crowd maintained their tenuous relationships. (This story, and another one that was even more dramatic, would later show up in Bloomfield’s 1980 book, Me and Big Joe.)
Ruby had come back to Chicago from boarding school, and Michael asked him to help out with Williams, who had a gig that he wanted to go to. Bloomfield, Ruby, and Charlie Musselwhite traveled with Williams to a roadhouse near Gary, Indiana. The trio of young white blues performers played on the show as comic relief. As Ruby remembered it, the place was located among steel mills and coal fields, and it consisted of a barbecue pit in front and a large room in back, where the band played. The bill was a good one: J. B. Lenoir’s big band, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Sunnyland Slim, and saxophonist A. C. Reed. Ruby drove his mother’s car.
“[Williams] is about sixty years old at this time, and all his life he loves to fight,” Ruby told Dan McClosky. “He has scars, thirty wives, a lump on his head like an egg, and Big Joe was a powerful, incredibly strong man. At the age of sixty he looked like he could put a fist through a brick wall. And this man, he would get angry and sullen. When I used to know him and he’d get like that, he’d usually direct it against Koester.
“I thought he was a folk singer, and I’m going out there with Charlie. Charlie lives with him, Michael knows him. Everyone knows, and they’re sort of giggling behind my back. I don’t know what I’m getting into. So we’re out there, and my God, man, Lightnin’ Hopkins and Big Joe sat at a table by themselves the whole night. It’s a gigantic room, like an auditorium almost, with a cement floor, and metal chairs, and metal tables with Formica tops on them. It was amazing to think, this is like the blues circuit—this is where Jimmy Reed plays, people like that.”
Big Joe and Lightnin’ drank two or three bottles of whiskey. As Ruby remembered it, Williams became sullen and angry, and on the way home he made a series of barely decipherable utterances. “All the way back, [Joe’s] giving me these cursory directions: ‘Left!’ And I was embarrassed to ask him what he meant, because I felt I was denigrating the Negro dialect by asking him, over and over, what he was saying. Every time I’d ask him, he’d get more and more angry. Sometimes I’d disagree with him. I’d say, ‘I think we went this way when we came.’”
The trio finally reached their destination. “[It was] like the most incredible slum of Chicago transplanted somewhere out in the country, for some reason,” Ruby said. “You’re out in the country and you get to this place, and you begin walking through, and it’s a huge area, like a city block of houses built up in these weird ways.” They walked up a flight of stairs to a small apartment, which contained some of Big Joe’s kinfolk—his brother-in-law or sister-in-law, Ruby wasn’t sure. Everyone gathered around Big Joe, asked him where he’d been, and someone gave Ruby a beer.
“Finally things cool down, and Joe says, ‘Let’s go,’” Ruby said. “And he’s still pretty drunk, but he’s sort of mellowed. He was pissed at me for being scared, you see. He could feel that I was scared. He was protecting me, and he was going to do me the favor of taking me to see his family. I remember, he was real excited to bring us out there. We were his protégés, and he introduced us to everybody.”
It was a strange relationship that these young white kids had with the older man. He never really said what he expected from them, and they tried to give him what they thought he wanted. What was in it for them, of course, was the blues experience, the experience of relating to people from another reality. Big Joe was handy, and he wasn’t averse to it.
Michael finally had his fill of the relationship after a frightening 1964 weekend trip to East St. Louis. This time, George Mitchell and another Chicago friend of theirs were along for the ride.
As Bloomfield told the story to Dan McClosky, they had traveled to East St. Louis over the Fourth of July weekend, and it was hot. Bloomfield followed Williams around all day, and Bloomfield got drunk. The next morning, Big Joe made breakfast for his young student of the blues.
“I was laying there, with my first real hangover,” Bloomfield said. “He was standing over me raving drunk at seven in the morning, with a barbecued pig nose, dripping hot sauce on my naked chest, burning me, and he was glowering at me, offering it to me for breakfast.” The day got worse. Bloomfield followed Williams up a flight of stairs, where a very obese teenage girl sat at the top, unable to fit inside her apartment. “She was dipping spare ribs in an old mayonnaise jar, in mayonnaise that looked like Unguentine,” Bloomfield said. “It had been curdled in the sun. I see this woman up there and she’s doing this, and I say, ‘Joe, I gotta leave.’”
Williams didn’t want to leave. He was there trying to find a fiddle player named Jimmy Brown, who had recently cut a record with Williams titled Back to the Country. Michael and Big Joe began to disagree. “I had to leave,” Bloomfield said. “I was slummed out. Joe wasn’t about to leave, and we had a huge fight. I said, ‘Man, I’m leaving you here in East St. Louis. I’m going back to Chicago.’ Joe wouldn’t let me leave, and he grabbed me by the arm, and I snatched my arm back, and I said, ‘I’m leaving.’ And he went downstairs carrying this tape recorder and his amplifier and his guitar, a real heavy amplifier and tape recorder, and he got in the car. And I said, ‘We’re going back to Chicago.’ He said, ‘No! We gonna visit my people! My people live here!’ I said, ‘OK, listen, get out of the car, because I’m going back to Chicago. You get out the car, man, you just get out of the car.’”
Big Joe refused to get out of the car, and they scuffled. Big Joe stabbed Michael’s hand with his penknife, and Michael kicked Big Joe hard in the stomach. “And then we looked at each other and we both felt real bad,” Bloomfield said. “It was like hitting my father or something, and he was real bad for getting so drunk and hurting me. He got out of the car, and the last thing I saw as we drove away was this old man walking down this dusty road with his guitar and his amplifier, just walking down the dusty road back toward East St. Louis.”
Back in Chicago, the two men saw each other about three weeks later, as Bloomfield remembered. “And you know what he said to me, real embarrassed? You know, he used to get this real boyish, bashful look on his face. He said, ‘We sure had us a time in St. Louis, didn’t we, man?’ I said, ‘Yeah, man, we sure had us a time.’”
Maybe it was this experience that showed Michael once and for all that, good as he might be at playing the blues, he was still not part of its milieu, and by virtue of his upbringing never could be. As he told Dan McClosky, the trip had been a put-on from the beginning. The blues fans had asked Williams to help them find a couple of old-time artists, Walter Davis and Mary Johnson, and Williams had agreed, even though he had no idea where they were. All Big Joe wanted to do was visit his kin. Bloomfield said the experience was a classic example of “a gypsy good time,” which means not getting what you came for—in this case, being literally taken for a ride. Maybe Bloomfield decided to stay in his place and work for the blues in any way he could as a white Jewish kid from the North Side. Whatever went on in his mind, the loathing in his voice as he described that pig’s nose spoke volumes, and went far beyond simply not wanting to eat a pig snout.
The Fickle Pickle was a nice place, but Big Joe Williams—and most of the young white musicians who worked with him—did better in a barroom milieu. In the early 1960s Old Town wasn’t quite the honky-tonk it is today. “It was for real,” Charlie Musselwhite told me. “Real artists lived there. It was a poor, run-down neighborhood. Now it’s all touristy, but then, the tourists didn’t know it existed.”
On Wells Street in Old Town, there were two bars. One was the Blind Pig, the scene of Bob Koester’s occasional blues shows. The rest of the time, a duet called Nick and Paul played there. “Nick” was Nick Gravenites on acoustic and electric guitar, and “Paul” was Paul Butterfield on harmonica. The other bar, Big John’s, was just a neighborhood hangout that wasn’t doing too well.
Michael, ever the hustler, decided that a little friendly competition might do everyone good, so, as Norman Dayron described it to me, he went to the bar’s owner and said, “Listen, man, my name is Michael Bloomfield, and I’m a musician, and I can make this place work for you with music. I don’t want no money or nothing. Just give me what you get at the door, and you can have the bar.”
Bowled over, as so many people were when Michael came at them full bore, the owner agreed to book a group consisting of Michael, Big Joe Williams, and Charlie Musselwhite for a weekend. At his first show at Big John’s, Michael played piano, an instrument he had begun fooling around with during his days at the Fickle Pickle. For the rest of his Big John’s shows, he would switch back to guitar.
Big John’s clicked almost from the beginning. Located at 1638 North Wells Street, the club held about 120 people, and it boasted a tiny stage, tables with red-checkered tablecloths, and two pool tables in the back. Norman Mayell, the drummer in Bloomfield’s band at Big John’s, remembered it as a place where “people used to sell Panama Red [marijuana] in little matchboxes for $5.” Mayell had gone into Big John’s one day, and he ran into Bloomfield and Big Joe Williams. “I started talking to Michael about the blues, and he said, ‘I got to start a band. If I get a band, I could play here,’” Mayell recalled. “I said, ‘Well, I play the drums.’ And he said, ‘Well, get some. We’ll get a band together quick.’ It was just that casual.” Mayell rented a set of Slingerland drums, and the group began their life as a quartet. Musselwhite joined them a few weeks later.
Big Joe, true to his wandering instincts, left after a short time to return to Mississippi, but Michael just brought in a bassist, and the band of young, white blues players kept playing. “The place just got more and more popular,” said Musselwhite. “They had to tear down some walls just to get all the people in.” Norman Dayron, who was still working toward his degree at the University of Chicago, recalls that Big John’s changed from a neighborhood bar to “the preeminent rock ’n’ roll hangout.”
One thing was certain: the group that became the Big John’s house band was in no way designed to take the spotlight off Bloomfield and Musselwhite. The band, which they called simply the Group, included not only Mayell, who would later join the Sopwith Camel, but also guitarist Michael Johnson, keyboardist Brian Friedman, and Sid Warner, a Texas-born musician who had played guitar with rhythm-and-blues saxophonist Big Jay McNeely in Los Angeles in the 1950s. Warner was an experienced musician who had played one of the earliest versions of the Telecaster guitar during his Los Angeles days, and he operated a jewelry shop in Old Town at the corner of North Sedgwick Street and North Avenue, near Bloomfield and Susan’s apartment. Roy Ruby occasionally sat in on bass.
Meanwhile, Gravenites had returned to Chicago in early 1964 after spending five years shuttling between Chicago and San Francisco, with sojourns in Boston and New Jersey. He’d gone west in 1959, and he threw himself into the Bay Area coffeehouse scene. During the same period, Butterfield was spending a lot of time traveling to California with his girlfriend, whose family lived in Los Angeles, and he visited Gravenites on one of his California trips. They met up with a producer from Cambridge, Massachusetts, named Paul Rothchild at a Berkeley club, the Cabale Creamery, where they were playing a set. “He made an offer to Paul [Butterfield] to cut a record with him. Paul thought it was an interesting idea, but he explained that he didn’t have a band together and wasn’t ready in any way to record,” Gravenites wrote in a Blues Revue column. “Rothchild told him that whenever he was ready, he would record him.”
Michael was also playing other types of gigs at this time, keeping up with rock ’n’ roll, playing occasionally with Barry Goldberg in topless clubs, and even doing a little session work for Chess. This work with Chess was in part thanks to Norman Dayron, who, in order to get closer to the blues, had taken a janitor’s gig at the studio. He parlayed this job into a loose sort of staff position.
While Bloomfield was booking shows at the Fickle Pickle and playing at Big John’s during 1963 and 1964, he had gotten to know the Fickle Pickle’s manager, Joel Harlib, a photographer who sold his work to Chicago advertising agencies. By all accounts he was a slick hustler who seemed to know every waitress, musician, and bouncer up and down Rush Street. He set up what appears to have been Bloomfield’s first unaccompanied solo performance, at a Chicago club called Mother Blues, sometime in the summer of 1963. Bloomfield and Harlib got along famously, and they treated every day as an adventure: if they weren’t trying to track down Howlin’ Wolf’s guitarist, Hubert Sumlin, they’d be out trying to score some marijuana. Harlib wasn’t exactly Bloomfield’s manager, since no one could really manage the eternally wired guitarist, but he believed in him.
It’s unclear exactly what was on the audition tape that Harlib took to Columbia Records executive John Hammond in New York City in March 1964. Norman Dayron says it was a recording of Bloomfield playing guitar with a vocalist named Dean DeWolf, who had been performing at the Fickle Pickle with Horace Cathcart and other musicians. It could be that the tape that Hammond heard contained some of Dayron’s recordings of Bloomfield as a solo guitarist, as well as a song performed by one of the Fickle Pickle singers. At any rate, Harlib had the courage to make a cold call on Hammond.
“Somebody brought me a record by a terrible vocalist, and I said, ‘Who in God’s name is the guitar in the background?’” Hammond told me. He had been the first to record Billie Holiday and Bob Dylan, as well as Charlie Christian and Count Basie, so he had helped to develop the careers of some of America’s greatest singers and musicians. “And this person said, ‘Oh, it’s nobody you’d be interested in, just some sixteen-year-old kid named Mike Bloomfield.’ And I took the plane to Chicago that night.
“I went to see him way the hell out to North Chicago, Winnetka, somewhere. I heard him that night with a not too terribly good group, and then, a couple of days later, I got him into a studio, and it was utter chaos. He had absolutely no idea how to run a session. And since rock is not my field, I was not the greatest help I could have been, but I got Epic to sign Mike right away.”
It is one of life’s little ironies that while Hammond was in Chicago, he took the opportunity to visit with an old jazz-hound friend, Rabbi Edgar Siskin. Siskin asked Hammond what he was up to, and when Hammond mentioned Michael Bloomfield, Siskin told him that he had presided at Michael’s bar mitzvah, and that he’d never realized Michael’s involvement with music was anything but a goof, that he’d settle down with the family business some day. Hammond, who had rebelled from a very wealthy family himself, felt a strong empathy with the kid who wouldn’t sell restaurant supplies.
Although Hammond arranged for Bloomfield to come to New York’s Columbia studio to record in early 1964, he still viewed it as a demo session. On the demo, you can hear Bloomfield tearing his way through a ragtime guitar instrumental, “Hammond’s Rag,” and he rips through “I’m a Country Boy” so fluidly and audaciously that bassist Bill Lee seems slightly flummoxed. At the end of “Hammond’s Rag,” the producer comes on the microphone. “I think we’ve exploited you enough,” Hammond says. “I just want you to know I’m signing you.” Bloomfield exclaims, “Oh,” sounding like a boy who has just gotten exactly the book that he wanted for his birthday. However, Hammond suffered a heart attack in April after signing Bloomfield to Epic, and it wasn’t until December 1964 that Hammond was able to return to Chicago to cut another demo session with Bloomfield and the Group.
Michael always maintained that if the Group’s album had come out quickly enough, it would have beaten the Rolling Stones. Hammond was dry on the subject, and probably more realistic. “He could not have competed with the Rolling Stones,” he told me. “He was no Mick Jagger, but he was a hell of a guitar player.”
If Michael felt any disappointment or hurt because of his failure to head straight to the big time, he swallowed it. He did, after all, have a contract with Epic Records, which was nothing to sneer at, and a deal whereby they would help him place any songs he wrote. So he bided his time and worked at Big John’s, and he noticed that Paul Butterfield, a musician he didn’t particularly care for, was coming to sit in more and more. Despite their personal antipathy, they sounded good playing music together.
Crowds came as never before. Michael took stock of the situation and realized that he had built Big John’s up from nothing, turned it into a scene, and focused so much attention on it that he was attracting the likes of John Hammond to Chicago. After playing at Big John’s for about a year, he and Musselwhite asked the club’s owner for a raise. They didn’t get it, and they moved to a North Side club called Magoo’s, which offered the band more money and a chance to play five nights a week.
Replacing them as the house band at Big John’s was the Paul Butterfield Band, featuring Elvin Bishop along with drummer Sam Lay and bassist Jerome Arnold, who had cut their teeth playing with such Chicago blues giants as Howlin’ Wolf. They would play at Big John’s for the next eight months, serving as competitors for Bloomfield’s Magoo’s band. By the end of their stay, Big John’s was attracting music fans from all over the Chicago area, thanks to the publicity from local radio personality Ray Nordstrand, who told his listeners who was going to appear there the following week during his late-night Saturday show on WFMT-FM, Midnight Special.
As Gravenites said about the scene at Big John’s, “That was the beginning of the white blues explosion right there—’64 in Chicago. Paul [Butterfield] started playing there a couple nights a week, on the weekends, and I think he played there for eight or nine months straight. . . . And the joint would fill up every night.” At Big John’s, Bloomfield had taught white blues fans how to appreciate the contributions of such men as Big Joe Williams and Sunnyland Slim. Later on, when Paul Butterfield’s band took over at Big John’s, listeners got to hear how effectively white players like Butterfield and Bishop could interact with black musicians like Jerome Arnold and Sam Lay.
Bloomfield’s six-piece group celebrated the new year at Magoo’s by playing “Auld Lang Syne” as a blues shuffle, with vocalist Tracy Nelson from Madison, Wisconsin, sitting in. Nelson was dating Musselwhite at the time. It sounds like fun, but Bloomfield’s future wasn’t in the clubs, and times were tough. “It was dismal,” remembered Gravenites, who often played in the Magoo’s band. “We didn’t make any money, nobody would show up, and we went from club to club.” Playing at Magoo’s turned out to be a bad experience for the Group, as Musselwhite recalled. “The people that hung out there—I don’t know how to explain them,” he said. “Sort of a criminal type, you know, a lot of guys that were going in and out of the joint. . . . Mike, more than anybody, hated playing there. I think he hated the audiences. Because you’re playing to these people, and they’re thinking that they’re hip and they’re in, and you know they don’t have a clue.” In fact, Magoo’s was operated by a pair of brothers named John and Terry McGovern, who ran any number of dubious enterprises out of the club. Sid Warner described Magoo’s to David Dann as a “gangster hangout,” and the McGoverns, who owned a series of small bars and clubs around Chicago, treated the band like low-level employees who could be moved from one location to another at short notice.
The Group didn’t stay long enough for that to happen. Bloomfield and Musselwhite figured out that Warner was getting double-paid by the bar’s owners, and they went by the club one night to check out the situation. There was Warner onstage, playing guitar and leading the band. They got back in their car, drove away, and never looked back.