Ah yeah, the debut Butterfield album! That was a game-changer, having a huge effect on us suburban white teenage musicians, making the British blues-wannabe’s we had been listening to and learning from irrelevant and obsolete. Dylan had heard Mike Bloomfield’s guitar playing, and hired him for his next couple of albums, saying Mike was the best guitarist he had ever heard (as seen in the Scorcese documentary on Dylan, which is fantastic). I saw Bloomfield live only once, in The Electric Flag in 1968 (with the great Buddy Miles on drums). the doors had a real hard time following them on stage ;-), sounding rather anemic in comparison.
Ya ever hear what Sonny Boy Williamson told The Hawks (later The Band) when he jammed with them in ’65? He had just returned from a UK tour, where he had been backed by a lot of the British "Blues" bands. He told them "They (the British players) want to play the Blues in the worst way, and that’s just how they play it." Good one, Sonny Boy! He and The Hawks made plans to tour together, but Williamson dropped dead before it could happened. They instead became Dylan’s road band, touring with him 1965-6. I have two old friends/bandmates who saw them together at The San Jose Civic Auditorium in late ’65, which I now would kill to have been at. I wasn’t hip to Dylan yet; he seemed like a beatnik to me ;-), weird and kinda scary.
