Like a million other kids in the early 1960s, I bought a guitar, got as good as I could on it, and then bought a better one. I worked hard learning the licks that would impress, the songs that were important. I strove to take all ten fingers and make them crank the fast-picked ragtime melodies and make it all seem easy. I learned to bend strings in emulation of the great blues singers. And when my heroes began tending toward electric instruments, I defended them.
Bob Dylan, for instance. He’d “gone electric” at the Newport Folk Festival, but he’d been writing songs that begged for electric instruments for some time. And Elektra, the folk music record label that was at the cutting edge of things, had just signed some hotshots from Chicago called the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, an integrated band that played blues, members of which had backed Dylan at Newport. If Elektra considered this folk music (and it was true that the pages of Sing Out!, the folkies’ bible, had been filled with the argument that Chuck Berry was a bluesman, and if that was true, so were the Rolling Stones), then so did I.
The Paul Butterfield Blues Band’s debut album came out in the fall of 1965, and I dutifully bought it. I can safely say that this thirty-eight-minute record, titled simply The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, changed my life, disordered my perceptions, and totally rearranged the way I thought about popular and folk music.
There was this guitar player on the record, a guy who was doing stuff that was absolutely impossible, who was playing rapid-fire notes and sweet swoops, who howled and screamed, begged and teased, and held the entire record together. This guy had to be the Paul Butterfield the band was named for, because he was all I heard when I played the record. But no, Butterfield was the guy who honked his harmonica like a saxophone.
The guitarist, the album cover said, was someone named Mike Bloomfield.
Well, I tried. I sat there with my very good acoustic guitar, and I listened to those lightning attacks on the fingerboard, and I felt a tiny glow of triumph when I finally figured out, and could play, the Elmore James lick on “Shake Your Money Maker.” Several weeks later, when that was still the only lick I’d learned, I began to get disillusioned. Slowly, it dawned on me that the typewriter was more my instrument than the guitar. It was all the fault of that Bloomfield character, but I guess it was all for the best.
Of course, he had just the opposite effect on a lot of people who had more talent on the guitar than I. In the course of researching this book, I have heard from innumerable guitar players, famous and not famous, good and not so good, and they all say, “I started playing because of him,” or “I completely changed my style after I heard him play.” (The great British guitarist Eric Clapton wasn’t at all known over on US shores in those days.)
Before Bloomfield, there was no glory in being a guitarist; after he appeared, mastering electric lead guitar became the test of manhood. Before him, many music fans thought blues was acoustic music played in a fingerpicked style in the manner of Mississippi John Hurt, or the eccentrically accented fingerpicking of Mississippi-born guitarist and singer Skip James, or Fred McDowell, Robert Pete Williams, or Sleepy John Estes, all of whom played blues on acoustic guitars and had been “rediscovered” by the folk movement. After Bloomfield, the circle opened wide to encompass Muddy Waters, B. B. King, Albert King, Otis Rush, and yes, Chuck Berry.
If Michael Bloomfield hadn’t come along to fuse the virtuosity of Chicago electric blues with the energy of rock ’n’ roll, someone else would have, but we were very lucky indeed to have had such a fine teacher as a pioneer.
This book reveals Michael’s story as he told it and as his friends and colleagues remember him. It is the story of what he achieved, what he created, and what it cost him. It is the story of Michael Bloomfield, an American guitar hero.