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  #16  
Old 10-08-2020, 05:51 PM
DCCougar DCCougar is offline
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Originally Posted by OldLefty View Post
Butterfield Blues Band was my first favorite band as a kid....
Fathers and Sons with Muddy Waters was a favorite album of mine....



Muddy Waters – vocals, guitar
Otis Spann – piano
Michael Bloomfield – guitar
Paul Butterfield – harmonica
Donald Dunn – bass guitar
Sam Lay – drums
Paul Asbell – rhythm guitar
Buddy Miles – drums on "Got My Mojo Working, Part 2"
Jeff Carp – chromatic harmonica on "All Aboard"
Phil Upchurch – bass guitar on "All Aboard"
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  #17  
Old 10-08-2020, 09:23 PM
FrankHudson FrankHudson is offline
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Originally Posted by DCCougar View Post
Fathers and Sons with Muddy Waters was a favorite album of mine....



Muddy Waters – vocals, guitar
Otis Spann – piano
Michael Bloomfield – guitar
Paul Butterfield – harmonica
Donald Dunn – bass guitar
Sam Lay – drums
Paul Asbell – rhythm guitar
Buddy Miles – drums on "Got My Mojo Working, Part 2"
Jeff Carp – chromatic harmonica on "All Aboard"
Phil Upchurch – bass guitar on "All Aboard"

I'll heartedly second that! I think this was recorded before Muddy had a car accident with injury that weakened him somewhat. He's in full force here and the band does a fine job of working with him. The version of "Long Distance Call" on this record is worth the price of admission alone.
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  #18  
Old 10-10-2020, 04:14 AM
davidbeinct davidbeinct is offline
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The idea of a ‘guitar hero’ was just around the corner in those days. I think Bloomfield was a more complete player than Clapton, especially when he was playing with Butterfield and Dylan. I think that’s around the time the Beano album came out. Anyway, some of the early guys like Bloomfield are a bit forgotten by the public consciousness because they were doing what they were doing before that gunslinger guitar hero image had become part of popular culture. I think Clapton was kind of the first to bring that image to the fore, partly because of his playing, but also partly because England is not America. Blues was a little more unknown and exciting there, and it’s a smaller country so perhaps easier to make an impact.
Waiting in the wings while Clapton was solidifying the idea of a guitar hero with British youth though was an American who would complete the image of a guitar hero and also fundamentally change the idea of what could be done with an electric guitar. I don’t think any other single rock musician is such a complete hard line of before him vs. after him. He was still relatively unknown when Mike Bloomfield saw him.

"I was performing with Paul Butterfield and I was the hot-shot guitarist on the block I thought I was it. I'd never heard of Hendrix... I went across the street and saw him. Hendrix knew who I was, and that day, in front of my eyes, he burned me to death. H-bombs were going off, guided missiles were flying I can't tell you the sounds he was getting out of his instrument. He was getting every sound I was ever to hear him get, right there in that room with a Stratocaster, a [Fender] Twin [amplifier], a Maestro fuzz [box], and that was all he was doing it mainly through extreme volume. How he did this, I wish I understood... I didn't even want to pick up a guitar for the next year.

"That day, Hendrix was laying things on me that were more sounds than licks. But I found, after hearing him two or three more times, that he was into pure melodic playing and lyricism as much as he was into sounds. In fact, he had melded them into a perfect blend."

Quote:
Originally Posted by FrankHudson View Post
Of course underrated/overrated is a dodgy concept as it adds an additional relativity to something, but I'd say "Yeah."

He had a short career almost entirely in the United States. He never produced a great or great selling record with his name on the cover. By the end of the Sixties he was a total non-factor. He didn't seem to want to be famous or promote himself. In the right mood or state he could be a great interview subject (friends invariably talk about how smart he was, but that didn't happen much.)

BUT....

The first Butterfield album was one heck of display of tight, aggressive Chicago style electric blues playing in 1965! This was too soon for that record to have more than an "insiders" impact. A few years later a lot more young white guys could do that, some with considerable chart success.

That same year Bloomfield appeared at the Newport Folk Festival "Dylan Goes Electric" event, one of the most famous single live appearances in "rock music" history. That opening song tear-through with Bloomfield turned up to 10 is still hair-raising. And he'd already recorded Highway 61 Revisited with Dylan, one of those has to be in the top ten of all time LP records.

In less than a year he'd record East-West, that second Butterfield Blues Band record and along with the rest of that band set the template for what would be filling ballrooms and converted movie theaters a year or so later.

The guy was in the absolute vanguard of rock guitar playing by that point. Alas, it was before much of an audience was looking for that, and before there was an infrastructure and publicity machine to make stars out the exciting lead guitarist. If there was anywhere in the United States that would have wanted to publish a Top Ten Electric Guitar Player list (there wasn't, that's my point) Bloomfield would have been on it.

A year later he was on side one of the "Super Session" LP as his subsequent to the Butterfield group, Electric Flag, was disintegrating. There were some live at the Fillmore recordings but that's about it for things that drew notice much less sales.

There are roughly similar tales starting later in the 60s (Peter Green, Shuggie Otis come to mind), but from a United States perspective no one ever was so influential and highly rated before we even started to think about rating such things than Mike Bloomfield, and it happened so early in the course of things that he was then largely forgotten.

We've gone through decades of advances in electric guitar technology and technique, and every one now can be influenced by a crowd of everyones, but the best Bloomfield playing still excites and pleases me.

So yeah, underrated.
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