Chairman Ralph's Ministry Of Truth

You'd never know it now, amid the plethora of boxed sets, bootlegs, remasters and reissues hitting the racks these days, but once upon a time, copies of the Stooges' landmark albums – The Stooges (1969), Fun House (1970), and Raw Power (1973) – were on the level of Bigfoot encounters, UFO sightings, or exotic rock rumors (“Jim Morrison is alive 'n' well, reborn as a corporate warrior/7-Eleven counter lackey/off the grid adventurer”). In other words, experiences and glimpses of something bigger, to speak about reverently, but not taken seriously, since – what were the odds that anybody would ever actually get to hear any of those so-called legendary platters?

Few bands started with such a promising bang, yet fewer still made the transition from hero to zero with such rapidity. I came of collecting age in a world where the infamous, in-concert snapshot, Metallic KO (1976), was the only Stooges album that you might even spot in a record bin – coming two years after their final breakup, even as their body of work languished in out of print limbo, curiosities to be seen, and maybe furtively enjoyed, but never actually heard.

Eventually, the world caught up -- somewhat. By the time I began rounding up the usual suspects in 1994-95 for my eventual MC5/Stooges retrospectives in DISCoveries, and Goldmine, the albums had finally become common currency (though, even then, workarounds persisted – hence, I found myself making do with a French import of The Stooges, after I'd snagged the other two albums). The notion of “Detroit rock” had finally become embraced as some sort of legitimate sub-genre, and highbrow rags like MOJO had begun publishing in-depth pieces – but that was as far as any power broker sitting behind their desk seemed prepared to go.

It's hard to imagine what followed, in hindsight, when I spoke to the Stooges' perennial backbone of Ron and Scott Asheton, on their Ann Arbor turf. Although they were finally getting a bit more respect – and even royalties from their albums, God forbid – neither were enshrined in rock 'n' roll Heaven just yet. Scott was playing locally, with various bands – including Stand Fast, fronted by his sister, Kathy – while Ron was dividing his energies between his major post-Stooge band, Dark Carnival, and trying to get various movie projects off the ground.

The phenomena that led to their renewed prominence – the Stooges reunion (2003), and their induction into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame (2010), along with the resurgence of the Detroit music scene, and Stooge music featuring prominently in commercial – lay a good half-decade or more off, light years away, in pop culture terms.

The notion of an academic exploration of the Stooges' music and legacy seemed equally far-fetched – what light, if any, could you shed on the lyrical mindset behind the likes of “I Wanna Be Your Dog” – yet that's exactly what Michael S. Begnal has done in his new book, The Music And Noise Of The Stooges, 1967-1971: Lost In The Future (Routledge), which offers a fresh look at the band, while trying to pierce through the fog of myth that surrounds so much of their history, as you'll see shortly. (Full disclosure: I provided full transcripts of my interviews with the Ashetons, because when you're involved – you're involved.) For availability, or other information, visit www.routledge.com.

Drawing on the critiques of scholars like Theodor Adorno, and interviews with many of the principals – notably, the MC5's guiding light, John Sinclair – The Music And Noise Of The Stooges raises the curtain on the collision between art and commerce, “with the band's 'noisy' music and singer Iggy Pop's 'bizarre' onstage performances confusing their label, Elektra Records,” its back cover blurb notes. “As Begnal argues, the Stooges embodied a tension between market forces and an innovative, avante-garde artistic vision, as they sought to liberate audiences from passivity and stimulate an imminent joy in the rock 'n' roll moment.”

All of these subjects definitely seemed worthy of deeper examination, once I read The Music And Noise Of The Stooges, which we then explored in our interview (3/09/22) – so crank up, drink up, rear up, and proceed accordingly. The highlights follow, as always, for your reading pleasure below.

PT. I: “THEY ALL HAD A VISION”

CHAIRMAN RALPH (CR): So let's get down to it, I guess, without further ado. Let's start with the level of fandom. I've told you my story. When I started, Metallic KO – for a long time – was the only Stooges record you could get, let alone find.

The Stooges were a name that everybody seemed to know, but not a lot of people got to hear. So what was your journey through all this? How did you find them, and how did that affect you?

MICHAEL BEGNAL (MB): I was into the Ramones when the first album came out in '76, when I was 10, thanks to a family friend, who brought the record to our house. At first, it was the Sex Pistols and the Ramones. The Sex Pistols had covered “No Fun,” so, I knew that was a Stooges song, even though I hadn't heard the original yet. And that Sid Vicious album, Sid Sings, he does “Search & Destroy.”

CR: That's right.

MB: So I was like, “Those are really good songs,” and I got Raw Power. I got it in New York City – we would go to New York a couple of times a year, when I was a kid, when I grew up in Central Pennsylvania. It was '81, and I got an import version of Raw Power, which was the '77 reissue, with the British reissue.

So I was into that, Raw Power, even before the Elektra ones. Of course, as you can tell from the book, the Elektra ones were the ones that really became the big ones for me, probably even more than Raw Power, obviously. They're all great. So I was into Raw Power, and then – was it '82, before the Elektra albums were finally rereleased?

CR: I'm gonna say '83, because that's when I remember buying Fun House, in the summer of. I'd gotten Raw Power during my high school days, at the mall, of all places – in the bargain bin, at Boogie Records!

MB: Yeah. Well, I bought 'em in '84. I remember getting into the first album, in the summer of '84, and I kept seeing the guys in Black Flag, Henry Rollins and Chuck Dukowski, at least a couple of times, mention that Fun House was the shit.

So I got that rerelease of Fun House, which isn't the gatefold, and then I had all three of the studio albums. Then I started getting into them, and I picked up Metallic KO around that time, too.

CR: Wow, so your trajectory's completely opposite of mine, basically.

MB: Yeah. It was just what was out there, you know? I'd heard of them because of the Sex Pistols. I knew it was Iggy Pop – Iggy Pop was having solo albums out, that I'd heard. I had the Soldier album, probably got that around the same era, and the same time I got Raw Power.

Also, there was an Iggy Pop Autodiscography in Trouser Press, in '83. And that had him talking about all the Stooges albums, so I was aware of them from that, too.

CR: And, of course, he was continuing to play the Stooges material live.

MB: Yeah. I mean, I didn't see him live at that time. But you'd hear the name the Stooges mentioned, any time you heard something about Iggy Pop.

CR: So, what made you decide, to write about them, and especially, to take the route that you did? At the time – in purely commercial terms – they didn't achieve a lot, really. As you point out yourself, they only really got welcomed back to the party, once their influence spread enough, to the point where they had something to sell.

MB: Right, right, yeah. I mean, that's one of the main arguments of the book, is the way that capitalism drives all this stuff. It's not like they were welcomed back, or got into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame, simply because of three influential albums, and then, nothing.

But yeah, why? I mean, it was one of those things, where it was, “Oh, they influenced the Sex Pistols, and all these punk bands. I guess I should check them out.” But then, it's the power of the band itself, and I don't know, it just got me at the right time, I guess.

When I started getting into Fun House, in '84, I guess I'd just turned 18. Fun House was one of those albums, that it grows on you over time. You keep listening to it, and hearing different things in it, and hearing it differently. In fact, when I first played Fun House, I was like, “Nah, I didn't like it quite as much as the first album, or Raw Power.”

But yeah, something's weird about the sound, it's got that big echoey metallic sound, as opposed to the, sort of fuzztone sound I'd been getting into on the first album. But then, I kept listening to it, and it started to grow on me, and it just becomes too powerful to deny, I guess.

CR: Oh, OK, that makes sense, I think.

MB: Actually, it is kind of funny, though, because a lot of the ideas that I've had about the Stooges' music over the decades, all came out in the book – but I wouldn't have had the wider critical context, or the theoretical context, to kind of somehow connect all these dots. That's something I've only been able to do later.

CR: So basically, the book is your attempt to put all these things into perspective, not only for yourself – but those that don't know a lot about the Stooges, or just maybe only know the name, and a song or two, and that might be it, them.

MB: Yeah, right. Well, I wanted to really bring out their importance beyond just, “Oh, it's cool music,” or, “I really dig them.” I wanted to do more than just describe them, but rather, to actually analyze, to the extent that I could. And honestly, I wanted to do more than just do, yet another Stooges fan type of book.

I wanted to take it somewhere else, and bring this critical context to it, and analyze it, in this wider context. Because I think, a lot of people actually tend to see the Stooges as separate from any context. “They were just out there, doing their own thing, and they were ahead of their time.”

I'm arguing back against that idea, throughout the book. And why that subtitle, Lost In The Future? Because a lot of people see them as ahead of their time, or influences on the stuff that happened later, and not that many people really stop to think about them in their own moment, in their own context.

CR: Even if they didn't sound like everybody else, to say the least. But what contributed to that impression? I mean, why did people take it like that?

MB: Yeah. I mean, I guess you could understand that with Fun House. That doesn't really sound like a lot of other stuff that was happening. The first album, it's almost – you listen to it, and it sounds very '60s now, with the wah pedal, and the fuzz tone, and all that.

When you really stop to think about the musical structures, the things that they're doing, they really are connected to the blues, and they really are connected to rhythm 'n' blues.

But that's one of the points I make in the book, is that that had gone out by the late '60s. That's when you had all of these players trying to be real slick, and do concept stuff. So that basic rock 'n' roll sound had come to be seen as passe.

CR: Yeah, and I'm reminded of when I interviewed Jimmy Silver for my Goldmine piece. You may remember the quote, when they opened for Ten Years After, the guys passed the time in the dressing room, making fun of them, and doing impressions of them, calling them Five Minutes Later?

MB: Yeah, Ten Years After, they're the villains for a part of the book. Even in your Stooges article, at that period in '69, the Stooges played with them a few times, and really hated them, and hated their audience, and their audience hated them, so Ten Years After gets to be the villain. But they do sum up what we were just saying, I mean, because Ten Years After was playing old rock 'n' roll covers, and they were doing some blues rock, but they were doing it in a slick way.

CR: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, and of course, to what extent does the influence – and the isolation, or the relative isolation of the Midwest – play into all this?

MB: Well, I mean, again, they weren't isolated from everything. The Detroit sound was its own thing, and they were part of that, for sure. It's not like they weren't original, in any way. Of course, even in the Detroit scene, they were seen as weirdos, or whatever, musically.

CR: Again, to go back to this way that the Stooges are seen – of course, you've got the Ed Ward review, which is awfully condescending, to put it mildly: “Yeah, this is pretty crappy, you might see something in this, God knows why.”

MB: Yeah, I think the line is, “But the fun is infectious.” He spends most of the article slagging them, but then condescends to be like, “But it's fun.”

CR: But I guess, one of the other things that I thought of, did that reputation get baked in, in some ways?

MB: Yeah, I think that's true. That's also easy, to critics like Ed Ward – and that is a condescending review – but a lot of critics really liked them, like Bangs, and Marsh, and all those guys. They got a lot of really good reviews.

Sometimes, the good reviews were still driven by that, “It's a clear degeneracy,” kind of thing. But they got a lot of good press. Yeah, I mean, maybe Elektra could have done more, maybe they just didn't resonate, to an extent.

But one of the points I'm making in the book, and that other people are making – that was a big thing that Sinclair was telling me. He said the Doors got big, because Elektra pumped a lot of money into promoting them. And they didn't do that for the Stooges.

CR: No, and one thing occurred to me when I read your book, that popped into my head was, you could even see that, in the way they were signed – because the MC5 got a $20,000 advance, and the Stooges only got five [$5,000]. Kind of underscoring their position as not just an underdog, but almost as an afterthought.

MB: Yeah, right, and that's why you got to thank Danny Fields for getting them signed at all. But yeah. I mean, Elektra thought the MC5 was going to be the next big thing.

CR: For sure. A bit more conventional, in that sense. So what do you think was the key factor, then, in the Stooge evolution, between the first album, and Fun House? Two albums, that are worlds apart – hard to believe it's the same group of people behind them, too, really.

MB: I know. I mean, I think they had a vision. This is the thing – the standard narrative is, “Iggy had the vision. The other guys were kind of just of his backup band.”

CR: They were there for the ride.

MB: Yeah, but I think they all had a vision. At the time, they were really locked in, as a unit, and it wasn't just Iggy. I don't meant to discount, Iggy, obviously, but I mean, I think Ron's vision is just as important as Iggy's. And all the guys were – I mean, they were playing all the time.

Yeah, I mean, it's hard to put your finger – it's hard to analyze that sort of intangible thing that happens, when an artist takes their art seriously, and puts their vision into effect, what's the chemistry behind that?

It's tough to quantify, but I think they had a collective vision, that they wanted to take a giant leap forward, and made it happen together, by playing all the time.

CR: Or, as Ron said, “We learned our trade by playing live.” And that, I think, is pretty much on the money.

MB: Yeah. And I guess Ron practiced a lot. There was that CREEM piece on the Detroit bands, where it talks about Ron practicing with Bill Cheatham. Bill was his understudy, and it talked of Bill being on Fun House, but then, he wasn't. But I guess Ron was teaching Bill the rhythm parts, so that he could work on his solos. So there was a lot of thought and effort and practice behind it.

PT. II: “JUST GO WITH THAT SOUND...”

CR: Well, and of course, when I finally got to hear the complete Fun House sessions... I spent, what was it? The whole summer of 2018, driving around in my car – which, I guess, is a very Stooge-like thing to do, and listen to these things – and what struck me about it was, it seemed much more disciplined and thought out, than we all had been led to believe, all these years.

MB: Right, even by the band members themselves – whether they just forgot some stuff, or they were purposefully, or maybe subconsciously, trying to create this myth: “It was almost all first takes.” No, it wasn't! There was, thirtysomething takes of “Loose,” or whatever.

CR: Forty-four. I mean, I spent a whole day or two, listening to those. It was almost like highway hypnosis, at a certain point.

MB: Yeah, yeah, I know. I've listened to the whole thing through twice now, and some of the other selections, just a number of other times. The last time I listened it through was in the early stages of writing this book, and I actually was driving back from a trip. And it was a 10-hour trip, and I listened to four of those (CDs), straight through, on that drive.

CR: Wow.

MB: Yeah. I know, but right, they were really intent on playing them, over and over and over, till they got the one that just felt right.

CR: Which is, in an odd way, very similar to the way that the Rolling Stones did stuff.

MB: Yeah, right, right. I've read a bit about the Exile On Main Street sessions, anyway. But with Fun House, the whole idea that it was basically just a live album just turned out, not really true.

I mean, in a way, yeah, because Iggy was singing live through a PA, but there's overdubs on almost all the songs, and it wasn't like the Kingsmen doing “Louie, Louie,” where they're like, “All right, go in. We wanna do a practice one.” “OK, go ahead.” “Wait, that's it, it's done.” “What?”

CR: Exactly. And then, of course, you have Steve Mackay as the X factor, which dramatically changed the sound.

MB: Yeah, absolutely. Steve Mackay's great on that. You know, it's weird – a couple of the reviews that came out, like Dave Marsh's review, and I think, Jazz & Pop, said something like, “These guys have a few things to work out yet, but I'm sure they'll end up being really good.” And it's like, “What? What are you talking about?” His playing is great on that album.

CR: Yeah, for sure, so you even still see a little of that, “What is this?” kind of stuff dogging the proceedings, with comments like that.

MB: Yeah, right.

CR: So, with that being said, when Iggy's asked, “How do you think they're going to take it?” He says, “I think the kids are going to flip out of their minds.” And some of them did, obviously, but not nearly enough. Why not?

MB: I don't know. I mean, again, part of it could be marketing, or lack of marketing. Like Iggy always says, he wanted to make music that he could get off on, the way that he got off on music that he really dug. So I think that they did that, and why that didn't resonate at the time for others, I don't know. I mean, it definitely doesn't sound like a lot of stuff that was happening out there.

One of the things that I'm arguing in the book is, by 1970, and really, a little earlier – but definitely by 1970 – the big thing in rock was going back to your country roots, like the Byrds, and the Dead. I mean, I like the Byrds, and I can even listen to Grateful Dead stuff, once in a blue moon, and the Band.

CR: They were the apostles of that, of course.

MB: Yeah. That kind of thing was getting really big around '69-'70, and the Stooges just didn't fit into that kind of zeitgeist.

CR: You also mention, of course, the '50s revival was starting to gather steam, too. And obviously, they weren't anything like that.

MB: Not really. I mean, they had the Bo Diddley beat on the first album, but they weren't overtly doing that in a recognizable way. So that couldn't be their shtick, or whatever. They were using elements of all that kind of music, but not in a recognizable way.

CR: Of course, as you point out, in the book – your here and now isn't working, so you're going back to some imagined halcyon time. And you can recreate this on your terms, and it's not a very exciting choice, right?

MB: Yeah. I mean, it's the narrative of authenticity. You think of the Dead and the Byrds: “We did that psychedelic thing, we were into the drugs, and we were into all that weird stuff. But now, we're into this real thing,” which is going back to, like you said, this idealized version of Americana.

CR: So I guess the Stooges didn't fit into anything like that, did they?

MB: No, I mean, it's that nostalgia thing that you see happening at the end of the '60s, and they definitely weren't doing that. And Alice Cooper wasn't doing that, at the time, and Alice Cooper was able to get gigs in '71.

CR: Well, because he, of course, and his merry men shed their artsier, psychedelic leanings on their first two albums, which – at times – sounds quite club-footed, to put it mildly, but it's entertaining, in that sense.

You're hearing them try all these weird things. But then, suddenly, when Bob Ezrin comes into the picture, it gets much more focused in the pop-rock realm, with some heavier guitars, basically.

CR: Yeah, I know, just poppy enough to get on the radio, but also hard rock enough, in a more structured way than their first two albums, that they're able to still keep their hard rock cred, or maybe even their new sound, hard rock cred.

They adopted Detroit, and I guess, Detroit kind of adopted them, and they took on that Detroit hard rock sound, and then, Bob Ezrin gave them just enough of that pop edge to get on the radio, which the Stooges couldn't do. The Stooges couldn't get on the radio, really.

CR: Not really. Even though, again, you go back to the first album, the shorter songs are are all pretty much to the point, and catchy, on their own terms.

MB: Yeah. Well, that's true.“1969” is pretty catchy, right. Just listen to it, on its own terms – it's catchy enough, that if there was promotion push from the label, who knows? That's what Danny Fields was arguing in that letter that's reproduced in the Jeff Gold book, where he writes to Jac Holzman, trying to tell them to do just that.

CR: Yeah. He's arguing, “You're missing the boat here, if you don't do this.” Although, when we get to Fun House, and they try the single there, what's telling is – the full-out assault, it's all edited out, before your ears are allowed to get to that point.

MB: Yeah, I think they edited the solo on “Down On The Street,” right?

CR: Yes. Well, there's that. And then, of course, you have that brief experiment, where Don Gallucci is doing his best Ray Manzarek impression...

MB: Yeah. That never came out at the time, though.

CR: No, but it's almost as if somebody upstairs felt, “We need to hedge our bets a little bit, so we can sneak this strange cargo across the counter.”

MB: Right. Yeah, like, “Is there anything you can do with this, make it a little more radio-friendly, or something?”

CR: “A little more presentable?” I mean, I have no complaints with what he played. What he played is appropriate. But it just ends up sounding like the Doors with a heavier guitar, maybe.

MB: Yeah, it does, it does.

CR: And it loses their identity, and I thought, “I'm glad that this didn't come out, because that would have been the wrong direction to go in,” as far as I'm concerned.

MB: Yeah. That totally would have.

CR: As you say, part of your book is how capitalism drives this stuff, this push, and this pull. They were able to get signed, and yet, from the very beginning, there almost seems to be this hesitancy on the part of the Elektra regime, to fully embrace what they have taken on.

MB: Yeah, exactly.

CR: So, from your perspective, when do things start to go south? When does it all go “pear-shaped,” as they say in the UK?

MB: I mean, in terms of just working with the label, or...

CR: Or even, in terms of the promise of the group, especially, because there's a lot of talent in in the original band, right? Scott's a terrific drummer, always knows what to play.

MB: Yeah.

CR: And Ron, need we say more? Ron is the guy that launched a thousand ships on guitar. And Fun House, for my mind, is Dave Alexander's peak as a bass player, really.

MB: Yeah, well, I mean... They fired him, what was it, three months after that, or something?

CR: I know. But, I mean, “Dirt,” and “Fun House,” it's that big, booming sound of his, that really drives the song along.

MB: Yeah, I know. You can really hear the difference between the two albums, the two Elektra albums. Dave's playing on the first album is fine, and he does a couple interesting little things, here and there, but like all the other guys, something happened in that year, where you hear his playing on Fun House, and it's just like, “Whoa, that bottom!” And his playing is doing things, like bending the notes in and out, and it's a heavy bass sound. And yeah, that group, with Steve Mackay? Just incredible.

I mean, this isn't that original for me to say, but I think the promise went south, once they realized that Fun House wasn't really selling. And then, of course, that's when the heroin came in, big time. So Fun House came out in August 1970, and a couple, few months later, it didn't seem to be going very well. The habits started getting out of hand.

CR: Yes, exactly. Although, as we see in that final chapter – and you make that point quite well – they almost pull it out of the ashes, even on the edge of oblivion.

MB: Right, right.

CR: There's all those songs, poorly recorded as they are, on that boxed set – which is the only evidence that we have of them, right? Yet it suggests, had they been allowed to, they could have made a pretty compelling third album, that – again – would have sounded nothing like the other two.

MB: Right. No, I mean – yeah, I think it would have been a great album. It's weird to me the way, more recently, that Iggy and James both have been, I don't know, critical of that material.

Maybe it's just the recordings, where it's hard for anybody who's not really into it, to just tune into the murk of the recordings. Obviously, it puts a lot of people off, but when you really do tune in, through the murk, the material itself – it's amazing stuff. It really would have been a great third album.

Then again, it would have been, probably not that marketable, which – aside from the drugs – was Elektra's issue. But who knows? There's a couple of pieces in there, that maybe could have been catchy enough for a single, or whatever.

CR: Yeah. Well, “Big Time Bum,” when I first heard it on YouTube – I thought, “This sounds like, if you had taken Mick and Keith and company, and fed them Mexican super meth (laughs). It's the Rolling Stones on meth, really.” But it has that raunchy rhythm 'n' blues-style drive, that you don't hear in other bands of that time period.

MB: Yeah, right. I mean, it's kind of a piece with “I Got A Right,” in terms of the tempo, and so on. Just a year later, the Stones are doing “Rip This Joint,” which is about the same speed, but a little more rockabilly-fied, there.

CR: And a little more cleaned up, obviously, to say the least.

MB: Yeah, yeah.

CR: Yeah, I've seen some of the comments on YouTube: “But I can't make out the words!” I think, “Just let the music carry you along. The music tells you what the mood's going to be, really.” It's not an issue for me, and it's not an issue for you, obviously.

MB: Right, right. Yeah, it's not, and that's a good point. Obviously, you can analyze lyrics as lyrics, and write about their meaning.

But there's another level, where you're just hearing the whole thing, and the lyrics is part of it, but it's a sound that's not analyzable, in the same way as just getting at the meaning of lyrics. And like you said, you can just go with that sound.

CR: To go back to the subtitle of your book – 1971 is where you draw your line of demarcation. Because there was a third album, Raw Power, and a different guitarist, in James Williamson – and Ron, of course, infamously gets shifted over to bass, and there's that whole drama.

MB: Right.

CR: So why is it not included in your line of thought? Why is that not the Stooges, or is just, Iggy & The Stooges?

MB: Well, it is the Stooges. I'm not even making a value judgment, about which is the better version – I think they're both great. I felt like stopping, and the band broke up there (in 1971). It's a natural stopping point.

There's a trajectory to the Elektra years, from when they started, to '71, that I track in the book. I think it's convenient for me, to those arguments that I'm making, because it does allow you to focus on the Stooges, how they were treated by Elektra, and their attempts to make the third album, and then, the breakup, and the collapse. It makes sense to follow that arc. And they pick up again, and the arc kind of repeats itself.

CR: Except, this time, it's [MainMan overseer Tony] DeFries, and Columbia, and not Jac Holzman, and Elektra, right?

MB: Right, exactly, but it's kind of the same thing, although the arc peaks and dips much more quickly, in the Raw Power years. But yeah, it seems like, the '67-'71 period is like a unit in their history, and they break up – it's a clean break.

At the time, that was it. Well, actually, there is the thing in the White Panther paper. They announce the breakup of the Stooges, and it does quote Iggy saying, he might use the name for something in the future. So that actually ended up happening, of course, but at the time, even Iggy and James, none of them knew what was going to happen.

The band was broken up. Iggy was like, “Yeah, I'll go to New York, and hang out in Danny Fields's apartment, and see if I can meet some people, and try to get something going.” But he had no idea that he was gonna be reforming the Stooges.

CR: Right, there were no guarantees.

MB: Yeah, so it was a clear break. The band was done. So, I mean, it seemed like a good stopping point. I guess, I don't know if this'll work out – it might not, so I'm not making any promises – but I've started trying to write an intro for a book, on the '72-'74 years.

CR: Yeah, because you could almost make the case for treating that on its own, just like you treated the Elektra era, really.

MB: Yeah, I think so. Yeah, definitely.

CR: We'll see how it turns out. Was there anything that surprised you about the Stooges, in all your research? Or something you learned, that you didn't know before?

MB: I mean, there's a lot of myths about the band out there, that aren't really true, and a lot of information keeps getting repeated, as if it were true, but it's not.

CR: Such as?

MB: Well, I knew you were gonna ask me that. I mean, one, which we've kind of already covered, is that it's all Iggy.

But really, they wouldn't have been who they were, without all four of those guys contributing. And Ron, especially, I think, didn't initially get as much credit for the vision of the Stooges' sound, as he does now... I'm not saying, that's all thanks to me, obviously.

CR: Right, right.

MB: But, boy, I think one of the myths is – when did the heroin start? Some people think Fun House is a heroin album, and it's not. OK, Iggy may have sampled it one time, in San Francisco, but even that, Iggy denies that.

And it was late summer, or early fall, really, when that stuff started. So Fun House is definitely not a heroin album. And then, “Loose,” “I'll stick it deep inside,” is definitely not about shooting up.

CR: No. Well, I never thought that, even when I first heard it.

MB: Yeah, I know. I never thought that, either, but I've seen people saying that. “What? And then, that makes you like it? That's why you like it?” You're crazy.

CR: Maybe that says more about them, than it does about us. OK. What else? Well, people treating them separately from everything that's happened, we've kind of covered that.

MB: Separately, yeah, I mean, and that's one of the main arguments of the book, that we've kind of touched on, this idea that they were punk before there was punk. Well, punk was already being talked about in 1970. It's not exactly the same as punk as we know it now, but...

CR: Right.

MB: So they weren't proto-punk – that's a term that I hate.

CR: You dislike that, you make that pretty clear, I think.

MB: Yeah, yeah, it's just a retroactive term. It doesn't really make a lot of sense. It's like, “Hey, guys, I've got a great idea for what we should call it! Let's call it proto-punk, and then, in 1977, there'll be some British bands that...”

CR: “That'll pick up on it...”

MB: Yeah (laughs). “And they'll call it punk,” even though it was already being called punk in America, from 1970 onwards. This is something, that if I'm able to manage to write book II, that I want to get into more, is because the punk thing actually does start to take off, in around '72, '73, even before the CBGB's scene.

The term starts getting used a lot more often, and people are defining it a little bit more specifically, than just like, an odd mention here or there, than something like Lester Bangs does there, or something.

PT. III: “THEY DID CREATE SOMETHING ORIGINAL”
CR: What is the thing that you want people to take away most from your book, in general, and the Stooges, in particular? What do you hope they understand?

MB: I would like people to understand that the Stooges were great artists, and that they thought about their art, and that they had a vision for it, and that they were pretty uncompromising in their vision, and it wasn't just a bunch of, “Oh, I don't know, let's just play some crazy rock 'n' roll.”

Like Ron Asheton says in that interview – I think that's a filmed interview – “People would see us onstage, and doing all this stuff, smashing things, and they'd be like, 'Oh, it's the Stooges, just being these crazy guys.'” But they actually were also very serious about their art, and they knew what they were doing.

It wasn't just random chance events that led them to do what they did, and I think they really wanted to create their own genre of music, that would be original. But I think that they thought that they could also be commercially viable somehow.

CR: Yeah.

MB: In retrospect, I don't know, maybe that seems a little far-fetched. But then again, that's the other part of the book is, we like to think that all this stuff is just random, “Oh, you know, people's tastes, and it was just ahead of their time.”

But the way that the music industry has a stranglehold on this stuff, and shapes people's tastes, and basically tells them what to like, plays a big factor in it. And the industry chose not to allow the Stooges to be a viable band for very long.

CR: Yeah, I guess, Culture Industry: 1, Stooges: 0, and all roads lead back to Paul Butterfield, at some point, is the box score, right?

MB: Yeah (laughs). I mean, I guess I didn't really talk too much about Butterfield. I mean, of course, there's the famous connection to Sam Lay, and Iggy's time in Chicago. But yeah, I know, the Stooges were pretty into those early Butterfield albums, as I recall.

CR: Exactly. Of course, you had the band that Iggy was in before the Stooges, the Prime Movers, who were even more overtly influenced by that kind of material.

MB: Yeah, that's another one of the myths. Because Iggy tells that story about coming back from Chicago: “I'm not gonna do the blues anymore, and I'm create something totally original.” So they did create something original, but it is actually, also, connected to the blues. There's blues stuff and blues material throughout the Stooges, but it's just not in that recognizable eight-bar form...

CR: That we're all used to.

MB: That we call the blues. That's not a completely original idea, either, but it's something that I think needs to be reiterated. There's a really great book on punk that just came out, pretty recently, by Evan Rapport, on punk. And he makes that point, too, that these early punk bands were a lot more connected to blues roots than we realize. It's called Damaged: Musicality and Race in Early American Punk.

CR: Wow. That's quite a mouthful, but I think that sounds promising.

MB: He's approaching it from a musicological standpoint, and also, a sociological standpoint. He transcribes, in musical notation, some of these songs – and then shows you how the early Stooges, and the New York Dolls, and he writes a lot about the MC5, as well – he shows you the connection to the blues roots that these bands have. Even the Ramones, who pretty overtly claimed they didn't have any blues influences, in fact, do.

CR: Sure. Well, they're using the classic I-IV-V form, again and again and again...

MB: Right, right.

CR: That's the early template that sets their style, right?

MB: Well, “Blitzkrieg Bop,” that totally uses the I-IV-V.

CR: So that's what you want them to take away, that's what you want them to know. That there's more here than meets the eye, and what you've been told is not necessarily true.

MB: Yeah, I mean, pretty much. On the one hand, yeah, there's an intangible quality that serious artists have, where they're taking that stuff, and transmuting it into something new – but it's not as if they're completely sui generis, as if they're not connected to history, or their own time, and place. Because, of course, they are.

CR: Absolutely.

The passage of time is a complicated and mysterious thing. It's something we never think about, until some anniversary or other reminds us of its passing – and forces us to think about our mortality. However, it can also lend a dose of perspective that's hard to come by, when the latest, greatest phenomenon in any creative field is enjoying their day in the sun.

This is especially true of popular music, where today's trend quickly becomes tomorrow's curiosity, such as the solo crooners and quirky instrumentals that served as the soundtrack of British life in the early '60s – before the Beatles dropped their first single, “Love Me Do,” and changed that equation forever.

Though much of its sales were concentrated around the Fab Four's Liverpool stronghold, every guitarist who heard “Love Me Do” now had to think about learning to sing, and write their own songs – or risk falling behind in the race of chart success.

On the flipside, there are plenty of musicians who never become household worlds, but persist in people's memories, long after they pass on. So it is with Danny Gatton, who left us too soon in 1994 – yet remains an influential name among guitar players, although he never scored a Top 40 pop hit, and rarely toured nationally. In his lifetime, much of his exposure came through his two major homegrown releases, Redneck Jazz (1978), and Unfinished Business (1987) – which served as the title of my book.

I've covered cult heroes of all shapes and sizes in my writing career, but the aura surrounding Danny Gatton -- and his jaw-dropping instrumental ability – puts him near the top of that list. We're closing on 20 years since Unfinished Business: The Life & Times Of Danny Gatton saw the light of day, yet I still get emails at a steady clip to this website.

Every now and then, however, you get one that reminds you of why you did the work. Ronnie Joyner's email (August 16) is only the latest such example. He's recorded a fine, rockabilly-driven tribute, “It's Alright, Rest Easy, Dan,” whose dclivery – and chorus – tells you what you need to know: “Well, listen now, I feel you near, I got a message that you'll want to hear/It's alright, rest easy, Dan – everything's fine, with Holly, and Jan.” You can hear it at the link – which you can cut and paste below, or hit from my Links page.

You'll want to hear Ronnie's other songs, like “Girl Too Beautiful,” about the doomed Twenties silent screen idol, Barbara LaMarr – which he's posting at a steady clip on his YouTube page. (See that link, too, for further reference.)

But like all true deep divers, Ronnie didn't leave it there – he also shared his thoughts about what inspired “It's Alright,” followed by his own recollections about Danny's life and legacy.

I post them here, because they definitely show – along with the other various bits and pieces on the “Danny Gatton” corner section of this website – the depth of his legend, whether you know him as “The Humbler,” “The Master Blaster of the Telecaster,” or “The Telemaster.” Enjoy, dig in, and remember, there's always room for one more.

RONNIE JOYNER: WRITING “IT'S ALRIGHT” (8/16/21 email)
Hi, Ralph — my name is Ronnie Joyner! I’m from DC, but I live down in Charlotte Hall, just 10 minutes from where Danny Gatton lived in Newburg. I’m a singer and rhythm guitar player in a rockabilly band called Flea Bops — and have been since 1992. My band opened for Danny a couple times at Tornado Alley in Wheaton, Maryland.

I don’t know why it took me so long to read your book about Danny, but I finally read it about six months back and I thoroughly enjoyed it. What an epic accounting you did of Danny’s life and career. Invaluable! Reading your book recharged my consciousness about Danny, so I got the urge to do what I usually do when that happens — write a song and make artwork.

The COVID-19 layoff from gigging encouraged me to finally learn GarageBand so I could start recording demos of my original songs that have been piling up. It’s been fun and I’ve uploaded about 21 songs to YouTube over the last year.

So, I wrote a song about Danny. My son played electric guitar on the recording and I gave him the direction to play like Danny (haha — impossible!), and he did a pretty good job. I told him to play with the vibe of what Danny played on “Driving Wheel,” right down to paying homage to Danny’s lead break, which is a lick Danny liked to play over and over throughout his career.

Meanwhile, I did an illustration of Danny that I used for the page graphic on the YouTube “video.” It’s not really a video — it’s really just a static image — but it looks pretty cool.

Incidentally, my band played at the Sam’s Crab House tribute, and I designed/illustrated the commemorative t-shirt for the event.

Anyway, for obvious reasons, I thought you might enjoy checking it out: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIofzO07HSA.

GROWING UP WITH DANNY (8/16/21 email)
“It’s Alright, Rest Easy, Dan” is a song I wrote about guitar legend Danny Gatton. The Telemaster. The Humbler. By the time of his death in 1994 at age 50, Danny was recognized by many folks as arguably the greatest guitar player ever. While I didn’t know Danny, he was in the orbit of my life for as long as I can remember because of my father.

My dad loved hot guitar, and Danny could play some hot-ass guitar. Plus, Danny was from the same Washington, DC neighborhood as my dad. Dad was two years older than Danny. They didn’t know each other, but Dad knew all about the kid from Elmira Street who was a guitar burner in the still-early days of rock-n-roll in the late 1950s. Dad was born on January 17, 1943 and Danny was born on September 4, 1945.

Oddly enough, Danny and I share the same birthday, although I didn’t come along until 1963. Dad saw Danny play while Danny was just a teenager gigging with a local band called the Offbeats. And Dad followed Danny’s upward trajectory through the 1960s and into the 1970s. I still have Dad’s copy of the Danny & the Fat Boys' 1975 45-RPM single “Harlem Nocturne” on Aladdin Records. It was magical to me. Danny’s take on that classic song became one of his signature tunes.

Dad had neighborhood pride, so Danny was a made-man forever in Dad’s eyes. And Dad knew good guitar. It was all around him. In fact, Dad’s best friend was another neighborhood kid named Dwight Clark. Dwight’s brother was none other than Roy Clark, another legendary picker. Again, I was always in the wake of Danny as he (and my family) moved further and further away from DC over the years. Danny moved to nearby Oxon Hill, Maryland in the 1960s, and my family moved to Oxon Hill shortly thereafter. Danny and his wife (Jan) later moved to Accokeek, Maryland, and it was there they had their only child (Holly).

When I got married in 1989, my wife (Carla) and I bought a house in Accokeek. In 1988 Danny and his family moved to rural Newburg, Maryland, and my family moved to nearby Charlotte Hall, Maryland in 2002. And always there was Danny’s music around me. My dad was nearly ten years gone by then, but I met Danny in 1993 — and Dad would have been amazed.

I was in a rockabilly band (Flea Bops) that was on the undercard of a Danny Gatton gig at Tornado Alley in Wheaton, Maryland. I met him and watched his set in awe from right in front of the stage. We played one more gig with Danny, but it would be the last.

Sadly, Danny, a sufferer of depression, shockingly took his own life on October 4, 1994. Here was a guy that, from the outside looking in, seemed to have it all. He could play the guitar like nobody else alive. He had a wonderful family. And he lived in an old farmhouse with lots of surrounding land and a big garage for his hot rods.

But depression is a dangerous thing, so much so that anyone suffering from it is capable of a desperate act to escape it — even if it means leaving devastated loved ones behind.

My song is a prayer sent to Danny. If I could tell him something to relieve his immortal soul (if it needs relieving), it would be, “Hey, Danny, it’s alright now. Rest easy — everything’s fine with your wife and daughter.” I don’t know Holly or Jan, so I’m not really qualified to say they’re fine. But everything I’ve read about them seems to indicate that they soldiered through the tough times after Danny’s death, and are now doing great in their lives. Because of how life ended for Danny, it’s hard to hear his name and not think of that tragic finish. My way of shaking that off is to play some of his music. His guitar playing is so amazing that you can’t help but get swept up in its genius — and soon you’re thinking of nothing but goodness.

Your punk band may crash and burn, but you'll never have a better time before your dream runs aground. The Vagrants are no exception, as Ralph Heibutzki learns in 1989, in six dizzying months of playing bass with them. Like so many other bands, their story ends with the usual kiss off: "So near, and yet so far."

You've never heard of the Vagrants, who never got out of London, never got signed, never put out a record, never played more than a handful of gigs to pockets of garage-punk fanatics. Yet for these prisoners of rock 'n' roll, the dream often seemed tantalizingly in reach.

Follow Ralph around London in this short sharp shock, 28 page recollection, as he learns six and a half songs in an hour, meets x-members of the Clash, and shreds what's left of his hearing, as he and his bandmates wait for their rock 'n' roll ship to finally come in.

Well, it's taken a bit longer than I'd expected, but after a couple months of work, I've released my first Amazon Kindle Publishing, "My Life As A Vagrant (Digging For The Bones Of Strummer & Jones)," which looks back at the band I joined during my six-month stay in London (see description above), against the backdrop of what was happening at the time -- Acid House, anti-Thatcher agitation, and much, much more. Though the band didn't realize its potential, let alone release anything, it marked a special time period in my life, to which I wanted to pay tribute.

I'd toyed at various times with the subject over the last 20-odd years or so. The earliest versions go back to July 1999, which makes sense, coming a good decade after the original experience, when I thought it might make some kind of a memoir. Eventually, though, once I'd decided to give the whole Kindle thing a try, I filleted the fish, so to speak, pulled out the most relevant parts -- the Vagrants' rise and fall, plus the Clash anecdotes -- and set about writing a (relatively) compact piece about it all.

To get the various basic boring details right, like where and when we played, I dipped into my journals from the time, along with the usual flyers and ticket stubs that I still had from that era. Funnily enough, I have a live shot or two of the band, but after turning my flat upside down, I can't seem to come across it. Maybe tomorrow, as the Pretenders song says, maybe some day...

I spent a fair amount of time trying to work out the usual technical bugs, like spacing, for instance. I got additional help in that area from Don Hargraves, whose photos have appeared here; thanks, Don, for your assistance there.

"My Life Is A Vagrant" is intended as the first release in a series of short and medium-length articles for Kindle, which some pundits assert is the true "sweet spot," notably Kate Harper's book, How To Publish And Sell Your Article on the Kindle, which encouraged me to give it a go. So here we are! Time will tell how it all works out, but it seems a lot more exciting than sitting around and waiting for someone to say "Thumbs up," or "Thumbs down" -- if, in fact, if they aren't having too much success to let you know either way.

I think back on those times, and wonder whatever happened to my fellow Vagrants, with whom I spent much of those six months, scratching, clawing and scheming, as we plotted 'n' planned on taking the rock 'n' world by storm, swearing to take no prisoners along the way. Whether we did or didn't, it was a hell of a ride, which you can find out for yourself -- and buy a copy -- by clicking here:

https://www.amazon.com/My-Life-As-Vagrant-Strummer-ebook/dp/B08HJ491Z5/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=ralph+heibutzki&qid=1600296877&s=digital-text&sr=1-1

"Back in the day" probably ranks among the most abused phrases on the planet, next to similar well-worn expressions we'd rather not hear again (or similar gems like "at the end of the day," "put in a bucket," "unpack," and so on).

But when my thoughts turn to pioneers like these two women, Cherie Currie and Brie Darling, I can't coin a better phrase to describe my own feelings about their contributions that they've made in their respective bands, The Runaways, and Fanny, two trailblazers that should find room in anyone's record collection.

Because, back in the day, rock 'n' roll culture as we knew it -- and popular general, in general -- worked way differently than it does nowadays. Sure, there was no lack of dross, especially in the Top 40, but it's also easy to forget how the same decade that produced the likes of "Undercover Angel" and "The Night Chicago Died" also gave us the first stirrings of punk, rap, and yes, Fanny and The Runaways, the first notable all female rock bands.

I first became aware of The Runaways' influence at record shows, where I specialized in selling live tapes. My top sellers, the ones that always went first, were a live Misfits compilation -- a pretty watery-sounding one, but apparently, with several versions of songs you couldn't find anywhere else -- and Bad Reputation, the first notable Joan Jett bootleg, which captures a 1981 show from Long Island, with plenty of blazing guitar to stroke your earlobes. Needless to say, I played that tape a lot back then, and still pull it occasionally now. 

Where the Runaways lived and breathed, Fanny didn't fall too far behind, as I discovered on my semi-regular trips to our local township library, where I discovered The Butts Band's self-titled debut, Electric Music For The Mind & Body (Country Joe & The Fish), Hall Of The Mountain Grill (Hawkwind) -- and Rock 'N' Roll Survivors, Fanny's final album.

Let that sink in for a minute. A library record rack, a cassette box at a record show -- if that's not some kind of deep cultural footprint, what is? Actually, I'll add one more, because I also remember the excitement at going out to the mall and getting Neon Angel: The Cherie Currie Story (1989), right when it came out, another all-American moment, if you want one.

Nowadays, there's plenty of markers to let everybody know what they missed the first time around, whether it's The Runaways biopic, the Fanny documentary, or all the CD reissues and new releases.

But back then, or back in the day, their work didn't get the respect it deserved, having already been filed and forgotten as curios from another area. With no Internet to suss out what you were getting, you had to scour bookstores, record shows, and relevant shops -- the hippest ones, always way out of town -- and put together the relevant puzzle pieces yourself.

It was an often tiring pursuit, but a strangely exhilarating one, at the same time, because you only appreciated your success all the more, when those proverbial dominoes or puzzle pieces finally fell together in the right way.

So when I found out last fall that Cherie and Brie were coming the Acorn Theater, and had released an album, The Motivator (Blue Elan Records), my excitement rose by several notches. How could I turn down the chance to talk to them, and catch their show? Thankfully, I got to do both, including an advance story for The Herald-Palladium, but inevitably, I only had so much room. 

What follows, then, is the longer version of my interview with Cherie and Brie, as it unfolded for them in Los Angeles, and I, back here in Michigan. Pull up a chair, and remember...we still don't give a damn about our bad reputation.

"I WAS READY TO THROW IN THE TOWEL"
CHAIRMAN RALPH (CR): Reading the (recent) story in Rolling Stone, I was really amazed to find out that, even though you guys are part of the same era, you never met until 2017?

CHERIE CURRIE (CC): That's right.

CR: So how did that come about, and lead to the momentum for this record that you have just done?

BRIE DARLING (BD): I was making a record with two of the girls from Fanny, and I had had this idea to call in some of the women from girl bands – from all different times. We had girls from the Go-Gos, and the Bangles, other members of Fanny that weren't involved in the record yet. And, of course, the Runaways.

Patti Quatro introduced me to Cherie, Cherie came in, and just blew me away. I loved her, from the second she walked in the door, and I had to know her better. And that's what happened. We never got a chance, the girls in Fanny, to go out and support that record, because Jean, the bass player, had a stroke, right when it was released.

Cherie and I, meanwhile, had become friends, and found that we had a lot in common. And the rest is kind of history. Cherie, you can take it from there. 

CC: Well, for me, I was actually putting my house on the market for sale. I was in escrow for some land up north. I was throwing in the towel with that damn music business (laughs)!

BD: You'd had it, right?

CC: Yeah, just kind of had it, and I felt like, I was at the end of whatever I was going to be doing. And I was asked to come on in and sing on Fanny Walks The Earth. I don't know if you've heard that record.

CR: I haven't – I've heard of it, though. I know of it.

CC: Oh, you should listen to it, it's great. I'd heard the songs, and I was being asked to back (them up, vocally) – and I thought to myself, “Who is this singer?” I mean, first of all, I'd known of Fanny since I was a kid. I mean, I was, “Why isn't she a big star?”

And I was so intrigued by the songwriting, by the production, I just wanted to do this project – and then, when I met Brie and her husband, Dave Darling, who's a six-time, Grammy-nominated producer, I mean, something clicked with all three of us.

Now I'm not selling my house, and here, I've got a record out with Brie, we are getting ready to go on tour, and it's really exciting.

BD: Yeah, we're pretty excited about it.

"I'M A HAPPY CAMPER"
CR: So then, how did you guys – since these are mostly duets, right – how did you decide to divvy up the vocal parts (on The Motivator)?

BD: Well, Cherie, you've got a good sense of this one, because she kind of made this happen, so you go ahead.

CC: Yeah, when we decided to test the water a little bit, of course, Brie had thrown “Gimme Shelter” into that, which was a song – basically, Dave just wanted to hear what we sounded like together, was more the idea.

But then, when we really loved how we sounded together – I think Dave's first idea was that, I would do a few songs, and Brie would do a few songs, we'd back each other up.

Brie was doing scratch vocals on all the songs, “The Motivator” happened to come around, and Dave had made up his mind that I was going to sing lead on that song. But I had a completely different idea.

I heard her on that second verse. I mean, it's clear as a bell, and it wasn't until I got in the studio – she, being the team player that she is, even though she really loved the song, she loved singing the song, she was going to let me have it, being the cool chick that she is (BD laughs).

CR: Right (laughs along).

CC: And the thing is, is that I just turned to Dave, Brie had excused herself from the studio, and I said, “I'm telling you, this has to be a duet.” And I said, “Please put her scratch (vocal) in that second verse, and hear it.”

And he did, and he just said, “Wow.” And so, the fact that we brought her in... To see the look on her face, when her vocal came in on the second verse – and we just really realized, we just make each other better.

So why not share these songs, really capitalize on what this union is, and make it a joint recording, because our voices just sound great, when we do duets?

The thing is, is that we're a team, and this is what this whole project is all about.

BD: Plus, I really loved singing in the studio with Cherie right there. It makes me sing better, and she inspires me. She does something, I hear something, and it's not like I copy her. But she inspires me to step up my game, and I love that. I love being pushed.

And it's a real support thing between us, in a lot of ways. Not just the singing, but in our making decisions about the band, what we do onstage. It's really a great team, and it's my favorite thing I've done so far. So I'm a happy camper.

"ONE FOOT IN THE BUSINESS, AND ONE FOOT OUT"
CC: It's a breath of fresh air in a business where women are usually a little cutthroat, and always jealous, and always afraid of someone else's talent. To me, it's just why I'd had enough.

BD: Not just women, men, too, men can be...

CC: Yeah, most all people. Well, I guess you have to be somewhat narcissistic, to be in this business, anyway – but the thing is, that I'd reached an age where I was just not gonna play (laughs). I'm not gonna play the game anymore.

CR: Yeah, I understand.

BD: It's heartbreaking. When you're in a band, you have this hope that you're having a family, and you want it to be this beautiful thing. And sometimes, it hurts, really bad, and it's disappointing. So far, we're two years in, and we're having a ball. And hey, we have our struggles, too.

CC: Yeah, Brie, but we're just having a great time.

CR: What I've found, in interviewing a lot of folks, and trying to play with folks, as a musician, is... This business attracts a lot of people who have a lot of talent, but they often seem to have something missing.

CC: Interesting. Me bringing up the whole narcissistic thing – I mean, I'm not exactly sure that's the right word, but you have to develop some sort of it (narcissistic quality), to even survive in such shark-infested waters.

And not just this business – Wall Street, it's the same kind of mentality, I believe. I really felt like, I just didn't have it in me. I mean, sometimes, you have to just give up the fight, because it's just not worth it.

It's not worth the heartache, when you can't be a loving person, or be a supportive person in this business, without, in the end, getting stabbed in the back, is what it felt like, to me.

I guess I've always had one foot in the business, and one foot out. I could never fully engulf myself in just the cruelty of it all.

"IT REALLY WAS OUR WORLD"
CR: But, to go back to your record, how did you go about picking these songs? Because one thing that strikes me on hearing (the duo's versions of) “Gimme Shelter,” or “For What It's Worth,” they seem to be more current now, than they did at the time.

BD: Isn't that crazy how that happens? Sometimes, a good song, a real song, written about what's really going on in the world – and I think that, really, maybe things never really, really changed. Human beings, we go through the same struggles, over and over and over again. So we find ourselves experiencing some of the same things.

For me, a lot of things like “Get Together,” is talking about, what's really important in life? Loving one another, and making that effort, and that speaks volumes, to me.

It's a period of time – like, when Fanny had the last album out, The Runaways were coming up. And I actually did go to see her (Cherie) perform, in the mid-'70s. I didn't meet her, but I saw her perform, at SIR Rehearsals.

It was like, we were handing over the torch, without having met. There was some music coming out, ending right around that time, but that was part of our reference in life, that music, that we listened to.

CR: So it was part of the soundtrack of your life, as it were, I guess.

BD: There you go.

CC: Oh, absolutely. I mean, these songs made us feel good as kids. I mean, you know, a natural high, that euphoria. If you can grab that, and hold onto it, then every time I hear these songs, the original – still, I go back to better, simpler times. And Brie and I really wanted to pay homage to people who have written such outstanding songs, that changed, and mattered, to our lives.

BD: Yeah. And Cherie's younger than me. And for me, I don't know if that was the time, when I first started listening to music, when it was simpler – with the Vietnam War going on, and everything – but it was still a time when music really spoke to the young people.

And it did make me feel like, there was a place in my head and in my heart, that I could go, and I could express myself, and I could play with my rock 'n' roll band, and be a person, have my own brain, and get away from some of the things that were, that I couldn't understand, when I was a teenager, because I started playing when I was 14. I don't know if Cherie was born yet (laughs).

CC: Was!

BD: She was. I'm kidding (laughs). But yeah, it's pretty incredible, what music means to young people, or at least, from our day. It really was our world. And yeah, soundtrack of our lives, for sure, like you said.

"WE'RE JUST GETTING STARTED"
CR: So how you might see this evolving, then, for the next record? Because that's always the million dollar question.

CC: Yeah, I think Brie and I, just going out on tour together, I think we're going to write songs together, obviously – and probably take our experiences, and turn them into music. We'll always want to put a couple songs from our past, covers, on the record.

We've got a four-record deal, but we're just looking forward to getting out onstage together, getting our sea legs, and having fun, and being able to see the fans, and all that good stuff. It's about fun. This isn't about going out there, and... We're not planning on taking over the world, like we did, when we were kids.

CR: Right.

CC: It's about really, truly enjoying what we've done in our lives, and what brought us to this point, yeah.

CR: For sure.

BD: The originals on the record, the three originals, we wrote those while we were doing the record. So we were just getting to know each other, and we clicked so well, that these ideas – those are brand new songs that just came out, while we were actually working.

So if that's the kind of stuff that we can create, in just those couple of months, I'm going, “Wow, I mean, we need to come up for air here,” because we've just been slamming, getting ready for this tour, and all this stuff following the release of the record.

But yeah, once we get out there, and we're driving in the van, I'm sure there's going to be some things that we get to share, because the songs that we wrote are about real situations, and real feelings.

So I think that we're going to experience those things together. We're just getting started. We got a whole lot to learn about what we have to say together. I'm so looking forward to that.

"FOR ME, THAT'S THE MAGIC"
CR: Well, I really enjoyed those too. I think it seems like it was a natural evolution, and will continue to progress. It's also nice to see guys in your situation committed to doing new stuff, not just relying on the glorious past to get you a passing grade, if you will.

CC: Yes, absolutely! And we've both been songwriters throughout our lives. And it's just so neat, to actually have someone to work with.

BD: I know! I love it.

CR: Yeah. And bounce ideas off of, as well.

BD: Both of us are inspired by things that we've thought together, or loved together. And, for me, that's the magic. But there are a couple of songs, like Cherie mentioned, and I was, “Oh, my God, we got to do that on the next record!”

So there's a couple that poked their heads out after the fact, that we'd loved to do, too, so... But I'm not going to tell you what they are.

CR: Well, we'll have to wait to be surprised by the next one, I guess.

BD: That's right.

"LET SOMEBODY ELSE KEEP TRACK"
CR: How do you guys feel, when you look on your respective back stories? We have the Runaways movie, the Fanny documentary, the Rhino boxed set that came out, some years back.

So you finally have your place in the culture after, what, 40 years? Does that feel a bit bittersweet, that the acceptance took this long? I mean, how do you look at that?

CC: You know what? To be honest, I'm pretty amazed, that in our current society, that anyone even took the time. All I know is that I'm just so happy I grew up in the time I did, before social media, and all this craziness that is kind of hard for me to wrap my head around. But I never thought that the Runaways – I thought we were all but forgotten.

I thought that, 22 years ago – and for almost 20 years, I didn't even listen to our music. And it wasn't until I started looking at videos, listening to the music again... I went, “Wow! We really were trailblazers.”

We were following in the footsteps of Suzi Quatro. I think that the Runaways wouldn't have existed, had it not been for her. Big shout out: I hope she gets in the Rock 'n' Hall of Fame – please!

BD: Yeah.

CC: Hey, I'm just glad that the people do remember Fanny, the Runaways, and Suzi Quatro, and women that really worked hard, to kick the door open.

BD: It's a funny thing. Instead of looking back at the past, I've always looked at, what am I gonna do next? And I'm just discovering, that that's how I've looked at it, all my life.

Right now, I'm looking at some things – because we've got this event that's coming up, that Cherie and I are gonna do – I'm looking at some of the things I've done in the past, I'm going, “Wow, did I do that?”

I mean, I'm not even aware of listening to the records. I want to keep moving forward. I'm excited about what I'm going to do next. I'm good with somebody else keeping tabs on the past.

CC: I like that a lot, Brie!

BD: But I wanna do it with you, girl. I like that. Let somebody else keep track of the past.

CR: Let somebody else keep the flame, I suppose, right?

CC: Yeah. And you know what? Thank you for that, by the way. If it wasn't for people like you, we would have been all but forgotten.

BD: Well, I appreciate it. I'm just not doing that anymore.

CR: I understand that you want to keep on keepin' on. Conversely, what do you think accounts for that turnaround.

Because, I've got to say, when I was preparing for this – I looked, for instance, at some of the old music press things of the Runaways, like in CREEM – and there was some horrible kind of stuff written, and said. Even by publications you'd think would be on the cooler vanguard really fell down, in that respect. So what accounts for that turnaround, you think?

CC: Well, I guarantee you, that most all of them were written by men.

CR: Yeah.

CC: Sometimes, men like to dig their heels in, and not give women a chance, especially teenage girls. And Brie, her whole experience, I think, also, with Fanny – I mean, the music was different. These chicks really know how to play. I mean, they were superb musicians.

The Runaways were more of the three-chord crunch, in your face, or like, as Joan would say, just kick you in the face, from an attitude. But, I mean, we evolved. It had to happen. It was going to happen.

Now, I mean, as you can see, it's almost like a tidal wave, at this point. And of course, women and their feelings, on the subject, I should say – which I don't care to get into.

CR: Yeah.

CC: But it is a tidal wave now, of women's unhappiness with the male dominating type, the world we live in. So I think it'll all burn itself out, and maybe we'll have something a little more (favorable) afterwards, I guess.

BD: For me, I guess I've always felt blessed in doing what I love, playing drums and singing, and if somebody gave me a hard time around upon it, I don't remember it so much, as to how much I enjoyed doing it. 

CC: I think you got really good reviews, Brie (laughs)!

BD: I'm sure it got done. But to be honest with you, I didn't give a fuck. I just really enjoyed, I loved doing what I loved doing, and I just didn't let it get in my way, I don't think. And if somebody didn't like it, it was their problem, and not mine.

And today, I think, if you want a place, take your place on that stage, or in this business, just be freakin' good at what you do. And that way, if you're the best one in the group, nobody can push you off that spot. So take your place, and earn it. Be good at it.

That's one thing, that when I look at the old tapes of Cherie doing what she's doing, she was just – she owned that spot! And nobody was pushing her off it. And I love that. I get goose bumps talking about it, because her voice, her presence, her performance, everything about her was so commanding... In that day, she owned it 1,000%.

CC: Welcome to it! This tour is just you out front with me, so...

BD: I love it! I honestly love it.

MORE INFO:
https://www.blueelan.com/artists/cherie-currie-brie-darling/

If you play guitar, and know a little bit about the blues, chances are, you'll offer an eager response when I ask, "I just got this Mike Bloomfield show from 1980, wanna hear it?" If you're part of the general public, you'll probably just shrug, or ask, "Michael who?" That's hardly surprising, as his name gradually receded from commercial consciousness after his glorious 1960s run -- first, with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, then, with his incendiary guest shot on Bob Dylan's album, Highway 61 (1965), and his work with the Electric Flag on The Trip soundtrack, and his only album with them, A Long Time Coming.

And, while Michael did his share of inspired work during the '70s -- notably, If You Love These Blues, Play 'Em As You Please, his mail-order-only album for Guitar Player's short-lived recording division -- getting it was no mean feat. As a teenager, it required a lot of detective work to track down, after a high school teacher turned me on to those '60s-era sounds.

For me, it meant scouring rack after rack of discarded "Special Value" eight-tracks, which is how I scored The Best Of The Electric Flag, among other treasures, and Nick Gravenites' My Labors, one of many albums that Michael guested on. (Alas, I never got to hear it in its entirety, after going through two eight-track -- and one cassette -- an omission that I've since remedied, with the bootleg stuff from that era.) 

My quest accelerated after Michael's untimely death in February 1981, at just 37, which inspired a fine profile in Rolling Stone -- one that raised bigger questions. How (or why) did someone with such a fiery, instantly recognizable guitar style, fall so firmly off the commercial radar? Why didn't more people acknowledge his influence at the time? What contributions did he make, in the grand scheme of popular music? And what particular hellhounds -- chemical, emotional, psychological, take your pick -- led to Bloomfield's sad and lonely end, abandoned by his partymates in a battered old  car, after failing to come around for the final time?

Now, we have a better idea, thanks to Guitar King: Michael Bloomfield's Life In The Blues (University of Texas Press), by David Dann, who addresses all of these issues, and many, many more, in 740 breathtaking pages.

Monumental and massive, Guitar King gives its subject a suitably epic feel, even as it moves at a brisk pace through the peaks and valleys of Bloomfield's life -- building on the foundations laid down by earlier efforts, If You Leave These Blues: An Oral History (Backbeat Books, 2000), by Jan Mark Wolkin and Bill Keenom, and Michael Bloomfield: The Rise And Fall Of An American Guitar Hero, by Ed Ward (Cherry Lane Books, 1983, reissued in 2016), and then, taking those works to the next higher level.

As Guitar King takes shape, you feel Bloomfield's larger than life presence all over again, and other bygone figures with whom he hung out, or played, like Albert Grossman, Bill Graham, Janis Joplin, and Buddy Miles, to name just a few -- as well as Paul Butterfield (another figure overdue for rediscovery and reappraisal, which has partially happened with the documentary, Horn From The Heart, now available on DVD).

As a longtime Bloomfield fan, I couldn't pass up the chance to talk with David, to whose website I contributed, as he notes -- and revisit the larger questions that surround Bloomfield's life, and art, which we naturally could only do on the most relevant occasion, as all-American as one you could find...what would have marked the Guitar King's 76th birthday (7/28/19). So sit down, strap yourself in, and...well, hell, enjoy the ride.

PART I: "...VERY, VERY FEW GUYS WHO SOUND LIKE BLOOMFIELD"
CHAIRMAN RALPH (CR): So what thoughts run through your mind, on that particular occasion (Michael Bloomfield’s birthday)? I worked with you on the site, and watched that grow by leaps and bounds. Then, gradually, I saw you expanding it further. You did the radio special.

DAVID DANN (DD): Well, obviously, it’s a day to think about Bloomfield’s contributions to American pop culture, which is – for me – a fairly large consideration.

The radio broadcast was done in four hour-long segments. I had a show for many years here, at Catskill Public Radio – it was broadcast there, and a few other stations. That was really the very first effort I made to reach out to Bloomfield’s former bandmates, and some of his family members, and get them on tape, so that I could use them for the radio program.  

But I had no inkling that I was ever going to write a biography of Michael. Certainly, the radio broadcast, I thought, was going to be the end of whatever my efforts were.

CR: But when I listened to it, I thought, “If you really want to do the excavation work, there’s a hell of a book in here, and a hell of a story to be told.” What got you on that particular path?

DD: Bill Keenom and Jan Mark Wolkin published an excellent oral biography, If You Love These Blues. I had read that book, and that was what got me started on doing the website – you were the first person to make an outside contribution, which I very much appreciated, because it was all about Norman Dayron, who, at that time, was sort of a mystery man. To me, anyway.

CR: And kind of a polarizing figure among some, too.

DD: Indeed! Very much so.

CR: And we’ll get to that, of course…

DD: Sure, sure. On my doorstep one day arrived a large carton, which turned out to be all of Bill Keenom’s interviews – and he very kindly sent them to me,  because he saw that I’d been working on the website, and thought they would be helpful.

At least half the material on these tapes never quite made it into their book. I just became more and more fascinated in the story, and started to do interviews of my own for the website. One thing led to another, and I started to write, about seven or eight, nine years ago. Here we are today.

CR: For sure. And then (came) the search for someone to publish it, which, of course, you successfully managed, so…

DD: Yes. I was very lucky in that regard. I first went to the University of Chicago, thinking that –

CR: That would be the logical home.

DD: Yeah, because Bloomfield spent so much time in Hyde Park, he’s from Chicago, and it’s (about the) blues. They said, “This isn’t the kind of book we do, but there’s a place in Austin, Texas, that would love this. The editor there, he’s a big Bloomfield fan. So contact Robert Devens, at University of Texas Press, and see if they’ll go for it.” That’s what I did, and they were very interested. It was very easy. I didn’t…

CR: You didn’t have the struggle.

DD: No, no struggle at all. No agent, no nothing.

CR: I was really glad that they gave you the space and the time that you needed, to get the story told.

DD: They were great, in that way. My editor, at first, was alarmed, because I sent him over 850 manuscript pages (laughs) – he was expecting 300, I think, or 400.

And he said, “You know, this is wonderful, but it’s far too large for us to publish. Economically, we just can’t manage it.” So I spent about a year, hacking away. After seven edits, and (cutting) 140,000 words, we came up with something that was too big for them, but too small for me, so we sort of met in the middle.

CR: But you have the website. And you could put extras from your book on it.

DD: That is, in fact, the plan. A number of interesting anecdotes and side stories are going up on the website, once the book comes out. I’m going to do a fairly detailed thing on Bloomfield’s Les Paul, the guitar that is pretty much identified with Michael, and he lost in 1974.

CR: Right, when he just ran out on the guys at the –

DD: The Cave, in Vancouver. I had a lot of help, from several Canadians – Chris Okey, who owned the guitar after Michael passed. He, unfortunately, has passed, but we had a great couple years’ worth of e-mail conversations about it. He was looking for it, trying to find who had it, and I think he found the person – but he couldn’t confirm it, nor could I, so I didn’t include that.

CR:  But do we know where that guitar is, then?

DD: I have a pretty good idea. It’s in the United States.

Tony Bacon, the British writer who’s a guitar expert – in his book, Million Dollar Les Paul, he speculates that Bloomfield’s guitar, should it come on the market, would approach that figure.

Which is wildly absurd, when you think about what Michael thought about his instruments, didn’t take care of them, and didn’t really care whether he played a Les Paul, or a Sears Silvertone. So, to think it could be of that value, is just –

CR: Mind-boggling.

DD: Sweetly ironic.

CR: It is. Well, I remember asking Norman about this, and as he so eloquently said to me: “He didn’t give a shit.”

DD: That’s right (laughs).

CR: It’s an example of how he approached his art, because Norman went on to say, that Michael liked to say, “It’s all bare meat on steel strings.” And the more you use effects, the more you sound like everybody else.

DD: Yes, that’s very true. Well, he certainly didn’t, and that always is an indicator for me. Because there are people who can sound like (Jimi) Hendrix, (or) Robin Trower – and do so convincingly – and there are a legion of people who approximate what Clapton can do. There are guys in every town who play like that. But there are very, very few guys who sound like Bloomfield. Almost nobody.

To me, it’s like a jazz signature. There’s nobody who sounds like Bird, nobody that sounds like Ben Webster. Johnny Hodges had a distinct sound. So that tells you a lot about the quality of Bloomfield’s playing, and the uniqueness of it.

CR: For sure. So what were some of the biggest challenges that you encountered, along the way?

DD: Well, one of the more challenging aspects of the early writing was to find people that he knew in his grade school and teen years, his high school years. There were lots of stories about Bloomfield going to the South Side, and sitting in, all that kind of stuff – but most of it was sort of urban legend-type stuff.

I was very lucky to find a couple of guys, through endless searching on the Internet, and calling wrong numbers, eventually connecting – Gerry Pasternak was one of Michael’s drummers in his high school years. He and Michael played together on Rush Street quite a bit, and that was fascinating. He told me lots of Bloomfield stories.

The other guy was Roy Jespersen, another of Michael’s drummers. And he filled me in on the famous (story of) Michael playing the talent show, his sophomore year – he was supposed to play a Chet Atkins tune, which is nice and mellow, and they played that tune.

And then the curtain came down, and the kids were applauding, and the curtain came back up, so Bloomfield went into this rock ‘n roll number they had rehearsed, and the whole place just broke out in pandemonium. The kids climbed on the stage, and were screaming and yelling, and got him in quite a lot of trouble. But Roy filled that in, with all the color that you might expect. So that was great.

I spoke to maybe a dozen of his childhood friends, and they had some wonderful stories to tell me, family members, as well.  But, of course, the other difficult thing was Michael’s death – which was controversial, and sort of shrouded in…

CR: In mystery.

DD: Exactly. Well, I had a number of things to work from. Roy Ruby’s friend, a friend of Michael’s, Brent Pellegrini, who is an investigator, did some research for me.

He came up with some data that very much helped in formulating the story. I mean, no one knows for certain what happened, but I think I’ve gotten pretty close to the circumstances – and there’s no conspiracy involved, or anything really mysterious. It is speculation on my part, to some degree, but I also had some information, that I was unable to use, because I was asked not to publicize it – that pretty much confirms the scenario that I create.

CR: And I assume you had the old police reports, toxicology (reports), and things of that nature, to work with?

DD: Yes. He was poisoned with meth, and some other forms of amphetamine, and that was something, of course, all Michael’s friends knew he would never, ever have taken, because his system was running in high gear, constantly, so…

CR: Sure. So, I guess, it was almost like the scenario in Pulp Fiction, then (the accidental overdose scene).

DD: Yes, I think that’s pretty much what happened. Except that Michael didn’t wake. He woke up, and then, he went back (to unconsciousness).

CR: Right, and then, the second time, they couldn’t bring him around. Or he didn’t come back, basically.

DD: Exactly.

CR: The quote that really got to me was what Norman said, when he had to claim his car, seeing his (Michael’s) leather jacket on the back seat, and that’s when it hit.

DD: That was a powerful moment, when he said that. I think Norman was really shocked by it, because he had just seen Michael the day before. And Bloomfield seemed to be in good spirits, and good shape, relative to how he had been, prior to, the month or two earlier.

PART II: "THINGS WERE COMING TO A HEAD"
CR: Yeah, for sure. So, were there any surprises along the way, as you went through and researched those lesser-known corners of his life – like his involvement with the Mitchell brothers, for instance?

DD:  Yes, yes. The Mitchell brothers had opened a theater in San Francisco, the first real porn palace. They had the big theater portion, where they showed their films, but there were rooms for specialized viewing and activities.

And Michael, being an inquisitive guy, wandered in there, at one point, and met them. Being Michael Bloomfield, he struck up a conversation with them, and so, they knew him. They were running into trouble with the censors, because their stuff was seen as gratuitous, defined as pornography, and they wanted to put a high art gloss on it.

So they decided to hire real musicians, to compose real music, to go behind their unseemly movies. I’ve seen a bunch of them, and they’re about as unsexy (laughs) as anything I can imagine.

CR: Well, c’mon, something like Hot Nazis – how sexy could that really be, right?

DD: Exactly! It is not. And something that struck me as interesting, that Michael, being a person who identified very strongly with his Jewish background, Jewish culture and heritage, that he would do music for…

CR: For something like that, yeah.

DD: So I have to think, that he probably never saw any of these things. Or he only saw a few of them, and he was just given a script, and just cooked up some tunes, which is pretty much what Norman said. Norman probably told you about that. (CR mentions the presence of names like vocalist Anna Rizzo, among the all-star talent that Bloomfield recruited.)

DD: I know! She was the vocalist for the Sodom and Gomorrah theme. She obviously recorded it in the studio, and it sounds like “I’ll Be There,” something in that genre. If you heard it, you would recognize it. When she did see the movie, she was like, “This is too weird for me, I’m leaving.”

But you know what, Ralph? The most interesting thing about Sodom & Gomorrah is Michael’s music. If you can get through the visuals… it’s really world music. It’s quite impressive. It’s too bad that he didn’t do it for a legitimate Hollywood-type movie. Because I think he would have been lauded for real creativity, for the soundtrack. It’s pretty impressive.

CR: Because if he had been attached to something more legit – I think it would have done a lot more for him, probably.

DD: I think that’s true, but as you pointed out about Michael’s guitar, he didn’t care. He really didn’t care about his career, at that point, not in the commercial sense.

CR: No, that’s true, and again, we can get into all this. But were there any people that you didn’t get, like (Bob) Dylan?

DD: I had back channels to Dylan, and managed to get to Dylan’s guy. And apparently, the request was passed along, but was politely declined. Which is not unusual. Because, who am I, and he’s Bob Dylan (laughs), so…

CR: Sure. Was there anybody else who fit that category?

DD: This is funny, but I have six or eight hours of in-depth interviews with Nick Gravenites, that Bill Keenom recorded. I reached out to Nick, because I wanted to talk to him about certain aspects, that I wanted to fill in, from Bill’s interviews.

And I sent him to my website, so that he could see the kind of work that I was doing. He went there, and saw your interview with Norman – and he was so incensed, that he refused to ever talk to me again.

CR: Really? What did he object to?

DD: Hey, listen, I have no idea. I tried to reason – I said, “Listen, this is perfectly innocuous. This is an excellent interview.” I hadn’t even talked to Norman at that point.

CR: And we just mostly stuck to the technical aspects, which is what the piece was about.

DD: Exactly, but I think there was such bad blood between Nick and Norman, for one reason or another, over the years, that just the mention of Norman – that definitely will turn Nick off. So that was one thing I regretted, not being able to talk to him. But I did have a lot of wonderful interviews that Bill Keenom did with him.

CR: Yeah, and certainly, in that book, he comes across very colorfully, and very well-spoken.

DD: Yes. He is. He really is exactly that, he’s a marvelous storyteller. And I have to sympathize with these guys, because they’ve told the story many, many times, and here comes another author, who wants to know something or other. And I can see where you’d sort of reach your limit.

CR: Yeah, and of course, if you look at the Jan Mark Wolkin book, there’s some acknowledgment, from Norman’s side, that things were not always what they should have been.

DD: Yeah. Norman is fairly candid about that. He was with me in the week that I spent out at Mill Valley with him. He’s apologetic about it, but Norman is an inveterate storyteller. He’s a real natural raconteur.

And he can just entertain you for hours. And, like, Michael was famous for embroidering the truth, stretching a story, that kind of thing – and I think Norman does that, to some degree. But once you know, you know where the truth is, and where it isn’t. And Michael was doing quite a lot of drugs, off and on, and Norman was, too, and so, judgment was always kind of –

CR: Clouded.

DD: Exactly.

CR: I mean, you point out, quite correctly, some of the flaws (on the Dayron-produced albums). I just took the liberty, before I talked to you, of listening to some of that (material) again. Cruisin’ For A Bruisin’, the title track, the vocal is really garbled.

It’s hard to make out what Michael’s actually saying. And I thought to myself, “Well, somebody should have caught this,” because the track is fine. If you can’t hear what the guy’s saying, I think that does take away your enjoyment, somewhat.

DD: Well, I think that’s true. I forget who it was – maybe it was Susie, when she heard it, she said, “Michael, I don’t know what you’re saying. I can’t understand you.” On that tune, anyway.

But I think, at that time, things were coming to a head – the EMTs in Mill Valley had regular trips up there, to revive people from overdosing. It wasn’t a healthy environment.

CR: No. And we’ll get into this, in a little bit – but my impression, at least of the Takoma albums was, Norman was doing the best with what he had, which wasn’t much.

DD: I think that’s right, and I think that Norman was really making a concerted effort to really have a production company. CT Productions had been incorporated, it had officers, and a base of operations, and he was working with Takoma, and a few other small labels. He was trying to make a product out of Michael’s creative efforts. And so, you got to give him credit. Because if it hadn’t been for Norman, we may not even have had those records. I think we would have not heard from Michael for the last portion of the ‘70s.


PART III: "MICHAEL WAS NONE OF THESE THINGS"
CR: So, to reel it back to the beginning – as you say, at the beginning of the book, the conflict with his father is certainly one of the major driving forces of his life, I would say.

DD: Yes. I think that’s a very important aspect of Bloomfield’s psyche. Harold Bloomfield was a driven man, a very gifted businessman, and someone, who, along with his brother and his father, Sam Bloomfield, created one of the great kitchenware industries in the country.

And so, this is something that only happens if one is quite committed to (being) very responsible, working round the clock. And he had this son, who was casual, to say the least – about, not only about his school work, but his responsibilities…

CR: His approach to life, for that matter.

DD: Approach to life. And the only thing that seemed to interest him was playing this guitar, this music… It wasn’t the kind of music that he would want his son to play, if he would want his son to be a musician, which he certainly didn’t.

He was a professional boxer, for a period – excellent sportsman, horse rider – and Michael was none of these things. He wasn’t particularly coordinated. He was heavy as a kid, clumsy, he was loud and obnoxious, at times. Harold was taciturn, to a fault.

So right away, father and son did not see eye to eye, and pretty quickly, I think, Michael knew, the bright and sensitive kid he was, realized that his father did not love him, did not care for him, was constantly judging him, and judging him negatively.

As Allen Bloomfield, his brother, told me, Michael never felt his father’s love. And he was always looking for it. And I think that created many issues in his life later, where he felt expectations being put upon him… And he either resisted them, or failed to make them.

CR: Where the gatekeepers of the music business, and the audiences he played for, become a surrogate father that he didn’t feel like satisfying.

DD: Absolutely. And his first manager, Joel Harlib, told me over and over again, that Michael had this weird, insecure side to him, where he could be this egotistical guitar player, who would climb up on the stage with Muddy Waters, at the drop of a hat.

He was also a guy who was really uncomfortable doing a solo set, at Mother Blues. Joel said, “I had to drag him to these few gigs that he would do, so he would have a career that I could manage.”

So he was very insecure about certain aspects of his life. Once he felt that he was not measuring up, and being judged as not measuring up – not only in his family life, but in his professional career – he was really overwhelmed, with feeling the inadequacy.

And I think that had a lot to do with, essentially, his breakdown around the Super Session recording dates, where he flipped out, and could not complete the recording. Then had to be sedated to sleep when they did the live Session (album). I think he really just, basically, had panic attacks a great deal.

CR: Yeah. And as Mark Naftalin says, in the Wolkin book, he would walk away again and again, rather than deal with this stuff.

DD: Yeah. He would retreat to the safety of his room, watch TV, play guitar to the commercials.

CR: When you talk about the (Paul) Butterfield, and the Electric Flag experiences – the one thing they had in common was… Well, first of all, how could the departure of one guy make such a difference? And yet, neither band was really ever the same, after he left. So that’s one thing.

DD: Yes. Good point. 

CR: The other thing that occurs to me is, even if they hadn’t overbooked them – as he complained to the press – I’m not sure that he would have stuck around that much longer, anyway.

DD: I think you’re right. He began to resent the direction the band was going in, with (drummer-vocalist) Buddy Miles. He wasn’t real happy about that. Also, as I point out in the book, his marriage had just fallen apart, and that was really a difficult time for him.

Plus, he’d been internationally humiliated in (Ralph J.) Gleason’s “Perspectives” column (in Rolling Stone), where he just said, “Hey, Bloomfield’s a phony. He’s not a black man, he never will be a black man, he’s just pretending to play this stuff. Why doesn’t he play his own stuff?” And I think Michael felt that deeply for years afterwards.

All of that came together – he just had to get out of it, he had to hide away. So, you’re right. I think he would have probably left the Flag at some point, anyway, because that’s what he always seemed to do.

CR: OK. So – once he quits those (two) bands, he’s done the Super Session record, which, on paper, makes him somewhat marketable, as a performer, right? It was his only gold record. It should have been the ideal launch pad to establish him as a solo artist. But that didn’t happen, either. How come?

DD: Well, for the reasons we’ve enumerated. He was an emotional basket case at that point. The best indication of his emotional state was his solo recording, which came out six or eight months after Super Session, It’s Not Killing Me. I mean, it was killing his listeners to listen to it, because it was a very, very painful and personal recording.

I asked Michael Melford, one of the co-producers  – “Why did he record those tunes?” Melford said, “Well, he had something he wanted to get off his chest. He wanted to really tell his public what had been going on in his emotional life. You know, he didn’t realize this would be painful for people to listen to.”

CR: And (Bloomfield thought) they would take it for what it was.

DD: Exactly. People were used to hearing Super Session, hearing those Butterfield albums, and that was another Michael Bloomfield they knew, not this guy who’d sing these slow country tunes badly (laughs).

CR:  It took him, I think, a few years to come to grips with singing, I would say.

DD: I agree. He was never a natural singer, but he found – certainly, in those recordings that were done at the McCabe’s Guitar Shop, in Santa Monica, in ’77, I think? They’ve come out in a million different guises, but his singing there is really, probably, the best that he ever recorded. He’s together, he’s relaxed, he’s not swinging for the fences. It sounds totally natural.

CR: I love his performances, too, on (Between The) Hard Place And The Ground, where his voice careens through things. It gives it, kind of an odd character, that a more polished singer would not have been able to do.

DD: Yes. It occurred to me, one time, listening to one of his very last recordings, that he sounded quite a bit like Ray Charles, in the way that he approached the vocal, and everything?

CR: Yes.

DD: I don’t know if Michael was consciously or unconsciously thinking of Ray Charles when he sang – he loved Ray – but it had never occurred to me before, and it gave me insight into what he was trying to do.

CR: I have to say, too, when I started doing my thing, I thought, “OK, if he can get away with it, maybe I can, too” (laughs).

DD: Well, yeah, you could, yes. You know, if it comes from the heart, you can do it.


PART IV: "NOT QUITE WHAT THEY HAD IN MIND"
CR: So, in terms of his addiction, which seems to be the filter through which he made a lot of his choices in life –

DD: Yes.

CR: What was the gateway? Lack of love from his father, or the culture of the time, which began to get more freewheeling? Because I think it started much earlier than most people surmised.

DD:  Allen Bloomfield told me an interesting thing about his brother.  They used to be shipped off, in the summers, to these dude ranches, camps out in the Southwest, for a couple of months.

He said that Michael developed this thing they would do there – I think he was probably 10 years old. They’d hyperventilate, then, a friend would grab them around the chest, so they couldn’t inhale. Allen would say, “We’d do this, and you’d see stars – you’d be tripping for 10, 15 seconds. A great high.” Which they didn’t understand was a high, but it just was a thrill.

His brother, loved to do this, just for the sensation, the thrill of it, the excitement of it. The other thing he would do, they would ride the Silver Streak at Riverview Park, which is an amusement park, in Chicago. It was the biggest rollercoaster, and it had an 80-foot drop, the first hill. He said that Michael would time it, to get in the front car. And Michael would stand up, just as they were tipping over the hill, so that he would levitate for a second in the car.

CR: Oh, jeez!

DD: He says, “My brother was totally into these wild, crazy sensations and thrills.” I think it was just built into Michael, that’s just his makeup. He was accelerated, and his personality hyper, most of the time. This was just like a peak experience for him, invariably. So drugs were more of the same, I think, and as long as they came along, he was going to take advantage of it.

CR: And in a sense, it was just an extension of his natural brain chemistry, then?

DD: I think that’s true, I really do. But now, it’s interesting, because it didn’t extend to alcohol, not until very late in his life.

CR: And so, now, to open this theme a little further – was Michael bipolar? There’s speculation in the Wolkin book, to that extent.

DD: Well, Allen thinks he was. And Allen also thinks their father, Harold, had issues.

CR: To put it mildly.

DD: Yes. Well, he manifested them in a different way. But I talked with the head of the Psychology Department at Rutgers, who was a fan of Bloomfield’s. I laid out Bloomfield’s personality traits, what I knew of his medical experiences, and this doctor said he really wasn’t convinced that Bloomfield was bipolar in the classic sense.

CR: Why not?

DD: He thought, he might have been OCD, or some other clinical definition – which, I apologize, I don’t have this right in front of me. It’s fairly technical.

CR: Sure. But, at any rate, he didn’t buy it.

DD: He wasn’t convinced. Not being able to actually examine Michael, he couldn’t say for certain. But so, obviously, Bloomfield had lengthy periods of mania, and didn’t have the accompanying depression, which is usually an indication of bipolar condition. At least, there’s not much evidence of Michael having the low moods – he was hyper all the time.

CR: No. But I would say, the OCD part fits. Especially, when we talk about things like that incident in Canada, where all he’s thinking about – he wants to watch that (PBS) TV show he’s on!

DD: Yes (laughs). Correct.

CR: He bitches to the performers. He rushes through the performance, so he can get back in time (to fiddle with his hotel room’s TV set) – this is extraordinary behavior, for sure.

DD: Right, absolutely. And it resulted in him abandoning his signature instrument. The interesting thing is, he never mentioned it again. That guitar, it’s just disappeared, completely off the face of the earth.

So Bloomfield had, I think, obsessive qualities. And he very much had an active mind. He couldn’t calm himself down. That was a large part of his issue. That’s, of course, why he liked heroin, and later, Placidyl.

CR: And, of course, the other issue was his discomfort, and his absolute dislike of going on the road, too, right?

DD: Yes, because he couldn’t sleep.

CR: Well, having been on my book tour with Mark last summer (for We Are The Clash), I thought, “I can empathize completely.” (DD laughs.) And when you do yours, you’ll understand what I’m talking about.

DD: I’m sure I will (laughs). Yeah, well, that’s a good insight. Imagine –Bloomfield had been doing it for two and a half years, by the time he quit the Flag. Even gone abroad, and done it with Butterfield – and the tour they did there was rigorous, to say the least. I mean, they slept on the bus, some of the time, they were just dragged here and there. Well, it’s a young man’s game, obviously.

CR: I imagine, that was where a lot of the drug stuff came in. Because you were using it as a tool, just to sort of get through it.

DD: Absolutely. I talked to a couple of guys who played with Michael, in the early ‘60s, on the North Shore of Chicago, and these were older musicians – and they told me quite a bit about amphetamine use, that it was extremely common. You took a couple of pills before the set, and that would get you through the night. And then, you’d take a pill to go to sleep, and you’d repeat that routine seven days a week.

And some of these guys had been doing it for years and years, so, the rigors – and these were people who weren’t on the road. They were just working a local gig. You can see that it’s arduous, it’s really difficult.

CR: What was the moment, for all practical purposes, that he became box office poison to a major label?

DD: Well, he famously did an interview with the LA Times, just prior to the release of the album that he had recorded with Barry Goldberg, and Ric Grech, and Carmen Appice, called KGB.

And Michael said, basically, “This whole scam, I don’t know these guys, the company says we’ve been dying to play with each other, and we’re creating wonderful music.” He said, “We go in the studio, I have no connection to these people whatsoever, I have no idea why I’m doing this, I’m just doing it for the money. It’s all hype and more music industry shenanigans.”

The was published, pretty much verbatim, what he said – and as you might imagine, the label (MCA), was outraged. So Bloomfield wrote a letter, resigning from the band, and later said, “I probably shouldn’t have said all that stuff, that was stupid, what I did,” although what he said was true (laughs).

His records prior to this hadn’t really been selling at all. But now, he was not only a guy who wouldn’t tour, and wasn’t producing hit records, but a guy likely to turn on, to attack his parent company in public. And nobody wanted to deal with him anymore. That was pretty much the end of his major label recording opportunities.

CR: And yet – right after that, you could argue, he gets into a sustained period of creativity and focus, from the Guitar Player record, to Andy’s Bad, and Analine, the all-acoustic album, his first album for Takoma.

DD: I would agree with that. He said, at the time, he had developed this aesthetic that was his own. He called it his “set of Bloomfield criteria.” He realized he didn’t have to play music that had commercial appeal.

He didn’t have to play music that pleased his manager, or his record label, should he have a record label. He could just play what he wanted to play. He didn’t even care if he pleased the audience. And I think he had been greatly impressed by Randy Newman, and by Ry Cooder. He saw those guys making their own kind of music, in their own way, not really worrying about the standards of the industry or what was selling, what wasn’t selling. And that really impressed him.

And that’s why he showed up at Radio City Music Hall, to play the Newport Jazz Festival, the opening night, for the midnight blues show. Bloomfield’s introduced, and the crowd goes wild, because there are so many fans who knew him from the Electric Flag, and Butterfield days, and he very rarely was in New York.

He comes out with a couple of acoustic guitars, sits down on a chair, in the center of this huge, 100-foot stage, and proceeds to play these acoustic blues numbers. Everybody, at first, is like, “What the hell?” No one knew what he was doing.

CR: Right.

DD: They were charmed by it, because Michael is such a good player, but then, he played two or three other numbers acoustically, and people began to get restless. Mike Michaels, who was playing harp with him – a friend, from the Hyde Park days – said he could hear people shouting for (songs from) Super Session.

And Bloomfield’s just plucking away on the stage, playing whatever he wanted to play, and that was the first time he did that. And he did that more and more, so that he would always do an acoustic set, sometimes on piano, then bring out the electric band. Toward the end, he was just doing solo sets himself. That played well with some people, but a lot of people in his audience did not understand what he was doing, and that made it…

CR: Yeah, and I think you make some pretty perceptive comments in your book about that, that it could be a rough ride, because he didn’t necessarily explain what he was always about to play.

DD: No, he didn’t put in the context. Even as late as 1980, when he played Washington, D.C., with Woody Harris, and played the acoustic gospel music – the reviewer said, “Everybody was like, ‘Where’s his amps? Where’s the drummer? What’s going on? We don’t understand. This is Michael Bloomfield, the Super Session god.’”

CR: Of course, he didn’t want to be the guitar god anymore, and people deep down, (were) hoping he would be. 

DD: Absolutely. Everybody was hoping, “Well, maybe the old fire will come back, and we’ll have Michael Bloomfield again.” But it did not happen.

CR: Exactly, so… Well, we could argue the Takoma relationship arose by necessity, as much as anything else, because nobody else would have been interested in letting him go down that path, right?

DD: I think you’re right. Takoma was issuing lots of acoustic music, and folk music, as well as blues. They were following the path of the early independent record labels of the ‘60s, like Vanguard, and Elektra. And they put out lots of really good records. Some of Bloomfield’s records are good.

CR: So, well, let’s get to that, then. Where does Norman fit into that picture? As we’ve mentioned, he’s fairly polarizing. And to some fans, those records are fairly polarizing, too. People either seem to like them, or not like them.

DD: I think everyone pretty much agrees that they were not quite up to the standard that one expected from Bloomfield, with his talent, and his musical vision. But they were also created on a budget, and at a fairly chaotic time in Michael’s life. Norman had left Chess Records, after the death of Leonard Chess, and it was bought by GRT. And he came out West, and was teaching one of the first audio engineering courses.

CR: Right, as I documented.

DD: Yes, yes. But I think that wasn’t really paying the bills all that well. I think he realized that Michael could take control of his own art. That was the motivation – he was going to help his friend get his music out, but they were going to make some money doing it.

CR: Right, and as you alluded to earlier, he hoped to establish himself as a go-to producer for that kind of thing.

DD: Yes. Yeah, that’s right.

CR: Like I said, I think he did the best with what he had. Which wasn’t much.

DD: I agree. I think you’re right. As you reported in your interview with him, he got $2,000 to record, and then, they spent another $2,000 on production, to actually manufacture the records. But that was it.  That was their budget.

CR: I mean, even in the ‘70s, that wasn’t much money, really.

DD: No, you were working with Columbia…Or some of the other (major) labels, which Michael had been. The only time that Michael and CT Productions was working with a real budget was when they recorded the Count Talent album, for TK.

CR: Yeah, and that was $50,000, I think, is the figure Norman quoted.

DD: That’s right. But that was the exception.  I mean, that was very unusual.

CR: Because you had somebody that was actually prepared to sink that kind of money into it. Although, as you document, even then, they were less than happy, and they made them go back and redo things, right?

DD: Yes, they tried to remix the recording. But that is an odd record.

CR: It really is. Not without its charms, though. And I thought it was his weakest, although now, I think there’s actually a pretty good double EP trying to get out.

DD: I think that’s right, yeah.

CR: I like his vocal on “Saturday Night.” I like “You Was Wrong.” I like Nick’s song, “Bad Man,” that’s exceptional. He did a good job on that. “Sammy Knows How To Party,” I’ll put on there, too, because it’s so weird, and so unusual, and knowing that it’s about Sammy Davis, I think, “Okay. Now I know what he meant.”

DD: Yeah, but without that context, it is weird.

CR: It is weird, and it doesn’t make sense, right. I would agree with you on that. Those particular ones, I think, are the standouts. Maybe one of the Bob Jones cuts (“Let The People Dance,” “Love Walk”), too. Those were pretty good semi-disco records for the time.

DD: Yeah, the playing is good. It just, it’s certainly not what TK was looking for, because they wanted to launch their Clouds label as a rock ‘n’ roll label.

CR: Right, and he comes back with, as you said, celebrations of rhythm and movement. Not quite what they had in mind.

DD: Not quite what they had in mind, no, that’s true.


PART V: "IT'S A GREAT RELEASE"
CR: So, when we get to the end of that (Takoma) period, marking the downward slope of Michael’s life – could he could have gotten himself out of that? Why didn’t he get better? Why didn’t he make the effort?

DD: Part of it was, that he was surrounded by lot of drug users, heroin users, people who needed things from him. Woody Harris said he was astonished, when they were recording the gospel record… how people took advantage of Michael. They just manipulated him, and were constantly pestering him for various…

CR: Like hitting him up for money?

DD: For money, or a place to stay. So his home environment was just…

CR: Chaotic.

DD: Chaotic and toxic, to some degree. So you try to be creative, in an environment like that, and you also are dealing with pretty unsettling emotional stuff. His relationship with Christie Svane was probably the best thing he had in his life at that time.

CR: Yeah, but he couldn’t make the effort (to clean up) even for her, really.

DD: No. He tried, but… And the claim was, at the end of his life, he was cleaning up, getting himself together, and looking healthy. And that he was encouraged, because he was pretty sure that they were going to get married, and he was very excited about that.

CR: So that house must have been like a train station.

DD: I think it was. There were a lot of people in and out, all the time. Chris McDougal, who was Michael’s assistant during the Flag days, said that during that period, and afterward, there would be guys just banging on the door night and day.

There’d be junkies from down in the city, looking for a fix – they were strung out -- or there guys looking to sell whatever they had on hand, psychedelics, or narcotics... That’s a pretty rigorous environment for even a healthy person to deal with, and Michael was not, emotionally, in good shape.

He was drinking toward the end, way to excess, and I actually have a recording of Michael, singing and playing, when I can only think that he’s really, completely knackered, and it’s pretty terrible.

CR: It’s excruciating, I imagine.

DD: It is, yeah – and yet, the playing still is, like, “Wow! Boy, this is really great.” But I also think that Michael was charming. He was a charming guy, even when he was loaded – and that was one way he was able to move in certain circles on the South Side, or the West Side, or to hang out with Polish polka bands, because he could just talk his way into anything.

So when he’s up on stage, in the last portion of his life, and he’s clearly inebriated, and he’s not quite together, he does have this kind of boyish charm that I’ve seen, over and over again, in videos from that period.

CR: Yeah, even on those Italian shows, where the crowd could get fairly difficult.

DD: Yes, exactly! That’s one thing I was thinking of, too. Those were painful, those shows.

CR: But let’s turn it around. What if he had lived? Because (in) the ‘80s, if your name wasn’t Stevie Ray Vaughan, or Robert Cray, you were in for a bumpy ride (DD laughs), really. Well, they were the only two, in my mind, who survived it.

DD: That’s true, if you were going to play in that style. I doubt, very much, that Michael would have been playing that way. If he’d gotten himself cleaned up, somehow gotten his home life together, and got into the hands of a responsible and capable producer, who wasn’t his best friend, and party mate, which Norman was, to some degree…

CR: Right. Yes.

DD: I think he would have done very much what Ry Cooder did, which is, explore different kinds of music. He would have played electric on occasion, but he certainly never would have been in the category of Stevie Ray, or played like that, anyway. I think those days were long gone, and I don’t think he had any regrets about that.

CR: Right, although I’ve seen some things online, which mentioned that, supposedly, he was suffering from arthritis in his hands those last couple years. Did you find any documentation of that?

DD: Yes. In ’76, I believe it was, he was in the hospital, in the summer, for an operation on his thumb. He didn’t say what that was, but I have him on tape saying he’d just gotten out of the hospital for that treatment. I think he probably had a bone spur … I don’t know if that was arthritis, but he did have a problem with one of his hands.

And I speculated for awhile, maybe, that’s why he played so much slide, because his fingers were hurting, toward the end of his career. But (Mark) Nafatlin said to me that he was not aware of Michael ever having any pain in his fingers.

But the way he played, I can’t imagine that he would not have had some physical difficulty on occasion. Just add the intenseness, the intense way he played, particularly with Butterfield…

CR:  Yeah. Right. It’s fairly demanding music, right?

DD: Absolutely, and people don’t realize that. As a guitar player yourself, and I am, too – you got to be in good physical shape to play like that.

CR: You do. That part is not negotiable.

DD: Yeah, and so, it wouldn’t surprise me if he had trouble with his fingers.

CR: But you didn’t actually find anything one way or the other, then?

DD: The only thing I know is that he was in the hospital for a procedure on his hand. But I don’t know – it doesn’t sound like that was arthritis. It sounds more like a bone spur, or something…

CR: But when we look back, what do you think his legacy is? For a non-listener, a non-initiate coming late to the party – where they should they start?

DD: Well, they should start with the first Butterfield record. That’s a really good place to start. The tunes are short, the soloing is intense, the playing is first-rate, and that’s how people learned about Bloomfield’s talent.

But I think Michael’s real contribution is that he was a guy who was an amalgamator. He brought together disparate musical styles, and created something more out of them. He took blues, and infused it with rock, sort of a rock sensibility, where the soloing was intense, and it was loud, fast, and exciting, and it was long.

There was that aspect of jazz, Coltrane or Pharaoh Sanders taking a 20-minute solo, well, Bloomfield would take a 20-minute solo. No other rock guitar players ever did that. They had 15 or 20 seconds of solo, before the singer came back. But Bloomfield would wail, he would just go. So that was part of it.

And then, of course, taking a bastardization of Indian music, and adding that to the mix, for “East-West,” then, getting into soul music and other world music styles, with the Electric Flag …I like to kick around the idea that Bloomfield’s playing with Butterfield, and later, with the Flag, pointed jazz in the direction of fusion. Because fusion was largely driven by guitars. I think that Michael had a hand in setting the stage for that.

So I see him as somebody who helped pop music to grow up, from the early ‘60s formulaic stuff, to a music where you not only rocked out, but also listened. And, of course, brought blues to the greater consciousness of the American listening public, which was a huge contribution. And pretty much shaped the sound of rock for a good portion of the ‘70s, certainly, the late ‘60s.

CR: Well, and “Another Country” always struck me as the logical sequel to “East-West.”

DD: Absolutely, yes. And it’s sort of like “East-West,” using the studio as an instrument, in addition to the musicians.

CR: Yeah, I actually got introduced to it by, The Best Of The Electric Flag, on eight-track, of all things.

DD: Wow! That’s great.

CR: Yeah. But, as a teenage boy, I remember, when it got to that free-form interlude, my head was completely blown apart. “Wow,” I thought, “this was radical, even for 1967.”

DD: Well, it wasn’t the first time that had happened. But it was within six months of the first time, or seven months. That record is probably my favorite Bloomfield record, just because it encapsulates so many different ideas, and so many different styles. And it’s got some great pop tunes on it, it’s got great soloing, and –

CR: It’s got great everything, really.

DD: Yeah.

CR: And to go back to “Another Country” – what’s exciting, once they blow your mind, with the free-form barrage, and then, how he leads the band back out of it.

DD: It’s a great release.

CR: It is.

DD: And it’s very similar to what he does in “East-West,” with the melodic portion, the third portion… Where you get this intense aural assault going on, and suddenly, boom, it all drops out, and it’s just Bloomfield in rhythm. And it’s, wow!

CR: Exactly. So, yeah, that is masterful. Because, as we know, that kind of thing, especially back then, was pretty deadly when it fell into the wrong hands.

DD: Yes (laughs), that’s certainly true.

CR: Of the later things that he did, what would you recommend? The Guitar Player record, perhaps, if they can get it?

DD: Yes, that would be a good place to start. There’s some exceptional playing on it. I love “Thrift Shop Rag,” that just knocks me out every time I hear it. Some of the other tunes, as well – “Death In My Family,” that’s great. It’s all good.  So, yes, that would be the record, I think. (Between The) Hard Place (And The Ground) would be good, too. That’s an excellent recording.

CR: I always enjoyed that.

DD: Yeah, it is good. You know, what’s interesting, too – is that three of the tunes on there are not from the (Old) Waldorf.

CR: Yeah, they’re studio creations, right?

DD: They were recorded for Columbia. And I think Norman just purloined them. They were supposed to be on Try It Before You Buy It, Bloomfield’s second solo album. I guess Norman had to fill out the rest of the record, and he said, “Oh, we got this tape, let’s throw it on there, so…”

CR: Which is surprising, considering how much stuff he did record of them (live), that he couldn’t find enough to fill that record out, right?

DD: It is surprising, but I think he also thought that those were good tunes, and – as I quoted him (saying) in the book, “We were done working with the corporate people. It was Michael’s stuff, and we were gonna put it out.”

CR: Yeah, and that definitely makes sense to me. Because, if you had gone to see him in that time period, those are songs he probably would have been playing anyway, right?

DD: Yes, I think so, yeah.

CR: So, what do you think is next for you? What are you kind of looking at down the road, if anything? Or is this (book) going to be it for awhile, you think?

DD: Well, it’ll be it for a bit of time, but I would love to do a detailed history of the Chicago music scene, starting around 1955, and going up to, maybe 1967, ’68, after Big John’s closed. There was so much stuff going on at that time, and it had such a huge effect on the national scene, by the end of the ‘60s.

The guys from Chicago, or who had been through Chicago, were making huge success and affecting the sound of pop music. Nobody’s talked about those early days, and all the guys in Old Town, the clubs there, who was playing, and who was down on the South Side. That would be a fascinating story.

CR: All right. I think we’ve basically covered what we need to cover – unless you can think of something I’ve forgot.

DD: No, I think you’ve hit all the bases, and then some – I appreciate it. Very good. This has been really terrific. I really appreciate your taking the time, and investing in this interview. I feel like we’ve done a pretty good job of covering Mr. Bloomfield on his birthday.

Special thanks to David, and also, Joel Pinckney, University of Texas Press, for images, press materials, and a copy of the book!

RELEVANT LINKS
Michael Bloomfield: An American Guitarist:
http://mikebloomfieldamericanmusic.com/#top

michaelbloomfield.com:
https://www.michaelbloomfield.com/d2ijjklh0eixt0ejvreg8dg18kgbzq

Last Thursday, I got the thrill I'd awaited since this summer, when I recorded my contribution. RECUTTING THE CRAP VOL. 2 (Crooked Beat Records) landed, right on my doorstep, plus the bonus LP, THE FUTURE IS UNWRITTEN, which I ended up on. As the cliche goes, it's one thing to see any object on a screen, but a different feeling to hold it in your hand. And what a package it is -- the two photos I've posted only scratch the surface (so to speak: I'll post more images after this weekend).

RECUTTING THE CRAP picks up where last year's VOL. I release left off, with various Washington, D.C. area bands recasting songs from the Clash's final bow, and likely, its most controversial: Cut The Crap (1985), as well as the handful of unreleased tracks that have circulated mainly in tape trading and bootleg circles ("In The Pouring, Pouring Rain," "Jericho," and so on) all these years. 

THE FUTURE IS UNWRITTEN, for which I recorded "Beyond The Pale" (Big Audio Dynamite), rounds up the various Joe Strummer-Mick Jones collaborations that they managed after the Clash broke up, including those that made it on record (notably, the second BAD album, No. 10, Upping St.), and those that didn't (such as "Dog In A Satellite," and "US North," which BAD actually played on their spring 1987 tours). I also wrote the liner notes, as well (while my compatriot, Mark Andersen, with whom I co-authored We Are The Clash, did the honors on VOL. I).

Crooked Beat will release both albums on Record Store Day, which is Saturday, April 21. This edition is limited to 1,000 copies, so act fast, if you want a copy, as they tend to go quickly. For more information, see: http://www.crookedbeat.com/.

For "Beyond The Pale," I carried the full instrumental load (bass, acoustic and electric guitars), and sang the song, while my longtime friend, Don Hargraves, did the drum programming, helped me work out the arrangement, and produced the track. We largely recorded it in August 2017, with additional touch-ups and remixing completed in October.

I chose to record this song for one simple reason: its central theme ("Immigration built this nation/You got a bloodclot standing here"), which provoked no less argument at the time of its release (1986) than it does nowadays. Some of Joe's most powerful and provocative lyrics are here, particularly this line: "If I was in your shoes/I'd say Soweto's gonna happen here, too." Not surprisingly, many fans see it as the "great lost Clash song".

More pertinently, I relate to this song on a personal level, since my late parents came from Germany to the USA...though they went three times, before they finally decided to stay here for good, during the 1960s. Like many people in that era, they simply hoped to build a better life -- as the so-called German "economic miracle" was still a long way off -- without clamoring for undue attention from the powers that be.

That attention waxes and wanes, depending on the level of demagoguery attached to it, and whether the haters manipulating it think they can get away with it. I still hold strong memories of the '90s, when the Republican-controlled Congress floated ideas to cut off legal immigrants, as well as their illegal brethren. I'd never seen my father so angry in my life -- it was "intergalactic," as Miles Davis's biographer observed of the late trumpeter's equally explosive outbursts.

Thankfully, that mania passed, but Trump's ascendancy -- and determination to punish all who disagree with him, legal or illegal -- is a warning not to relax too deeply, or risk sliding into banana republic status. Ironically, I might not have ended up in our current political situation, had my father gotten his first wish: Australia. He wanted to go there first, but couldn't get in, due to strict labor quotas in place at the time.

I often think of how differently my life would have turned out, in a country several time zones away...one of many associations that comes to mind when I listen to "Beyond The Pale," or play it live.

Now, all I need is a record player to hear it...and I'll be in business!

The hunger for something tangible seems all the rage these days -- as anyone witnessing the return of vinyl can attest. The same situation seems to apply to 'zines, those gloriously cut 'n' pasted, hand-designed, errantly-stapled samizdat dispatches from some alternate universe where nobody gives a rat's ass about celebrity A-list circle-jerking...the latest auto-tuned pop something-or-other phenom...let alone the latest installment in some mercifully forgotten movie franchise.

No, 'zines serve a purpose, and more people seem to have reached the same conclusion, judging by the turnout I witnessed at the Grand Rapids Zine Fest (7/25/15), which took place at the Kendall College of Art and Design's Fed Galleries. Having planned on doing a 'zine myself for some time now, I decided to go and see how the field looked. After all, pundits and scenesters alike had been sounding the death knell of 'zines since the 2000s, when blogs seemed to have taken over the space that they'd occupied. The '90s era of zinesters-make-good-now-here's-your-book-deal seemed as unthinkable as an ashtray on a motorbike.

However, the energy on display in the room said something else to me, as my wife and I made the rounds of tables -- from anarchist-oriented, to feminist, to personal and back again, all the passion on display made me want to pursue my objective that much more. Given the heavy hand of tech developments like "Mobilegeddon," all of a sudden, paper looks like a better and better bet: you can hold it in your hand, you can put it down again. Hey, what a concept! I suspect that's one reason for developments like the return of vinyl records, and the apparent rebound of indie bookstores.

The day's bigger draws included Matt Feazell, best known for his series of mini-comics: "The Amazing Cynicalman." Fittingly enough, he gave a workshop on the subject -- and, 90 minutes later, I found myself creating my first one! Now that's energy in action, I say. The afternoon concluded with a workshop, where several exhibitors read from their own 'zines -- and, though I didn't have a table, I was able to read excerpts from one of my own 'zine's forthcoming articles. Hear it for yourself on the "Featured Songs" portion of this site.

Somewhere, somehow, an inner ring of true believer is doing its best to keep the cause alive, which makes me want to sign up all the more. The nature of instant publication is hard to deny, especially when you're used to publications sitting on your ideas for weeks -- or even months -- at a time, only to say "NO" anyway...or, worse, seeing them watered down through sheer attrition in the editing process.

While I can't leave these developments behind just yet, I've dedicated that it's time for my own outlet, my 'own zine -- and its name is DESPERATE TIMES, which will combine my lifelong love of outsider music and art with personal commentary, essays and reflections on whatever topic or issue might strike my fancy (though it'll most likely come wrapped up in a social bent). I'm working on it this week as I speak -- creating a look that dips into the currents of Punk and Mod, without permanently dropping anchors into the choppy waters of the past.

DESPERATE TIMES will cut through the fog of those '77-era ills that seem stronger and more noxious than ever -- cultural apathy, glaring social inequity, mindless media content, and narrowing of opportunities for the majority -- with humor, without a concern for the passing of trends, or falling into the common traps of art/cynicism for its own sake, or making lengthy lists of rules that everybody else but the compilers feel obliged to follow. DESPERATE TIMES will offer a voice to music and the culture on the margins, and -- in the process -- reclaim a space outside mainstream cliches of "elevator speeches", "media platforms" and "staying on message." DESPERATE TIMES will stake out a presence away from the gatekeepers' mindless power games of "thumbs up, thumbs down, what else you got, kid?"...and, hopefully, leave its own lasting imprint.

What happens from this point? Stay tuned, as I begin assembling the final product, and figuring out the usual distribution/promotion issues...but all I know is, after seeing all that energy on display, I don't feel like standing still.