Butterfield Blues Band 1963

[TeleBluesMan]

From October 2, 1963. Earliest known recording. Butterfield, Bishop, Bloomfield, possibly the Wilson Brothers on bass & drums. Recorded at University of Chicago twist party. Recorded by Norman Dayron.
http://mikebloomfieldamericanmusic.c...dy11Da8CCF5wCU

[OldLefty]

Thanks for this! Butterfield Blues Band was my first favorite band as a kid.

I went and checked out that Michael Bloomfield site, there's a lot of other interesting stuff and downloads on there as well.

[jseth]

What a tremendous band they were! That first vinyl LP is still one of my favorites... Loved that initial line-up... Elvin Bishop and Bloomfield were terrific foils for each other... just some really raw, fiery playing on that thing! An early introduction to the Electric Blues for my (then 14 years) young Southern California brain!

Much as I appreciate and admire Bloomfield's playing, there was something BIG missing when Elvin left the band...

I enjoyed many more recordings from Paul Butterfield, throughout his much-recorded career...

[Mr. Jelly]

Bloomfield, Butterfield and the Bluesbreakers were my first musical wonders. Great stuff that is unequalled to this day. I watched a Butterfield documentary on Amazon Prime a little while back that was pretty good. FYI Michael Bloomfield was an acoustic blues and country rag guitar player that started out as a folkie booking agent.

[DCCougar]

Originally Posted by TeleBluesMan

From October 2, 1963. Earliest known recording. Butterfield, Bishop, Bloomfield, possibly the Wilson Brothers on bass & drums.....

Man! Had to grab my C harp and jam with that one!

[FrankHudson]

Their East-West LP was a touchstone for me. Great blues, the hardbop classic Work Song, and a breathtaking vehicle for improvisation in the title song.

There's an "official bootleg" of that song East/West in three versions being played in clubs as part of that bands repertoire as a live group in 1966. It's called East-West Live and it's on Spotify if you want to listen. Quite a document of how increasingly adventuresome that band could get.

A year before I attended the small Iowa college I first went to, that band played a gig there and the stories I heard were that the volume and aggression of their playing drove a lot of the college students out of the room. I swore to everyone who told me about that event that I would have rushed to the front.

[Mr. Jelly]

I look back now on bands around the mid sixties like Butterfield that were my introduction to these different musics and find my introduction was by the best there is.

[MakingMusic]

One of the advantages of having an older brother and growing up in NYC was being able to discover the 1960's music scene at a very young age. The Cafe Au Go Go was our go-to place in Greenwich Village and I saw Butterfield there many times, along The Blues Project, Tim Hardin, The Youngbloods, The Dead, etc. It was a small, intimate 350-seat venue and it was a magical place for live music.

The highlight of the half-dozen times I saw The Butterfield Blues Band there was one night when the place was sold out and our table had one empty seat. About half way through Butterfield"s first set, Richie Havens walked in, grabbed our empty chair and sat at our table just as the band went into "Work Song" and "East-West" back-to-back. An hour of uninterrupted non-stop music!

What a night!

[Tahitijack]

I've seen David Sanborn several times. Although today he is recognized as a jazz sax man, he includes a few way back when stories during his show. In 1969 he was with the Butterfield Band at Woodstock. His stories about that day are very funny. They went on before Jimi and after long delay after delay both the Butterfield band and Hendrix were more than READY.

[MakingMusic]

Originally Posted by Tahitijack

I've seen David Sanborn several times. Although today he is recognized as a jazz sax man, he includes a few way back when stories during his show. In 1969 he was with the Butterfield Band at Woodstock. His stories about that day are very funny. They went on before Jimi and after long delay after delay both the Butterfield band and Hendrix were more than READY.

haha. I bet they were!

[frankmcr]

Just my opinion, or is Bloomfield somewhat underrated?

[ghostnote]

Originally Posted by frankmcr

Just my opinion, or is Bloomfield somewhat underrated?

Maybe by the general public, but not by guitar players. Every player I know holds him in high regard.
The Butterfield Blues Band was the first real concert I saw, in 1967, on a Friday night at the local football stadium. I was 15 and had an older girlfriend (17) who thought we should go. She was right - I had never heard music like that. I was very impressed.

[TeleBluesMan]

Originally Posted by frankmcr

Just my opinion, or is Bloomfield somewhat underrated?

IMHO, yes he is. He was hugely influential but never achieved the commercial success of peers Garcia, Clapton, Beck, Page and Hendrix.

[FrankHudson]

Originally Posted by frankmcr

Just my opinion, or is Bloomfield somewhat underrated?

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.

[TeleBluesMan]

Bloomfield's vocal ability is an acquired taste and no doubt hurt his commercial success. And he was not the strongest songwriter. But Bloomfield's work in the 1970s definitely foreshadowed the Americana movement, with an emphasis on acoustic and electric roots music from earlier eras. The quality of his later work can be somewhat uneven, but there are some real gems in his later catalog, as he drew upon his impressive knowledge of American music and applied his still-formidable skills to the tracks. Recommended is his album If You Love These Blues, Play 'Em As You Please.