He Was Better Than Clapton and Then He Vanished

He Was Better Than Clapton and Then He Vanished

I think that Bloomfield was one of the most influential players that the 60s saw. He never had a hit record, but guitar players idolized him. Mike Bloomfield doesn’t fit the script. He is one of those names that sits slightly sideways in the story of American rock. Not because he was minor or obscure, but because he burned hot, changed the direction of the music, and then vanished.

 But to understand why he eventually walked away from the music, we first have to understand what drove him to it in the first place. Mike Bloomfield was born in Chicago on the 28th of July, 1943. a comfortable upbringing, a family with money, a life that on paper had none of the usual ingredients that people like to imagine are required for the blues.

 Yet, the blues does not ask permission. It does not check your background at the door. It either gets inside you or it does not. >> It’s very strange cuz I’m not born born to the blues, you know. It’s not in my blood. It’s not in my roots in my family, man. I’m Jewish, you know. I’ve been Jewish for years.

>> As a teenager, Bloomfield did something that was considered radical and dangerous for a white kid in the late 50s. He went looking for the real thing. Not in books, not in a sanitized club designed for tourists. He went into the city, into the southside, into the rooms where the music was not a hobby or an art project, but a living language.

Chicago in the late 1950s and early 1960s was a furnace for electric blues. The Great Migration had carried musicians north and the music grew louder, sharper, and more urgent. This was the era of muddy waters, howling wolf, and buddy guy. It wasn’t museum blues. was competitive, modern, and fierce.

>> Like all the great blues singers live in Chicago and they play there, you know, and uh I’ve since I was very young, I’ve been going down to hear them, you know. I I sneak down to the bars and see could I get in and listen and hear what they’re playing. It flipped me out. >> Bloomfield showed up with a guitar and a hunger to learn.

 He listened, watched hands, watched faces, learned how the guitar could talk like a voice rather than a machine. He did what serious students do. He kept turning up. And it mattered that he turned up with respect because Bloomfield was young, white, Jewish, and from money. None of those things guaranteed a welcome. But the blues scene, for all its toughness, could recognize sincerity.

Bloomfield was not playing dress up. He was chasing the truth in the sound. He learned that the note is only the start and that the real story is in the bend, the vibrto, the way the string shivers for a split second before it settles. He learned that the point is not to impress but to communicate.

 And somewhere in those nights, among the cigarette smoke and the clatter of glasses, he became a guitarist who did not merely imitate the blues. He absorbed it. >> I was 13 years old. My cousin had gotten a guitar and I was just jealous of him and wanted one, too. By the time I was 15, I was the best that anyone around me knew. I was a monster.

>> But having the skill is one thing. Getting the world to listen is another. By the early 1960s, Bloomfield had a reputation in Chicago, not a manufactured one. A real one passed from musician to musician, club to club. If you needed a young guitarist who could handle himself, who could play with fire, but also with taste, Bloomfield was the conversation.

He drifted through the ecosystem that surrounded the blues and folk scenes, clubs, sessions, informal sitins, small bands that formed and dissolved. He was restless, driven, and already a little uneasy with the conventional idea of a career. He didn’t want a job title. He wanted the music. That restlessness makes for a great artist but a difficult employee.

Bloomfield was the kind of player who put everything into the moment. People like that are impossible to replace, but they can also be impossible to control. A key break came when the legendary talent scout John Hammond took notice. Hammond had ears that mattered, and if he heard something, it meant you might be standing at the start of a bigger road with major label possibilities.

 After all, this was the man who found Bob Dylan and later Bruce Springsteen. But Bloomfield was not built for the slow, polished climb. He did not want to sit in a corporate waiting room while executives decided how to sell him. He wanted to play. So, he did the unthinkable. He turned away from a carefully packaged solo career to join a band.

 But not just any band. A band with a mission and a sound. >> >> Paul Butterfield was a harmonica player and singer with a deep feel for Chicago blues. And he wanted a band that could deliver the music with authority, volume, and force. He did not want a pale imitation of blues. He wanted something that could stand in the same room as the original masters and not flinch.

 Bloomfield became the lead guitarist. And with that choice, the band gained its cutting edge. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band was one of the most important American groups of the mid 1960s because it carried the blues into spaces where it had not been heard in its real electric form. It did not merely borrow the blues as a style.

 It treated it as a foundation. Shake your baby. >> If he was a pleneria, a tuna fish sandwich, Butterfield would be into the blues. >> Their early recordings and performances delivered a shock to listeners who thought blues meant either country acoustic lament or polite cleaned up club entertainment.

 This was Chicago electricity. It moved. It pushed. It had teeth. Bloomfield’s guitar was central. He could play fast, but he did not rely on speed. He relied on attack and phrasing. His solos felt like conversations with the singer, like arguments with the drums, like a second voice that could agree, interrupt, tease, and explode.

 The sound was raw and unrestrained, largely due to Bloomfield’s aggressive solo. On their first album, they proved they could play the blues with more authenticity than any white band in America. They had mastered the form, but Mike Bloomfield was easily bored. He didn’t just want to play the history of the blues.

 He wanted to see what would happen if you were willing to stretch beyond that. So, he stretched. The outcome was the 13minute instrumental track called East West. Not only did they perform uncompromising hardedged electric blues, but they were an integrated band and they played extended solos and long jazzy instrumentals.

instrumentals like Mike Bloomfield’s East West. In an era of 3minut pop songs, this wasn’t just a recording, but a statement. It was long, hypnotic, and built on a radical idea that the blues wasn’t a cage. It was a doorway. Bloomfield’s playing on East West didn’t abandon the Chicago sound, but it tested how far that sound could travel.

 The phrases became circular. The sense of time loosened. But Michael Bloomfield remained the de facto star of the Butterfield Band, playing ever more adventurous and dazzling solos night after night in town after town. >> We have to remember the timeline here. This was 1966.

 This was before jam bands were a genre and long before the long festival solo became a rock cliche. Bloomfield was doing something brand new. He was proving that rock music could absorb jazz and eastern philosophy and still stay physical. In his hands, the guitar became a vehicle for trance.

 not a dreamy decorative trance, but an intense forward driving one. He was still an urban Chicago player at heart, and you could hear it in the way the notes snapped and bit. But he was also searching for a way to make the music more spacious, more open, more possible. For a brief period, Bloomfield stood in a rare position.

 He had authenticity in the blues world, credibility in the rock world, and the imagination to push both forward. But history moves fast in the 60s. While Bloomfield was stretching the boundaries of the blues, a famous singer in New York was shifting from folk hero to something more volatile and electric. He needed musicians who could make that shift sound inevitable rather than awkward.

Bob Dylan made the call. Bloomfield was invited into the sessions for Highway 61 Revisited. This is where a lot of music history becomes too neat. People want a single hero, a single genius, a single narrative line. >> Way later, he phoned me up, you’d remember it, and he asked me to come play on his records.

>> The truth is that records are collaborations. And sometimes one musician changes the temperature of the whole room. Bloomfield’s guitar did that. Mike Bluefield said he’d heard my first record [laughter] and uh he said he wanted to show me how the blues were played. And I I didn’t feel much in competitive.

 I didn’t feel much competitive with him. I mean, he he could out play anybody even at that at that point, you know. But when it was uh time to bring in a guitar player on my record, I couldn’t think of anybody but him. I mean, he just was the best guitar player I ever heard. And so I got there real early and I plugged in and all the other musicians as they came in, they’ve seen me on sessions.

 Didn’t look weird to them and I was doing pretty good. And then uh uh uh Dylan came in with another guitar player and uh and the guy sat down next to me and he he was like plugged in. He was warming up and just in warming up he played 50 times better than me. And I went, I’m in deep trouble here. I got to get out of here.

>> On like a rolling stone. He is not showing off. He is doing something harder. He is creating tension. And he is pushing the song forward. His lines are sharp and conversational, like someone leaning into Dylan’s words, answering them with a snarl, then stepping back to let the lyric land. >> How does it feel? How does it feel? Other musicians in the room later admitted they were terrified.

 Bloomfield wasn’t just good. He was operating at a level of certainty that made everyone else feel like an amateur. >> Gentlemen, no noise. >> Some loved the new Dylan, but many in the audience couldn’t hear the singer’s lyrics over the roar of the band. They began booing their folk hero. Dylan played the three songs he’d prepared with Bloomfield and hastily left the stage.

>> Can you talk about the Newport experience at all? >> Yeah. Yeah. The Newport Folk Festival was a really good musical service. It brought a lot of um real good music to the ears of a lot of people that may not have heard it. Though it wasn’t, in my opinion, the best folk festival that you could see.

 I think the University of Chicago probably had the best folk festivals that were going on in America at that time. But Newport was no slouch. That performance, whatever you think of the mythology around it, represented a door slamming shut and another being kicked open. Bloomfield’s guitar was part of the force doing the kicking. Dylan wanted him to go further to join the touring band to become part of the next chapter.

 It was the golden ticket. Bloomfield could have said yes and become a permanent fixture in one of the most documented careers in modern music. But he said no. Most musicians spend their lives chasing the structure of success. The tour bus, the hotel routine, the interviews. Mike Bloomfield ran from it. But why? By February, the constant touring and performing had caught up with Michael Bloomfield.

 An insomniac since childhood. Bloomfield suffered from sleeplessness while on the road with Butterfield. And now, exhausted, he quit the band. He had plans for a band of his own >> because Mike Bloomfield was allergic to the machinery of stardom. Touring is a meat grinder. It rewards consistency. It demands that you be the same person playing the same songs in the same way night after night.

 It rewards the people who can show up on command. Bloomfield could show up and be brilliant, but he couldn’t show up and be the routine. He was intense, private, and battled severe insomnia. for a man whose mind wouldn’t let him sleep. The pressure of the road wasn’t just annoying, it was torture. Bloomfield stayed with the Butterfield Band for a while, but the friction became impossible to ignore.

 He wanted to follow the sound. The industry wanted him to follow the schedule. Eventually, he left. Not with a long public drama, not with a carefully scripted press release. He simply stepped out. >> To Bloomfield, it was all just music. To people watching from the outside, it looked self-sabotaging. To Bloomfield, it may have felt like survival.

 But he wasn’t done with music. In fact, he was just getting started on his biggest gamble yet. Bloomfield thought if he couldn’t fit into someone else’s band, he should rather build his own. And so he did. His band, the Electric Flag, was his attempt to create music that sounded like America from north to south, east and west.

 blues, soul, rock, jazz, horns, rhythm, sweat. A homegrown fusion that reflected the real complexity of the country’s sound. He recruited musicians who could handle that ambition. There were horns, which meant the music could punch like a soul review. There was Buddy Miles, a drummer with power and groove. There were players with deep roots and strong instincts.

 They played Mterrey, one of the key festivals of the era, and the idea seemed to have momentum. >> Man, we’re really nervous, man. You know, we’re really nervous, but we love you all, man. Cuz this is very groovy, man. Monterey is very groovy, man. This this is this is something, man. This is this is our generation, man.

 All you people, we’re all together, man. It’s groovy. The band recorded a long time coming and you can hear the attempt to build a big flexible canvas. Blues riffs, funky rhythm, horn stabs, a sense of color. And when I’m with you, I should. But you can also hear the strain. The electric flag, for all its talent, struggled to become one organism.

 Too many directions, too many personalities, too much pressure, and increasingly too much drug use. Bloomfield, who had been the engine, began to pull away again. It is one of the strangest patterns in rock history. A musician repeatedly standing at the front of the wave, then stepping off the board just as the wave rises.

 He left the electric flag before the album even properly became the story it could have been. He was done with the pressure of leading a band. He was done with the music business. He needed a jam session. If you want a single recording that captures the essence of Bloomfield as a guitarist, Super Session is the place many people start.

 The concept was simple. Put Bloomfield and Al Cooper in a studio with a rhythm section and let them play. No overthinking, no elaborate production tricks, just musicians in a room listening and responding. The result is remarkable because it sounds alive, not like a performance being documented, but like a conversation being overheard.

[music] The song Albert Shuffle is often cited as an example and for good reason. Bloomfield’s tone is huge and direct. His phrases are clear. He is not throwing notes at the listener. He is speaking. Every bend has intent. Every run lands where it should. The guitar is both aggressive and elegant.

 And then in a moment that almost feels like a parable, Bloomfield disappears. He records his part, delivers something close to a definitive statement, and then leaves. Not in a dramatic blaze, but in a quiet withdrawal, as if the act of being present for too long was itself a threat. Cooper brings in Steven Stills to finish the album, and the record becomes a success.

Bloomfield should, by every traditional logic, have used that success as fuel for a sustained mainstream career. But instead, the success becomes another point of tension between what the world wanted him to be and what he could tolerate becoming. And this very tension soon reveals itself to the world outside of his sheltered space.

A studio can be controlled, a stage cannot. The live recordings with Cooper captured Bloomfield in a rawer form. Longer performances, less editing, more room for mood and unpredictability. When he was locked in, he could be astonishing. He could take a song and stretch it, not for the sake of showing off, but to find what else might be hiding inside it.

 But the live setting also exposed the instability that was becoming harder to ignore. missed appearances, vanishing acts, the sense that Bloomfield was fighting something private while the public kept demanding a show. One night he disappears and Carlos Santana ends up filling in. It is one of those rock stories that sounds like myth but carries a deeper meaning.

 The older hero vanishes, the younger one steps into the space and the music keeps moving. Bloomfield’s gifts were real, but so were his limits. Bloomfield’s influence is everywhere in blues rock, even in places where his name is not spoken. >> That Bloomfield was the most influential player of them all. >> In so far as not selling records, but selling guitars.

 There’s a big difference between selling records and selling guitars. There are some artists who sell millions of records, but guitar players don’t necessarily look up to them. But Bloomfield was really a phenomenon unto himself. When he first started playing electric guitar with the Butterfield Blues Band, he used a 52 telly.

 And I saw those things go from about $75 right on up to about $600 almost overnight. And this period like 64 and five, $600 for a guitar was a big amount of money. There wasn’t much in the way of new guitars that cost that much. Then he switched from playing that Teleer to playing a 1954 Les Paul standard gold top. And the telly’s went down almost overnight.

 And the 54 type Les Paul’s went from $75 to about $800 in a matter of just a few months. And I would have to attribute that to Bloomfield and his enormous impact. >> Bloomfield’s tone was often straightforward. a good guitar, a loud amp, volume high, and then the rest came from his hands. >> This is a Cherry Les Paul Sunburst guitar.

 It’s one of the greatest rock and roll guitars ever made, and I’ve enjoyed uh playing one for years and years. Though it is not the first Les Paul guitar that I ever played. The first Les Paul guitar that I ever did play was a black fretless wonder that was given to me by my guitar teacher, a man named Tony Tanaglio, uh in the suburbs of Chicago in Gleno, Illinois.

But the equipment was not the point. The point was his feel. You could hand Mike Bloomfield a cheap porn shop guitar and he would still sound like Mike Bloomfield. He could play strict Chicago blues, explore modal improvisation, or simply sit inside a groove with horns. That range is why he was revered by his peers. He wasn’t a showman.

 He was a translator. He could move between musical worlds, black and white, old and new, acoustic and electric, and still sound completely honest in every language. But there is a cost to that kind of sensitivity. The same open nerve that allowed him to feel every note also made it impossible for him to shut the world out.

When people talk about musicians falling apart, they often talk in lazy cliches. a talented artist, too sensitive, too wild, the usual tragic arc. Mike Bloomfield’s case deserves more care than that, because he was not chasing chaos. He seemed, if anything, to be trying to escape it. He battled insomnia.

 Not occasional restless nights, but something that could wreck the rhythm of a life. When you cannot sleep, everything becomes harder. Focus, patience, reliability, stability. The mind becomes a room that will not turn the lights off. On top of that, there was anxiety and a deep discomfort with the expectations placed on him.

He was not built to enjoy being marketed. He did not thrive on the attention. Fame for him did not look like a reward. It looked like a trap. And then he found the only thing that promised to turn the lights off. Heroin. Bloomfield was not the only musician pulled into it, but his story shows how quickly it can undo a career that seems unstoppable.

It affected his reliability, his health, his relationships, and at times his desire to play at all. The tragedy is not simply that drugs were present. The tragedy is that the very thing he needed most, stability and rest, was the thing he could not get, and drugs were his brutal substitute.

By the early 1970s, Bloomfield’s role as a major rock figure had faded. Not because the world stopped needing guitar heroes, but because he stopped wanting to be one. He did not vanish completely. He played, recorded, and collaborated. But he drifted towards smaller settings, away from the big machine.

 In a way, it was a return to the roots of what had made him great, the love of the blues for its own sake. He worked on projects that showed his respect for the deeper history of the music. He explored acoustic styles. He played older material. He became at times less interested in the modern race for volume and more interested in the lineage, the craft, the tradition.

 To some observers, this looked like a decline. To others, it looked like a form of integrity. He was choosing music over careerism, even if the choice cost him status. But even in this quieter phase, the instability did not fully lift. He remained unpredictable. He remained fragile but capable of brilliance. Bloomfield’s later recordings are often discussed like a separate chapter because the cultural spotlight had moved on.

 Yet there are moments in these years that show he was still a musician of real depth. He played with Dr. John and John Hammond Jr. on triumvirate, a meeting of roots musicians who understood the old language. >> He was involved in various bands and projects that never quite caught fire in a lasting way. Some of it was circumstance, some of it was the era changing, and some of it was Bloomfield’s own inability to stay inside a conventional structure.

 He also did something that says a great deal about his relationship to the music. He turned to teaching. He made recordings that were partly instructional, demonstrating blues styles, explaining approaches, showing how the music worked from the inside. A revealing choice. The hungry teenager who once went to learn from the masters was now passing the knowledge forward.

 It suggests that even if the mainstream career did not unfold in a neat line, his devotion to the music remained unwavering. November 1980, San Francisco. Bob Dylan is in the middle of a residency at the Warfield Theater. Bloomfield shows up. He joins Dylan on stage and they launch into Like a Rolling Stone. It was a loop closing.

 15 years after they changed the world together, they were back in the same song. Bloomfield looked older. He looked battered. He was wearing slippers on stage because he couldn’t find his shoes. But when he played, the history was still there in his hands. >> Anyway, he played on like a roll of the stone. And he’s here tonight. Give him a hand.

Michael Bloomfield. Once upon a time you dress so fast in your prime. For anyone in the audience who knew the story, it must have felt like time folding in on itself. A reminder that Bloomfield’s peak, though brief, was the foundation that the rest of Rock stood upon. It felt like a new beginning.

 a sign that maybe, just maybe, he could find a way to exist in music without being crushed by it. But the return wasn’t the start of a new chapter, it was a goodbye. 3 months later, on February the 15th, 1981, at just 37 years old, Mike Bloomfield is found dead in his car. The doors are locked, the engine is cold, an empty pill bottle is on the seat next to him.

 He spent his life running from the title of the guitar king and ultimately he left the throne empty. But there was one man who did claim the title. A king who wore that crown and defined the era long before Bloomfield found his final silence. Click here to watch the story of Jimmyi Hendris and his transformative years in London.