I am not going to begin by telling you about this person. I will say that he is the greatest blues guitar player who ever lived, hands down.
And this song embodies the everything the blues was meant to be: Smoky, Desperate and Devout. It is a scotch going down the back of your throat followed by a drag of an unfiltered Lucky. It is that black man in a red suit and a white fedora sitting at the bar shaking his head slowly with a 1978 black Cadillac Eldorado parked outside, a Gibson Hollow Body, fluorescent lights reflecting off of a rain soaked street at three in the morning, huge vibrato, minor pentatonic scales with a side of chromatic thrown in for good measure and it is NOT any type of distortion. This song is the pinnacle of the guitar-voice trade offs and an example for all those would be bluesmen of perfect phrasing, however it cannot be done better than this.
Buy the song now and give it a listen.
Eleven minutes and five seconds later I can tell you about this backwoods slave descendant from Mississippi....if that was who the man was. Rather, Mike Bloomfield was born in 1943 in Chicago to wealthy Jewish parents. He was a skinny white boy with curly hair and confidence problems. He was also the man who took Dylan electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, the lead in Mitch Ryder's hit "Devil With the Blues Dress" and a session musician for a myriad of songs from the late sixties and early seventies. Chances are if you hear a song from that time period the man behind the lead guitar was Mike.
I was introduced to Bloomfield by an aged English professor who smoked too much weed, drank too many shots and lived a little too fast. However he saw Dylan in the Village when his name was still Robert, Miles downstairs before the Vanguard sold out, The Allman Brothers when they still had Duane and Reed before he became an iconoclastic idol; he had over five thousand records and could play every song contained within them. Many drunk, high nights I'd pass out up on the bench of the bar at six in the morning with all the skin on my right thumb missing from playing and a dead squirrel in the back of my throat. And from those nights I learned a lot about music and what was the real deal. Reed over Dylan, Bloomfield over Clapton...his thoughts on music ran in direct contrast to most everything I had held dear but when he invested the time to explain it all nothing was more clear. Though he was an adept teacher and a shaman of the blues when I asked him to teach me how to play like Mike he lowered his eyes straight faced and told me it was impossible.
Mike Bloomfield died at age 37 in circumstances that were never known. Towards the end of his life he was a heroin addict and the most productive notes he put out were used for cheap 70's Porn. In short, he lived by the blues and died by the blues, that is the way all the greats expire. Nonetheless there is eleven minutes and five seconds worth of his life that was not spent on the floor of a gritty bathroom, jonesing and shivering, in reality there was a lot more and while worth listening to I still haven't tired of this perfection.
