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In the Thrall of Michael Bloomfield • Michael Bloomfield: An Appreciation In the Thrall of Michael Bloomfield • Page 1 • Page 2 • Printable version
In the Thrall of Michael Bloomfield, cont.
Wilson's Lovecraft-like parasites eventually caused depressions and suicides among their human hosts, so there was a price for enlightenment in their author's fictional world. Michael talked about it all the time. "They banned this book in schools in Boston," he said, pointing to "The Mind Parasites" with obvious delight. "The students believed it was a true story, and when their parents read it they thought so too and started to complain. The kids were having nightmares about things entering their minds in the dark. I tell you, it's something mysterious inside our unconscious. Something I feel all the time." The theme of exogenous beings influencing our thoughts and lives entranced Michael because, as he said, "Improvisation and writing contain inspirations that simply can't be our own – at least not of the part of our minds we have conscious control of." I asked him if it couldn't be from God. "Not the God of the Pentateuch," he replied. "That cat is an A&R man: tricks and rip-offs. Those guys don't know music from pig-farts." When he wasn't reading, Michael would pace around like a caged jaguar, contradicting what he said about the Golden Bear being a "retreat" or "vacation." He and Mark never went to the beach as far as I knew. Later I found out poppy was in it. No wonder. I'm trying to remember the year: It had to be 1970 or '71. Though I was an aspiring young guitarist with a band that had already achieved some recognition, I was with Michael for long stretches in those days. Our band's bass player, a guy named Cliff Winston, knew Michael then too. They would talk a lot about curly Jew-boy hair. Cliff's frizzball had a pyramid shape, and Michael's had that Elvis/motorcycle hood pompadour-springing-apart look (called "Eddie Munster wolf-boy" by one of his girlfriends). Years later we thought that because Michael was quite large he had a certain Chewbacca-like appearance. "I am a stone coward, so it's good to be tall," he would say. Michael loved antithesis. He had read about the Greek Sophists. They taught that speech could be persuasive without the speaker having to believe the point he was making. Very cynical guys. So Michael would get up on the Golden Bear stage and announce that the guy from Ampeg was there, and all the amps that night were provided by that company. His Twin Reverb was in the back room gathering sawdust. He would say, "Listen now, these amps are incredible, really great amps, but basically they're totally fucked-up amps." When a writer would be trying to interview him as they waited in the sawdust room while drinking Heinekens (Naftalin's favorite back then), Michael would play with antithesis. "I use really heavy strings, with an .013 E-string, so they give me lots of resistance when I do bends to achieve notes between the intervals." Then he'd go onstage and tell the crowd (with the writer still there), "I always use Ernie Ball Super Slinkys, with the .009 E-string so I can control my bending." "My picks are the heaviest, thickest ones Fender makes, but really they are quite thin and flexible." When I asked him why he did this, he said it was because he was bored. He liked to reverse the first and last letter of words too. Did it frequently. Frid it dequently. Freq it didquently. He was interested in Islam and Sufism, too – Gurdjieff's "Meetings with Remarkable Men" – and said other Jewish people would get nervous when he talked about those subjects. Like with Bill Graham and his staff. More antithesis. Another thick/thin guitar pick. My relationship with Michael started with my fetching him new E-strings, straps and cords from my own guitar case when he broke stuff. I read books about philosophy, history and weird religions, so he let me hang out. Eventually I got the job: lessons for a roadie-in-training. (He actually used the Super Slinkys. I know because I kept his strings. And Fender Extra Heavy picks. That tobacco-colored Les Paul 'Burst was lost shortly after I started.) My goal, of course, was to receive some guitar lessons. For that I had to go to the motel. There he taught me how to finger-pick. At the club he insisted upon pacing around or talking. I told him how much I liked "Blues on a Westside" from the "Fillmore West" album, and he told me horror stories about "all the horn players." During those sessions, he said, he got distracted and could not get the horn players their charts, so they'd get up and improvise. "Those people, like Snooky Flowers, would be trying to be jazz guys and would play notes that didn't harmonize. They sounded like a bunch of wheezing asthmatics." He took the blame, though, for not getting them charts, or rehearsing with them. "Yeah," I told him, "but the rhythm section with John Kahn on bass, you on guitar and Nick doing the call-and-response created one of the best slow blues in the history of the world." "Too bad the horn players had no idea what they were doing," Michael persisted. To him, the horn players with their musical chaos had ruined his dream of perfect, organized music – music like the Flag made at the Shrine. When Bloomfield wanted to use heroin, he'd disappear from his motel room and nobody could find him. When I was there, he never let on he was doing it. Maybe because I was 18 or 19 – just a youngster – he didn't want to infect me. Or maybe he was just embarrassed. As a result, Michael spent too much time lying on the floor stoned and listening to records (we all did). I believe the tragedy of so much drug use wasn't just his premature death – it was also his inability to focus as he chose. Lost hours, days and months. If he'd had more time, he might have met some of the second-generation Mississippi guys, too. Players like Junior Kimbrough and Asie Payton. He'd already done it with the guys who came upriver to Chicago, East St. Louis and elsewhere. I wish Mark Friedman – the pianist on Michael's "If You Love These Blues" – or someone else had gotten him an ethnomusicology grant and a tape recorder. It's a wonder to me that Mandy Stein finally did it with her blues bio-flick "You See Me Laughin'." Another "big city Hebe gets the gold," as Michael would say.
"... so we think that, in Western technological society, electric can openers and space rockets are more important than feelings. And it shows in our artwork." – Michael Bloomfield
King of the kinetic form B.B. King's low-volume, reverby messing around in certain portions of his intros and solos – usually to match dynamic changes in his singing parts – provides a big contrast to the louder parts, when the feeling builds to a mighty climax. Many musicians I know felt that Michael had mastered this dynamic variation, a technique that in interviews he called "musicality." His definition of that term also included the varying of attack – the rise, sustain ("decay" in engineering lingo) and release of a single note. In the course of a single solo, Mike would make you feel relaxed and almost sleepy with his low volume playing, and then he would hit you with the goods – hard. This is especially apparent in the slow blues on both of the live albums with Al Kooper, with "Mary Ann" and "I Wonder Who" being particularly effective. Once Mike cranks up, it raises the little hairs on the back of your neck. "Just like Vladimir Nabokov's prose," Al told me more than once. Kooper knew Michael had this ability and wanted to document it. Praise the Lord for Al, whose B-3 swells encouraged it! "Art has got to be kinetic," Michael so often said. "It has to transmit the emotions we suppress all the live-long day in order to get along in society." On phrasing, he would say everything more than once. Michael called himself "a stoned teacher" – boy, I'll say. He was Beaver Cleaver with a VERY loud Twin Reverb. Vulnerable like a little kid, but he cowed the biggest shots in town. Since those days, many others have played and overplayed those blues- and rock-guitar riffs that grew from Michael's pioneering style. That approach has become almost a sideshow trick – something no longer taken seriously. Michael gave signs that he suspected that had already started happening by the time I knew him. Still, no one really tried to do his "against the rhythm" style. No one. I can't really describe a couple of the more adventurous solos he pulled off with Mark Naftalin at the Golden Bear – I try but can't capture them in words. Michael had a few "Bitches Brew"-type songs just for experimenting, and would go into stuff I never heard anywhere else, I'll say that much. He used some of the modal, "East-West" scales, but also newer, jazzier ones. And some pretty advanced chords. I remember them improvising together for a long sequence, and Mike'd be facing away from the audience toward Mark, and then all of a sudden he'd whip around and hold the guitar in that odd upright angle and – Jesus! Building modal teasings and searching ascents, he'd then start into those bluesy cadenzas amid all the outer limits-stuff, and the band would be totally attuned. Then – BAM! – back into the head. Everyone would be exhausted following a performance like that. The experimental playing at the Bear was – in a few instances when he hit his second wind – far above anything else I saw or heard him do before or since. The unsuspecting club attendees were almost unable to clap afterward. As stunned and open-mouthed as I'd seen at only a few other master performances. Joe Pass at Donte's. Allen Holdsworth at the initial appearances of IOU. Land and Hutcherson, Lee Morgan and others at the Lighthouse. Buddy Rich's band. Carmen McRae. Lady Day's "Autumn In New York." Certain Ray Charles moments. You know. And so Michael was the champion of musical esthetics in my life experience. He believed that "taste" had some possible definitions. One definition stipulated that artists should transmit music to the audience in the most emotionally kinetic way possible for deep recognition. The tools of those kinetics – varied touch, attack, sustain and release (with Michael these often involved funny little swoops up the neck at the end of a phrase), and the relationship between intense volume and those soft, subtle blips on the waveform – were basic to Michael's musical orthography. They were aimed at shared emotional truths whenever possible. Michael was a gunslinger, no doubt about that – but his finer sensibilities about art surprised the hell out of me as a young player, and this surprise only grew as the years gathered. His guiding aesthetic seemed a truly exquisite kind of caring for his audience, which to me means a caring for people in general.
The last word If I were a Tibetan Buddhist or some other Vipassana practitioner, I might believe I'd absorbed (at least part of) Michael Bloomfield's spirit and could "bring it into my social communicative sending apparatus" whenever I wished. Of course, I am not a yoga practitioner, nor do I believe that literally. Their metaphors are not ours. But I think my style of speech and my memories from being with him are as strong as they are because of my emotional attachment to him. I was a young thrall and, among other things, copied him in speech patterns. Older guys did too. Michael's use of jazz scatology seemed thicker in the earlier days when he was just starting out. Words like "cat." Later he got more original, speech-wise. By the time I met him he was verging on the purely original. Not so many "cats." He had already coined "filthy lucre." I felt he was anti-business due to his deep commitment to the artistic side – a common conflict with artists. Later I thought he would grow more complex, but other things seemed to waylay such concerns. I don't know. Eventually our paths had diverged. I did not try to get in touch with him because it felt wrong. I had no idea the trouble he was having in the late '70s until I read Terry Haggerty's story in Guitar Player magazine about trying to get him to detox from heroin. "Heroin gives me pimples," the neotonous, childlike Michael enthused in Guitar Player. That scared me, busy at the time getting endorsees for Ovation Guitars and publicizing them. I thought of him as a potential Ovation artist, but no way would Michael play a fiberglass guitar, I mused. He liked old Gibson J-40s and stuff like that. With scratches and holes, preferably. But I did have that summer with Michael, and I am lucky to be able to recall enough of our time together to write down a bit of his wisdom. Now, as a professional linguist and communication specialist myself, it's a pleasure to abandon scholarly and journalist stylebooks and "be (with) Mike" again. My sense is that there are many who found him a fulcrum with which to lift their own development, scruffy and disorganized as he was in so many things. In putting the human heart on the table, Michael Bloomfield had few equals. As my ex-wife, who occasionally joined us at the Golden Bear that summer, expressed it, "Michael had huge, haunted, dark-flashing eyes, and he was gone in a whirl. But his eyes haunt me to this day."
David Pearson is a linguist, communication specialist and expert in literary property law. He has also worked as a freelance journalist and photographer for the New York Times and other newspapers, and is an occasional artist and poet. He resides in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Page 1 • Page 2 • Printable version © 2008 David Pearson |
Michael Bloomfield Discography & Performance History • Sources
A selection of remembrances of Michael Bloomfield from contributors to this site
A detailed look at the studio and live versions of the Butterfield Blues Band's "East-West"
An interview with producer Norman Dayron by Ralph Heibutzki
A check list of currently available recordings by Michael Bloomfield © 2008 David Dann |
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