In January 1965 Paul Rothchild was relaxing at a party in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when he got a phone call from a friend of his named Fritz Richmond, who played bass in the house band at a Cambridge folk venue, Club 47. Rothchild was a former New England record salesman and label owner who had attracted the attention of New Jersey folk music company Prestige Records by recording and selling an album by a Harvard Square bluegrass group, Bill Keith and Jim Rooney and the Charles River Valley Boys. Rothchild took over Prestige’s folk department, and by 1964 he had moved to Elektra Records, a pioneering folk label that issued records by Oscar Brand, Jean Ritchie, and Theodore Bikel. Rothchild got around—he had signed folkies Tom Rush, Geoff Muldaur, and Mitch Greenhill to Prestige, and he was on the board of directors for Club 47.
Around the same time, Joe Boyd was sitting at the Kettle of Fish club in New York, where recently rediscovered blues singer Son House was getting ready to go onstage. From Boston, Boyd was a blues and folk fan who had gone to work for concert promoter George Wein in 1964 after graduating from Harvard University, where he had presented a show by Lonnie Johnson, the great 1930s blues guitarist he’d found working as the doorman of a Philadelphia hotel. Like Roy Ruby and Michael Bloomfield, Boyd had seen the blues lifestyle up close: traveling with Sleepy John Estes and Hammie Nixon from Ithaca, New York, to Cambridge, Boyd had been obliged to supply them with quantities of bourbon whiskey, and the results had been predictable.
Hanging out in the Boston and Cambridge folk scene, Boyd had gotten to know Rothchild. As he sat in the Kettle of Fish, Boyd talked to Prestige Records producer Samuel Charters, who had written The Country Blues, a book Boyd had devoured with the appetite of a true believer. Boyd was spending a last night in New York before heading off to Chicago, where he planned to meet Muddy Waters to discuss the singer’s participation in the Blues and Gospel Caravan, a package tour Wein had put together. He told Charters he was going to Chicago, and Charters said, “Well, there’s a band there you have to hear. There’s a band with white kids and black guys, led by a harmonica player named Paul Butterfield. You should make a point to hear them.”
Boyd called Rothchild the next morning, and they agreed to meet in Chicago that evening. By the time Boyd arrived in Chicago, Rothchild had already caught a set by the Butterfield Band at Big John’s. What he heard bowled him over. As he said later, “It was the same rush I’d had the first time I heard bluegrass.” Rothchild sat in a booth with Butterfield and Elvin Bishop, talking to them about recording for Elektra. “[Butterfield] was going for it,” Rothchild said. “He was totally, magnificently jive. Beautiful. I loved him. Chicago street hustler.”
Meanwhile, Boyd had already heard of Bloomfield. In fact, he had briefly met the guitarist during a 1962 swing through Chicago with his brother, Warwick, and his Cambridge friend Geoff Muldaur. Hanging out at Koester’s Jazz Record Mart, Boyd had run into Bloomfield, but he had other things on his mind that day.
“I was generally unimpressed with white blues players,” Boyd says. “[Bloomfield] was OK, but I was in the middle of taping Bob Koester’s 78 collection, including Tampa Red, Big Joe Williams, and Sleepy John Estes. What twenty-year-old kid noodling on a guitar could compete with that?” Back in Chicago a couple of years later, Boyd heard Bloomfield sit in on guitar with Muddy Waters one night at Pepper’s.
Again, Boyd wasn’t bowled over by Bloomfield’s playing. “He sounded like a white guy sitting in with a proper South Side blues band,” he says. “Good, but not flattered by comparisons with the company, and not as in-the-pocket rhythmically as a real blues player.” Despite his reservations about Bloomfield’s style, Boyd had liked Bloomfield’s intensity, and he perceived a heroic quality in the way the guitarist carried himself onstage. Boyd suggested that Rothchild take a listen to Bloomfield, who was playing at a rowdy blues joint in Evanston, Illinois, the next evening. Boyd, Rothchild, and Butterfield found their way to the club, where Butterfield joined Bloomfield onstage to jam on a Freddie King instrumental.
“Paul and I exchanged looks,” Boyd wrote later. “This was the magic dialectic, Butterfield and Bloomfield. It sounded like a firm of accountants, but we were convinced it was the key to fame and fortune for the band and for us.” After the set, Bloomfield sat down with Boyd and Rothchild, and the deal was made. Returning to New York to draw up the contracts, Rothchild arranged for Albert Grossman, who was then managing Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary, and other currently popular folk acts, to go to Chicago to catch one of the group’s sets. The young hotshot guitarist would become a member of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band—and finally get his shot at the fame he deserved.
Bloomfield had already received some attention from the press. Pete Welding, who had helped Bloomfield and George Mitchell book acts for the Fickle Pickle, was a Philadelphia-born writer and blues scholar who moved to Chicago and founded his own blues label, Testament Records, in emulation of Bob Koester’s Delmark. Welding reviewed several of the Group’s Big John’s performances in the December 1964 issue of DownBeat magazine. They were “rapidly evolving into one of the finest, fiercest-swinging rhythm-and-blues combinations in Chicago,” Welding wrote.
Bloomfield wrote some music journalism of his own during this period. He interviewed Muddy Waters for Rhythm and Blues magazine in July 1964, and he and Welding talked to John Lee Hooker for the magazine later that year. Bloomfield mentioned Welding’s forthcoming Testament release, Rough and Ready, in one of the columns he wrote for Hootenanny magazine that year. He and Joel Harlib were the magazine’s “Our Men in Chicago,” and they diligently covered the minutiae of the scene: “Ed Gordon of It’s Here on North Sheridan Road is presenting Dean DeWolf, Ed McCurdy, Josh White Jr. and Mike Settle,” they wrote.
Bloomfield always maintained that he had been scared of Butterfield during their early days together in Chicago, and it’s not clear exactly why. For sure, they had very different personalities. In many ways, the adult Bloomfield remained what he had been at New Trier High School: a big, friendly, open-faced kid who was ready to talk about music or books—or, for that matter, the secrets of pawnbroking he had picked up while working for his grandfather—with anyone at any time. By contrast, Butterfield possessed what Norman Dayron characterized as a “hard Irish kind of cool,” and he carried himself with a quiet assurance that could be off-putting to some people. Seven months older than Bloomfield, he had grown up in a middle-class family in Hyde Park. His father was a respected lawyer who was known for doing pro bono work on the South Side of Chicago, and his mother was a painter who taught art at the University of Chicago.
“The Paul Butterfield I knew was a sweet guy, a nice kid who liked to jive,” Gravenites wrote in a Blues Revue column. “Paul was raised in a inter-racial neighborhood, had many black schoolmates and friends, and enjoyed rewarding relationships with many southside black and interracial families. There was no ‘thug’ in him, no gangster vibes, no savagery, no violence, no hatred that I could see.” No doubt Butterfield affected an air of toughness and invulnerability when he sat in at South Side clubs, but that was part of the routine. It was a matter of manning up and making sure you didn’t violate the social codes of the people around you.
At any rate, the Bloomfield and Butterfield partnership worked out fine onstage and in the recording studio, where it counted. “For a while [Paul] thought I was a turkey, and then, when he realized I was not a turkey, he gave me utter freedom to do what I wanted to do,” Bloomfield said. “And it worked fine. The thing became a real good act, and I added a lot to the band. The band added a huge amount to me—it made me a pro, because Paul was a professional.”
Getting ready to move to New York in early 1965 to begin recording with the Butterfield Band, Bloomfield and Susan put all of their things in storage in Chicago. She felt they’d be gone a while, and she was definitely looking for a change. “I was a bored kid,” she told me. “I didn’t like my life at home, and it was wonderful to go places and meet people. For me, even going to a supermarket in New York and seeing the way it was different from the ones in Chicago was a big treat.” Susan and Michael rented a basement apartment in the heart of Greenwich Village, and the band started working on their debut album.
The first recordings the Paul Butterfield Band did weren’t released at the time. “We recorded for a couple of days, and we didn’t put that out,” Butterfield recalled. “We decided we wanted to do something more with it. And Michael played keyboards.” They cut a whole album’s worth of material in early spring 1965, and one of the tracks, a pass at a song Gravenites had written called “Born in Chicago,” showed up on an Elektra sampler label head Jac Holzman put together. That album, Folksong ’65, sold an astounding two hundred thousand copies after it was released in September 1965, and “Born in Chicago” became an underground favorite with blues fans on campuses across America before the Butterfield Band’s first album had even hit record stores. Five tracks from the first Butterfield sessions appeared on Elektra’s 1966 What’s Shakin’ anthology album, a record that also featured recordings by the Lovin’ Spoonful and a British pickup band called Eric Clapton and the Powerhouse, which Michael picked up on immediately.
At the beginning, Rothchild managed the Paul Butterfield Band, and they played the Village Gate in New York in early 1965. This may have been when keyboardist Mark Naftalin caught a set by the quartet. As he told writers Jan Mark Wolkin and Neal McGarity in 1995, “In January or February of 1965, Paul and Elvin showed up with the rhythm section they first recorded with, Jerome Arnold and Sam Lay, and they played at the Village Gate, I think it was. I went to hear them and it was some of the best music I’d ever heard in my life, a very pure form of Butterfield—it was all Butter.”
Born in Minneapolis in 1944, Naftalin was the son of a professor and politician who was currently serving as mayor of that city, a position he would hold until 1969. Naftalin had picked up experience playing with a Minneapolis blues band called Johnny and the Galaxies before he began his freshman year at the University of Chicago in 1962. He had gotten to know Bloomfield, Butterfield, and Bishop at the school’s twist parties, and he’d played piano with them during that period. After graduating from the University of Chicago with a music degree, Naftalin had moved to New York to study composition at the Mannes College of Music. A superb pianist and organist with a sure feel for rhythm-section dynamics, Naftalin would bring a sophisticated rhythm-and-blues sensibility to the Butterfield Band, and he was a subtle, slightly understated soloist in his own right.
Born in Glendale, California, in 1942, Elvin Bishop spent most of his childhood in Iowa before moving with his family to Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the early 1950s. After he won his scholarship to the University of Chicago as a National Merit Scholar finalist, he began attending the university in 1960. Bishop wasn’t the extrovert musician Bloomfield was, and he knew it, but he had a knack for playing the kind of parts that kept the band swinging, and he could essay a terse, slangy guitar turn. The tracks Rothchild produced during the spring 1965 sessions caught the band’s elegant approach to ensemble playing. As the release date of the record neared, though, Rothchild began to have reservations about the results, and at the last minute he decided that what he had cut didn’t represent the band in its fullest sonic or musical capacity. He convinced Elektra label head Jac Holzman to delay the record until he had figured out how to capture what he had heard in Chicago. Holzman gulped hard, because Elektra had already pressed twenty-five thousand copies of the album, but he trusted Rothchild’s instincts. Looking for a way to capture the band’s power, Rothchild tried recording the band live for four nights at the Cafe au Go Go later that spring, but the results were no more promising than the studio sessions had been.
Heard today on the 1995 release The Original Lost Elektra Sessions, what would have been the first Paul Butterfield Blues Band album sounds like a classic collection of modern Chicago blues standards from the likes of Rice Miller (or Sonny Boy Williamson, as he called himself, after another virtuoso harmonica player who’d been murdered in 1948) and Little Walter, with a couple of originals by Butterfield and Bishop thrown in for good measure. The performances are concise, and Butterfield shows off his knack for phrasing. The true heir to Rice Miller and Little Walter, Butterfield acquits himself brilliantly throughout, while “Nut Popper #1” finds Bloomfield dashing off a furious solo that strains at all known limits of electric guitar playing in 1965.
While Rothchild tried to figure out how to record them, the Butterfield Band played as a quartet at New York’s Village Gate in late February. Bloomfield may have sat in with them at the Village Gate, and it’s likely Sam Lay and some of the other Butterfield band members, along with bassist Bill Lee, backed him at a March 1 demo session for Hammond at Columbia Studios. He was a member of the Butterfield Band, but the group hadn’t quite worked out its identity, and Bloomfield continued to perform with Gravenites and Musselwhite at Big John’s during April 1965.
No one seems to remember exactly when Albert Grossman began managing the Butterfield Band, but he probably didn’t enter into a formal agreement with them until after their appearance at the Newport Folk Festival in July. Paul Rothchild remembered calling Grossman about managing the band a month or two before the Newport Folk Festival was to start. Grossman agreed to check them out at Newport, and it’s likely he viewed the Butterfield Band’s Newport shows as their audition for the big time. As it turned out, they passed with flying colors.
It wasn’t apparent at the time, but what the Butterfield Band was doing with blues was truly authentic, if that word can be used to describe the aesthetics of any music that has been removed from its original context. But what was the context of blues? For Bloomfield and Butterfield, blues meant more or less the same thing as it did to, say, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, and Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones—it was a kind of music you could master, if you worked at it hard enough. Bloomfield and his compatriots learned blues in person from Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, while Jagger and Richards learned it mostly from records, though there was a healthy English blues scene that sometimes featured American performers. The context was simply human endeavor and folly. In the hands of anyone smart or dedicated enough to master it, blues could illuminate corners of the world that had previously been dismissed as too crude, shocking, or benighted to bother with. Blues may not have been pop music, but it wasn’t exactly folk music either.
In 1965 the folk world had grown to include a sizable percentage of the teenagers and college students in the United States, and it thrived on controversy. When the activists in this generation of kids took time off from arguing about disarmament and integration, they argued about folk music. What was folk, anyway? As did blues fans, folk listeners wanted authenticity, but how did you achieve it, and how did you know when you had witnessed it? You knew when you hadn’t seen or heard it, because the antithesis of authenticity was commercialism. Thus, one could sneeringly put down an opponent’s favorite performer by saying, “Yes, but that’s awfully commercial.” Appearing on the dreaded Hootenanny television show, which had blacklisted folk saint Pete Seeger, was a particularly heinous crime. (Even though Pete Seeger’s own half-brother Mike performed on Hootenanny—with the help of Pete himself, who babysat Mike’s kids so he could make an appearance with the New Lost City Ramblers.)
The folk music fan’s bible, the Rolling Stone of its day, was a contentious publication called Sing Out! In its columns and letter pages the great issues of folkiedom raged. By 1965 it was apparent that the great authenticity debate had veered completely out of control. Why, some people dared to say that Chuck Berry, who was a rock ’n’ roll performer, for heaven’s sake, was a blues singer and guitarist! Since some of the readers had heard “Deep Feeling” and a couple of his other blues tunes—backed, incidentally, by the cream of Chicago’s blues instrumentalists—Berry was reluctantly admitted to the pantheon by those who were willing to concede that Muddy Waters’s electric blues was authentic. That was a tiny minority; the mighty Mud had met with a chilly reception when he brought his all-star electric Chicago band to the Newport Jazz Festival in 1960, and the next year he was obliged to play acoustic and solo. Admitting that Chuck Berry was authentic was only a short step to admitting that the Rolling Stones, who played songs by Chuck Berry and such hard-core blues artists as Slim Harpo and Willie Dixon, were okay, too.
So imagine the confusion when, in the spring of 1965, Bob Dylan, idol of thousands and spokesman for the more artistic, creative, and avant-garde wings of the folkie craze, a mysterious, brilliant figure who was looked up to by the best and the brightest, dared to release an album that was half rock ’n’ roll! Bringing It All Back Home was, in retrospect, a pretty wimpy sort of rock ’n’roll. But it had electric instruments and, horrors, drums on it, and it sent shock waves through the world of folk, as could be seen from the letters column of Sing Out! and its feisty competitor, the Little Sandy Review, which was edited by a boyhood chum of Dylan’s named Paul Nelson.
This was the mishegas that the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, outsiders from Chicago, would blunder into at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where Dylan would use members of the band to play his new songs in an electric, rock ’n’ roll style that would create controversy among folk fans, blues fans, and rock fans. But first, Michael Bloomfield was about to help Dylan change the course of American popular music.