MEMORIES OF MICHAEL BLOOMFIELD
I first met Michael Bloomfield up in the guitar room at Lyon and Healy, the largest music store in Chicago, located on Wabash Avenue. I was trying out (read – having fun playing) guitars and at the other end of this long room filled with guitars was a young man and woman and he was playing some fantastic music. Drawn to him, like to a flame, I walked closer and closer, listening. And I told him how incredible I thought his playing was. I was dumbfounded listening and watching his fingers. Then he asked me to play something. I did and he said I was pretty good too.
I think he must have given me his phone number because not long after that I began to spend some time with him.
One of the first encounters I remember. It turned out that Bloomfield, who lived in Glencoe, was a cousin of my friend, who lived just around the corner from me, in Highland Park, David Deutsch. Deutsch played with him sometime and it was arranged that he, Michael, and some other players – I remember one was a black bass player named Horace – would play as a band at our Rec Center. I hadn’t heard Michael play electric until then and again, at that gig for impressionable white high school students, my mind was blown by his inventiveness, talent and energy.
At that time, I was going down for guitar lessons every Saturday, often with friends, to the Old Town School of Folk Music, located then on North Avenue near Sedgwick, in the heart of the very hip, Old Town, Chicago’s answer to New York’s Greenwich Village. Being at the Old Town School was the best school experience I ever had and it saved me from the blandness and the lack of soul in suburban culture.
I remember Bloomfield visiting the Old Town School and also a time where I’d asked him if he would play at a little concert at a church in Rogers Park, where me and my playing partner at that time, Nate Herman, were also doing a duo set of old-timey and bluegrass tunes. Michael graciously said yes and again was a complete delight as a person and astonishing as a player.
So we hung out a bit like that in the early 1960’s. I recall out of context one time my mother was driving us somewhere and Michael was in the passenger seat, I was in back and we got to talking somehow about classical music and somehow Schubert. Michael enthusiastically said “I love Schubert!” and rapped on a bit about that…further blowing my mind. I think he said he tried to play some of his tunes on guitar.
Then I’m not sure what year it was, but it was still during high school. I’d had a fight with my family and ran away from home. I called Michael and asked if I could stay at his place. Gratefully he said yes and I went to stay at the apartment Michael had at that time with his girlfriend, later wife, Susan. It was in uptown, then the “hillbilly” neighborhood on Chicago’s north side. Michael was inspiring and accommodating as usual. As I recall, I had my old frailing style banjo with me and seeing I had no strap, he enthusiastically gave me his bathrobe belt to use as a strap – I had it for years, but lost it some years later…wish I still had it!
Later that afternoon, he took what apparently was all the money they had – just change in a ceramic bowl on the little table in their living room – and went out shopping for knickknacks – some cute toys and maybe candy as I recall. And I remember when we returned, Susan looked both amused and astonished at his irresponsible but irrepressible and impulsive nature.
I think maybe the ride in my mother’s car was after that runaway weekend - probably Michael was being given a ride back to his family’s home in Glencoe that was on our way to Highland Park.
Then my first most exciting and now also embarrassing story about being with Michael in those days. I wrote this up as a “true confession” ten years ago.
True Confessions - Me, Michael Bloomfield, and My Chemistry Tutor
This was during high school so you will notice my great enthusiasms alongside a now embarrassingly insensitivity.
I was a fifteen-year old student at Highland Park High School in the Chicago suburbs. I was flunking chemistry and my parents had arranged a tutor. She was a friendly young woman, now about likely a third of my current age.
I was also way into guitar playing. I spent most of my spare hours listening to old blues recordings and copying their playing note-for-note. By fifteen I had become a somewhat skillful young bluesman.
Anyhow, the chemistry tutor was over for an evening of tutoring. No one was in our large suburban house except for her and me. Part way into the session I got a call. It was from my friend and mentor at the time, the great guitarist, Mike Bloomfield. On Tuesday nights Michael was in charge of “Blues Night” at the Fickle Pickle, a Rush Street club on the near north side of Chicago.
Michael said, “You’ve got to come down to the Fickle Pickle right now. I want you to play tonight.” This was incredible to me for a number of reasons. Michael had said he was the only white person he’d allow on stage at this blues night. So I was deeply complimented. And the excitement of going down to the big city on a school night and hanging out with Mike and any of the bluesmen also playing that night was irresistible.
But here I was with this tutor.
I made a decision. I called my friend, Justin Green, who had a driver’s license. Justin later became a famous underground cartoonist particularly for “Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary” (which got him a fan letter from Fellini!).
And I told Justin the situation. I told him, ‘Justin, I want you to pull into our driveway in 15 minutes and don’t honk your horn. I’ll sneak out with my guitar and we’ll go down to the Fickle Pickle.”
Soon fifteen minutes had gone by. I told the tutor I had to go to the bathroom. I went up to my room, got my guitar, put it in the case, and silently went out the side door.
There was Justin. And we took off for the club – about a forty-minute drive. We had an incredibly exciting evening, hanging out with Bloomfield, with Big Joe Williams and the offbeat patrons.
Now of course I think wincingly about that poor Chemistry tutor. The boy’s supposedly gone to the bathroom. He’s gone for quite a while. What does she do? No doubt calling out in a strange house, “Hello? Hello?” Finally leaving with God knows what feelings rolling around inside of her.
When I got home, of course, I got hell from my parents. But I had that great evening to remember for my whole life, along with the wincing embarrassment for what I put that poor tutor through.
Now she is likely an old woman and Bloomfield's long ago overdosed (1981). Justin passed away last year, most recently living in Cincinnati doing his wonderful art and sign-painting.
However, I in the meantime am happily reliving these memories, occasionally plunking on my guitar and grateful for this wild life we get to live.
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I remember hanging out with him, Charlie Musselwhite, and Big Joe Williams at the Old Wells Record Shoppe, a fantastic place in Old Town run by an great old character, Bill Shavers. Around this time, he began playing with Paul Butterfield and I saw him many times at Big John’s in Old Town. I loved hearing him and being awestruck by the music they made. Michael played so loud that not only would the music reach deep into my ears and mind, but my eardrums seemed to emit the music, the intensity of the vibrations causing feedback from the ears. The music came in and out of my ears as I went deep in and out of my mind!
Michael Bloomfield & Charlie Musselwhite
Then in 1965 I went, immediately after graduating high school, to New York City as a kind of rite of passage. However, I wanted to go with some pot – I called Michael who by then was living in the near-north side Chicago development, Carl Sandburg village. I came to see him with my best friend, George Doherty, who was to accompany me on the trip. Michael graciously greeted us, we visited for a while, then he took us up to the roof of his building, to sell me my first ounce and to avoid the smell of our smoking getting him into trouble with the neighboring residents in the building.
He also gave me a note of introduction for the folksinger Pat Sky to welcome us in Greenwich Village. When we got there, I contacted Pat and he took us two young unknowns all around and helped us feel very excited and at home, navigating in these new, stimulating surroundings. Thank you, Michael and Pat.
It was 1965 when the first Butterfield Blues Band album came out. I was delighted of course to hear many of the songs I was familiar with from their Big John’s sets. About a year later, it was summer of 1966, I was living in Old Town on North Park Avenue. I remember that August eagerly awaiting the second album any day now. I bought it the day it came out, immediately went home, got stoned and put it on the record player. I listened to the whole album straight through and by the time I got through the ultimate cut, “East-West”, I had been catapulted into such a wondrous state that I kind of stumbled out of the apartment and went for an aimless walk. I remember not remembering where I had gone I was in such an altered state, not by the pot, but by the music. What rock and roll could be – what music itself could be - had in that one listening been transformed. When I got back to the apartment I put the whole record on again and settled again into such pleasure and amazement, it was a life-transforming day. To this day, I am not aware of much in any rock and roll music since that surpassed the inventiveness of particularly that cut “East-West”, which combined rock and roll, rhythm and blues. New Orleans stomping, Indian music in a complex structure that built, as did the final moments of Indian ragas, into a series of climaxes, each building on and surpassing the last. It remains one of the greatest accomplishments in rock and roll.
Around this time, I went off to college and don’t recall having much contact with Michael. He was also off blowing everyone’s mind and hearts and ears – as, until Jimi Hendrix, he was for a relatively short while recognized by many as the greatest American blues/rock guitarist. I had known him equally as a brilliant acoustic player as well as a quite inspired piano and banjo player. I recall when I had my runaway weekend, him talking about and showing me some Papa Charlie Jackson.
He was so funny, full of life. His language often a rollicking combination of a hipster slang and Yiddish. He was gracious, full of enthusiasm and when you were talking with him he focused on you so you were a temporary center of a universe.
I do recall shortly after he met Bob Dylan. I asked him what he was like. He said he was a “yeshiva bucher” – meaning like student at a Hebrew school. I still consider that both comical and insightful.
Michael and Bob Dylan at Highway 61 Revisited recording session
A few years later I called him when he lived in Mill Valley, California. It might’ve been 1970, I’m not sure. But I called him from San Francisco and said, “Michael, this is David Lauterstein, I’m not sure you remember me but…”
And he interrupted me and said, “David Lauterstein, of course I know you, you were the only guitar player I’ve ever met who could be as good as I am.”
Of course these were precious words to me then and now. And those words kind of encapsulate him for me – they were gracious, they were cocky, and they were a lie - he must’ve met many guitar players that were way better than me! But what he said, in holding forth the possibility that there was something in me that was possibly remarkable, lightens my heart to this day and lets me know that I do have something, something that I can draw on that has a least a bit of the taste of real soulfulness of which Michael Bloomfield in his way was an incredible embodiment.
Wherever you are, Michael, even if only living in some people’s memories, thank you for being a source of delight and inspiration in my and other’s lives through your unique way of being and your beautiful music.
FYI -
Some of Michael’s playing that was consistently stunning in his early live shows was captured on record. To this day I think only Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, Butterfield Band’s “East-West,” and the later, mostly acoustic album, Analine, fully captured that brilliance.
for further reference - David Dann – Guitar King: Michael Bloomfield’s Life in the Blues
Here’s the link to the incredible 13-minute title track, East-West from the eponymous album first issued in 1966.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvWvOwLCWGg