Horn From The Heart: The Paul Butterfield Story


An interesting documentary streaming on Amazon Prime.
mtbrider

While bands like The Yardbirds, Cream, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, John Mayall, and finally Led Zeppelin (except for Hendrix himself, all British fellas) are given credit for the "Blues revival of the late-60’s", it was actually The Paul Butterfield Blues Band (along with Charlie Musselwhite) who did so.

A Butterfield song was included on the 1966 Elektra Records sampler album entitled What’s Shakin’, and every good musician I knew had his head blown off by Paul and his band (which included Mike Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop on guitars, and drummer Sam Lay and bassist Jerome Arnold, hired away from Howlin’ Wolf!), after which we all bought Butterfield’s 1965 debut album.

When Sonny Boy Williamson met and jammed with The Hawks (later known as The Band, of course) in 1965, he had just returned from a UK tour. For that tour, the promoter provided Williamson with local backup bands, one of which was The Yardbirds (of which Eric Clapton was at that time still a member). Sonny Boy told The Hawks: "They (the English musicians) want to play the Blues SO bad. And that’s just how they play them." ;-) But it isn't just English guys who can be faulted: for a great example of how NOT to play Blues, watch the Canned Heat's performance at Woodstock. Dreadful! If you're a glutton for punishment, follow that with Ten Years After's set. Oy!  

Just for the record, it was not the entire Butterfield Band who backed Dylan at Newport, only Bloomfield and drummer Sam Lay. The bassist was Harvey Brooks, later in The Electric Flag with Bloomfield, keyboardist Mark Naftalin (another Bloomfield band member), and the mighty Buddy Miles.

thanks, I saw Paul B. live a handful of times....one of my all time favorites and who I "tried" to emulate when playing blues harp

@tuberist, if you want to discover a really, really good though relatively unknown (outside of Northern California) harp player, look for a copy of Up The Line by The Gary Smith Blues Band. His tone is insane, as good as I've ever heard, which is based on Little Walter and Musselwhite, with whom Gary studied.

Gary is a well-known fixture in the Bay Area Blues scene, and always has a great band backing him. I played with him briefly, right after he switched from drums to harp. He's a monster, and Up The Line is a very good pure Blues album.

For the record, Naftalin was another PBBB member (played on the first 5 PBBB albums according to Wiki) though actually joining in Sept, a few weeks after the July 1965 show(s) in Newport .  Maybe more important than how much of Butterfield's band backed Dylan was the fact that the band's high energy, knock-out, "folkie-shocking" performance was witnessed by Dylan and (as per the NPR piece linked above) served as the inspiration for him deciding to perform electric later at the same Newport festival (he already was electric in the studio).  If you'll pardon the hyperbole, one might argue PBBB was the catalyst that created "Judas" but maybe only sooner rather than later, since based on his studio work Dylan seems to have already begun that transformation.