9

BUTTER DAYS

The Butterfield Band was energized by their Newport experience, and they loaded their equipment into their van themselves, since roadies were unknown in those days. They knew they had some work to do in the studio in New York. As soon as they had caught their collective breath, they prepared to cut the album that would be called The Paul Butterfield Blues Band.

Bloomfield rejoined Bob Dylan and producer Bob Johnston in New York on July 29 to cut more tracks for Dylan’s new album. The band included organist Al Kooper and drummer Bobby Gregg, and they cut “Tombstone Blues,” a tune that added and subtracted measures in the manner of the old, eccentric Delta blues artists Bloomfield and Butterfield had studied in Chicago. Bloomfield played a beautiful obbligato on the song, complete with slurs and bends that reinforced a Dylan lyric that mentioned Ma Rainey, Cecil B. DeMille, and Galileo. The sessions for Highway 61 Revisited ran through early August.

The Highway 61 sessions over, Michael was approached by Albert Grossman. Dylan wanted Bloomfield in his touring band, and Butterfield wanted him, too. Harvey Brooks, who played bass on some of the Highway 61 sessions and would go on to perform in Dylan’s road group, remembered how Bloomfield weighed his options. “Dylan had some gigs coming up—we were going to do Forest Hills [New York] and the Hollywood Bowl,” Brooks said. “But Michael was going to stay with Butterfield, because he felt that was his obligation and that’s what he should do. . . . He said we’d go on and be stars and everything, but he was going to play the blues.”

As Bloomfield told me, “With Bob, I’d have no identity. I didn’t even know that. All I knew was that I didn’t understand what was happening. At the same time, I was also offered a gig to be the guitar player on [the TV variety show] Shindig! Jimmy Burton took it. I didn’t want to do that either. The producer of the show was a guy named Jack Good, who’d come to Chicago, and he was an Englishman and a blackophile and really dug hanging out at blues bars with me. But I couldn’t imagine going to Hollywood and doing that thing, either. So I told Albert, ‘Man, I’m a bluesman. I’ll go with Butterfield.’ And I played with Butter and didn’t play with Dylan, and we were cookin’. We wailed from then on.”

The Butterfield Band had played New York’s Cafe au Go Go two days after the Newport festival ended, and they performed at a series of dates in Massachusetts in early August. They settled in for a three-night run at Cambridge’s Club 47, which had recently moved to a new location on Palmer Street. It was a well-appointed space with stone and brick walls and oak tables with slatted wooden chairs. Club 47’s manager, Jim Rooney, had served on the board of directors for the Newport Folk Festival. As Rooney later wrote, “The sound in that small room was unlike anything we had heard before. We were charging $1 at the door and were paying the band $100 per night.”

They continued to play at the Cafe au Go Go in late August and early September, and Bloomfield did session work with Peter, Paul and Mary, Judy Collins, and Chuck Berry during this time. Meanwhile, Mark Naftalin, who had attended the Butterfield Band’s January performance at the Village Gate, sat in with them on piano at one of their Cafe au Go Go shows. “I had spent that summer trying to get involved with professional music,” Naftalin told Jan Mark Wolkin and Neal McGarity. “I had taught myself Fender bass and I was trying to get myself into a band as a bass player because I didn’t see much of a market for keyboard players—it was the Beatles era—and I got a couple of gigs that way.”

On September 8 Naftalin went to the Butterfield Band’s session at Mastertone Recording Studios at 130 West Forty-Second Street. “I dropped by the session, hoping for a chance to sit in on organ, which was the only keyboard on the scene,” Naftalin remembered later. “Someone, probably Paul Rothchild, said that they might try organ later in the session. I was too impatient to hang around. I went home and came back the next day, sometime in the mid-to-late afternoon. On this occasion Elvin was late for the session. This was four-track recording, so they put me on his channel, and we played an instrumental.”

The track ended up on The Paul Butterfield Blues Band album as “Thank You Mr. Poobah.” Naftalin had never played Hammond organ before, but he acquitted himself well enough that Rothchild and the band invited him to stay for the rest of the nine-hour session. As Naftalin remembered, “Sometime during the session Butterfield asked me if I would join the band and go on the road with them to Philadelphia that weekend. This was just days before I might have gone back to school, because nothing had been happening. So I wound up playing on eight of the eleven selections on that album, playing Hammond organ. Hammond wasn’t an instrument I knew much about, so if it sounds like I had sort of an unimaginative approach to it, that’s why.”

Naftalin is being overly self-deprecating. When The Paul Butterfield Blues Band hit the record stores in October 1965, the last thing people were worried about was his approach to the organ. The very opening lines of the record knocked listeners for a loop from which they would not recover until the album ended. Nick Gravenites’s lyrics for “Born in Chicago” went to the core of the toughness Bloomfield had sought since adolescence, and spoke to thousands of those who had had the urban experience or wanted it in words of realism and caution: “I was born in Chicago / In 19 and 41 / My father told me / ‘Son, you had better get a gun.’” In every way, “Born in Chicago” was a brilliant updating of the Chicago blues tradition, and it ended with this line: “Things just don’t seem the same.”

All of this was delivered against a hard electric background totally unlike anything the folk or the rock ’n’ roll audience had ever heard. It was a shocker. It even had a boxed reminder on the back cover that read, “We suggest that you play this record at the highest possible volume in order to fully appreciate the sound of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.” Pete Welding’s liner notes placed the record into a modern context: “Putting aside for the moment Butterfield’s long intimacy with the culture that produced the music that he performs so brilliantly and his equally long apprenticeship in the style, it is apparent that the musical idiom itself is much less bound up in a maze of socio-cultural factors than is the country blues of another time and place.” Elektra released the album’s “Mellow Down Easy” and “I Got My Mojo Working” on a single in October. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band went only to Number 123 on the Billboard chart, but its influence far exceeded its sales.

The album was a good balance of original material by Butterfield, Bloomfield, and friends, and blues classics by Little Walter, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Willie Dixon. True, the Rolling Stones had recorded these people’s music before, but it hadn’t sounded like this. Butterfield’s harmonica had the expressiveness of a saxophone, Lay and Arnold worked as if their lives depended on it, and over it all was the swooping, ecstatic guitar of Michael Bloomfield, who, it was noted, appeared “courtesy of Columbia Records.”

The response was phenomenal, if not in sales then in the controversy it engendered in the press and among musicians. Julius Lester, a respected black journalist of the time who played folk music on the side, attacked the record savagely. Lester’s review appeared in the June 1966 issue of a small, short-lived jazz magazine called Sounds & Fury, which had begun publication a year before. Lester had written a book titled The Folksinger’s Guide to the 12-String Guitar as Played by Leadbelly with Pete Seeger, and he was critical of white blues musicians. “Despite reports to the contrary, Paul Butterfield sounds like a young white boy trying to play and sing Negro music,” Lester wrote. “I wonder if these same people would try to become cantors as readily as they attempt the blues.”

Essentially, Lester was accusing the Butterfield Band of stealing music that didn’t belong to them—though he knew that the group contained two black musicians, Sam Lay and Jerome Arnold. “I hope one day the Butterfields will realize that you can’t walk into another man’s house and cook the meal that he would cook on his stove,” he wrote. “If you try it, the man might not like it.” Lester’s accusations infuriated Bloomfield. “He really put it down, and he said it was just a watered-down version of the blues,” Bloomfield told Dan McClosky. “I met him in New York, and I made a point of meeting him, saying, ‘Hey, man, listen, you don’t know how many gigs I’ve played with black cats. You know, how many cats have took me to be their protegés. But you know, he’s right—it was a cultural ripoff.”

But given the fact that Paul Butterfield, Michael Bloomfield, and Elvin Bishop had been welcomed by black musicians at their Chicago houses and clubs, Lester’s charge made no sense. The history of rock ’n’ roll up to that point had been full of collaborations between white and black musicians, and those collaborations produced great music despite the racism and oppression blacks had found in cities such as Memphis, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Lay and Arnold had taken the Butterfield gig partly for the money—as Lay remembered later, “Myself and Jerome Arnold left [Howlin’] Wolf’s band together to go work for Butterfield. We was looking for the money part of it.” What could be more American than that?

Lester’s review prompted a long response from Sounds & Fury’s editor, Ralph Berton, in which Berton cited the example of Cab Calloway, who had done a cantor routine onstage in the 1930s that Jewish audiences relished. And, Berton said, Louis Armstrong had played with white trombonist and singer Jack Teagarden for years.

For the first time in the history of popular music, the white kids who had appropriated a black form were actively promoting the black artists whose music they played. Welding bent over backward to say that in the liner notes: “So individual and fully assimilated is his approach that, listening to him sing and play, the question of his aping Negro style or specific Negro artists never arises,” he wrote about Butterfield. The originators were named and given credit for their music right where anybody could see them. And at the time, all of the classic Chess albums Little Walter and Muddy Waters had made were available for any of the fans who wanted to go and buy them. A lot of us did just that, and discovered for ourselves the dark sensuality of Waters’s music, the astonishing harmonica styles of Little Walter and Sonny Boy Williamson, and the bawdy good times of Howlin’ Wolf.

There were no radio stations to play this music when it appeared, no way for much of its intended audience to check it out, but slowly the word spread. The Butterfield album became a symbol, among folkies, of having crossed a Rubicon that said, I accept America’s music as it is, not as it is interpreted for me. Michael Bloomfield became the name on everybody’s lips. How did he play guitar like that? We waited for the band to tour.

In retrospect, Michael made the right decision to go with the Butterfield Band. It must not have seemed like it at the time. Bob Dylan was selling albums hand over fist, while the Butterfield Band got a lot of good words in the rock press, such as it was at the time, mostly in Hit Parader, whose Jim Delehant ran a series of 1967 articles titled “Mike Bloomfield Puts Down Everything.” Crawdaddy reviewed the band’s first Elektra single in early 1966, and Variety reviewed one of their Chicago performances in its June 1966 issue. But their album wasn’t exactly setting the charts on fire. Bob Dylan was touring the world and staying in first-class hotels, drawing first-class hangers-on, while the Butterfield Band traveled in a Ford Econoline van and set up their equipment themselves.

Still, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band got through to fans and musicians alike. The band made music that was tough but accessible, and “Born in Chicago” laid out the blues ethos in a way that any garage-band musician or aspiring blues guitarist could relate to. Fritz Richmond, who had been present when Rothchild was mixing the record at Mastertone Recording Studios in New York, was on the road with the Kweskin Jug Band in late 1965, just after the record hit stores. They couldn’t afford to stay in hotels, so they depended upon the kindness of their friends when they hit a new town.

“The way we would get those parties going was to play records,” Richmond remembered. “We would carry around the records that were very good to serve this purpose, and I carried the Butterfield album. That was worth about two bottles of whiskey, as far as getting a party going. That album and the Junior Walker Shotgun album were wonderful for that.”

The Butterfield Band was on the road almost constantly in the early days. “We had an apartment in the Village, at 10 Christopher Street, a basement apartment we never lived in,” Susan told me. “We were on the road pretty much constantly until almost ’67.” When Susan said “we,” that’s just what she meant—she and Michael, and usually Michael’s dog, a big mutt named Harry, would drive in their own car along with the van.

Life on the road, too, was different than it is today. “It was right at the point before they started getting crazy with the money and before it got into that whole superstar thing,” Butterfield told me. “We were out there, very honestly, just working hard playing. We were very into the music, not so much into the Hollywood of it all. I think that protected us in a certain way, that naïveté or something,” Certainly doing all your own equipment work and driving your own van to play for $1,500 to $2,000 a night would tend to shrink a swelled head.

Still, the band had some of the typical rock-band problems. Bloomfield remembered Butterfield as a “despot, as far as the money was concerned,” and Sam Lay also recalled how Butterfield tried to take the lion’s share of the proceeds in the group’s early days. “The first few jobs we played after we recorded, Butterfield gave us a little money,” Lay said. “Bloomfield didn’t like that, and he raised all kinds of hell. Butterfield came back the same night after Bloomfield raised so much hell about it, and he paid us more than double.”

Michael’s best friend on the road, besides Susan, was Mark Naftalin. In terms of the group dynamic, this was probably a good thing, since Naftalin was the outsider in the band. After the group played at the Philadelphia Folk Festival on September 11, they returned to Chicago to begin a six-week run at Big John’s. Naftalin and Bloomfield would walk along Wells Street together, smoking joints. Deeply introverted, extremely reticent, and highly intelligent, Naftalin had a dry sense of humor. He didn’t get along well with Butterfield at all, although Paul insists that he looked up to him and to Bloomfield. “To me the band was a warm family, and I felt altogether accepted, though sometimes musically inadequate,” Naftalin said later. “I retain a vivid memory of Paul looking at me over his harp with such an intense expression of what I thought was disapproval that I later sat on the curb and shed private tears. I think he was trying to get me to play right, and God knows I was trying.”

“None of us were really close,” Susan told me. “Michael was often the peacemaker, although there weren’t too many fusses. We were separate—so separate that I wasn’t aware the whole time that Elvin hated Michael’s guts. When we’d stay at a place, Mark and Michael and I would go for dinner. Paul usually had a girlfriend and went with her, and Elvin went somewhere by himself.”

Elvin Bishop was definitely not happy with things. “Elvin had a very hard time, especially since Michael was a better guitar player,” Butterfield told me. “Elvin was pretty much like the second guitar player, and Michael played most of the leads, and for good reason. So there was a rivalry on Elvin’s part, if not on Michael’s. Elvin worked hard, but you could feel it, the jealousy. I think that’s why he was a very introverted guy, and now he’s very extroverted, outspoken. I think he went the other way with it, overcompensated from being so subdued for so long.”

And while Susan was having the time of her life, Michael was making a discovery that would stay with him from then on. He hated touring. Hated it. Eternally wired, he had suffered from insomnia for years. It would keep him up for days, and although he was enough of a pro to keep it from interfering with his playing, he didn’t like it at all. Still, there was nothing he could do about it. The Butterfield Band was a draw, an attraction, and they spent as much time as they could touring a circuit that started on the East Coast, hit Detroit and Chicago, and then went to the West Coast.

Something else was brewing in the band, and it would exert a tremendous influence on the musicians who would hear the Butterfield Band’s West Coast shows in 1966. During the group’s six-week run at Boston’s Unicorn club in late November, Bloomfield and Naftalin were given two sugar cubes of LSD. “On one of our nights off, we took it,” Naftalin remembered. “Early in the trip we ventured onto the wintry street, without a destination—without, in fact, the ability to conceive a destination. . . . Around daybreak Mike joined me in the kitchen, and we tried to keep things going by smoking some joints. This was when he told me that he had had a revelation and that he now understood how Indian music worked. On our next gigs, while we were still in Boston, we began performing the improvisation that we called ‘The Raga’ for a while, until it was given a name, ‘East-West.’”

People had talked about Indian music before that epic piece, and words like “raga-rock” got tossed around whenever the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” or the Kinks’ “See My Friends” came on the stereo, but this was some serious music.

Michael described it perfectly to Tom Yates and Kate Hayes. “‘East-West’ was such a radical departure melodically, structurally, and chordally from the rock ’n’ roll leads and licks that were being played at that time,” he said. “It was a long, long series of solos using scales that just had not been played by rock ’n’ roll guitar players. It broke a lot of new ground, gave you a lot of new ways to play in a rather simple mode. I was playing scales and things that no other guitar player had ever thought of. But believe me, I knew they were not my scales. They were things I’d heard on John Coltrane records and guys that played a lot of modal music. Pre–‘East-West’ I’d been listening to a lot of Coltrane and Ravi Shankar and guys who played modal music. The idea was not to see how far you could go harmonically but to see how far you could go melodically or modally. The other things on the East-West album, other than ‘Work Song’ and ‘East-West,’ were just sort of typical guitar leads that to me isn’t as good as the stuff that I did on the album before that, the blues stuff that was on there. But I think those two tunes certainly broke a lot of new ground for other guitar players.”

As the band began to work out what would become “East-West,” Sam Lay fell ill. He had the habit of going out into the Boston winter chill directly from their Unicorn shows, and he developed pleural effusion, a serious lung condition. Lay played his last date with the Butterfield Band on November 27 at New York’s Town Hall. With Lay recovering in Chicago’s Cook County Hospital, Paul Butterfield hired Chicago drummer Billy Warren to take his place. Warren joined them for their show at Detroit’s Chess Mate Gallery a few weeks later, but Butterfield decided his style wasn’t right for them.

Butterfield, Bishop, and Bloomfield had sat in with Billy Davenport in 1964 and 1965 at shows around Chicago. Davenport was born in Chicago in 1931, and he began his career as a jazz drummer influenced by Gene Krupa and Big Sid Catlett before he switched to blues in the mid-1950s. Before he joined the Butterfield Band, Davenport had played with Junior Wells, Otis Rush, Fenton Robinson, and Magic Sam in Chicago. Bloomfield and Butterfield got Davenport on the phone the Sunday after they had finished their Detroit show and convinced him that he was making a smart move, and Davenport traveled to Detroit from Chicago that night with eleven dollars in his pocket.

“When I first started I was all on edge because it was the first time, you know, that I had ever played with a mixed band, for one thing, and I didn’t really know how it would work out at all,” Davenport told Crawdaddy magazine’s Paul Williams in 1966. “And what it is, well, it worked out wonderful for me, I mean everybody respects me and I respect them. And what they got is mine if I need it and everything.” A well-trained, versatile musician, Davenport would play a major part in developing “East-West” and the new material the band created in the next six months.

Davenport flew with the Butterfield Band to Los Angeles on New Year’s Day 1966. Their first California engagement was opening for the Byrds at the Trip, a club next door to the Playboy building, at 8572 Sunset Boulevard. They played the Trip through the end of January and moved to the Whisky a Go Go in early February. By this time they had developed “East-West” more fully, as live performances from the period document. In 1996 Mark Naftalin released three performances from 1966 and 1967 on a collection titled East-West Live. On their twelve-and-a-half-minute rendition of the tune recorded at the Whisky a Go Go in February 1966, the band locks into the song’s syncopated two-bar riff while Bloomfield plays an extended solo that straddles the line between blues and raga. Davenport and bassist Jerome Arnold switch to a straight four-four beat, and Butterfield plays a harmonica solo that manages to be bluesy without breaking the mood of the song. It’s a remarkable performance that clearly anticipates the later work of the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers.

The Butterfield Band’s 1966 shows in Los Angeles and San Francisco would turn the heads of the California rock musicians. “I remember I moved out here at the beginning of the hippie boom,” Nick Gravenites told me. “None of the shows [concert promoter] Bill Graham put on were really serious until the Butterfield Band showed up, because they were the hotshots from the East, people who were already accomplished electric musicians. Most of the hippie bands that were playing in this area were the result of a lot of acid and not too much expertise. So when the Butterfield Band came, it became real evident that these people were just children, learning how to twang. The Butterfield guys had been playing this shit for years on records and stuff, and they could really play it. They influenced many musicians. It showed them the way—here’s what’s happening, here’s what’s possible. Work at it, apply your musicianship, and practice, and you can do this.”

During this period, Bloomfield also incorporated a fire-eating act into the band’s sets. Naftalin remembered Bloomfield showing off his kit, which included a wand, rags, and white gas. “He said it was easy,” Naftalin remembered Bloomfield telling him. “‘All you have to do is keep your lips wet and make sure you keep breathing out.’”

The band’s San Francisco shows also caught the ears of a young Mexican-born guitarist named Carlos Santana, who had cut his teeth playing the music of B. B. King, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard in rough-and-tumble Tijuana clubs. After moving to San Francisco in 1962, Santana had started to attend shows at the Fillmore Auditorium, a rock venue that promoter Bill Graham had opened in late 1965.

“We all used to wait for [Bloomfield] to take his solos,” Santana remembered. “As much as we loved Paul Butterfield and Elvin, all of us were always anticipating, ‘What is Michael going to do, man?’ Just the way he put his finger on it—you get a chill and it gets you excited, you know.” Country Joe McDonald had a similar experience when he saw the band at the Fillmore in April. “Michael was playing a Telecaster, which I’d never seen anybody play before. He used it like a prop. He’d knocked the chrome plate off the bottom, where the strings are from the bridge, and it was very impressive.”

“East-West” in particular was a remarkable piece of music. Over thirteen minutes long in the version that they recorded for the East-West album with engineer Ron Malo at Chess Studios that summer, it wasn’t anything that would startle a jazz fan, as Michael said, but to rock ears it was an amazing piece that kept unfolding until it reached a throbbing climax, a perfect soundtrack to the times. And their version of Cannonball Adderley’s “Work Song” was the same thing, only funkier. It was all improvisation except for the melody, with the band stretching out to nearly eight minutes. This was unprecedented in rock ’n’ roll in August 1966, when the record came out.

Aspects of “East-West” can be traced back even further than the band’s LSD-inspired experiments with Indian music in Boston. The two-bar riff that begins the song came from a Gravenites tune called “It’s About Time” that he and Bloomfield had been playing since 1964. Another element of “East-West” was derived from Latin music and from the moves of the shake dancers the band often played for in Chicago clubs, as Elvin Bishop explains. “The bass player in the Butterfield Band, Jerome Arnold, didn’t play jazz and he didn’t know anything about Indian music,” Bishop says. “If you listen to it, the bass part he plays is the type of beat they’d play behind a shake dancer. That’s all it was.” What tied the disparate parts of “East-West” together was Davenport’s drum pattern, which he played in a bossa nova style.

Of course, those weren’t the only songs on the record. Elektra didn’t mind having prestigious artists like the Butterfield Band on the label, but a hit single would have been nice. They knew this stuff had potential, and they weren’t as sure about some of the acts they were signing. Elektra had signed Love, a Los Angeles pop-rock band that was led by a pair of songwriters named Arthur Lee and Bryan MacLean. Love would make the lower rung of the charts in spring 1966 with a crazed version of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “My Little Red Book.” That summer, Elektra signed another Los Angeles band, the Doors. The label pressed up one thousand copies of their first album and then didn’t release them for months, until they’d gotten some feedback from the fans as to whether this was anything worth bothering with. Hoping for a hit single, Elektra let the Butterfield Band hang out in Los Angeles, where they recorded Monkees guitarist Michael Nesmith’s “Mary, Mary” during the summer. The Monkees cut their own version at the same time, but they wouldn’t release it until January 1967.

“We got real hot for a while to cut commercial records,” Michael told me. “We went with these guys who used to cut records for the Stones, Bruce Botnick and Dave Hassinger. We cut ‘Mary, Mary’ and a song called ‘If I Had My Way,’ which never came out. All sorts of weird attempts to make rock ’n’ roll singles. We really wanted to do that, but it never happened.” The group would also cut a fine single called “Come On In” in September that flopped miserably after it was released that fall, perhaps as much because of Elektra’s innocence in the world of pop music as the Butterfield Band’s lack of commercial expertise. “Mary, Mary” was an interesting foray into pop music, but it didn’t become a hit.

East-West was a mixture of commercial attempts, blues, and experimentation. Heard today, it stands up as some of the era’s most adventurous and accomplished rock music. Other bands were attempting similar blues-rock fusions in 1966. Producer Tom Wilson, who had moved to Verve Records after leaving Columbia the previous year, recorded a band called the Blues Project, who featured the guitar work of Steve Katz and Danny Kalb and the keyboards of Al Kooper. Their November 1966 album Projections would sport an avant-garde version of Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me.” But it was East-West that laid the foundation for the Grateful Dead’s Live Dead and much of the Dead’s subsequent work, and it anticipated by five years the Allman Brothers Band’s At Fillmore East and Eat a Peach.

In July 1966 the Butterfield Band was performing at the Cafe au Go Go in New York City when Michael Bloomfield first saw Jimi Hendrix play. “The first time I saw him was when he was Jimmy James, and he was with the Blue Flames at the Cafe Wha? in New York,” Bloomfield told me. “I was playing across the street and I was the local hot guitar player on the street with the Butter Band, and he was just across the street, unknown. I went over there one night, and man, he wouldn’t even shake hands. I mean, he knew how bad he was. He got up there. He had a Twin; he had a Strat, the first fuzztone that ever came out, and there were jets taking off. There were nuclear explosions and buildings collapsing! I never heard anything like it in my life. And it was an off night for him, too. I was sitting right in the front row and he was doing it right to me, like a machine gun. ‘You like this, man?’ B-bb-bbb-room! He was just mowing me down. Oh! Talk about burning!

“Every time we played together, it was pretty hip. . . . I remember once playing with him, taking this long solo, and then I looked over, and I heard these insane sounds, and he was playing with the toggle-switch of his guitar, and a knob and his bar, and he was tapping the back of the guitar and it sounded like sirocco winds on the desert.”

The band continued to tour, Michael grew more miserable, and though there were still plenty of triumphs live—Michael told me about hearing tapes of “versions of ‘East-West’ that were forty minutes long that were unbelievably coherent all the way through”—this version of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band was about to become history.