The applause that followed the introduction was polite at best, but the audience reaction was quick once Butterfield, hands cupping his harp and microphone, began to play. The instrument, this small novelty item whose notes would not even comprise a complete scale, sounded like a primitive voice originating somewhere down in his gut. He had all the authority of Little Walter and a melodic sensibility more nearly like the classic tenor men of jazz. In his mouth it moaned and quavered like the human voice at its most primal. Answering his phrases was Bloomfield's guitar, playing long sustained notes followed by brilliant cascading figures; intricate, frantic and so dazzling. The rhythm section -- the handkerchief-head on drums, the preppy black man on bass, the Merit Scholar from Tulsa on rhythm guitar -- laid down the foundation. And all the while Butterfield sang, not of failed crops and lost love, but of life in the urban jungle.
I was born in Chicago
In 19 and 41.
Well, my father told me
Son, you had better get a gun.
(Nick Gravenites)
The crowd loved it. This was blues with balls, not blues as destitution and oppression. And it was hip, urban and integrated. No matter how hard the young white folkies had tried, they never could quite pull it off, never could manage to sound convincing playing the music of old black men. For the sons and daughters of privilege how to sing about a life sentence at Mississippi's Parchman Farm Penitentiary, how to call out "Saddle up my black mare", was a conundrum. But here was Butterfield, fresh from the dives of Chicago's South Side, playing a pocket instrument and making it sound like a tenor saxophone, leading a black rhythm section, and singing music that was at once Black, urban and hip. The crowd went nuts.
That night another event occured which shook the musical world. At the time it eclipsed the sensation of Butterfield's debut, but in the longer run it was, perhaps, the lesser of the two. This was the debut of "folk rock", the first day Bob Dylan plugged in his electric guitar in public. A kind of low-grade pandemonium broke out. Some people jeered, others cheered. Backstage, Pete Seeger was livid. What Dylan was doing was a repudiation of all they had worked for.
Folk music was not for hip-swiveling pretty boys to make their millions by grinding their hips and curling surly lips. It was not adolescent, it was serious, high-minded; it was not to protest the sexual morals of the older generation, it was to protest the social injustice of the system. It was holy, not profane. It was not rock and roll, it was folk music. Yet here was Dylan, leader of the younger generation of folk musicians, volunteer in the civil rights movement, singer of such sturdy hymns as "The Answer Is Blowing In The Wind", standing on the stage of the Newport Folk Festival, Fender Stratocaster slung around his neck, bellowing about "Your Brand New Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat". He had to be stopped. According to witnesses, Seeger grabbed a fire ax and prepared to chop the cable to the sound system. Cooler heads prevailed.
Dylan's electric band that evening was made up of Butterfield's sidemen, and as a result, in the hagiography of American superstars the Butterfield Band is accorded the status of a footnote on a footnote, sidemen at the birth of folk rock. Now, the proper place of folk rock in the history of pop culture is not my concern. Perhaps it ranks as a phase in the diversification of musical tastes and as a chapter in the illustrious career of Bob Dylan, nee Zimmerman. In my view the importance of this day as the birth of folk rock pales beside the significance of what the day meant for blues and the collective American consciousness. This was where the blues began a headlong rush from the ghetto market of Pepticon and Hadocol to the mass market of Levi jeans and Timberline shoes. It was Paul Butterfield who slit the membrane between the two cultures, the membrane, semi-permeable though it was, which had kept Mainstream America from meeting the most important component of our nation's musical culture. Through that opening came a flood of artists who had never played before a mass audience, among them B. B. King.
B. B.'s debut with the new audience came a few years later, in 1968, at Bill Graham's Filmore West. Arriving at the address written on the contract, B.B. was sure a mistake had been made. Everything was wrong. It was the wrong part of town, the wrong kind of building, and all the faces in the crowd waiting outside were white. He sent his road manager inside to ask if it really was B.B. King they expected. There was no mistake. All this was for him. When the moment came to take the stage he heard the voice of Mike Bloomfield on the house PA announcing him as "the greatest living blues guitarist, the King Of The Blues, Mr. B... B... King". He stepped from the wings and was met with a standing ovation. Two years before his name was known to only a few thousand white Americans outside the South. Now he was treated as an object of veneration on his first-ever outing in the mainstream. It was Bloomfield and Butterfield, more than any others, who made this happen.
Within a few months of Newport, as the first album took off, Butterfield and his band became a sensation. Concerts sold out in hours. Club dates saw lines for blocks. It's hard to say which of the two, Bloomfield or Butterfield, was more popular. Bloomfield was idolized as no rock guitarist had been before. A measure of his popularity and influence on those who were learning to play blues guitar was the effect he could have on the market for vintage guitars. There was, and still is, a national network of dealers, serious collectors and musicians who buy, sell and trade the classic original guitars of rock, jazz and, starting with Bloomfield, blues. When Bloomfield would be seen playing a Gibson, Les Paul, curly maple model, the price for such originals would jump tenfold, nationwide; if he switched to the black model of the same guitar, its value would go up ten fold.
However dramatic was the appearance at Newport the key to Butterfield's impact was the first album on Electra, titled, simply "The Paul Butterfield Blues Band." On his first attempt producer Paul Rothchild recorded enough material to make a very decent album. But he knew something was missing. The power of the sound was just not there. Next, he recorded them live, over a series of New York club dates. The result had more spontaneity, but he knew he hadn't captured the particular quality that laid their audiences out cold. He resolved to try the studio again.
Returning to the studio they acquired a new band member, keyboardist Mark Naftalin. Naftalin had been a regular on the scene in Chicago when Butterfield played more spontaneous jam sessions than regular bookings. By his own account Naftalin, son of a Minneapolis academic and politician who served four terms as mayor, had known since the age of ten that there was only one thing in the world he wanted to be and that was a blues piano player. During his student days in Chicago he jammed with Butterfield and Bishop many times. At one hangout there was an upright piano just off the small stage. When Butterfield was on the bandstand Naftalin would take up the spot at the keyboard and play, often unheard for lack of amplification, never quite acknowledged as part of the band, never quite sure if Butterfield approved of his playing or even noticed him.
After graduation in 1964 Naftalin moved to New York City to get a year of conservatory training in the foundation of music theory. On the eve of the new studio session Naftalin ran into one of the Butterfield band members on the streets of New York and learned about the coming session. Would he like to come down to the studio, he was asked. He had no reason to think he was being invited to make musical history, but he needed no prodding to turn up for the first session. Bishop was late. Rothchild told Naftalin to sit at the Hammond B-3 and told the engineer to put the organ into Bishop's channel, number four of four. Whenever Elvin might show up, he and Naftalin could share number four. With tape rolling they began an instrumental warm up. They were winging it, cold. Just playing in a groove. It was an up-tempo, jazzy groove. First, Butterfield, then Bloomfield, took solos, followed by Naftalin. Then they traded licks, two-measures each. It was just over four minutes long. They named it "Thank You, Mr. Poobah" and it became the third cut on the A side of the album.
What must it have been like for Rothchild in the control room that day? Did he know at once that he was getting the elusive quality he'd been missing from the earlier efforts? The result of these sessions was an album that effected our musical history in much the same way as Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band changed the musical scene, making it forever after different. Three Butterfield Blues Band albums on Elektra followed, but none compared in influence to the first. Since its release in 1965 The Paul Butterfield Blues Band (Elektra EKS-7294) has remained in print without interruption.
Initially, I thought the book might be a biography of Paul Butterfield, but Mark Naftalin changed my mind. I asked him about Butterfield the man, and Butterfield the story. Was Butterfield a character worth writing a book about? Did he have a life whose story was worth telling? Before letting him answer I told him about my own crushing disappointment upon meeting Butterfield and spending an afternoon with him beside the pool at a Howard Johnson Motel, north of Boston. I came away from three hours in the presence of the master feeling utterly empty. How could someone who had so profoundly moved me have so little to say to me in person, I wondered then, and told Naftalin now. "I'm glad you put it to me that way," he began, "so I won't feel bad for saying that I had much the same experience over a longer period of time." [An approximate quote taken from recollection.] According to him, Butterfield was an unerring musician. "In all the times I heard him play, man, I never heard him blow a false note. Almost on a nightly basis, he would blow me away, sometimes with a single note, played with just the right feeling. Yet for all the time I spent with him I could never feel I got inside the man. Now, as a musician, Bloomfield was the exact opposite. He would go right off the rails, regularly, but he was so brilliant, so quick, that, before you could notice, he would be onto something else, something dazzling; it didn't matter how wrong he'd been just a moment ago. But Paul never went wrong. "
So, if it's not a biography of Butterfield, what kind of book is it? Naftalin cautioned me that it would be difficult to separate the unique impact of the Butterfield Band from the effect of the times. Indeed, the success of the band had much to do with the nature of the times. The musical climate made possible things that couldn't have happened just a few years before. Musicians were crossing barriers that had previously been inviolable. Does this make the book a history of the time? Certainly not. The musicians of the Butterfield Band came together independent of the times; it's rather the other way around: they had a strong hand in making the times. What's more, it would be a mistake to turn the book into a polemic, that is, an attempt to prove that Butterfield launched urban blues on its odyssey from Pepticon to Levi's. No, this book is to be the biography of a band. If I just tell the story of the band, who they were, how they came together, what they did together, and, briefly, what became of them, I will give the readers something of value.
I am convinced that this book represents a unique opportunity to tell a story of great importance to our cultural history, one that will engage and enlighten readers, and one which I am uniquely qualified to write. My conviction in the importance and vitality of this story is just as strong as the conviction which lay behind my ten year pursuit of B.B. King's life story. That conviction carried me past seemingly insurmountable obstacles in the form of indifferent publishers; past the efforts of editors determined to remake my book to fit their preconceptions; past these obstacles to the realization of a finished book which won critical praise including Book Of The Year award from Leonard Feather, LA Times' music critic, and the commercial success of three hardback printings and paperback editions in four countries.
