Ah ... Butterfield Blues Band ... where to start?
First, the blues: There are those like myself who loved the blues all our lives. I loved the blues as far back as I can remember, even when I was 5, "before I knew to call her name." It was so hard to find. It was hidden, like a treasure. Instead, we were drowned in schlock, a flood of schlock: Sinatra, Elvis, Tony Bennett, Perry Como, Pat Boone, Beatles, ad nauseam. You had to hunt. You had to hope. I found the LP Best of Slim Harpo (Excello) where? In Dublin.
When Butter's first album came out, it shook my world. I saw them at Town Hall, mid-town Manhattan, fall 1966. I sat in the front row, right in front of Bloomfield's Bassman speaker cabinet. He played an old, gold Les Paul. Butter blew into a bullet mike. Bishop played a red 335. His face was so red, you thought he'd bust a blood vessel.
They were real. All music, just music. No light show, no costumes, no dancing girls. They came on stage, plugged in and played -- no talk, no BS. After an hour, they walked off. They came back and did an encore. And they were better, much better, then the record - which was a killer - the mark of true musicians.
This was just before East-West was released. Of course, they did East-West, the song.
Saw them shortly thereafter in '67 in the Village, in one of those tourist traps, the Café A Go Go. Again, they took no prisoners. Hard, pure, sexy blues. (Richie Havens opened and sucked.)
As a kid, I'd ride my bike down to Brook's Record Shop (Plainfield, NJ) and stare at album covers of records I could not afford: Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Thelonius Monk, Moms Mabely, Little Richard. Mr. Brooks had a mail order service, where, as it turned out, Butter bought blues and soul 45s. Mr. Brooks turned me on to the Swan Silvertones.
This movie is invaluable for explaining many facts about Butter I never knew, such as his educated, middle-class origins in Hyde Park, Chicago. It gives you a rough, though incomplete, idea of who he was as a person. Like so many accounts of pop music, it strays from essentials to the hyperbole of marginal, but famous pop people, like Maria Muldaur, Bonnie Raitt, Happy Traum and Jim Kweskin.
Elvin Bishop, who came from dire poverty in Oklahoma to the University of Chicago on a National Merit Scholarship, hung around black cafeteria workers, who took him to blues clubs on the Southside.
These clubs, like the Southside itself, were dangerous and violent, not a safe haven for white, middle class, wannabe hippies. I knew the Southside because my brother did a residency at UC. I also went to med school in Chicago.
You have to read Michael Bloomfield: If You Love These Blues, An Oral History (Wolkin and Keenom), not only for the Butterfield Blues Band, but for insight into '60-'70s music, like Dylan, Janis, Mother Earth, etc. Where Bloomfield was key. To get to the blues, he had to rebel against an oppressive, affluent father in Glencoe, Il., which I also knew. That my have been his undoing. I saw him at the Lion's Share, a club in San Anselmo, Marin Co., CA in '72. To quote Hank Williams, his body was "just a shell." He couldn't hit a note.
Both Butter and Bloomfield destroyed themselves with drugs. Woodstock, for all its idyllic beauty, was a hellhole. The festival there descended into chaos (I was there). See the movie Once Were Brothers about the Band, who also destroyed themselves with drugs in Woodstock. It's a cliché to say that the flowers of Flower Power died on the dung heap of heroin, speed, alcohol and coke. Easy money and fame led to an early grave for many.
