Of course! Bloomfield's fluid, dynamic virtuosity shaped pivotal moments during classic rock's creative surge.
His ear-opening forays with the swashbuckling Paul Butterfield Blues Band forged the template for future superstars like Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck. Lyrical, acerbic, exuberant, and aching, Bloomfield's guitar stings with vibrato and channels chromatic flourishes, which have shaped pickers from Duane Allman to Joe Bonamassa.
Bloomfield turned down Dylan's offer to join his road band - take a sec to ponder how that might've changed rock history - to stay with Butterfield. Then, burned out by nonstop touring, he bailed on that outfit, and in 1967, went - where else? - to San Francisco.
Then the restless insomniac signed on with ex-Blues Project member Al Kooper for the jazzy jams called Super Session.
But in 1970, he simply stopped playing. You could say the blues' demons had infested his soul, as they did Clapton's: he'd become a hardcore junkie. Over the next decade, he'd come back to perform and record in spurts - until an overdose killed him in 1981.
His vibrant music remains, however - an essential sound in a tumultuous, expansive era. Below are fourteen of the best tracks that make Michael Bloomfield immortal.
"Blues With A Feeling" (1965)
The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the first serious white electric blues outfit (anchored by Howlin' Wolf's ex-rhythm section), coalesced in 1965. Thanks to the legendary John Hammond, Bloomfield had recorded a few sides for Columbia (only released much later). But Elektra's Paul Rothschild produced this band's debut, after recording their minor hit, Born In Chicago
. This cut, originally a hit for Butter's harp idol Little Walter, Muddy Waters' reedman, lets Bloomfield fire off his already formidable chops arsenal. Listen to how his supple riffs respond to Butter's vocals, how he replicates Muddy's stinging Telecaster bottleneck, how his agile timing finesses B.B. King and keeps you on the edge. He was barely 22, but he'd played with Muddy and Wolf, and they'd embraced him. "This was not just another white boy," Al Kooper later explained. "Michael used to say, It's a natural. Black people suffer externally in this country. Jewish people suffer internally. The suffering's the mental fulcrum for the blues." Until it killed him, it made him burn brightly."Thank You Mr. Poobah" (1965)
"Tombstone Blues" (1965)
"Highway 61 Revisited" (1965)
"I've Got A Mind To Give Up Living" (1966)
and Double Trouble. The southpaw axman made a specialty of burning long, slow notes in minor keys. (Bloomfield later co-produced his 1969 album Mourning in the Morning in Memphis' FAME studio, stirring soul in Rush's blues.) There's only about a year between the group's first album and this follow-up, but comparing this cut to, say, "Blues With A Feeling," it's evident how much Bloomfield has grown in concept and control. Now using a Les Paul and tapping into its different sonic possibilities, he's extended both his tonal and musical range. Those smooth chromatic runs will be a staple of his playing from now on and offset the staccato bursts, slinky note bends, and nonstop riffs that rarely repeat an idea. His inventiveness is as staggering as his technique; at the time, only a handful of black blues guitarists, like B.B., Albert, and Freddie King and Buddy Guy, could outduel Bloomfield's endless bag of tricks onstage—and they'd be the first to admit they had to work for it."Work Song" (1966)
"East-West" (1966)
. The Grateful Dead were barely starting to mess around with Dark Star. But on this 13-minute cut, Trane's modal excursions found their first true crossover reimaginings, becoming the inspiration for a multipart instrumental portrait of American music that still hits like a piledriver. The arrangement is astounding for that (or really any) time: ranging over half a dozen musical styles or more, the band subtly repaints backdrop colors while soloists fire away, all over a simple bass line whose varied accents give it all the flexibility it needs to accommodate the blasts of change roaring over it. Bloomfield's sheer virtuosity here is, uh, mind-blowing. Sure, others did the fake sitar drone thang, but how many managed the velocity and melodic turns as well? It's impossible to mention everything, so I'll pull this up: the Dixieland concluding section, keying off Bloomfield's lead as other voices gradually emerge from the background, until finally they're all blazing away on the front line in counterpoint or harmony or simply in tandem. Much of the Allman Brothers' concept and catalog—and a lot of Dickey Betts' guitar approach—has its embryonic beginnings right here."Stop" (1968)
, and thought, "Why not do an entire jam album together?" The result: Super Session. "Why not try and legitimize rock by adhering to [jazz] standards?" Kooper later wrote. He argued that Bloomfield seemed "inhibited and reined in" in the studio—a difficult point to make stick, you'd think, in light of East-West, but hey—it was the germ of this meeting. Ironically, Kooper's manifesto outshone some of the music it yielded. But this genial, soulful tune lets Bloomfield's guitar breathe differently and showcase some other angles. Bits of Curtis Mayfield surface; vocalic cries float, echoing those Jimi Hendrix subsumed into his style, then bend into heartache. If you wanna A/B Bloomfield and Hendrix, check out Buddy Miles (see Electric Flag below) singing this same R&B hit with Band of Gypsys."His Holy Modal Majesty" (1968)
"Killing Floor" (1968)
was cut, President Lyndon Johnson had escalated the Vietnam War to levels few had expected, the country was torn about by riots and demonstrations, Congress was fiercely divided, and the culture wars that still bedevil us were crescendoing into violence in the streets. In that explosive context, Howlin' Wolf's classic blues took on a whole nother meaning. Look, Bloomfield & Co. seem to be saying, THIS is the blues today. Of course, they unveiled this at the legendary 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, which was supposed to launch the next stage of California hippie dreaming. For a while, it almost looked like that might happen against all odds: Woodstock managed to become an instant myth just weeks before the Chicago police riots brutalized or jailed thousands of anti-Johnson protesters at the Democratic presidential convention—including universally beloved newsman Walter Cronkite. A year later, Altamont nailed that dream shut. But the music endures. Listen to Bloomfield's guitar twist and float and cajole and cry over the insistent rhythms, paying homage to Wolf's eccentric guitar monster Hubert Sumlin. And the horns—punching, swaggering, uplifting with all the soul they can muster from the redoubtable head charts dreamt up at Memphis soul studios like Stax. The Flag was meant to be an American music band, tackling the growing possibilities that classic rock's creative surge was unearthing, reshaping, offering. And for an all-too-brief moment, it was one of the best.
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