The Rock Hall got it right this year for some nearly forgotten hometown heroes. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band who will at last enter the hallowed halls in 2015 along with other deserving artists such as Stevie Ray Vaughan and Lou Reed solo (shocked they were not already there), Green Day, Joan Jett, Bill Withers and The 5 Royales. Ringo also gets a special award based on his nearly lifelong contributions to rock. But how about Butter, Mike Bloomfield, Elvin Bishop (hey Elvin!), Mark Naftalin, Jerome Arnold, and Sam Lay? Wow, better late than never I guess. Finally, the band whose unofficial theme song was the Nick Gravenites classic, Born In Chicago. Paul, a tough customer, blues harp master and son of a lawyer who hailed from Hyde Park. Bloomfield, guitar genius from Glencoe, who eschewed family wealth to hang on the south side, going boldly where few pale faces had gone before, walking the wild side about which Lou Reed sang and left to die a lonely junkies death far from home in Cali. Elvin, who came all the way from Okla to attend the U of C, using the Butterfield Band as a springboard to a long career as a fine but self effacing guitarist and band leader whose personal life has also been touched but tragedy. Jerome and Mark have mostly dropped out of sight but not Sam Lay who is a presence at most Chicago Blues Festivals as a performer and reminder of past glories with Butterfield. Howlin Wolf, and Siegel-Schwall reunions. How important was the Butterfield Band? Though some who focus on skin color as a qualification for playing the blues have downplayed down their contributions over the decades, Butterfield and Mike Bloomfield learned their lessons well at the feet of black electric blues masters Muddy Waters, Wolf, Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson, Willie Dixon and others. Then Butterfield brought the music out of the tough South side hoods to Old Town and points farther North in a city bitterly divided racially where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. got a brick in the head. That helped to get the blues noticed again at a time when the market for the real stuff was dying. The mostly young white student crowd started to support the blues and other musicians like Steve Miller and Charlie Musselwhite came to Chi Town to learn this native musical art form of ours. People also began to check our next generation of black blues men like our now beloved Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, Luther Allison and Otis Rush. The mostly folk oriented, NYC based Elektra Records took a chance and recorded the very first, self titled Butterfield Blues Band album with its highly amplified approach to originals and blues standards like Muddys Got My Mojo Workin and Little Walters Blues With a Feeling. Across the ocean, Brit blues godfathers Cyril Davies, Alexis Korner and John Mayall were watching Chicago and in turn inspiring future members of the Stones, Peter Greens Fleetwood Mac and The Yardbirds ....Mick, Keith, Ian Stewart, Keith Relf, Jim McCarty, Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, Mick Taylor, Clapton, Beck, Page and Green who in turn gave us Cream, Derek and The Dominoes and Led Zeppelin. Back over here, bands like the Allman Brothers, ZZ Top, Mountain and Aerosmith were inspired by the Brits who traced their musical roots back here to Chicago and Chess Records on South Michigan Avenue. Butterfield important? OMG you must be joking man! And now decades later they are officially recognized....the band whose first record I checked out of the Northbrook Library one day in the late Sixties, a band of greasers in cheap suits and dark glasses posed in front of some dusty looking South side store. I was 12 or 13 then, now 58. You do the math. Their music would help change the rock to which we listen forever.... the stuff that still keeps me up all night.
Posted on: Wed, 17 Dec 2014 09:00:22 +0000
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