The five best songs featuring Michael Bloomfield on guitar
Forget Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix, forget Jerry Garcia and Jimmy Page. Michael Bloomfield was the best blues-rock guitarist of his generation.
Whether it was in his days powering The Paul Butterfield Blues Band in Chicago or when he was electrifying Bob Dylan and his folk-fans at Newport; slightly later when bringing rock, blues and soul together with The Electric Flag or when putting the Super into Al Kooper’s Super Sessions or else when bridging the generations with Muddy Waters on the incredible, and massively underrated, Fathers and Sons album, or even as part of a triumvirate with Dr John and John Hammond Jr, Michael Bloomfield could run rings around just about anybody in his time.
An incredibly dexterous, explosive, soulful and skilful player, Bloomfield cut his teeth playing the blues with the real deal and true greats of the genre on the south side of Chicago in the late 1950s and early 1960s, sitting in with Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, Sleepy John Estes and Luther ‘Guitar Junior’ Johnson, as well as hitting the road with Big Joe Turner (which he documented with vibrant wit, vivid life and viscous detail in his short but brilliant book Me and Big Joe, a true must read for any music fan) before making a name for himself around the Windy City, and subsequently teaming up with Paul Butterfield and his blues band.
Considering his blues guitar mastery, indeed Al Kooper even said of Bloomfield that he captured the “true essence of the Blues” in his playing, it must have come as quite a surprise when he was brought in by Dylan to play on the sessions for Highway 61 Revisited and was asked by his new boss to not play “any of that B.B King shit”. Perhaps what Dylan was getting at, though, was that he only wanted to hear Michael Bloomfield playing like Michael Bloomfield, not like anybody else.
Indeed, he didn’t want anybody else to play guitar at those sessions, as he later said, that “when it was time to bring in a guitar player on my record, I couldn’t think of anybody but him. He just was the best guitar player I ever heard”.
And if you listen to these five songs, you’ll probably think he’s the best guitar player you’ve ever heard, too.
Five best songs featuring Michael Bloomfield:
‘Walkin’ Thru the Park’ – Muddy Waters
Re-uniting with his old hero Muddy Waters and his former band-mate Paul Butterfield, the sessions for Fathers and Sons produced some of the finest music that Muddy Waters ever put out, and that is really saying something.
This re-record of ‘Walkin’ Thru the Park’ really cooks, really jives and really swings, and it’s no wonder with so much talent in the room. Alongside Waters, Butterfield and Bloomfield, that’s fellow father Otis Spann on piano, and other sons Sam Lay on drums and Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn on bass. Despite all that enormous individual talent on the track, what really comes across is their tight connection. The way the group jump around in time, ebb and flow and take it in turns to turn up the heat with their lead parts before melting back into the groups rhythm is a real masterclass in playing together as a collective.
There is some outrageously cool playing from all involved, and though Bloomfield’s guitar might be less of a driving factor than Butterfield’s harmonica, Lay’s incandescent drumming or Muddy Waters’ cooler than cool singing, it’s no less impactful when he does step into the spotlight and fire off a mess of notes, and take over as the main man in the song.
‘Albert’s Shuffle’ – Al Kooper, Michael Bloomfield
After meeting the year before during the Highway 61 Revisited sessions—and playing alongside Dylan at his infamous and incandescent electric set in Newport—Al Kooper was, understandably, blown away by Michael Bloomfield’s talent.
Following those sessions, the pair stayed in touch and their schedules aligned a year later when Kooper left his group Blood, Sweat and Tears at around the same time that Bloomfield was having trouble with his own band The Electric Flag. Kooper booked a couple of days of studio time to get together with Bloomfield, ostensibly to jam but really to show the rest of the world just how great a guitarist his new-found friend really was. Bloomfield turned up and tore it up on the first of two proposed session dates, but unexpectedly left town before the second session, leaving Stephen Stills to step in at the last minute.
If Bloomfield’s playing wasn’t enough to demonstrate his own talents, the songs that he doesn’t play on show just how great he was, as well, as the contrast in his and Stills’ styles shows what a huge gap there was between the two guitarists.
‘The Killing Floor’ – The Electric Flag
The opening song from the criminally underrated 1968 Electric Flag album ‘A Long Time Comin”, this Howlin’ Wolf cover showed off the talents of all involved in the group, but especially Bloomfield at his scintillating and electrifying best, as his guitar cuts across the vocal lines and leads the band through the instrumental sections.
Nick Gravenites, perhaps the finest White blues singer of all time, took the vocal part here and sings the hell out of the song, but elsewhere on the album, drummer Sam Lay steals the show on the exuberant, joyous and just plain phenomenal ‘Over Loving You’. Other songs like ‘Groovin’ is Easy’ and ‘She Should Have Just’ really capture the feel of the time and truly sound like the essence of 1968 distilled, whilst elsewhere, ‘You Don’t Realize’ (written by Bloomfield) is the greatest soul song that you’ve never heard.
After the epic psychedelic-meets-soulful-rock-and-blues of ‘Another Country’, the album gently drifts out of the atmosphere with the slow blues jam ‘Easy Rider’, with Bloomfield quietly easing your mind with the sort of easy and slow electric blues which he could have played as easily as breathing.
‘Moon Tune’ – Nick Gravenites
After the dissolution of The Electric Flag, Bloomfield continued to work with his old friend Nick Gravenites. The pair had first gotten together in Chicago before they’d either made it in the business, with Gravenites even writing the opening song from The Paul Butterfield Blues Band’s eponymous debut, ‘Born in Chicago’.
When Gravenites got around to making his own debut album, like Dylan before him, he knew there was only one guitarist he wanted to be beside him in the studio, and that was Michael Bloomfield.
Bloomfield brought an incredible range of playing to the album, including a real chunky, powerful and cutting swagger to the outrageously cool opener ‘You’re Killing My Love’, but it is his solos on ‘Moon Tune’, where he really tears into the song and tears up the playbook, that showed off the full extent of his absurdly great guitar mastery and virtuosity.
‘Let Them Talk’ – Michael Bloomfield
First recorded in 1959 by Little Willie John, this soulful ballad, written by Sonny Thompson, had been recorded by a few other singers, including James Brown, before Bloomfield got to it, but no one ever got to the heart and soul of the song quite like vocalist Roger Troy does here.
Bloomfield was a monumentally talented guitarist, but he also had a supreme knack for pulling a band together and for selecting just the right material for the group he’d assembled. On this track, the closing number of his 1975 album Try It Before You Buy It, an album that was ultimately rejected by his label Columbia Records, Bloomfield brought together his supreme talents for assembling a band, selecting and arranging a song and then performing on it with this sumptuous performance. His guitar solo in the middle of the song is virtuosic, bordering on frenetic without ever overstepping the mark, and helps to tip the track into its next building point. He fires off a burst of notes without ever for a second being at risk of playing too many, and subtly pushes the song onto further and further heights.
At almost twice as long as anyone else’s version of this beautiful song, Bloomfield and his band push it further than anyone else ever did, and build up to a crescendo and real breaking point of emotion, before resolving into a triumphant and satisfying finale
