May 27, 2022

Paul Butterfield retrospective, with Tom Ellis

Paul Butterfield retrospective, with Tom Ellis
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Season 1 Diatonic Harmonica Blues Harmonica Retrospectives

Tom Ellis joins me on episode 62 for something a little bit different as we do a retrospective of the legendary Paul Butterfield, with Tom our resident expert. 

Born in 1942 in Chicago, Butterfield frequented many of the South Side blues clubs located there and even had the audacity to hire Howling Wolf’s rhythm section before going on to record his seminal album ‘The Paul Butterfield Blues Band’. His high energy form of blues launched him on the scene and he quickly followed this with the genre busting East West album, with the band evolving further in the following albums by incorporating horns. 

Butter moved to Woodstock and formed Better Days. He also appeared in some notable sideman roles, including The Last Waltz concert with The Band.

Butterfield has left us a tremendous body of work. He helped bring blues to the mainstream and created his own sound on harmonica that is as influential as any of the classic harmonica players.


Links:

Tom’s Blues Access magazine articles on Butterfield:
http://www.bluesaccess.com/No_25/butter.html
http://www.bluesaccess.com/No_27/butter.html
http://www.bluesaccess.com/No_29/butter.html
http://www.bluesaccess.com/No_31/butter.html

East West Live album review:
https://www.bluespower.com/447rev.htm

Horn From The Heart documentary:
https://www.hornfromtheheart.com/

Homespun instructional material:
https://www.homespun.com/instructors/paul-butterfield/

Videos:

Album with John Mayall:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR040iW52_c

Performing at Woodstock in 1969:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h62W2ARtwU8

Mystery Train with The Band:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-fmqOU8_Uo

Playing with Muddy Waters:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5Sj5tpn-no

Performing with BB King, Eric Clapton, Steve Ray Vaughan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-i-tIXxtlY

2015 Hall of Fame Induction, with Jason Ricci:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMxFvBVTWmM

Podcast website:
https://www.harmonicahappyhour.com

Donations:
If you want to make a voluntary donation to help support the running costs of the podcast then please use this link (or visit the podcast website link above):
https://paypal.me/harmonicahappyhour?locale.x=en_GB

Spotify Playlist:
Also check out the Spotify Playlist, which contains most of the songs discussed in the podcast:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5QC6RF2VTfs4iPuasJBqwT?si=M-j3IkiISeefhR7ybm9qIQ

Podcast sponsors:
This podcast is sponsored by SEYDEL harmonicas - visit the oldest harmonica factory in the world at www.seydel1847.com  or on Facebook or Instagram at SEYDEL HARMONICAS
and Blows Me Away Productions: http://www.blowsmeaway.co

Support the show

01:17 - Paul Butterfield retrospective

01:31 - Where Tom gained his in-depth knowledge of Butter

02:20 - Tom read an article where Butter said he didn’t think The Doors played authentic blues

03:38 - Tom has written extensively on Butter, including some liner notes on two of his albums

04:16 - Tom saw Butter play at the campground of a festival

05:36 - And interviewed him in Houston

06:22 - Butter had a tough guy image, but he was friendly when Tom met him

07:24 - Butter was born in 1942 and classical flute was his first instrument, with this musical knowledge being essential as a bandleader with great musicians

08:40 - Got to a good level playing flute

09:51 - His father was a lawyer (although not a wealthy one) and his mother a teacher

10:17 - Brother Peter was a big jazz fan, which influenced Butter

10:54 - Grew up in the Hyde Park area of South Chicago, where of the blues clubs were situated

12:10 - Sat in with lots of the black blues players in the Chicago clubs, along with Charlie Musselwhite

12:37 - Met Muddy Waters who went on to become his mentor

12:47 - Hired Howling Wolf’s rhythm section for the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, forming one of the first interracial bands and bringing blues to a white audience

13:26 - Started making a name with the band playing in a club in the north side of Chicago

14:40 - Before forming the Paul Butterfield Blues Band he played in a duo with Nick Gravenites, Elvin Bishop joined them and this trio went on to form the band

15:21 - Paul Butterfield Blues Band first album was released in 1965, with the Lost Elektra Sessions recorded before then but released later

15:58 - Mike Bloomfield joined the band, who choose Butter instead over Bob Dylan

16:35 - Newport Folk Festival in 1965 where the band backed Bob Dylan (without Butter)

17:35 - Butterfield Blues Band performance at Newport blew the audience away

18:37 - More on the first album

19:57 - East West album in 1966

21:21 - Butter had a unique style of playing the harmonica

23:07 - Live performances of East West often went on for almost an hour

24:06 - Did some recordings with John Mayall and The Bluesbreakers in London

24:58 - Resurrection of Pigboy Crabshaw and In My Own Dream albums introduced a horn section

28:06 - Father And Sons album with Muddy Waters in 1969

29:52 - Played at the famous Woodstock concert in 1969, with the band developed into a stellar line-up

32:48 - Butterfield was a greatest soloist

33:23 - Last album with Butterfield Blues Band in 1971 before forming new band, Better Days, based in the creative area of Woodstock

34:12 - Better Days was more of a roots band, with it’s folk influences from Woodstock

35:00 - Woodstock album with Muddy Waters in 1975

35:35 - Appeared in The Last Waltz concert

36:12 - Released first solo album in 1976: Put It In Your Ear

37:25 - Last few albums weren’t as strong as earlier output

37:40 - Last album: The Legendary Paul Butterfield Rides Again in 1985, financed by some wealthy fans

38:16 - Substance abuse had started to take it’s toll on Butter

38:43 - Other performances and session work towards the end of his life

39:39 - Health problems and started using heroin

40:12 - Died of an overdose in 1987

41:22 - Horn From The Heart documentary

42:11 - Also a great singer and bandleader, with William Clarke a fan

43:21 - Soundtrack of a Jane Fonda movie: Steelyard Blues

44:20 - Album with Levon Helm RCO Allstars

44:42 - Blues Harmonica masterclass with Homespun owner Happy Traum and acoustic playing

46:32 - Entered the Blues Hall of Fame in 2006 and the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame in 2015

48:19 - Played a little chromatic

49:26 - Tom has a microphone business where he has provided mics to many of the top players

50:40 - Butter played through the Shure 545 gun mic (before that an ElectroVoice mic)

52:13 - He mainly used a Fender Super Reverb amp

54:29 - Difference between high and low impedance mics

55:11 - Other amps used

56:17 - Played a Hohner Marine Band, upside down and embouchre

56:45 - Influence of flute playing on his playing and embouchre

57:34 - Butter’s legacy to harmonica players and music in general

WEBVTT

00:00:00.066 --> 00:00:08.794
Tom Ellis joins me on episode 62 for something a little bit different as we do a retrospective of the legendary Paul Butterfield with Tom, our resident expert.

00:00:08.993 --> 00:00:23.006
Born in 1942 in Chicago, Butterfield frequented many of the Southside Blues Clubs located there and even had the audacity to hire Howling Wolf's Ribbon Section before going on to record his seminal album, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.

00:00:23.185 --> 00:00:33.704
His high-energy form of blues launched him on the scene and he quickly followed this with a genre-busting East-West album with the band evolving further in the following albums by incorporating horns.

00:00:34.185 --> 00:00:36.493
Butter moved to Woodstock and formed Better Days.

00:00:36.835 --> 00:00:42.054
He also appeared in some noticeable Sideman roles, including the Last Waltz concert with the band.

00:00:42.305 --> 00:00:44.808
Butterfield has left us a tremendous body of work.

00:00:44.929 --> 00:00:53.540
He helps bring blues to the mainstream and created his own sound and harmonica that is as influential as any of the classic harmonica players.

00:00:53.901 --> 00:00:56.484
This podcast is sponsored by Seidel Harmonicas.

00:00:56.905 --> 00:01:05.917
Visit the oldest harmonica factory in the world at www.seidel1847.com or on Facebook or Instagram at Seidel Harmonicas.

00:01:13.986 --> 00:01:15.908
Hello, Tom Ellis, and welcome to the podcast.

00:01:16.188 --> 00:01:16.888
Thank you for having me.

00:01:17.388 --> 00:01:19.311
So today we're doing something a little bit different.

00:01:19.350 --> 00:01:22.212
We're doing a Paul Butterfield retrospective.

00:01:22.293 --> 00:01:24.956
So obviously, Paul, sadly, is no longer with us.

00:01:25.215 --> 00:01:31.281
So you're here as our resident Paul Butterfield expert to talk us through Paul's life and his career.

00:01:31.361 --> 00:01:35.665
So maybe you can start off by telling us, you know, your sort of background with Paul Butterfield.

00:01:36.045 --> 00:01:37.807
Well, I'll give you the kind of a short history.

00:01:37.906 --> 00:01:40.929
I grew up in a beach town in northeast Florida.

00:01:41.209 --> 00:01:44.813
And when I was 15 years old, the local radio station.

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It was a small little 5,000 watt station.

00:01:47.516 --> 00:01:50.599
They hired a disc jockey who came from New York.

00:01:50.659 --> 00:01:51.799
His name was Jay Thomas.

00:01:51.900 --> 00:01:56.926
And Jay actually became a TV actor and a very famous radio personality in Southern California later.

00:01:57.146 --> 00:02:02.131
But Jay was hired to do a show from three to eight every day.

00:02:02.471 --> 00:02:15.104
And Jay brought nothing but albums and was doing album-oriented rock in 1965, which exposed me and my friends to a whole host of musics that we would never have heard on traditional AM radio at that time.

00:02:15.366 --> 00:02:19.189
And one of the things that Jay, one of the groups he loved a lot was The Doors.

00:02:19.270 --> 00:02:20.311
He played a lot of Doors.

00:02:20.651 --> 00:02:27.078
About two years later, I was working with a group of people, one of whom had been living in San Francisco.

00:02:27.117 --> 00:02:35.026
She brought a copy of early issues of Rolling Stone magazine, in which there was an interview with Paul Butterfield, who I had never heard of.

00:02:35.306 --> 00:02:48.760
And in that interview, he made some fairly negative comments about The Doors' opinion that The Doors were not a Well, I was a big Doors fan, so I immediately thought, who is this Paul Butterfield?

00:02:48.781 --> 00:02:51.544
And that is kind of what set me on my search.

00:02:52.125 --> 00:02:59.712
I subscribed to Rolling Stone magazine at that point in time so I could enjoy all of the music news that I would never have received in Florida.

00:02:59.973 --> 00:03:06.159
I went out and bought the first Paul Butterfield album at a record store that eventually hired me.

00:03:06.180 --> 00:03:12.286
And I worked there for a couple of years and learned a lot more about blues and music in general, having access to their catalog.

00:03:12.486 --> 00:03:13.807
But that's what started me with Paul Butterfield.

00:03:13.807 --> 00:03:14.268
Butterfield.

00:03:14.449 --> 00:03:21.316
I got the first album and I knew nothing about the blues, nothing about the Chicago tradition at all, but was blown away by it.

00:03:21.575 --> 00:03:28.804
One of my closest friends was a jazz guitar player and we had listened to a lot of jazz and a lot of guitar players, a lot of jazz guitar players.

00:03:28.824 --> 00:03:31.326
He, of course, was wiped out by Michael Bloomfield.

00:03:31.526 --> 00:03:38.213
So Butterfield became this thing that bonded the two of us and a couple of other folks that were big music fans like me.

00:03:38.533 --> 00:03:43.639
With your long association with Paul Butterfield, you've actually done quite a lot of writing about him, haven't you?

00:03:43.659 --> 00:04:03.760
You wrote some excellent articles for the blues access magazine which are four of which are available online i'll put links onto those people who want to go and delve deeper into the details of paul's career they're fantastic articles well recommend reading them you did a seminar about paul busfield at the spa convention um you wrote the liner notes for the paul busfield box set and electra

00:04:03.942 --> 00:04:15.213
yes but not only the box set but also the the reissue of the live recording where we basically put out twice the music that had appeared in the first recording there was a whole additional cds worth of material that that had never been released.

00:04:15.294 --> 00:04:16.033
And we put that out.

00:04:16.435 --> 00:04:18.596
And you also interviewed the man himself.

00:04:18.797 --> 00:04:19.819
Yeah, I did.

00:04:19.858 --> 00:04:24.704
The first time I saw Butterfield, the first Miami pop festival was in the late 60s.

00:04:24.923 --> 00:04:32.172
Me and my jazz guitar player friend and another friend who was a drummer, we all went to the pop festival specifically to see the Butterfield Blues Band.

00:04:32.432 --> 00:04:35.615
This was a point in his career that we were unaware of.

00:04:35.675 --> 00:04:39.418
We had not heard the Pig Boy Crab Shaw recording yet.

00:04:39.720 --> 00:04:48.389
And the band that he had in Miami was in fact that original Pig Boy Crab Shaw Band with Mark Nathalan, Philip Wilson, Sanborn was there.

00:04:48.689 --> 00:04:51.512
We were just blown away, just completely blown away by Butterfield.

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And that night, in those days, they had a lot of camping out went on at these festivals.

00:04:56.276 --> 00:05:04.867
As you know, if you've watched the Woodstock films, we went into the campground because we had been told that there were a lot of musicians who were performing who were wandering around in the campground playing.

00:05:05.047 --> 00:05:06.788
And in fact, so Butterfield was.

00:05:07.129 --> 00:05:09.310
He was with Gene Dinwiddie.

00:05:09.471 --> 00:05:18.661
The two of them were walking around and kind of jumping in and jamming with people and And it was funny because Dinwiddie was playing mandolin, which he played, you know, on In My Own Dream.

00:05:30.466 --> 00:05:32.107
And then Butterfield was playing flute.

00:05:32.267 --> 00:05:36.812
So I kind of got to sit up close and personal with Butterfield in a different kind of setting.

00:05:36.951 --> 00:05:38.432
But I did interview him later.

00:05:38.452 --> 00:05:41.875
Yes, when I lived in Houston, I wrote for a music magazine there.

00:05:42.115 --> 00:05:47.961
He came to town, and this was the period right after Ronnie Barron had left the Better Days Band.

00:05:48.161 --> 00:05:49.822
Jeff Mulder was still in the band.

00:05:49.843 --> 00:05:51.324
Amos Garrett was still in the band.

00:05:51.463 --> 00:05:52.745
The original group was there.

00:05:52.865 --> 00:06:00.312
And they had hired Goldie McJohn, who had become famous as the keyboard player for Steppenwolf and then later for Crosby, Stills, and Nash.

00:06:00.391 --> 00:06:06.529
So But I got to interview Paul after that gig, and to say I was intimidated is a significant understatement.

00:06:06.670 --> 00:06:13.389
But he was very outgoing, very easy to talk to, obviously somebody who was extremely proud of the music that he had released.

00:06:13.858 --> 00:06:15.218
So what was he like as a person?

00:06:15.238 --> 00:06:21.665
I read some things that he, certainly when he was younger, he was quite a tough guy, but had he mellowed out a little bit by the time you met him?

00:06:22.004 --> 00:06:29.250
Yeah, you know, I think that tough guy reputation, I think that was something that all of the band leaders in Chicago probably had.

00:06:29.290 --> 00:06:31.452
They carried around a lot of cash after gigs.

00:06:31.612 --> 00:06:34.475
It was kind of a dangerous area, certainly where Butterfield grew up.

00:06:34.615 --> 00:06:38.439
He was right on the edge of the University of Chicago campus, but where he grew up, it was pretty tough.

00:06:38.800 --> 00:06:42.362
He was very, very open in talking about his music.

00:06:42.603 --> 00:07:16.358
It was kind of bizarre our interview because we talked for about 15 minutes and I'm writing notes and asking him questions and I got to a certain point where I wanted to know what had happened with Buzzy Featon who you may remember was his guitar player at Woodstock and then on the Keep On Moving album Buzzy had left the band or actually had been kicked out of the band I think because he had some substance abuse problems and when I mentioned Buzzy Butterfield kind of ended the interview he said you know I really don't want to talk about that that wasn't a good situation and I So we had kind of an odd ending.

00:07:16.559 --> 00:07:18.901
He was a very nice guy, very, very nice person.

00:07:19.081 --> 00:07:21.785
I sense none of that, you know, bully tough guy stuff.

00:07:21.985 --> 00:07:22.906
Yeah, good to hear.

00:07:22.925 --> 00:07:23.565
I'm sure he was.

00:07:23.826 --> 00:07:24.687
He was born in 1942.

00:07:25.447 --> 00:07:29.392
And you mentioned there that you heard him playing flute at the festival there.

00:07:29.432 --> 00:07:31.314
So I think that was his first instrument.

00:07:31.415 --> 00:07:33.958
He learned classical flute as a youngster, didn't he?

00:07:34.158 --> 00:07:34.697
Yeah, he did.

00:07:34.798 --> 00:07:43.728
And I think one of the important things about Butterfield that most people overlook is the fact that because of his classical training, he learned how to read music and he understood how to play.

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music theory to a certain extent.

00:07:46.651 --> 00:07:57.041
If you look at the traditionally famous blues players, very few of them had any relationship either with classical music or with reading or writing music in terms of sheet music.

00:07:57.161 --> 00:08:14.161
And I think that that is an aspect of his character and his background that opened him up to the kind of musics that led to East-West and then provided him with a secure position in fronting a band that was full of fantastic horn players, just fantastic players.

00:08:14.221 --> 00:08:22.589
The big band, the last iteration of the big band had stellar musicians, all of whom on paper were much greater musicians than Butterfield was, but he could hold his own with those guys.

00:08:22.949 --> 00:08:32.700
Sanborn told me once that the leader of that band from an arranging standpoint was Dinwiddie, of course, because Dinwiddie had come straight out of bebop and he was very, very seasoned.

00:08:32.820 --> 00:08:33.861
Paul did read music.

00:08:34.101 --> 00:08:39.888
He didn't read music well, but he did read music and he understood what these arrangements were like when he looked at them on paper.

00:08:40.128 --> 00:08:42.291
Did he get to a good level playing flute?

00:08:42.471 --> 00:08:44.153
Do you know what sort of age he played that tool?

00:08:44.393 --> 00:08:49.879
I guess the best way to answer that question is to say he studied with the first chair flautist of the Chicago Symphony.

00:08:50.219 --> 00:08:54.143
And I doubt the first chair flautist of the Chicago Symphony just takes all comers.

00:08:54.583 --> 00:08:59.808
I actually, doing my research for Butterfield, I wanted to know more about what learning the flute was about.

00:08:59.849 --> 00:09:03.052
And I spent some time with the first chair flautist of the Dallas Symphony.

00:09:03.232 --> 00:09:13.443
And the basic stuff he explained to me that he would require his students to know indicated to me that you have to be somewhat schooled and educated to get to that level of instruction.

00:09:13.543 --> 00:09:14.544
So So yeah, I think he did.

00:09:14.565 --> 00:09:16.365
I think he fully understood the flute.

00:09:16.407 --> 00:09:19.528
He sounded great, you know, when we heard him in the campground that night.

00:09:19.809 --> 00:09:23.091
He's not recorded playing flutes in any of his albums, is he?

00:09:23.253 --> 00:09:41.308
I think he's the flute player on Love March.

00:09:41.328 --> 00:09:42.490
I'm almost positive he is.

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Because they didn't have a flautist in the band.

00:09:45.150 --> 00:09:47.139
You know, they had baritone, tenor, alto.

00:09:47.178 --> 00:09:48.224
They had a trumpet.

00:09:48.244 --> 00:09:49.408
They had everything, but they didn't have a...

00:09:49.690 --> 00:09:51.456
And none of those guys were flute players.

00:09:51.874 --> 00:09:53.755
And so his father was a lawyer, right?

00:09:53.796 --> 00:09:54.515
So he came

00:10:02.503 --> 00:10:20.599
from a reasonably wealthy family then?

00:10:21.840 --> 00:10:23.662
jazz fan, played jazz all the time.

00:10:23.861 --> 00:10:26.144
And when Paul was younger, he had to be around that.

00:10:26.184 --> 00:10:27.706
He had to be exposed to all of that.

00:10:28.086 --> 00:10:29.567
He was around jazz all the time.

00:10:29.989 --> 00:10:34.494
I got to spend quite a bit of time with Peter in doing my research, who was a wonderful person.

00:10:34.714 --> 00:10:41.461
And he made it clear to me that it was his opinion that that had had a huge impact on Paul, being around all of that jazz.

00:10:42.001 --> 00:10:49.690
There weren't blues records to the extent that there are today in the early 60s, late 50s and early 60s.

00:10:49.750 --> 00:10:53.433
And jazz, of course, was a hugely popular idiom here in the United States.

00:10:53.833 --> 00:10:56.517
You mentioned that, obviously, he grew up in Chicago, the blues town.

00:10:56.557 --> 00:11:00.260
I think he, from the south side in Hyde Park here, where lots of the blues clubs were.

00:11:00.421 --> 00:11:02.143
Yeah, lots of the blues clubs.

00:11:02.644 --> 00:11:09.350
I think at one point in time in the early 60s, there were something like 100 blues clubs in Chicago, and they were all over.

00:11:09.530 --> 00:11:21.222
There's actually some really interesting information about late 50s, early 60s Chicago club environment in the new Billy Boy Arnold book that Kim Field helped Billy Boy write.

00:11:21.464 --> 00:11:22.524
There were clubs everywhere.

00:11:22.585 --> 00:11:24.346
And then that's just on the South Side.

00:11:24.386 --> 00:11:27.289
And then there was a whole other group of clubs on the West Side.

00:11:27.450 --> 00:11:33.976
What Butterfield did was he grew up enmeshed in the South Side traditions, which was the Muddy and the Wolf.

00:11:34.076 --> 00:11:36.840
And West Side was more guitar-oriented.

00:11:36.860 --> 00:11:40.303
I don't think there's many harp players that were famous that came from the West Side.

00:11:40.384 --> 00:11:41.905
Otis Rush was from the West Side.

00:11:42.145 --> 00:11:59.323
What he did was he enmeshed himself in that South Side thing, which was being around Muddy and all those guys all the time, and was, from what everyone told me, completely unafraid to go down into those neighborhoods, you know, any time of the day or night, wandering out of the club at 3 a.m., he was unafraid.

00:11:59.384 --> 00:12:07.131
I mean, he and Charlie Musselwhite were really warriors in the fact that they would go down into that environment to hear the music.

00:12:07.352 --> 00:12:10.096
Fully ingrained in the Southside tradition there for a couple of years.

00:12:10.375 --> 00:12:14.721
Yeah, and he sat in, what, with Howling Wolf and Muddy Waters as well during that time, did he?

00:12:14.961 --> 00:12:19.205
I would imagine that Butterfield sat in with more people than we would ever know.

00:12:19.405 --> 00:12:28.075
I'm sure you've read the quotes from Elvin Bishop when where elvin said you know he started playing harmonica and you know and he was a beginner and a year later he was he was an expert he was a master

00:12:28.174 --> 00:12:28.335
yeah

00:12:28.455 --> 00:12:34.741
that kind of growth has to come from somewhere it doesn't come from sitting in your bedroom it comes from getting out playing and being exposed to the music

00:12:34.861 --> 00:12:45.894
so yeah i think you know he sat in the clubs and you know certainly said that money waters was his mentor and obviously recorded a couple of albums with him which we'll get on to later but yeah so he formed that early relationship with money then did he

00:12:46.193 --> 00:13:13.703
yeah he did of course you know the most notorious thing that butterfield did was he hired sammy lay and Jerome Arnold away from Howlin' Wolf as his rhythm section but besides that's a pretty ballsy thing to do you know I think it's an indication of how much respect he had garnered and had earned in the south side in the clubs that he could approach guys like that who were you know well seasoned and in demand and convince them to come you know with this young upstart white boy with another white boy guitar player

00:13:13.884 --> 00:13:25.414
and I think that's a you know really critical thing that Butterfield did is he brought blues to a mainstream white audience yeah and he also had an interracial band, as you say, because he had the rhythm section from Howling Wolf's band.

00:13:25.615 --> 00:13:25.995
Yeah.

00:13:26.576 --> 00:13:33.523
And I think that, you know, the beginning of that was certainly the playing at Big John's, which was a club on the north side.

00:13:33.802 --> 00:13:36.605
And the north side was a wealthier part of Chicago.

00:13:36.666 --> 00:13:38.527
There were a lot of music clubs around.

00:13:39.028 --> 00:13:42.471
John Hurt, who became Albert Grossman's partner, owned a club there.

00:13:42.510 --> 00:13:46.234
They had a white audience that was interested in drinking, partying and dancing.

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And when Butterfield hit the scene there, it became a scene.

00:13:50.785 --> 00:13:52.729
I think they were booked every weekend.

00:13:52.769 --> 00:13:57.195
He would support booking Muddy or someone else on the weeknights.

00:13:57.695 --> 00:14:00.859
So he was already working to spread the blues.

00:14:00.960 --> 00:14:05.485
And he and Bloomfield probably were the leaders of that, especially in the Fillmore days.

00:14:05.785 --> 00:14:08.009
But when he got to the north side, things really exploded.

00:14:08.129 --> 00:14:11.594
And then the college kids came to the clubs on the north side.

00:14:11.614 --> 00:14:12.495
They got interested.

00:14:12.534 --> 00:14:13.937
Then he started playing some colleges.

00:14:14.017 --> 00:14:15.519
And from there, it just blew up.

00:14:15.798 --> 00:14:18.022
And then you got to Monterey and New York.

00:14:18.081 --> 00:14:20.446
And he really became...

00:14:20.769 --> 00:14:25.037
really famous, actually, I think, within music circles at that point in time.

00:14:25.177 --> 00:14:30.565
But he certainly became a star in a loud, highly propulsive music.

00:14:40.400 --> 00:14:51.279
So before that, before he became well known, he started out I think playing with, is it Nick Gravenites in the duo before he then went on to form the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.

00:14:51.500 --> 00:14:56.845
Yeah, they would play these socials, house parties, socials, whatever.

00:14:57.225 --> 00:14:59.567
Elvin Bishop was involved in that scene as well.

00:15:00.107 --> 00:15:12.038
I think that that trio of Nick Gravenites and Elvin and Paul Butterfield, they kind of got together and did a lot of playing at a lot of events, mostly just parties is what it was.

00:15:12.057 --> 00:15:12.839
It was private parties.

00:15:13.360 --> 00:15:21.066
Okay, so they Then he got the band together, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, as you mentioned, Howling Wolf's Rhythm Section, Elvin, Nick.

00:15:21.307 --> 00:15:29.774
They were formed, I think, in 1963, and then they released the first album, which I'm sure many people listening to this heard many times, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band album.

00:15:29.933 --> 00:15:33.216
It was released in 1965 after a couple of false starts trying to record them,

00:15:33.657 --> 00:15:34.437
yeah?

00:15:34.457 --> 00:15:36.320
Yeah, there's actually an earlier iteration.

00:15:36.360 --> 00:15:38.782
There's the Lost Paul Butterfield Electro Sessions.

00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.000
.

00:15:45.153 --> 00:15:51.857
That was kind of the band without Bloomfield.

00:15:52.994 --> 00:16:00.900
The producer, Paul Rothschild, really lobbied Butterfield very heavily to bring Bloomfield into the band.

00:16:01.280 --> 00:16:10.509
And of course, that changed the dynamic and the entire trajectory of both of their careers at that point when that first album came out, because it had such a huge impact.

00:16:11.230 --> 00:16:11.570
Right, yeah.

00:16:11.590 --> 00:16:14.413
So Bloomfield was on that 1965 album, yeah?

00:16:14.753 --> 00:16:15.332
Yes, he is.

00:16:15.714 --> 00:16:18.735
He decided to play with Butterfield instead of Bob Dylan, didn't he?

00:16:19.096 --> 00:16:19.576
He did.

00:16:20.017 --> 00:16:30.928
And, you know, I think you can tell a lot about that band from from that famous quote that appears on the back of that album cover, which is, we suggest you play this record at the highest volume possible.

00:16:31.149 --> 00:16:35.452
These guys were very much in your face, very confident in what they did.

00:16:35.493 --> 00:16:53.952
When Newport happened and Bloomfield pulled a portion of the Butterfield band up on the stage to back him in his electric music performance that created so much controversy, I don't think that Dylan probably could have offered them the kind of playing environment that they had in Just

00:16:53.972 --> 00:16:55.534
to highlight that, just bringing that out.

00:16:55.595 --> 00:17:08.067
So this is the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, where Paul Butterfield's band backed Bob Dylan in his first electric performance, which is, of course, a very famous incident where all the folkies were unhappy that he wasn't playing acoustic.

00:17:08.307 --> 00:17:10.631
But Butterfield wasn't playing in that band, was he?

00:17:10.711 --> 00:17:12.573
It was just the band,

00:17:12.752 --> 00:17:22.083
yeah?

00:17:22.864 --> 00:17:27.489
friend of Dylan's, you know, from living in Woodstock and being managed by Albert Grossman.

00:17:27.689 --> 00:17:32.134
So that appearance at the Newport Folk Festival, was that before the album was released?

00:17:32.173 --> 00:17:34.455
That helped to gain some more recognition, did it?

00:17:34.817 --> 00:17:35.457
Yeah, it did.

00:17:35.497 --> 00:17:46.729
It's funny, you had a whole group of people at Newport who would later all become part of that same music scene in Woodstock, including, you know, Jeff and Maria Mulder and Eric Von Schmidt.

00:17:46.789 --> 00:17:56.579
I mean, all these people saw Butterfield play at Newport, you know, in that first performance, which I think was a an afternoon performance, and it literally blew everybody away.

00:17:56.839 --> 00:18:02.405
I mean, you talk to them even today and they'll say, we just never had heard anybody play music that way.

00:18:02.686 --> 00:18:04.147
Certainly not blues that way.

00:18:04.669 --> 00:18:12.457
It just engendered this, you know, enthusiasm and reputation and people started talking about him and it just blew up from there.

00:18:12.797 --> 00:18:18.022
And you mentioned the original Lost Electro Sessions, which, you know, there's some great songs on that.

00:18:18.042 --> 00:18:19.463
It's a double album, as you say, isn't it?

00:18:19.483 --> 00:18:20.325
Some really good songs.

00:18:22.708 --> 00:18:22.768
And...

00:18:22.768 --> 00:18:46.114
but maybe a little bit raw but certainly the um that was released later i think in in the in the 90s yeah but um the first album again the uh the paul butterfield blues band album which has got born in chicago of course probably one of his most iconic songs so uh what about that album

00:18:46.657 --> 00:18:49.962
In preparation for this, I listened to that whole album again the other day.

00:18:50.002 --> 00:18:53.849
And what struck me was the variety of the music.

00:18:54.329 --> 00:18:58.497
The tribute to Little Walter and Muddy.

00:18:58.696 --> 00:19:04.787
You sense the honoring of those people that taught him so much and that he respected so much.

00:19:04.846 --> 00:19:06.769
You sense that throughout that whole album.

00:19:06.891 --> 00:19:09.173
But when you listen to a song like Thank You, Mr.

00:19:09.273 --> 00:19:13.981
Poobah...

00:19:16.130 --> 00:19:22.218
Which is a very interesting instrumental workout.

00:19:22.397 --> 00:19:29.106
Unlike anything I've ever heard, even today, I've never heard anything that quite reminds me of Thank You for Mr.

00:19:29.166 --> 00:19:29.508
Puba.

00:19:29.647 --> 00:19:39.240
I mean, these guys were at a level of sophistication or targeting a level of sophistication that was far beyond a version of My Babe or a Muddy Tomb.

00:19:39.381 --> 00:19:41.042
They were going after something else.

00:19:41.723 --> 00:19:50.509
Luckily for them, they hit a time when the listening audience, had big ears and people were searching out new music to hear.

00:19:50.549 --> 00:19:56.234
They were aggressively looking for something new and it fit right in with that desire to find the new.

00:19:56.555 --> 00:19:56.934
Yeah.

00:19:56.954 --> 00:20:03.340
And you've already mentioned East West, which came next year in 1966, which is definitely a departure from standard blues.

00:20:03.861 --> 00:20:08.925
East West being the typical of that kind of inspired by Indian music slash kind of jazz.

00:20:09.006 --> 00:20:12.229
So that East West song was quite a departure, wasn't it?

00:20:12.528 --> 00:20:12.888
It is.

00:20:13.369 --> 00:20:20.898
And again, I hate to keep using the word sophistication, but you have to be a sophisticated musician to play across those changes the way they do.

00:20:21.098 --> 00:20:25.986
Certainly, that song could never have been played with Sammy Lay on drums.

00:20:26.405 --> 00:20:31.012
Sammy's always been a great drummer, but you needed a jazz drummer to have the right feel for that.

00:20:31.413 --> 00:20:33.355
Billy Davenport opened that door.

00:20:33.695 --> 00:20:40.405
If you listen to Work's song, I can see Sammy playing that very easily, but even Work's song, that's not a traditional blues song either.

00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.000
...

00:20:44.130 --> 00:20:49.374
Thank you.

00:20:50.082 --> 00:21:07.457
It's a different set of changes, and certainly the way they solo over the changes of both of those tunes, as impressive as it is on work song, you can ramp that up a couple of degrees for East-West, because the playing of everybody, you really hear Elvin.

00:21:07.836 --> 00:21:12.902
Elvin has now come out as a guitar player and really has established his personality as a guitar player.

00:21:13.102 --> 00:21:16.964
Bloomfield, of course, is kind of an outer space, but very much grounded.

00:21:17.005 --> 00:21:20.048
And then Butterfield, what Butterfield plays, it's just butter.

00:21:20.048 --> 00:21:20.508
Butterfield.

00:21:20.808 --> 00:21:27.976
And the thing that strikes me about Butterfield is his playing style was his and his alone.

00:21:28.297 --> 00:21:41.351
You know, Levon Helms said to me when I was writing the articles and we were writing about a performance where Muddy Waters came up to Woodstock to play, he said to me, Muddy Waters' idea of fun was not getting together with a bunch of white boys to play the blues.

00:21:41.830 --> 00:21:43.032
You had to be more than that.

00:21:43.073 --> 00:21:44.153
You had to bring more to the music.

00:21:44.173 --> 00:21:47.176
You had to be more than unique to get on the stage with Muddy Waters.

00:21:47.396 --> 00:21:50.661
I mean, Muddy Waters, you know, when Butterfield was a kid and when he was coming up.

00:21:50.721 --> 00:21:54.204
And even through the first album, Buddy Waters, he could call up Little Walter.

00:21:54.285 --> 00:21:57.067
He could call up a whole range of players.

00:21:57.127 --> 00:21:58.630
They all live right there in Chicago.

00:21:58.670 --> 00:22:03.615
He didn't need to have some white boy who was not that good on the harmonica playing on stage with him.

00:22:03.755 --> 00:22:05.237
So Butterfield brought something different.

00:22:05.277 --> 00:22:11.284
And if you listen to Butterfield's playing throughout his entire career, there is no one else that sounds like that.

00:22:11.324 --> 00:22:20.375
The way he approaches the instrument, the way he puts together phrases and and puts together notes, the way he plays background.

00:22:20.736 --> 00:22:21.737
It's not Little Walter.

00:22:21.917 --> 00:22:22.999
It's not James Cotton.

00:22:23.240 --> 00:22:24.161
It's Butterfield.

00:22:24.582 --> 00:22:34.898
And if you're looking for Butterfield to try and find the parts of Butterfield's playing where he obviously sounds like Little Walter or Cotton or Big Walter, you're not going to find that.

00:22:35.098 --> 00:22:35.920
That's not him.

00:22:36.059 --> 00:22:39.486
His personality is very, very distinct as a harmonica player.

00:22:39.746 --> 00:22:49.034
Yeah, and I read so many times, you know, researching for this about people saying he just put everything into every performance, even in his later years when he was dwindling, he still put everything into it.

00:22:49.453 --> 00:22:49.815
He did.

00:22:49.855 --> 00:22:54.919
You know, when I saw him at the Miami Pop Festival, those guys laid it all on the line.

00:22:55.179 --> 00:22:57.761
There was nothing left after that performance.

00:22:57.801 --> 00:23:02.326
They were sweaty, they were worn out, but they played their hearts out.

00:23:02.786 --> 00:23:03.747
I was shocked.

00:23:04.227 --> 00:23:07.329
Watching Butterfield was just, it was inspiring to watch him play.

00:23:07.529 --> 00:23:15.368
Going back to East West, apparently the live versions of that would sometimes run on to almost an hour yeah and it became this big epic epic song every time they performed it

00:23:15.589 --> 00:23:35.523
yeah in fact I got to spend a little time with Martin Afflin when I was doing my writing and at his place up in north of San Francisco and He actually, you know, he released the live East West performances on his label, which are fantastic and are really much different in many ways from what you got on the Elektra albums.

00:23:36.025 --> 00:23:41.550
But he has, you know, hours and hours of additional tape of varying quality from East West.

00:23:41.971 --> 00:23:42.972
I listened to some of it.

00:23:43.173 --> 00:23:45.355
Well, we stayed up from midnight till 5 a.m.

00:23:45.395 --> 00:23:47.498
doing nothing but listening to versions of East West.

00:23:47.538 --> 00:23:50.461
And I was never bored.

00:23:53.538 --> 00:23:59.964
Oh, my God.

00:24:06.594 --> 00:24:11.157
So in 66, he did a recording with John Mayles' Blues Breakers.

00:24:11.538 --> 00:24:12.980
Yeah, he went to England.

00:24:13.019 --> 00:24:14.381
The band went to England.

00:24:14.421 --> 00:24:15.541
The entire band went.

00:24:15.761 --> 00:24:22.327
There's a very interesting history of that trip to England in David Dan's Michael Bloomfield biography.

00:24:22.528 --> 00:24:25.309
If you're into Bloomfield, I would highly, highly suggest you read.

00:24:25.349 --> 00:24:26.090
They went.

00:24:26.391 --> 00:24:27.551
It was not a great tour.

00:24:27.592 --> 00:24:28.833
The weather was bad.

00:24:28.853 --> 00:24:31.015
They had all kinds of equipment issues.

00:24:31.375 --> 00:24:35.759
It didn't come off the way they wanted it to, but he did do that recording with John Mayles.

00:24:36.440 --> 00:24:44.382
I love Cry for you Cry for you

00:24:45.057 --> 00:24:48.980
i've

00:24:49.040 --> 00:24:58.048
seen recently some bootlegs of a peter green fleetwood mac performance where he is also playing and i don't know if that was recorded at that same time or not

00:24:58.288 --> 00:25:09.960
and then in 67 you already mentioned the resurrection of pig boy crabshaw album this was a bit more of an r&b album yeah so what about the inspiration for this one and where's the name pig boy crabshaw come from i always wondered

00:25:10.240 --> 00:25:22.892
big boy crabshaw was a moniker that alvin bishop came up with for himself uh You know, Elvin's always been the guy that wore the overalls on stage and kind of portrayed himself as a Oklahoma country boy, which he was.

00:25:22.972 --> 00:25:24.297
He happened to just be brilliant.

00:25:24.738 --> 00:25:26.019
from an education standpoint.

00:25:26.839 --> 00:25:27.721
Superstar guy.

00:25:28.101 --> 00:25:29.741
But that was his deal.

00:25:30.502 --> 00:25:39.611
So it was kind of his coming out, not only as part of the new band, but also stepping far away from the Michael Bloomfield-led sound of the first band.

00:25:40.171 --> 00:25:45.895
Elvin told me was that when Butterfield put that band together, everybody wanted to have a band with horns.

00:25:46.376 --> 00:25:51.760
The template for the Butterfield band was Junior Parker, because Junior had a full horn section.

00:25:51.800 --> 00:25:52.021
B.B.

00:25:52.061 --> 00:25:53.123
King had a horn section.

00:25:53.182 --> 00:25:54.564
That was kind of the thing.

00:25:54.703 --> 00:26:00.029
that was really, really interesting to Butterfield in his next phase was to have a horn band.

00:26:00.230 --> 00:26:12.323
And I think when you listen to Pig Boy Crab Shot, you listen to the arrangements, especially on a song like Driving Wheel, which is a Junior Parker tune, you're not going to find them straying too far from the original arrangements or the original approach.

00:26:12.682 --> 00:26:15.705
The band obviously had not, it wasn't seasoned yet.

00:26:15.846 --> 00:26:17.387
It takes a while to season a band.

00:26:17.669 --> 00:26:24.174
By the time they got to Woodstock, which was not too long after that, and Elvin, of course, had left, that was a different band.

00:26:24.316 --> 00:26:30.683
Actually, the In My Own Dream Band was a very different band when I listened to it from the Pigboy Cramshaw.

00:26:30.844 --> 00:26:31.865
Much, much more.

00:26:32.105 --> 00:26:33.847
The charts are much more complex.

00:26:33.907 --> 00:26:35.028
The arrangements in the charts.

00:26:35.230 --> 00:26:37.732
The song selection is much different.

00:26:37.952 --> 00:26:40.696
The reading of a song, like the way they do Just To Be With You.

00:26:40.737 --> 00:26:43.259
That's one of my absolute favorites of his.

00:26:43.319 --> 00:26:53.692
Of any harmonica song, it's fantastic.

00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.000
...

00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.000
...

00:27:00.193 --> 00:27:03.538
You can listen to Muddy do that all day long, and it's as great as it is.

00:27:03.919 --> 00:27:08.085
The way Butterfield does it is just as great from a different perspective.

00:27:08.545 --> 00:27:13.511
Yeah, so in My Own Dream, as you mentioned, there's an album released in 68, so he's releasing an album a year.

00:27:13.551 --> 00:27:15.955
He's busy, but this is still the Paul Butterfield blues band.

00:27:15.976 --> 00:27:17.518
He just added horns to it, yeah?

00:27:17.998 --> 00:27:19.220
Right, exactly.

00:27:19.800 --> 00:27:21.522
Horns and changed the structure.

00:27:21.784 --> 00:27:29.314
The biggest change that probably happened with Pig Boy Crab Shaw was, besides the horns, the obvious thing, was the change in the rhythm section.

00:27:29.698 --> 00:27:34.044
because he had Bugsy Ma, who you referenced R&B.

00:27:34.084 --> 00:27:39.913
That was a good observation because Bugsy Ma had come out of Wilson Pickett's band, had been the bass player for Wilson Pickett.

00:27:39.932 --> 00:27:42.516
So he was an R&B guy, pretty hardcore.

00:27:43.096 --> 00:27:46.622
And then he had Philip Wilson, who, you know, Philip Wilson was a free jazz guy.

00:27:46.642 --> 00:27:54.614
I mean, he had been playing in New York and Chicago with Mulhall Richard Abrams and a lot of those kind of people who were playing completely free.

00:27:54.933 --> 00:28:06.005
And so he brought that rhythm section That odd combination of those two guys brought a very, very different sound to Butterfield from Jerome Arnold and Sam Lay, or Billy Ballantyne.

00:28:06.546 --> 00:28:12.131
And then a slight departure for Butterfield, he did an album with Muddy Waters called Father and Sons.

00:28:12.451 --> 00:28:15.153
You know, I think Muddy Waters, I've read, was really pleased with the album.

00:28:15.192 --> 00:28:19.336
He felt it was his best since his kind of heyday in the 50s playing with Little Walter and co.

00:28:19.356 --> 00:28:20.758
Yeah, so he was well pleased with it.

00:28:21.018 --> 00:28:21.858
Yeah, you're right.

00:28:21.898 --> 00:28:32.390
You know, that weekend of the recording, the live recording, as well as the studio recordings That was a weekend of honoring Muddy Waters in the city of Chicago.

00:28:33.069 --> 00:28:42.260
So, you know, you had people who were very big Muddy Waters fans who were attending those shows that show up on the Fathers and Sons on the live cuts from Fathers and Sons.

00:28:42.701 --> 00:28:44.284
I can see why Muddy was pleased.

00:28:44.384 --> 00:28:48.749
I mean, when I listen to Fathers and Sons, even today, it has not aged.

00:28:49.189 --> 00:28:51.531
It is still a spectacular blues album.

00:28:51.833 --> 00:28:52.693
I don't really know.

00:28:53.153 --> 00:29:03.364
If there are a lot of albums that were made by leading blues guys like the Howlin' Wolf London Sessions or any of those, I don't know if any of those albums even come close to Fathers and Sons.

00:29:03.523 --> 00:29:12.333
Fathers and Sons is just many rungs up the ladder from those other kind of tribute albums or albums where guys got to play with their heroes.

00:29:12.753 --> 00:29:16.416
If you listen to a song on that album, the same thing.

00:29:17.238 --> 00:29:37.830
That same thing That's

00:29:37.871 --> 00:29:39.972
about as deep a blues as Muddy Waters gets.

00:29:40.493 --> 00:29:49.103
The way Duck Dunn and Butterfield in particular, the way they approach their instruments in that album, man, it's as heavy as the original Muddy's tune.

00:29:49.483 --> 00:29:51.806
Maybe heavier than the original Muddy tune, in my opinion.

00:29:51.970 --> 00:29:57.104
In the same year, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band played at Woodstock, which is a very famous concert.

00:29:57.144 --> 00:30:00.011
And his caption is, there's a motion picture made of it.

00:30:00.113 --> 00:30:03.982
And originally they didn't make the motion picture, but then it was added later on, wasn't it?

00:30:04.042 --> 00:30:06.329
So that was a big deal playing in that Woodstock festival.

00:30:06.529 --> 00:30:08.250
Yeah, that was a really, really big deal.

00:30:08.632 --> 00:30:23.285
One of the unfortunate things about Woodstock was that Albert Grossman, the very famous Svengali manager who managed Janis Joplin and a bunch of bands, he was reticent to have his groups recorded without getting paid.

00:30:23.644 --> 00:30:28.348
Everybody that played at Woodstock, nobody got paid for the recordings that appeared in the movie.

00:30:28.588 --> 00:30:31.050
So a lot of the good Butterfield stuff didn't come out.

00:30:31.211 --> 00:30:32.893
It's almost all out now.

00:30:33.073 --> 00:30:37.739
I know there's a bootleg LP that can be found on eBay that I think is the entire set.

00:30:50.828 --> 00:30:52.874
But the band had changed a little bit then.

00:30:53.115 --> 00:30:55.714
Bugsy Maw had left, Elvin had left.

00:30:55.954 --> 00:30:57.316
Buzzy Featon was on guitar.

00:30:57.355 --> 00:30:59.038
He was, I think, 19 years old.

00:30:59.377 --> 00:31:00.199
Incredible player.

00:31:00.219 --> 00:31:03.821
Then you had the very huge ad of Rod Hicks on bass.

00:31:03.922 --> 00:31:05.182
Rod Hicks played a fretless bass.

00:31:05.222 --> 00:31:07.085
He played with Aretha Franklin forever.

00:31:07.105 --> 00:31:09.366
And he was a very, very well-taught bass player.

00:31:09.767 --> 00:31:12.730
Really had a rhythm section that was incredibly strong.

00:31:13.009 --> 00:31:15.251
And Buzzy was so full of energy.

00:31:15.291 --> 00:31:28.144
You can almost sense when you watch the Woodstock stuff, whether you see all the recording of just what appeared in the original film, you can sense the energy level Buzzy Featon had when he got And the horn section had fleshed out some too.

00:31:28.203 --> 00:31:32.689
They'd gotten a different trumpet player, a guy named Stephen Deo, and they'd added a baritone bass player.

00:31:32.709 --> 00:31:35.391
So they had a much thicker sound out of the horn section.

00:31:35.491 --> 00:31:44.621
And it was at that point in time, I think, with Butterfield where he really, you know, there was an interview with him where he said something to the effect of, you know, I don't want to play all the solos.

00:31:44.922 --> 00:31:47.564
I've got some guys in this band that can really play.

00:31:47.805 --> 00:31:54.672
And as the band continued on after Woodstock, it became more and more of a, almost more of a jazz band.

00:31:54.672 --> 00:32:04.162
Yeah, and I think, you know, there wasn't then quite

00:32:05.723 --> 00:32:09.007
as much harmonica in the recordings, was there?

00:32:09.027 --> 00:32:12.111
But it's something, as you say, that he wanted to do, yeah, with the sound overall.

00:32:12.391 --> 00:32:19.578
One of the things that I've always felt very strongly about Butterfield was that he was very much a creature of his bands.

00:32:19.959 --> 00:32:23.021
He was driven by the quality of the musicians around him.

00:32:23.403 --> 00:32:27.968
He never had anybody in his band who wasn't a stellar player, who didn't go on to do something else.

00:32:28.008 --> 00:32:33.373
I mean, the whole horn section, when the big band ceased to be, the whole horn section, Stevie Wonder hired them all.

00:32:33.713 --> 00:32:35.915
He had players who were highly respected.

00:32:35.955 --> 00:32:37.597
He had to hold his own with these guys.

00:32:38.157 --> 00:32:41.281
You know, Butterfield was particularly strong in the live recording.

00:32:41.582 --> 00:32:44.846
That kind of brings me back to my comment about, you know, Butterfield played Butterfield.

00:32:45.046 --> 00:32:59.344
You listen to some of those songs, and you listen to some of the solos Butter does, where he just bar after bar after bar, ideas just flowing just one after another after another, after another, all interesting, all tied together, all different and unique.

00:32:59.744 --> 00:33:02.569
The sound of one song completely different from the sound of another song.

00:33:02.891 --> 00:33:18.157
Who is not a straight jazz player like Toots or who could play at that level with that level of musicians and be improvising and that creative.

00:33:18.357 --> 00:33:18.397
So

00:33:21.473 --> 00:33:23.657
Right.

00:33:23.998 --> 00:33:36.099
Everybody

00:33:36.140 --> 00:33:37.182
was living in Woodstock.

00:33:37.506 --> 00:33:38.646
or they lived in New York City.

00:33:38.926 --> 00:33:47.153
So there was this interesting confluence of all these different musical styles in Woodstock, and people were playing constantly.

00:33:47.253 --> 00:33:50.978
They weren't just gigging at the Golden Bear Club.

00:33:51.057 --> 00:33:51.919
They weren't just gigging there.

00:33:51.939 --> 00:33:55.240
There were afternoon get-togethers where everybody would play.

00:33:55.662 --> 00:33:57.202
Very creative music environment.

00:33:57.242 --> 00:33:59.005
The band, of course, was up there as well.

00:33:59.545 --> 00:34:06.611
And Better Days came together, I think, because of that jamming that went on among all these different musicians.

00:34:07.352 --> 00:34:11.521
It was made up of a group of really, really stellar musicians.

00:34:12.003 --> 00:34:17.657
But did he go back to being a bit more rootsy in the first couple of albums with Better Days?

00:34:31.777 --> 00:34:36.422
Yeah, and I think a lot of that's because of the people he was playing with.

00:34:36.782 --> 00:34:39.664
I mean, Jeff Mulder was definitely a folky.

00:34:40.085 --> 00:34:44.409
Ronnie Barron brought a lot more of that up-tempo, kind of like R&B kind of a feel.

00:34:44.628 --> 00:34:52.295
Amos Garrett was a guitar player who was also a great arranger, understood music very well, and was very unique.

00:34:52.496 --> 00:34:54.257
So again, it was an all-star ensemble.

00:34:54.358 --> 00:34:57.579
And a lot of those guys also were being managed by Albert Grossman.

00:34:57.760 --> 00:35:00.143
So it was kind of an in-the-family kind of a thing.

00:35:00.443 --> 00:35:04.327
And then he did another album with Muddy Waters in 75, the Woodstock album.

00:35:04.467 --> 00:35:05.510
I didn't know this until I read it.

00:35:05.530 --> 00:35:09.436
It was the last album released by Chess, and it won a Grammy, that album, as well.

00:35:09.735 --> 00:35:09.996
It did.

00:35:10.036 --> 00:35:17.067
On some of the songs, the band sounds a little timid behind Muddy, I think maybe a little intimidated, and on other of the songs, you know, they sound great.

00:35:17.347 --> 00:35:24.157
Yeah, probably not quite as strong as Falling Suns, but still a very good album from Muddy, I think, that one.

00:35:35.585 --> 00:35:43.755
And then in 1976, he appeared again on another very famous recording of The Last Waltz with the band and very famously played Mystery Train.

00:35:43.894 --> 00:35:47.900
I was watching a short little video clip with Robbie Robertson introducing him.

00:35:48.000 --> 00:35:50.222
He says something like, how about a little Paul Butterfield?

00:35:50.322 --> 00:35:51.704
And the crowd just goes nuts.

00:35:51.983 --> 00:35:54.246
Butterfield definitely had a stature.

00:35:54.907 --> 00:35:57.170
Even at that point, his bands had kind of gone away.

00:35:57.210 --> 00:35:58.371
He still had that stature.

00:35:58.512 --> 00:36:01.335
And his playing on Mystery Train is just fabulous.

00:36:04.217 --> 00:36:04.318
Music

00:36:12.769 --> 00:36:17.094
Then getting late in 76, he released his first solo album, as he called it.

00:36:17.134 --> 00:36:23.719
So this was what, he didn't have the Butterfield Blues band, he wasn't playing with Better Days, it was what he called it, his solo album, and put it in your ear.

00:36:24.159 --> 00:36:31.746
When I listen to the second Better Days album, It All Comes Back, it's apparent to me that they probably went in the studio a little early.

00:36:31.766 --> 00:36:34.509
Those songs, they needed to be performed more.

00:36:34.728 --> 00:36:36.630
It sounds a little forced to me.

00:36:36.951 --> 00:36:50.206
And I think that the live album, the Put It In Your Ear album, is another example of why a musician who has had an opportunity to live in a song and perform that song can present it fully fleshed out.

00:36:50.487 --> 00:36:55.295
In that first Put It In Your Ear album, you had Henry Glover, the spectacular producer.

00:36:55.576 --> 00:36:58.260
You couldn't get a better producer than that with a huge reputation.

00:36:58.659 --> 00:37:03.889
The songs obviously were written and performed relatively quickly.

00:37:03.929 --> 00:37:07.454
There's some great harmonica playing on it.

00:37:16.065 --> 00:37:17.697
It doesn't sound like a Butterfield band.

00:37:17.737 --> 00:37:20.356
It doesn't have that cohesiveness that you came to expect.

00:37:20.769 --> 00:37:24.833
from everything that was put on recording by the Butterfield Blues Band.

00:37:25.014 --> 00:37:29.878
And I think it's fair to say that his last few albums didn't have the power of his early ones yet.

00:37:29.938 --> 00:37:32.539
So he had North-South in 81.

00:37:32.780 --> 00:37:34.621
Again, some good songs on there.

00:37:34.681 --> 00:37:36.103
Bread and Butterfield's a good one.

00:37:36.483 --> 00:37:38.545
But yeah, then he did Alive at the Lone Star with

00:37:39.226 --> 00:37:39.786
Rick Danko.

00:37:40.106 --> 00:37:44.090
And then his last album was the legendary Paul Butterfield Rides Again.

00:37:44.250 --> 00:37:48.213
This was an attempt at a comeback just a couple of years before he died.

00:37:48.293 --> 00:37:48.373
Do

00:37:48.853 --> 00:37:50.735
you know the story behind the financing on that album?

00:37:50.735 --> 00:37:50.956
No,

00:37:51.336 --> 00:37:51.898
no, go

00:37:51.918 --> 00:37:52.157
for it.

00:37:52.318 --> 00:37:52.978
It's interesting.

00:37:53.018 --> 00:37:54.521
There were a group of guys.

00:37:54.822 --> 00:37:57.005
I don't know whether they were stockbrokers or what.

00:37:57.025 --> 00:37:59.447
They made a lot of money and they'd all gone to college together.

00:37:59.728 --> 00:38:03.673
And when they were in college, the number one thing they listened to all the time was the Butterfield Blues Band.

00:38:03.693 --> 00:38:09.561
They found out that Paul Butterfield was out there, didn't have a recording contract, you know, just kind of floating around.

00:38:09.641 --> 00:38:12.766
And they actually put together the money to put that album out.

00:38:12.961 --> 00:38:16.025
They were just huge fans of his, and it's just not a very good album.

00:38:16.284 --> 00:38:23.251
At that point in time in Butterfield's career, the substance abuse issues had really started to cause him some problems.

00:38:23.670 --> 00:38:27.514
And I think he felt without a band, he was kind of cut adrift.

00:38:27.815 --> 00:38:29.976
Albert Grossman died in that time frame.

00:38:30.016 --> 00:38:32.938
He'd been his business guy, got divorced.

00:38:33.300 --> 00:38:39.644
Of course, he had his problems with pancreatitis, which created all kinds of drug-related issues with him in his later years.

00:38:39.965 --> 00:38:43.548
Those albums, they're not representative of the Butterfield that I want want to listen

00:38:43.568 --> 00:39:03.730
to no but again in those later years though he did he did do some good stuff and he did a little bit more kind of session work of sitting in with people didn't he played in 1987 and a bb king and friends concert which was great you know a lot of stellar names on that such as bb king obviously eric clapton and of course we mentioned mystery train played with bonnie ray and maybe a little bit earlier than that

00:39:03.929 --> 00:39:28.916
you're right he did some great stuff in fact i saw him at a small club here called poor david's but that first set he played was stunning he went out for a break and I think he ingested some things that you know diminished his creativity because his second set was sad it was really sad to see what had happened in a 30 minute gap while he took a break you know but the first set when he was on boy he laid it out it was really something

00:39:29.197 --> 00:39:49.539
you know you mentioned there obviously he had his health problems with this stomach problem that he had and that really caused him a lot of problems didn't he he had to have a lot of operations and he started using heroin before then was that maybe partially as a result of the pain he was in, but maybe partially from the kind of us being the star that he was, you know, he was drawn into that, you know, and alcohol as well.

00:39:49.559 --> 00:39:49.699
Yeah.

00:39:50.019 --> 00:39:52.101
I think the pancreatitis led to that.

00:39:52.161 --> 00:40:00.010
You know, one of the things that I was told when I was doing my research was by guys in the early bands, he had no tolerance for hard drugs, none.

00:40:00.490 --> 00:40:12.463
It was always ironic to me that at the end, all of these people who loved him and who cared about him, you know, they tried interventions, they tried all kinds of different things and they just could not get him to kick, you know, his heroin problem.

00:40:12.704 --> 00:40:12.784
Yeah.

00:40:12.784 --> 00:40:16.673
Yeah, and this is ultimately, he died of an overdose, sadly, in 1987, yeah?

00:40:17.054 --> 00:40:17.335
Yes.

00:40:17.556 --> 00:40:19.842
He was living, I think, in Los Angeles at the time.

00:40:19.862 --> 00:40:27.360
In his later years, talking to his brother, I really got the feeling that things had really gone awry for Paul.

00:40:27.746 --> 00:40:30.909
ran around with a pretty hardcore drug crowd.

00:40:31.208 --> 00:40:32.809
It's almost a rock and roll cliche.

00:40:33.150 --> 00:40:36.594
A very sad ending to someone who had been what he had been.

00:40:36.634 --> 00:40:40.157
How was his death received in the musical community?

00:40:40.597 --> 00:40:42.898
I heard it on NPR, on National Public Radio.

00:40:43.139 --> 00:40:44.280
I'll never forget where I was.

00:40:44.300 --> 00:40:50.326
I was in my car and I was listening to NPR and they said, today Paul Butterfield, they played a little bit of Born in Chicago.

00:40:50.846 --> 00:40:52.608
I think a lot of people were kind of shocked.

00:40:53.088 --> 00:40:58.773
It elevated an interest in him again, which is kind of what led to me doing a lot of the writing that I ended up doing.

00:40:58.992 --> 00:41:05.260
But you have to remember that at that point in time, 10 years, maybe 15 years after the heyday.

00:41:05.460 --> 00:41:08.083
And so Butterfield, you know, music styles had changed.

00:41:08.143 --> 00:41:09.664
The blues was basically dead.

00:41:09.925 --> 00:41:17.032
Butterfield could still draw a crowd, couldn't sell any albums because people didn't know who he was, couldn't hold a recording contract because he couldn't sell any albums.

00:41:17.432 --> 00:41:18.454
It was a rough time for him.

00:41:18.753 --> 00:41:21.838
The music world was stunned, totally stunned.

00:41:21.858 --> 00:41:27.563
I've got to mention that there's a fantastic documentary, if people haven't seen it, about him called Horn From The Heart.

00:41:27.664 --> 00:41:35.135
Lots of interviews with, you know, many of the musicians were in his bands and people he played with and many of the names you've mentioned here on that documentary.

00:41:35.155 --> 00:41:36.661
So do you know who put that together?

00:41:37.153 --> 00:41:46.202
I can't think of the name of the guy that put that together, but that was very much a labor of love in the works for many, many years.

00:41:46.222 --> 00:41:52.967
I mean, I think the first time I talked with the guy that did that, gosh, I want to say it was 10 years before it came out.

00:41:53.307 --> 00:42:00.134
His timing was great because not long after that, within a year or two after that, a lot of the people that played with Butterfield just passed away.

00:42:00.554 --> 00:42:06.599
I think it is a good introductory to Butterfield, his history, especially the early days.

00:42:06.960 --> 00:42:07.119
Yeah.

00:42:07.119 --> 00:42:08.481
Definitely worth a watch, yeah.

00:42:08.561 --> 00:42:09.663
So a few more things he did.

00:42:09.682 --> 00:42:10.963
First of all, let's talk about his singing.

00:42:11.003 --> 00:42:16.869
We talked about, obviously, as a harmonica player, but certainly in the Butterfield Blues Band, he was the singer, and then later on he shared the singing.

00:42:16.889 --> 00:42:22.655
But, you know, I think singing was a real strong point of his, although he wasn't necessarily known for being a singer as much as being a

00:42:24.759 --> 00:42:25.358
harmonica

00:42:30.123 --> 00:42:30.244
player.

00:42:31.365 --> 00:42:35.550
I thought I'd be your king, baby You would be my queen, yeah, yeah

00:42:38.273 --> 00:42:39.521
I think you're absolutely right.

00:42:39.621 --> 00:42:41.353
I think Butterfield was a great harp player.

00:42:41.373 --> 00:42:42.702
I also think he was a great singer.

00:42:43.041 --> 00:42:48.025
I was not very close to, but knew Bill Clark, William Clark, pretty well.

00:42:48.085 --> 00:42:54.771
And the last time I saw Bill, I was sitting backstage with Bill and we were talking and he said, you know, you did all that writing on Butterfield.

00:42:54.791 --> 00:42:55.393
And I said, yeah.

00:42:55.432 --> 00:43:00.277
He said, you know, when I was going, starting out, I didn't have any respect for that guy.

00:43:00.476 --> 00:43:17.032
You know, he said, but now the more I listened to it, the more I realized not only what a great harp player he was, but what a great singer he was and what a great band leader he was to hold that caliber of musicians to in a band and keep them all incentivized to stay.

00:43:17.353 --> 00:43:20.815
Coming from Bill Clark, I thought that was a very astute observation.

00:43:21.117 --> 00:43:22.117
He did a little bit of film work.

00:43:22.177 --> 00:43:29.465
I know he did a film called Steelyard Blues, which was his last recordings with Mike Bloomfield, interestingly, and Jane Fonda was in this film.

00:43:29.525 --> 00:43:33.048
So that was, I don't know if he had many other film soundtracks, but certainly that one.

00:43:33.369 --> 00:43:37.713
Yeah, he did a Christmas tune on an album out of Woodstock.

00:43:37.753 --> 00:43:38.534
He did some stuff.

00:43:39.195 --> 00:43:40.476
I've seen Steelyard Blues.

00:43:40.556 --> 00:43:44.041
It's not a very good movie, in my opinion, but the music The music is really good.

00:43:44.322 --> 00:43:48.306
I don't know if Butterfield actually appears in that movie in the background somewhere or not.

00:43:48.606 --> 00:43:51.130
Steelyard Blues has a couple of great Butterfield tunes.

00:43:51.791 --> 00:44:03.525
The one I think I referred to you was Swing With It, which starts out the recording, and there's some guitar noodling going on, and then all of a sudden Butterfield comes in and takes the song over.

00:44:03.684 --> 00:44:07.268
The presence of his harmonica is just amazing.

00:44:07.710 --> 00:44:11.032
Swing with it.

00:44:11.054 --> 00:44:11.454
Swing with it.

00:44:12.481 --> 00:44:27.675
Yeah, and there's one other album I'd like to mention, and that is the Levon Helm RCO All Stars.

00:44:29.119 --> 00:44:30.461
All Stars

00:44:42.081 --> 00:44:48.288
Something else he did, he did something called the Blues Harmonica Masterclass with the homespun owner, Happy Trom.

00:44:48.568 --> 00:44:53.052
It's a really nice recording because you kind of get to hear him talking about his approach to harmonica.

00:44:53.432 --> 00:44:57.277
I've read that it's been described as a zen-like approach to harmonica instruction.

00:44:57.737 --> 00:45:01.581
...around with the rhythms at the same time as you're learning those different licks.

00:45:02.342 --> 00:45:05.605
So I'm going to play a little rhythm just to leave you with maybe you can get some idea.

00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.000
...

00:45:12.289 --> 00:45:20.577
Yeah, and you know, one of the things that's great about that is there's so much of his acoustic playing on it, which is something he is woefully underestimated for.

00:45:20.757 --> 00:45:24.099
His acoustic playing was really, really great, really different.

00:45:24.119 --> 00:45:27.362
A lot of it on the Better Days stuff is great.

00:45:27.402 --> 00:45:28.684
Some of my favorite playing he does.

00:45:29.164 --> 00:45:42.255
It is, and you're right to point out his acoustic playing there because, you know, we've talked about his power and the emotion he gets out of his harmonica, certainly when he's amplified, but, you know, he does play a lot of acoustic on it as well.

00:45:42.255 --> 00:45:46.679
Don't try to

00:45:47.342 --> 00:45:49.293
love

00:45:51.170 --> 00:45:54.972
Yeah, you know, his brother Peter told me this story, great story.

00:45:55.032 --> 00:46:01.398
He said that Paul was playing in, I guess they were playing in Chicago, and the brothers hadn't seen each other for a long time.

00:46:01.478 --> 00:46:05.682
And Peter was unable to go to the gig, and Paul came over afterwards.

00:46:05.983 --> 00:46:13.909
And Peter, his wife's name is Pam, Peter and Pam's daughter was a baby and was crying, and they could not get her to stop crying.

00:46:14.050 --> 00:46:23.545
And so Paul walks in the bedroom and pulls out, you know, harmonica, and for about 30 minutes plays her what Peter described as this incredible incredibly beautiful piece of music.

00:46:23.666 --> 00:46:28.384
It was almost symphonic because it just kind of had sections that it built to calm her down.

00:46:28.403 --> 00:46:29.527
Obviously, all acoustic.

00:46:29.969 --> 00:46:31.737
He was a great acoustic player.

00:46:32.097 --> 00:46:37.762
And then he was honored as he deserved, first of all, in 2006, inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame.

00:46:38.222 --> 00:46:43.427
And then in 2015, inducted much more prestigiously into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

00:46:43.547 --> 00:46:43.768
Correct.

00:46:43.847 --> 00:46:44.628
I was at both of those.

00:46:44.849 --> 00:46:46.409
Yeah, both of those induction ceremonies.

00:46:46.670 --> 00:46:53.597
The induction at the Blues Hall of Fame, which was held in Los Angeles, it brought out an incredible array of musicians.

00:46:53.797 --> 00:46:59.021
I mean, everybody from Billy Gibbons to John Fogerty to obviously the members of the band.

00:46:59.202 --> 00:46:59.922
Bonnie Raitt was there.

00:47:00.001 --> 00:47:01.163
I mean, a lot of people came out.

00:47:01.202 --> 00:47:02.063
It was a big deal.

00:47:02.063 --> 00:47:04.487
when Butterfield was inducted into that.

00:47:04.668 --> 00:47:12.960
And of course, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a little shout out to my friend Bill Bentley, who is a very, very well-known person in the music world here in the United States.

00:47:13.061 --> 00:47:19.710
Bill lobbied for years with some other people too to get Butterfield considered for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

00:47:19.771 --> 00:47:21.132
And of course, he was successful.

00:47:21.414 --> 00:47:22.255
So good work for Bill.

00:47:22.576 --> 00:47:22.835
Yeah.

00:47:22.936 --> 00:47:26.061
And Jason Ritchie played at that concert, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, didn't he?

00:47:26.300 --> 00:47:26.722
Yes, he did.

00:47:29.226 --> 00:47:29.405
Thank you.

00:47:38.978 --> 00:47:44.150
So these inductions for both, these were for Butterfield himself or was it for the band or both?

00:47:44.351 --> 00:47:51.289
You know, the induction ceremony was really for the first iteration of the band.

00:47:51.650 --> 00:47:56.293
meaning the Bloomfield, Bishop, Mafflin, Sammy Lay, Jerome Arnold version of the band.

00:47:56.793 --> 00:48:10.346
The Butterfield Blues Band obviously includes two or maybe three very different ensembles, but in terms of who was invited to speak at the induction ceremony, it was the core remaining members of the band who spoke.

00:48:10.445 --> 00:48:17.371
I think Bloomfield's niece was there, and then Butterfield's first wife was there with her sons.

00:48:17.833 --> 00:48:18.994
But yeah, first version.

00:48:19.514 --> 00:48:20.655
Did he play any chromatic?

00:48:20.675 --> 00:48:23.980
I've got a record one of his albums, If I Never Sing My Song.

00:48:33.434 --> 00:48:34.896
Is that him playing chromatic on there?

00:48:34.916 --> 00:48:35.637
Is that somebody else?

00:48:35.876 --> 00:48:37.239
I think he does play a little chromatic.

00:48:37.259 --> 00:48:47.074
You know, that's a funny story for me, because when I first found out about Butterfield, there was an early PR photo of Butterfield that appeared somewhere that I saw, and he's playing the chromatic.

00:48:47.297 --> 00:48:50.960
I remember when I first started to play harmonica, I wanted to play like Paul Butterfield.

00:48:51.722 --> 00:48:52.282
That was my goal.

00:48:52.583 --> 00:48:55.385
So I went out and bought a chromatic because that was what he was playing.

00:48:55.505 --> 00:48:59.027
And of course, I had no idea how to play chromatic, no idea how the notes laid out.

00:48:59.088 --> 00:49:01.811
And it didn't function at all, you know, playing a C chromatic.

00:49:02.010 --> 00:49:03.251
Was this a photo shoot of him?

00:49:03.731 --> 00:49:04.072
It was.

00:49:04.452 --> 00:49:08.916
Because often they use chromatics because they're bigger and you can see them in photographs, right?

00:49:08.936 --> 00:49:11.498
So they didn't necessarily play them that much.

00:49:11.559 --> 00:49:13.219
But yeah, they just look better in the photographs.

00:49:13.621 --> 00:49:14.461
Yeah, I'm sure.

00:49:14.702 --> 00:49:18.425
Well, it's the same thing with, you know, there's a famous Dylan picture with him holding a chromatic.

00:49:18.485 --> 00:49:21.447
It's like, come on, Bob, you don't play chromatic in a rack.

00:49:21.708 --> 00:49:24.512
We'll get on to talking about the gear that Butterfield used.

00:49:24.532 --> 00:49:30.157
So you've touched on earlier on that you used to have a harmonica microphone business called Tom's Mics.

00:49:30.378 --> 00:49:30.938
Tell us about that.

00:49:31.018 --> 00:49:31.259
I did.

00:49:31.518 --> 00:49:33.601
It's still limping along.

00:49:33.641 --> 00:49:38.286
I'm not as engaged in it as I used to be, but I did, yes, for a long time.

00:49:38.306 --> 00:49:49.097
And I sold harmonica microphones to, that's how I got to know Bill Clark and Charlie Musselwhite and all of these guys, Jerry Portnoy, all of these guys that I, you know, consider to be my friends.

00:49:49.318 --> 00:49:51.460
I got to know them through that business.

00:49:51.521 --> 00:49:55.204
It was a wonderful opportunity for me to get to get up close and personal with a lot of heroes.

00:49:55.684 --> 00:49:55.784
Great.

00:49:55.804 --> 00:49:57.606
And so you sold mics to all those guys, did you?

00:49:58.108 --> 00:49:58.969
Yeah, I did.

00:49:59.009 --> 00:50:00.690
Either sold or gave them mics.

00:50:00.710 --> 00:50:10.300
I mean, one of the things that we did was we, harmonica microphones, you know, have typically been thought of as a JT-30 or a Green Bullet or, you know, some version of those two.

00:50:10.380 --> 00:50:40.333
And one of the things that I was interested in, because of the microphone that Butterfield played or the two that he played, I was really interested in in exploring you know other great mics for harp players that provided maybe a different bit of color or a different bit of tone or performed very differently based on you know whether you were a hard blower or a soft blower how much nuance you could hear out of certain microphones as opposed to others and so i tried to expose a lot of my my harmonica playing professional friends and amateurs too to all of these different types of microphones

00:50:40.733 --> 00:50:48.943
yeah so of course butterfield famously played what the shura 545 and then the sort of gun shaped one that Is that his main mic?

00:50:49.463 --> 00:50:50.246
Yes and no.

00:50:50.666 --> 00:50:52.429
His first mic was an Electro-Voice mic.

00:50:52.510 --> 00:51:02.969
But in the mid-60s, when the Shure company, of course, was based in Chicago, at that point in time in the mid-60s, Shure was sponsoring bands.

00:51:03.851 --> 00:51:06.755
And they would provide all the microphones for a band.

00:51:07.117 --> 00:51:09.902
And they were sponsoring the Butterfield Blues Band.

00:51:10.081 --> 00:51:13.373
At that time, the 545 had not come out.

00:51:13.554 --> 00:51:14.778
Well, it was not called a 545.

00:51:14.918 --> 00:51:16.465
It was called a PE54.

00:51:16.786 --> 00:51:18.592
The PE was for professional entertainer.

00:51:19.202 --> 00:51:23.306
And one of the people that had played that microphone was Little Walter.

00:51:23.385 --> 00:51:26.427
It was a microphone he used a lot at the end of his career.

00:51:26.628 --> 00:51:28.670
And so everybody who played harp wanted to get one.

00:51:28.969 --> 00:51:31.092
And of course, Butterfield ended up getting one as well.

00:51:31.373 --> 00:51:42.581
And in fact, if you go to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and you look in his kit that, you know, where he kept his harmonicas and his microphones and all that stuff, his kit was donated by his wife, Catherine, to the Rock and Roll.

00:51:42.902 --> 00:51:45.724
You can see the PE-54 in there, 545.

00:51:45.764 --> 00:51:47.586
It was a high impedance microphone.

00:51:47.887 --> 00:51:54.092
And so, you know, you mentioned Obviously, most people play a kind of bullet mic, a kind of crystal or a green bullet type mic.

00:51:54.132 --> 00:52:00.059
So what do you think that Shure dynamic mic brought, which was different in sound to those more traditional mics?

00:52:00.498 --> 00:52:01.400
Well, a huge sound.

00:52:01.739 --> 00:52:03.121
It's just a whole different animal.

00:52:03.161 --> 00:52:06.143
First of all, it's a dynamic mic as opposed to a crystal mic.

00:52:06.164 --> 00:52:08.666
The consistency, the lifespan of it is much greater.

00:52:09.206 --> 00:52:15.793
What Butterfield did that I thought was really cool that no one had done was he paired it with a super.

00:52:16.130 --> 00:52:19.054
And there weren't hard players out there playing through supers.

00:52:19.114 --> 00:52:20.675
Now, one of the reasons he did that...

00:52:21.016 --> 00:52:23.639
Sorry, this was a super reverb Fender amp,

00:52:23.659 --> 00:52:24.141
yeah.

00:52:24.161 --> 00:52:24.501
Right, yeah.

00:52:24.541 --> 00:52:32.552
I mean, the first time when I saw him in Miami, I was just blown away because he had two supers and Elvin had two supers.

00:52:32.913 --> 00:52:35.376
I mean, two supers, that's a lot of volume.

00:52:35.396 --> 00:52:36.458
That's a lot of air movement.

00:52:36.769 --> 00:52:39.117
Of course, they're playing outdoors, you know, and that kind of thing.

00:52:39.199 --> 00:52:41.286
So a lot of sounds go in the way naturally.

00:52:41.407 --> 00:52:42.931
But no one had done that.

00:52:43.052 --> 00:52:47.728
And that 545 really matched up very, very well with the Super.

00:52:48.161 --> 00:52:54.931
Matched up well with anything, but an amplifier with the power of a super was not something that was in the harmonica player's repertoire.

00:52:55.231 --> 00:53:01.179
You know, today, Rod Piazza and Dennis Groening, those guys, they have those big amps with 610s in them.

00:53:01.260 --> 00:53:06.867
And, you know, I mean, they're designed specifically to match with the output levels of a microphone.

00:53:07.188 --> 00:53:08.050
This was different back then.

00:53:08.090 --> 00:53:09.371
They were messing around.

00:53:09.431 --> 00:53:11.054
And that combination was...

00:53:11.458 --> 00:53:12.920
was really, really brutal.

00:53:12.940 --> 00:53:24.101
And the 545, also one of the things that was great about it, and I think you kind of see this on the cover of the live album, you could play it very acoustically because it was omnidirectional.

00:53:24.362 --> 00:53:25.644
So you had two in one.

00:53:25.684 --> 00:53:28.190
You can't really play a bullet microphone acoustically.

00:53:28.322 --> 00:53:29.422
It doesn't work.

00:53:30.204 --> 00:53:58.288
You have to be too close to the microphone to get the full sound.

00:53:58.288 --> 00:54:01.673
very, very functional microphone across a lot of different uses.

00:54:15.106 --> 00:54:18.833
I think the 545 is very similar, isn't it, to the SM57?

00:54:19.333 --> 00:54:20.757
It is similar.

00:54:20.817 --> 00:54:29.052
Probably the biggest difference is that there was a change in microphone, really in amplification technology.

00:54:29.353 --> 00:54:36.065
The original amplification that harmonica players used was all based on the high impedance system.

00:54:36.385 --> 00:54:41.710
A high impedance signal coming out of the microphone going down to the amplifier, it's called an unbalanced signal.

00:54:41.791 --> 00:54:46.795
So what happens is if you have a piece of cable, let's say that you're standing 20 feet from your amp, it's fine.

00:54:46.815 --> 00:54:51.778
But if you go 50 feet from your amp, the signal deteriorates as it makes its way down to the amplifier.

00:54:52.000 --> 00:54:54.001
So they came up with what was called low impedance.

00:54:54.061 --> 00:54:56.523
And low impedance, you can have a cable of any length.

00:54:56.724 --> 00:55:02.068
And when they made everything low impedance, they had to change the sound element a little bit in the 57.

00:55:02.369 --> 00:55:12.318
So it doesn't have quite that big, thick sound that the So you mentioned

00:55:12.358 --> 00:55:13.539
he played the Super Reverb.

00:55:13.559 --> 00:55:15.442
Is there any other particular amps he used?

00:55:15.902 --> 00:55:18.184
He certainly had at Newport.

00:55:18.545 --> 00:55:20.726
It appears he's playing through an Ampeg.

00:55:20.987 --> 00:55:27.253
It's hard to define, you know, in a situation like that, was that a house amp or was that his amp?

00:55:27.554 --> 00:55:30.677
I haven't seen enough pictures to know, but he's definitely playing through an Ampeg.

00:55:30.697 --> 00:55:32.380
And I think Bloomfield's playing through one too.

00:55:32.639 --> 00:55:36.304
In the live Fillmore recordings that you referenced earlier, I think Bloomfield's playing through one too.

00:55:36.304 --> 00:55:38.626
earlier, there's a picture in those recordings.

00:55:39.146 --> 00:55:42.791
And unless I'm mistaken, he's playing through a super.

00:55:42.990 --> 00:55:44.793
Almost positive he's playing through a super.

00:55:44.813 --> 00:55:49.657
So, you know, back then, people weren't as sophisticated about amplifiers as they are now.

00:55:49.978 --> 00:55:56.364
You know, you probably have heard the stories that Little Walter would show up with a microphone and his harmonicas and play through whatever they happened to have.

00:55:56.606 --> 00:55:58.788
He just didn't carry stuff around.

00:55:58.927 --> 00:56:03.213
People were exploring a little bit, but I think he stayed with a super longer than anything else.

00:56:03.512 --> 00:56:05.956
That's what he was also playing when I saw him play with Better Days.

00:56:05.976 --> 00:56:17.052
He was playing And

00:56:17.092 --> 00:56:19.657
harmonica-wise, he played the Marine Band, the Hornet Marine Band, right?

00:56:19.677 --> 00:56:21.018
But that's about all there was back then.

00:56:21.059 --> 00:56:22.782
He also played it upside down, didn't he?

00:56:23.137 --> 00:56:23.458
He did.

00:56:23.498 --> 00:56:23.798
He played

00:56:23.858 --> 00:56:24.579
upside down.

00:56:24.599 --> 00:56:27.722
A lot of people have said, he's not a tongue blocker.

00:56:27.762 --> 00:56:29.983
He can't play blues unless he's a tongue blocker.

00:56:30.023 --> 00:56:31.485
Well, come on, just listen.

00:56:31.865 --> 00:56:39.711
I think Butterfield was a guy, and I think you hear a lot of the use of the tongue a lot on the Fathers and Sons album.

00:56:39.873 --> 00:56:41.693
He used what he felt comfortable with.

00:56:41.914 --> 00:56:42.574
He could do it all.

00:56:42.855 --> 00:56:44.956
But he did play backwards or upside down.

00:56:44.996 --> 00:56:52.784
Interesting thing I learned in kind of researching the flute playing, and that is that one of the things you have to be very, very adept at as a flute player is the use of air.

00:56:53.103 --> 00:56:56.427
And so, you know, he came prepared to play a wind instrument.

00:56:56.447 --> 00:57:00.070
He didn't just kind of pick it up and not have any experience of playing a wind instrument.

00:57:00.110 --> 00:57:00.831
He knew how to do it.

00:57:01.072 --> 00:57:06.798
The fact that he was pursing his lips to play flute, you know, that's probably why he played more as a pursed lip player.

00:57:06.838 --> 00:57:14.706
But he had a technique of hitting three notes at once and kind of sucking up on the middle note that sounded very much like a tongue slap in a lot of ways.

00:57:14.967 --> 00:57:18.070
And you hear him use that a lot to really thicken up sound.

00:57:18.351 --> 00:57:21.353
Jerry Portnoy has the most beautiful vibrato I've ever heard.

00:57:21.554 --> 00:57:22.896
But Butterfield is a close second.

00:57:22.996 --> 00:57:25.179
His of vibrato, he could turn it on and off.

00:57:25.440 --> 00:57:32.014
And by turning it on and off, he could effectively change the entire emotional feel of a sequence of notes.

00:57:32.574 --> 00:57:38.766
So final question then, what do you think his legacy is to harmonica players and music in general?

00:57:39.086 --> 00:57:39.748
A couple of things.

00:57:40.168 --> 00:57:46.168
First of all, without Paul Butterfield, I don't know if the blues would have ever escaped Chicago.

00:57:46.188 --> 00:57:54.255
It certainly would have never become a huge popular style of music that it became in the middle to late 60s.

00:57:54.737 --> 00:58:05.585
I think his legacy beyond that is that Butterfield, more so than any other player, put the harmonica in a number of very interesting, very disparate environments.

00:58:06.146 --> 00:58:12.592
The big band, the playing over jazz changes in the big band is completely unique and different from playing over jazz.

00:58:12.592 --> 00:58:23.364
over the Eastern music changes in East-West, which is very different from him playing last night, very different from what he does on a lot of the Better Days stuff.

00:58:23.403 --> 00:58:31.873
And then you move on to the RCO All-Stars where you've got him putting the harmonica again in a very different environment from where people expect to hear that instrument.

00:58:32.172 --> 00:58:37.018
It provided a setting where the harmonica could now be added and put in different environments.

00:58:37.579 --> 00:58:42.503
And that's a huge accomplishment that I think Butterfield needs to be recognized for.

00:58:42.543 --> 00:58:42.684
So

00:58:44.146 --> 00:58:48.028
thanks so much for joining me today, Tom Ellison, sharing all your knowledge about Mr.

00:58:48.048 --> 00:58:48.690
Paul Butterfield.

00:58:49.389 --> 00:58:51.052
Well, thank you so much for having me.

00:58:51.132 --> 00:59:00.621
It's been an honor, and I hope that anyone who listens to this will take up my suggestion, and I know it's your suggestion, to go out and listen to Paul Butterfield as much as they can.

00:59:01.222 --> 00:59:09.789
Thanks to Zydle for sponsoring the podcast, and be sure to check out their great range of harmonicas and products at www.zydle1847.com.

00:59:10.114 --> 00:59:13.159
or on Facebook or Instagram at Zeidel Harmonicas.

00:59:14.302 --> 00:59:18.148
Thanks so much to Tom Ellis for bringing his expertise about Paul Butterfield.

00:59:18.570 --> 00:59:25.001
Remember to check out the podcast website, harmonicahappyhour.com, where you can give a donation to the podcast if you are so inclined.

00:59:25.362 --> 00:59:30.893
And now we'll take up Tom's advice and listen to some more Paul Butterfield with Song for Lee.

00:59:32.878 --> 00:59:51.005
Song for Lee Thank you.