Oy Yeah, Mikey Bloomfield!!

Mike Bloomfield was one of the first rock & roll guitar heroes and, to many musicians around in his ’60s heyday, he remains one of the greatest guitarists that ever was. Born in Chicago in 1943, he was one of the first white boys to truly absorb Chicago blues and find his own distinctive voice within the style, then he expanded far beyond its stylistic confines before settling into its changes as home. He was the fuel that fired Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited and he was the dynamite in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, playing with a manic vigor that was notably absent in many of the British blues gods or the Californian jammers who followed in his footsteps. Those few years difference between Bloomfield and the class of the late ’60s—everybody from Hendrix and Clapton to Krieger and John Cipollina of Quicksilver Messenger Service—made all the difference, as Bloomfield came of age during the rise of electric blues in the late ’50s and early ’60s. As a teenager, he trekked down to the South Side of Chicago to hear, then play, blues with the masters who regularly gigged in the Windy City. By his own estimation, he sat in with “every living musician who played electric blues,” a boast that may have been an exaggeration but not by much.  Certainly, his playing illustrated a crucial difference from those other, better-known ’60s guitar heroes who largely learned the blues via vinyl: he absorbed the intricacies of a wealth of blues, jazz, folk and country styles, finger-picking with the same dexterity that he played single-note solos.