The Wall Street Journal - 19.10.2019 - 20.10.2019

C12| Saturday/Sunday, October 19 - 20, 2019 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

BYDAVIDKIRBY

Y

OU’RE SITTINGat a
bar, and somebody puts
a dollar in the jukebox,
and the first chords
of, say, “Honky Tonk
Women” by the Rolling Stones rumble
out of the speaker, and you smile at
the guy two stools down and say,
“They don’t write them like this any
more,” and the guy takes a sip from
his drink and says, “This isn’t bad, but
it’s not the real thing. You need to
listen to Muddy Waters and Howlin’
Wolf, or at least the white boys they
influenced, like Paul Butterfield and
Al Kooper.”
Your new friend might have men-
tioned Michael Bloomfield as well,
though heaven help you if he has read
David Dann’s encyclopedic “Guitar
King: Michael Bloomfield’s Life in the
Blues.” It isn’t the first biography of
this bluesman’s bluesman; that would
be Ed Ward’s 1983 “Michael Bloom-
field: The Rise and Fall of an Ameri-
can Guitar Hero.” But at a mere 267
pages, that book is just over a third of
the length of this one. “Guitar King”
is what old-timers in the book trade
call a doorstop or widowmaker, and
it’s packed with enough info to make
a blues nerd giddy with joy.
In Mr. Dann’s telling, the short and
troubled life of one the greatest
guitarists ever is punctuated by sig-
nificant encounters with Bob Dylan,
who flits in and out of the story like
Zeus stepping down from Olympus.
His account begins with a scene that’s
too good to be true, a sketch of Mr.
Dylan having coffee one afternoon in
a cheesy New York club where he’ll
play that evening. He’s startled by the
appearance of a brash young musician
who has come to show up the folk
singer from Minnesota. Bloomfield,
however, is astonished to learn that
Mr. Dylan, if not as adept on his
instrument, is as worshipful of the
blues as he is. It isn’t long before
Bloomfield and Mr. Dylan are laugh-
ing and swapping stories and jam-
ming on tunes by Son House and Big
Bill Broonzy, then moving on to Hank
Williams, Chuck Berry, Little Richard,
Elvis. Within months Bloomfield
would be playing on Mr. Dylan’s
“Highway 61 Revisited” and backing
his controversial appearance at the
Newport Folk Festival.
With this dramatization of a real
encounter that took place on May 2,
1963, Mr. Dann sets the tone for the
rich, resonant, detailed account that
follows. On page after page, he piles
up minutiae as few music writers do:
“Michael began with a chorus of facile
licks and then, to open his second
twelve bars, stretched a high G up to
an A,” he writes in a typical descrip-
tion of one of Bloomfield’s live solos,
“holding and shaking the note for
nearly four bars, his right arm ex-

friend to hear Muddy Waters. The doorman wouldn’t let them into the club (“Your mama know where you are?” he asked), but the two boys lis- tened from the sidewalk and were hooked. In and out of school for the next several years, Bloomfield added folk, rock, soul and jazz to his reper- toire and, on a trip to New York to hear Thelonious Monk, had his first encounter with hard drugs, shooting up sodium pentothal, a calmant that soothed the hyper Chicagoan and opened the gate to the heroin that would eventually kill him. Quickly gaining a reputation as one of the best young guitarists in the business, Bloomfield signed with fabled producer John Hammond of Columbia Records and seemed to be on the path to a long and happy ca- reer as a solo artist. But a seismic event in show biz changed all that. The morning after the Beatles’ Feb. 9, 1964 appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” apparently every music execu- tive in America woke convinced that the future lay in bands, not individual artists. It didn’t help that Hammond had a heart attack and needed six months to recover, but before long, his son, also named John, put to- gether a group made up largely of young men who’d learned directly from Chicago blues masters like Muddy Waters. The younger Ham- mond’s album “So Many Roads” was

recorded not long after the release of the first American album by another group of young white blues aficionados, the Rolling Stones. The differ- ence was that whereas the Stones had learned the blues from records by artists like Willie Dixon and Jimmy Reed, the Americans knew many of the creators of these songs personally. But if the Stones were less “pure” than Bloomfield and the musicians in the other bands he played in, notably Mr. Dylan’s, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and one Bloomfield himself founded, the Electric Flag, that might explain why the Chicago guitarist isn’t as well known as Jimi Hendrix or Eric Clapton, to name two musicians whom he idolized and vice versa. The remaining years of Bloomfield’s life consisted of stretches of performing live alternating with long periods of seclusion as he dealt with the anguish and insecurity that had always plagued him, in addition to his dis- comfort at playing the showman. He even hated it in others: his Electric Flag drummer Buddy Miles took over the live shows more than once, whip- ping the audience into a frenzy with stage histrionics he’d learned on the chitlin’ circuit and turning the guitarist into little more than a sideman. In a 1968 interview in Rolling Stone, Bloomfield said, “The Rolling Stones are a really good band, but, like, I consider them like a boys’ band be-

cause they don’t play men’s music. They don’t play professional music for men, they play music for young people.” But young people are what rock audiences consist of. (He felt differ- ently about the Beatles, who “slowly evolved to music for men with serious patterns and serious and curious ideas.”) Nearly 50 years after they first met and long after Bloomfield had died of an accidental heroin overdose at the age of 37, Bob Dylan remem- bered that “he could just flat out play. He had so much soul. And he knew all the styles, and he could play them so incredibly well.” That said, why devote countless hours of read- ing time to the story of a musician few people outside the charmed cir- cle of blues aficionados have heard of? If you’re not the kind of person who spends his days thumbing through record bins or chasing down blues acetates on eBay, one answer is that this book draws you in the way a novel does, one by Dostoyevsky, say, in which the hero is part genius, part stumblebum, a flawed artist making his way half-aware through a world of joys and pitfalls—someone very much like most of us, in other words, if a lot more talented and a little more careless.

Mr. Kirby is the author of “Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ’n’ Roll.”

tending above his head with repeated strikes.” Even when he’s not recount- ing a performance or quoting one of his hundreds of sources, Mr. Dann brings the reader into the story with little splashes of color and other sen-

sory appeals: The porches of a Cali- fornia house Bloomfield moved to in 1971 “caught the morning sun and cool evening breezes” in a way that put him “right at home,” and when he opened the “plush case” of a new Les Paul guitar, he was greeted by the instrument’s “warm luster and woody, polished smell.” Mr. Dann’s musical vocabulary is daunting; he introduced me to “puccolist,” a word that exists in no dictionary I consulted but which, in context, clearly means “whistler.” Born in 1943, Bloomfield grew up in the Chicago suburb of Glencoe, a bar mitzvah boy who developed a precocious ability on the guitar. Smit- ten by the blues, an underage Bloom- field made his way to the city with a

Steeped in music from his early teens, Bloomfield had a precocious gift on guitar but a distaste for the spotlight.

Guitar King

By David Dann

Texas, 740 pages, $39.95

The Boy With the Chicago Blues

TWELVE-BAR STARMichael Bloomfield in the studio, ca. 1970.

MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES

BOOKS

‘Mike Bloomfield is music on two legs.’—ERIC CLAPTON, 1966

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Methodology

NPDBookScangatherspoint-of-salebookdata frommorethan16,000locationsacrosstheU.S., representingabout85%ofthenation’sbooksales. Print-bookdataprovidersincludeallmajorbooksellers, webretailersandfoodstores.E-bookdataproviders includeallmajore-bookretailers.Freee-booksand thosesellingforlessthan99centsareexcluded. Thefictionandnonfictioncombinedlistsinclude aggregatedsalesforallbookformats(exceptaudio books,bundles,boxedsetsandforeign languageeditions)andfeaturea combinationofadult,youngadultand juveniletitles.Thehardcoverfictionand nonfictionlistsalsoencompassamixof adult,youngadultandjuveniletitleswhilethebusiness listfeaturesonlyadulthardcovertitles.Refer [email protected].

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LAST WEEK The Boys in the Boat 1 — Daniel James Brown/Penguin Super Attractor 2 New Gabrielle Bernstein/Hay House Blowout 3 1 Rachel Maddow/Crown The Great Mental Models 4 New Shane Parrish/Latticework Inside Out: A Memoir 5 2 Demi Moore/Harper Educated: A Memoir 6 3 Tara Westover/Random House Witch Hunt 7 New Gregg Jarrett/Broadside Autism in Heels 8 — Jennifer Cook O’Toole/Skyhorse Deep State 9 New James B. Stewart/Penguin Press The Four Agreements 10 — Don Miguel Ruiz/Amber-Allen

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Best-Selling Books|Week Ended October 12 With data from NPD BookScan

The Wall Street Journal - 19.10.2019 - 20.10.2019

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