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To: BluesDuke

Excellent! Love Green Onions, but heretofore have only heard the Booker T, pop, version. Thanks for the link.


76 posted on 08/03/2010 12:35:09 PM PDT by Mila
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To: Mila
Excellent! Love Green Onions, but heretofore have only heard the Booker T, pop, version. Thanks for the link.
Fair disclosure: Mike Bloomfield was one of the players (B.B. King, the Eric Clapton of Blues Breakers, Albert King, the Peter Green who founded Fleetwood Mac as a blues group, were the others) who prodded me to try to play a guitar seriously in my teenage years. (I still play---in fact, I recently won a Les Paul Studio model Gibson guitar---I've had her altered to resemble the classic Les Pauls, with cream-coloured trim and amber volume and tone knobs---and I've been out playing the blues in Las Vegas the last few months, getting ready to put my own blues group together.) Mike Bloomfield could say more in three notes hovering over two or three bars than anyone else says in three thousand notes crowding three bars.

His was a kind of sad story: he was raised by a successful father (his family is, indeed, the family behind the Bloomfield restaurant utensil/implement/coffee system fortune) who was otherwise a tyrant at home who actually couldn't bear that he had a musically-inclined son, and it soiled Bloomfield to the point where he came to believe success was a prison if it could turn people out like that. His mother was the opposite---she absolutely supported her son's musical bent and, when he died in 1983, insisted her son be buried in her family crypt in California (Bloomfield's adopted home state; the family was rooted and Bloomfield grew up in Chicago), well after she'd divorced his father and remarried. ("Hellhound on his trail? It was hard cash on his trail."---Al Kooper.) To the day he died, Mike Bloomfield's mother insisted the worst mistake she ever made was letting her husband put him in private schools which discouraged his musical ambitions. All he wanted to do was play good blues and explore that music from the ground up. (You should hear his 1970s recordings of traditional and other kinds of blues, including what began as an instructional set, If You Love These Blues, Play 'Em As You Please, a title which didn't always jibe with the audiences who still came out demanding he re-create Super Session . . . )

It was very much like a marriage. You took the good with the bad. And death did us part.---Al Kooper, on his friendship with Mike Bloomfield.

Here's my absolute favourite Mike Bloomfield performance . . . from Super Session . . .

Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper, "Really"

78 posted on 08/03/2010 2:15:28 PM PDT by BluesDuke (Another brief interlude from the small apartment halfway up in the middle of nowhere in particular)
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