Michael Bloomfield: S/D

Anyone have anything to say about Electric Flag? Always been curious...

I always wanted to like the Electric Flag stuff better than I go. I pull it out from time-to-time, and it's certainly enjoyable. They were a tough group. But yeah, when I'm going for that vibe, I find myself preferring the slicker Blood Sweat and Tears. Songs win out over rhythmic attack, in this instance, for me. Go figure.

Even though this thread is four years old, I gotta cop a plea for those solo albums that Bloomfield did for small folk labels in the last few years before his death. The pressure was off of him to be this blockbuster Rock Star, and he seemed to be finally free to do whatever the hell he wanted to. The best ones are Cruisin' For A Bruisin' (on Takoma), If You Love These Blues, Play Them As You Please (on Guitar Player) and the posthumous Living In The Fast Lane on Waterhouse. By this point, Bloomfield wasn't playing the blooze-rock Johnny Hotlicks role like everybody expected him to; he was actually more like a Ry Cooder or a Taj Mahal, not only doing different styles of blues, but occasionally stepping into other genres like funk (on the Waterhouse LP) and rockabilly (on Cruisin'). The album on Guitar Player (an offshoot of the magazine) is surprisingly listenable for an instruction record.

Destroy: that terrible Count Talent & The Originals LP on Clouds (a TK subsidiary), another blues-rock affair, from '78. Somebody handed Bloomfield a lot of money to do this, and the best he can come up with is a slide-guitar version of a Leo Sayer song ("When I Need You")? I. Don't. Think. So.

His first solo album, 1970's It's Not Killing Me, ain't exactly killing me either.

need to check out that new Bloomfield set! looks kind of great
http://www.amazon.com/His-Head-Heart-Hands-DVD/dp/B00G2DC2EG

New Bloomfield biography out in September via Chicago Review Press Revised edition of Ed Ward's long-out-of-print 1983 Michael Bloomfield: The Rise and Fall of an American Guitar Hero. I did the research and wrote the new material for it, and Ed Ward edited my contributions. The 1983 edition included lots of great interviews with Michael Bloomfield and Nick Gravenites, et al, and I was able to catch up with Michael's brother, Allen (who was also a source in the original edition) along with Gravenites, Mark Naftalin, Barry Goldberg and many others. A lot of new photos, too. I certainly came away from the project with a new appreciation for Bloomfield's great playing and his devotion to his art.

Picked up that set Tyler was talking about out in the post just previous to this one, but have yet to give it my attention. Interesting labor of love on Kooper's part throughout, it almost feels like he cashed in one last favor to get it compiled and released.

The Bloomfieid set has been controversial--many of the performances were edited. Mark Naftalin, who played with Bloomfield for years, put a side-by-side comparison of the original tracks and the edited versions on his website, and was none too pleased by the truncations. While I was working on the Bloomfield project, I talked to Bruce Dickinson at Sony, who produced the box along with Al Kooper. They did delve into the vaults, where there are even now many, many Bloomfield recordings that haven't seen the light of day, but they didn't have the budget or the space on the box to range across licensing some of the stuff that could have been on there--performances by Bloomfield on Mother Earth and Wayne Talbert records, for example. So the box is weighted toward the Kooper Super Session performances, though they do get some of the good stuff from the Kooper-Bloomfield Live Adventures record. Only 3 Paul Butterfield Band tunes (the live Butterfield stuff that Mark Naftalin put out on his own Winner label includes some great takes on "East West," but sound quslity isn't top-notch). The performance of Bloomfield and Dylan doing "Maggie's Fsrm" st Newport in '65 is pretty essential but it didn't show up (dunno how hard it would've been to obtain this), and an early Butterfield Band cut, "Nut Popper #1," is a really great example of Bloomfield at his best and didn't make it. The guy was all over the place and hard to compile.

huh, didn't realize there were a bunch of edits.
bloomfield's contributions on that giant 65-66 dylan box set last year are totally great.

Congratz on the book with Ed, Edd! Will be sure to get that. This is a bit painful to read, but it's the eloquent testimonial/take of his frustrated, passionate, judicious friend, journalist-musician Ira Kamin, and it burned into my brain the first time I read it, soon after it was published. Some tears of rage in here, but clear light too:
https://books.google.com/books?id=aeYDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA60&lpg=PA60&dq=Mike+Bloomfield+Checkered+Demon&source=bl&ots=qgml-BbM9_&sig=7AX7pmYOTBUY5XxkhSVZEtTg5gk&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiou73Vw4XOAhUCySYKHQ_GAbkQ6AEIIzAB#v=onepage&q&f=false

Yeah, I think you may have been the one who alerted me to the Mother Jones piece, dow. It is a heck of a thing, and in fact, I tried to use it in the book. (I was able to include a quote from Kamin, a notably sharp and unsentimental observer of Bloomfield, to the effect that drugs were his downfall and he never recovered after he began using them in earnest, and when I got Kamin on the phone, he declined to elaborate further on Bloomfield, telling me he'd said his piece.) I think the box is a decent testimonial to Bloomfield, but his style really did change after about 1973. The Winner CD from Mark Naftalin I mention above, East-West Live, is really good, as is the ST to The Trip--"Gettin' Hard" is great, and there's also this bit of psychedelica:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48o9092eB1Y

Remarkable piece by Kamin indeed. (Separately from anything else it's also interesting to see the dismissal/description of the later work as 'old man music' when I'd argue that's precisely the kind of things deeply valorized by younger fans/musicians these days in general, across the creative board.)

Also, that photo of Bloomfield from the box where he's sitting down in the studio in intense conversation with someone to the left of the photographer, while Dylan turns and looks over his shoulder, is really remarkable as a visual. Just a perfect example of a frozen moment.

when I'd argue that's precisely the kind of things deeply valorized by younger fans/musicians these days in general, across the creative board

I think Bloomfield was a precursor to Americana--he covered quite a bit of country music in his later career and took pride in playing guitar in an orchestral style that owed a lot to Ry Cooder's. Heard to good effect on the box' "D Flat Blues," or whatever it's titled; it's actually Randy Newman's "Uncle Bob's Midnight Blues." Had he lived to be 60, Bloomfield would've probably showed up in Nashville making albums with Buddy Miller.

Yeah, come to think of it, I guess "Tombstone Blues" and the Newport "Maggie's Farm" bring out his looser, scruffier, country blues, all cranked-up, of course, charging out of the barn----some of the more formal, urban blues homage of Super Sessions, for instance, hasn't aged as well, judging by the last time I listened (not recently). Reminds me of a Mike and Friends thing at one of the Fillmores, I think; the reviewer said the solo interludes of country blues were magical (group jams not so much).
Liked him best with Butterfield, Dylan, and the Electric Flag, also some of his playing on Muddy Waters' Fathers and Sons. It's Not Killing Me was more of a singer-songwriter set, with very mixed results, I thought (haven't heard it in a long, long time). Did like the title track, about lying awake" "Lord I itch and I bitch, about some small mental mistake...It's not killing me, but it sure is hard to take." Also more of a shaggy dog story, "The story of a good old guy!....he was cool, and pretty funny, stayed a while an' then he left."

I keep going back to stuff like the Butterfield Blues Band and Super Session to try to give it another chance, but something about his blues playing always sounds off to me, awkward phrasing. I like him on Dylan records but I can do without his blues.

Did you listen to East-West?

Just now saw Electric Flag's The Trip soundtrack on 1967 Rock Bands Debuts poll thread: knew they'd done it, but not that it was the first. Now I see some promising descriptions online---this Wiki lists several others I hadn't heard of, also looks like soundtrack was never on CD, apparently. I've still got A Long Time Comin' on CD, still holds up. I always thought of it as a more electric, hipster cousin to Big Pink: that same syncretic urge to merge different kinds of American music---"eclectic" was thee groovy term then, though some attempts just came off like resumé rock or more trend-chasing, a la Spinal Tap. Didn't hear any other EF---this article also reminds, as does the xpost Ed/Edd Bloomfield chronicle, just how precarious and hectic this band could be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Electric_Flag

DId we even discuss how that was a really early, pre-Monterey use of the Moog on that thread? No, I don't think we did.

the trip soundtrack did get a truncated cd release like 20 years ago, not sure what the logic was in cutting an already short album even more!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxpuE-yMtZc

#OneThread

Ha, exactly! Was wondering when we would get to that and even checked earlier today whether it had been posted recently.