Why I Suck... Progress Report #10! Mike Bloomfield

Another month, another lockdown announcement and oh look, the clocks have gone back so that's the sun going down at 4pm now... 2020 has provided no shortage of reasons to play the blues, so let's take a look at one of it's more overlooked exponents – Mike Bloomfield. Now I must confess to knowing the name but never really having listened to much of his playing, so this was a bit of a voyage of discovery for me. First, a little on the man himself.

Michael Bernard Bloomfield was born in Chicago to a wealthy Jewish family on July 28^th of 1943. Growing up, he increasingly found himself rejecting the discipline of school and the expectations of a wealthy, respectable family and drawn to the raw, earthy blues scene developing in Chicago's South and West sides (where, as previous articles have noted, the likes of BB King were beginning to make their mark). He acquired a guitar from a pawnshop run by one if his grandfather's, and despite being left handed, trained himself to play right-handed. Spending time at the pawnshop brought the relatively affluent Bloomfield into contact with people from the other side of life – people down on their luck, trying to scrape a few dollars together to get by for another week – and inevitably, into contact with blues music which was still very much “black music” in a racially divided nation.

A natural talent on piano as well as guitar, Bloomfield practiced many hours, refining his technique and picking out licks from recordings by artists such as the three Kings (Albert, Freddie and B.B.), Little Richard, Otis Rush and Scotty Moore, and by the early 1960's was a regular on the Chicago blues scene – to the point where Muddy Waters described the young Mike as his “son”. He would record as a sideman with both Waters and Howlin' Wolf before joining his first regular band, the Paul Butterfield Blues band with the eponymous singer and blues harp player.

It wasn't long – 1963, in fact – before he encountered and impressed a young up-and-coming folk singer by the name of Bob Dylan in a Chicago folk club, and in 1965 Dylan invited Bloomfield to the recording session for “Like A Rolling Stone”, where he made an immediate impact. However, he declined the opportuity to tour with Dylan, preferring to stay with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and doing occasional sessio work.

His next move came in 1967, moving to San Francisco and creating the short-lived psychedelic blues band The Electric Flag. He continued with session work on the side but mental health issues were beginning to take their toll. Bloomfield had long suffered with insomnia and had taken to heroin to try ad obviate the problem. This went about as well as you'd expect, and Bloomfield in fact gave up playing completely during 1970 -” ...and I put the guitar down – didn't touch it. Shooting junk made everything else unimportant, null and void, nolo contendre. My playing fell apart. I just didn't want to play. “

He continued recording and playing smaller, lower-profile gigs through the 1970s, but ultimately – tragically - met his end on February 15 1981, eight days after his final gig at the San Francisco State College. He was found dead in his car, an empty bottle of Valium by his side. Just 37 years old. The death was ruled as accidental, but it's easy to see how – as with Peter Green – the combination of drugs and mental health problems contributed to his downfall, and the world lost a great talent, described by no less than Eric Clapton as “music on two legs”. And so in the pantheon of blues greats, he is often overlooked, but his playing was up there with all of them.

So, that's the sad story of a talent that never really got a chance to shine. Let's take a moment to analyse some of his licks and see just what Mike Bloomfield could do.

In this excerpt from the Paul Butterfield cover of B.B. King's "I've Got A Mind To Give Up Living" in C minor, Bloomfield begins by outlining a C minor arpeggio, before alternating between 4th and major 3rd, finishing with a bend from 4th to 5th, and finishing on the 5th (G). The major/ sus4 alternation crops up a lot in Jimmy Page's blues playing too, although this is probably explained by the fact that both players copped it from B.B. King.

In this lick from later in the same track, he uses a chromatic "fill in" approach with minor pentatonic position 1, before sliding deftly into position 3.

In this final example, taken from The Electric Flag's cover of "The Killing Floor", Bloomfield starts off on a Bb - the b2. And to be honest, I'm not convinced he does it on purpose. However, he manages to articulate it with such authority and confidence that he makes it sound right.. proof, if it were needed, that there really is no such thing as a"wrong" note, at least in the blues! Check out the use of microtones to move in between the minor and major third - that ambiguity which is so critical to the blues.

So there we go, hopefully that has piqued your interest in a sadly overlooked and underrated player who still made a great contribution to the blues and music in general. Check him out on YouTube and Spotify, you'll be glad you did! 

Stay safe and sane out there, because next month it's the big man himself- Jimi Hendrix!