Wednesday, October 1, 2008

If There's Someone Left To Play


There's a raft of things you don't get unless you were there at the time. The Beatles and the Beach Boys as competitors for the most creative and best band in pop music. Jane's Addiction as part of a group of Led Zeppelin clone bands. Sha-Na-Na at Woodstock.

No, wait. I don't think all the brown acid available explains that one.

Here's another. Guitar journalism as we know it today started in order to promote Mike Bloomfield.

How many of you just said "Who?"?

When Dylan went electric, first time, out at Newport, he had Mike behind him, that's who.

The Best White Guitarist That Everybody Has Forgotten.

I picked up Butterfield Blues Band and East-West in the early 1990s, knowing that they were in the used CD bin and had "blues" in the title. I did research and found out who and what this was about. And what it was about was the blues guitar, electrified and hot, beginning to become the dominating force in rock music, followed by "East-West", which shares with the Byrds' "Eight Miles High" the introduction of Coltrane's modal style into rock music.

3 comments:

Pribek said...

Glad to see you mention Bloomfield. Way back, I bought the album "If You Love These Blues, Play 'Em As You Please" from Vintage Vinyl. It was released by GP mag as kind of a tutorial. A year or so ago, I found it on Napster so I bought the download. It's very cool, I think you may dig it Dave.

Dave Jacob said...

Just found it on Amazon, and I'll look other places, too. Looks cool. Thanks!

Pribek said...

It's pretty neat because there is some of Mike's finest playing on there. The music stands alone very well but, before each track he gives you a little info about the style/history and stuff like what kind of amp etc.
The original version came with a book of notation which was missing from my LP version; don't know if that is available.