BY RALPH
HEIBUTZKI
Twenty years after his death, the late Michael Bloomfield still exerts a gravitational pull over anyone who heard his ground-breaking blend of blues- rock guitar power and modal improvisations. That mixture captured my imagination — I can remember trying to kill time on a lengthy high school bus trip, and swapped Cream's Disraeli Gears for Nick Gravenites' My Labors, which had Bloomfield's fingerprints all over it. As I was enjoying "Gypsy Good Time", somebody piped up behind me, "Don't you have any music that isn't bizarre?" Suitably appalled, I turned around, "C'mon, man, this is your heritage! Don't you care where your Top 40 comes from?" I drew a blank stare, but I'd made my point.
Bloomfield's friend, and producer, Norman Dayron, relishes the anecdote. "Michael's idea was [that], you always go back to the source — as far as you can, to the plantation sound, the work song, the prison song. He was not interested in music that was created by imitating what someone else did last week."
Bloomfield practiced what he preached, shunning the major label rat-race after Super Session (1968), the jam-oriented album that became his only gold record. Instead, he focused on playing his San Francisco Bay home-turf, and recorded for small indie labels — making his work hard to find before he died of a drug overdose under murky circumstances in February 1981.
Now, Bloomfield's work is undergoing a reappraisal, after a series of reissue CDs — including Live At The Old Waldorf (1998), which Dayron compiled — and a new, unflinching oral biography, If You Love These Blues (by Jan Mark Wolkin and Bill Keenom: Backbeat/Miller Freeman Books). Dayron is among numerous friends offering insight into Bloomfield's musicological bent, as well as his bouts with insomnia, addictions to heroin, and alcohol — and contrarian quirks that eventually spun out of control (such as blowing out gigs).
