Guitar king Michael Bloomfield's life in the blues

Review by Booklist Review

Bob Dylan considered Michael Bloomfield just about the best damn guitar player I ever heard! Though now a somewhat obscure figure perhaps best remembered as the guy who accompanied Dylan when Dylan plugged in at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, Bloomfield was a virtuoso. His love of the blues as a Jewish boy in conformist suburban Chicago set him apart as a rebel and misfit. As a teenager, he would sneak into blues clubs on the city's South Side and on Sunday mornings he would head over to Maxwell Street, an open-air flea market, to hear the blues musicians perform. Bloomfield's father considered his son's obsession with music to be dangerous, bordering on an illness. Dann follows Bloomfield's career, playing Chicago's Old Town neighborhood as well as New York's Greenwich Village; his role in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band; and playing lead guitar on Dylan's masterpiece, Like a Rolling Stone. Despite some annoying errors, Dann makes a persuasive case for how this white kid from Glencoe, Illinois, played a central role in introducing white audiences to urban blues.--June Sawyers Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Library Journal Review

Musician, musical historian, and writer Dann (editor, Artenol) presents what may become the definitive biography of 1960s blues-rock guitar virtuoso Michael Bloomfield. This meticulously researched volume recounts how Bloomfield's love of blues and folk, along with his restless and searching persona, made for a distinctly American story. Dann chronicles Bloomfield's upbringing in Chicago, his honing of his guitar skills in clubs, and his eventual meeting with Bob Dylan, which led to Bloomfield's signature guitar playing on "Like a Rolling Stone" and his backing Dylan as he went electric at the Newport Folk Festival. Bloomfield's work with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and later his own group the Electric Flag, with whom he played at the Monterey Pop Festival, solidified his reputation as a musical innovator. Dann describes gigs, recording sessions, and song creation with intimate detail and scene setting and uses dozens of interviews with Bloomfield's associates and fellow musicians, as well as other sourced information, for a comprehensive narrative. VERDICT This monumental book illuminates the legacy of a musician who has been overshadowed by other Sixties luminaries but who helped bring the vernacular of the blues to rock and whose playing influenced the course of rock and roll.--James Collins, Morristown-Morris Twp. P.L., NJ

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

An exhaustive biography gives the legendary Chicago blues-rock guitarist his dueand then some.More than a half-century ago, Mike Bloomfield (1943-1981) was routinely ranked with the likes of Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix. His was the guitar that electrified Bob Dylan's watershed performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and that stung its way through his breakthrough "Like a Rolling Stone." As the lead guitarist for the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Bloomfield brought extended, jazzlike improvisation to the form and performed with a flamboyance that charged his every gesture. In 1967, he formed a band called the Electric Flag, which added horns to the blues-rock-soul-jazz mix and would attempt to transcend musical genres. But by the early 1970s, Bloomfield walked away from the spotlightor stumbled and staggered away, a victim of substance abuse, insomnia, insecurity, and an inability to deal with the pressures of the spotlight and the demands of touring and performance. By the time he suffered a fatal overdose in 1981, he had been all but forgotten, a footnote in rock's progression. "The obscurity Bloomfield longed for in his last decade he achieved posthumously with stunning success," writes Dann, who has approached his task with an archivist's expansiveness rather than the selection of detail and stylistic grace that distinguish a biographer's craft. The author includes every club owner, performance booker, and long-forgotten sideman as well as every recording session in Bloomfield's slide toward obscurity. Amid the dross, there is a compelling narrative of a young blues fanatic whose problems with drugs and mental instability predated his fameand who continued to perform in projects for which he had indifference or even contempt because he was so deeply in debt to the manager he had once shared with Dylan.Those with a passion for the music will enjoy revisiting a time when Bloomfield's influence exceeded even Stevie Ray Vaughan's. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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