richardh@woodhead.co.za
THE 1965 Newport Folk Festival is most famous for Bob Dylan’s first electric set to a live audience, delivered to a noisy mixture of consternation, righteous indignation and even a certain amount of enthusiasm.
Backing him that historic evening was the nucleus of the PAUL BUTTERFIELD BLUES BAND , albeit without Butterfield himself, whose guitarist Mike Bloomfield had contributed notably to Dylan’s current album, Highway 61 Revisited.
Electricity had been the cause of earlier trouble at the festival, too, when the renowned but inherently conservative blues scholar and song collector Alan Lomax introduced the Butterfield outfit’s own set with disparaging comments aimed at the band’s use of it to play what Lomax clearly didn’t recognise, despite Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and other electric greats, as the blues.
The comments resulted, according to reports, in an improbable physical fight between Lomax and Butterfield’s (and Dylan’s) equally amply proportioned and middle-aged manager, Albert Grossman.
The Paul Butterfield Blues Band was the standard bearer, a year or two ahead of the more celebrated British Blues boom, for what generally became known as white blues, or blues rock. Within two albums, its influence had extended way beyond that. The eponymous debut, released in 1965, revealed a band that was tighter, tougher and, for good reason, more steeped in Chicago blues than its better-known British successors. Butterfield himself was an outstanding harmonica player in the tradition of giants like Sonny Boy Williamson and especially Little Walter, and a decent singer unfazed by the fact that his vocals were closer to gruff white hipster than ancient black bluesman. His longtime blues buddy Elvin Bishop was an accomplished guitarist who slipped easily into a support role and newcomer Mark Naftalin was a deft enough keyboard player. Not only was the mighty rhythm section of Jerome Arnold and Sam Lay black, both to look at and to listen to, but it had come across from none other than Howlin’ Wolf’s band.
Even so, the ringer was guitarist Mike Bloomfield, who conceded that the bar mitzvah his wealthy father gave him set him apart from those ancient bluesmen, but who had learned his electric blues craft well and directly from its source in Chicago’s south and west sides before introducing it to a wild rock sensibility and traces of just about every other style he ever heard.
By East-West , released in 1966, the band had lost both its drummer and its Christian name, but had gained a slew of musical influences quite outside the usual blues purview. Though they still channelled a range of bluesmen to great effect, drew a fine New Orleans piano turn from Naftalin and rocked out convincingly on a song that would end up with the Monkees, it was the album’s two instrumental tracks that forced the wider rock world to take note.
If Nat Adderley’s jazz favourite, Work Song, provided a platform for impressive individual extemporisation then the sprawling title track, 13 minutes long here, but sometimes extending to an hour on stage, set rock itself on a new course.
Where the Byrds’ Eight Miles High had recently filtered folk-rock through John Coltrane and Ravi Shankar, the Butterfield boys took that ball and ran with it, incorporating elements from all over the map into a series of explorations that virtually redefined rock’s possibilities.
The baton change from Bishop to Butterfield sends the harpist into territory that is truly saxophonic in approach, but a blazing Bloomfield tops that in a solo that almost single- handedly invented acid rock.
Sadly neither Bloomfield, who formed Electric Flag shortly afterwards, nor the group he left behind ever really capitalised on the impetus of East-West. Plenty of others did, though.