July 19, 2023
Paul Butterfield retrospective, part 2, with Tom Ellis
Tom Ellis joins me (again) on episode 90. This is part two of the Paul Butterfield retrospective where Tom takes us even deeper into Paul’s career and talks us through more of his incredible output. About how Butter, while paying his due respect to the greats before him, took the blues in a new direction, with his experimentation and innovation. Butter’s music and bands evolved as he developed, with the best musicians joining him to provide a bedrock to some of the greatest harmonica ever rec...
Tom Ellis joins me (again) on episode 90.
This is part two of the Paul Butterfield retrospective where Tom takes us even deeper into Paul’s career and talks us through more of his incredible output.
About how Butter, while paying his due respect to the greats before him, took the blues in a new direction, with his experimentation and innovation.
Butter’s music and bands evolved as he developed, with the best musicians joining him to provide a bedrock to some of the greatest harmonica ever recorded.
Tom Ellis puts forward a compelling case for Paul Butterfield as the most influential harmonica player ever, with his cultural and societal impact overshadowing even the classic players of the 1950s.
Paul Butterfield retrospective, part 1:
https://www.harmonicahappyhour.com/paul-butterfield-retrospective-with-tom-ellis/
Was Butter a u-blocker?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-73mhQn4Pkc
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
01:33 - Tom Ellis joins the podcast again for part 2 of the Paul Butterfield retrospective
01:56 - Is Butter the most significant harmonica player since the days of the classic players?
02:34 - The classic players had a limited audience, Butter brought blues to a more mainstream audience
03:11 - The Chicago blues scene of the 1950s did not have mass appeal at the time
04:00 - Following the 1950s the blues scene was mainly for acoustic blues artists. Butter brought some electricity!
04:24 - Butter didn’t get into blues on the back of the British Blues explosion of the 1960s
04:45 - Meeting Nick Gravenites got Butter into the blues, with Butter (and Charlie Musselwhite) frequenting the blues clubs in Chicago
06:00 - Butter’s first album release was 1965, and what else was happening with rock blues at that time
07:04 - The rise of rock-blues and Butter’s unique take on classic songs he recorded on his early albums
09:10 - Why The Lost Sessions album wasn’t released as Butter’s first album
10:08 - Butter wasn’t keen to add Mike Bloomfield to the line-up of the band
11:32 - The sound captured for Butter’s harp on The Lost Sessions was well produced
12:18 - How Butter approached playing Little Walter songs
13:41 - Recorded his own instrumentals, with Nut Popper being the first
15:15 - Harmonica was the lead instrument in The Paul Butterfield Blues band, and he gave the harmonica real presence
16:11 - Little Walter advised Butter not to blow so hard on the harmonica as it was damaging to the body
17:45 - Butter must have known Little Walter and the other older blues guys, as did Charlie Musselwhite
18:10 - The immediate success of Butter and his band
18:40 - Butter also helped relaunch the career of some of the classic blues musicians
19:02 - Was also a great singer
20:17 - After the success of the first album the band started playing outside of Chicago
21:04 - Increasing fame playing at the Newport Festival and the West coast of the US, playing 6 gigs in a night
21:41 - Was Butter influenced by jazz music?
22:49 - East West album saw a move away from playing blues songs, with the experimental nature of the music lapped up by the audience
24:27 - With a move towards rock blues the band were loud, with lots of amplification
25:37 - Made regular trips to San Francisco and relocated there to be part of the modern scene that was taking place there
26:32 - The Resurrection of Pigboy Crabshaw album, which had a horn section added and moved further away from blues
29:05 - Didn’t fear adding horns and giving them a strong presence in the band
29:34 - Also let other band members sing in the band
30:01 - Becoming more of a mature band leader with the Pigboy Crabshaw album, and knew how to read music and put together songs
31:09 - In My Own Dream album and how his songs were evolving
32:22 - Selected a lot of songs to record which did not originally have harmonica on them
32:44 - Horn player David Sanborn found the alto saxophone in a cab that he played on In My Own Dream song
33:42 - Sting loved the song In My Own Dream
33:59 - Butter’s music had become highly sophisticated by the time of the In My Own Dream album
35:20 - Keep On Moving album and Walkin’ By Myself
37:00 - Butter was moving more away from blues, with the band now more like a jazz ensemble
38:46 - Better Days album saw the end of the big band format and Butter feeling a little lost
40:03 - Better Days band was formed from an eclectic mixture of musicians from Woodstock
44:02 - Second album with Better Days band wasn’t as commercially successful
44:54 - Live album was released towards the end of The Paul Butterfield Blues band
45:31 - Tom’s favourite Butter song is Everything’s Going To Be Alright from the live album
46:24 - The raw energy of the live performances
47:12 - Later career was plagued by illness and drug issues
49:19 - Will we ever see a harmonica-driven band like Butterfield’s again?
51:02 - Levon Helm video suggests Butter could have used the u-block embouchre
52:02 - Butter didn’t need to play too rhythmically, so he didn’t have the same need to tongue block
52:55 - Did his flute playing have an influence on his embouchre?
53:48 - Had an amazing vibrato
54:34 - Butter played hard (but could also be nuanced)
55:04 - Tom and Neil’s favourite Butter songs (Everything Going To Be Alright & Just To Be With You)
56:46 - Tom’s future plans in writing about harmonica
WEBVTT
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Tom Ellis joins me again on episode 90.
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This is part two of the Paul Butterfield retrospective where Tom takes us even deeper into Paul's career and talks us through more of his incredible output.
00:00:11.827 --> 00:00:19.420
About how Butter, while paying his due respect to the greats before him, took the blues in a new direction with his experimentation and innovation.
00:00:20.341 --> 00:00:28.053
Butter's music and bands evolved as he developed, with the best musicians joining him to provide a bedrock to some of the greatest harmonica ever recorded.
00:00:29.217 --> 00:00:40.649
Tom Ellis puts forward a compelling case for Paul Butterfield as the most influential harmonica player ever, with his cultural and societal impact overshadowing even the classic players of the 1950s.
00:00:40.728 --> 00:00:45.573
This podcast is sponsored by Seidel Harmonicas.
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Visit the oldest harmonica factory in the world at www.seidel1847.com or on Facebook or Instagram at Seidel Harmonicas.
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Hello Tom Ellis and welcome back to the podcast.
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Neil, how are you?
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It's great to be back.
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You last joined me on episode 62 back on the May 27th, 2022, talking about the legendary Paul Butterfield.
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So we're doing a follow-up on Paul Butterfield because of course one hour program isn't enough to cover the great man.
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So thanks for coming back to talk some more about Paul Butterfield's career.
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Well, you're very welcome.
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As you said, one time is not enough.
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Yeah, and I think that's probably testament to the fact that, you know, as we're probably going to touch on here, he may well be the most important harmonica player possibly ever, at least since
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the classic players, yeah?
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is another reason, and maybe an even more important reason, that I consider him to be the most important harmonica player of the 20th century.
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Yeah, definitely.
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I mean, obviously, you know, we've got the classic harmonica players, Little Walter, etc., but they weren't so mass popular as Paul Butfield, right?
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And he really was able to bring, you know, a much more popular and mainstream view of blues and the other sort of music he branched into.
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You're absolutely correct.
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And I think one of the things that people do today is, in their effort or their acceptance of the romanticizing of blues history, they overlook some of the real critical timing issues that impacted things.
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I mean, you know, most of the players that I know today are young players, let's put it that way.
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They're infatuated with Little Walter and with Howlin' Wolf and, you know, people who really made their names in the early 50s.
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And up until, say, the 57, 58 period.
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And that was kind of the golden age of blues.
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But it was a golden age in a very small market.
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I mean, it wasn't the golden age of the blues in the United States.
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It was the golden age of the blues in Chicago.
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And I think people fail to understand how insulated the music scene in Chicago was in that early 50s period.
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And even though there are fabulous recordings and great, great examples of what they were doing, Prime It was a long, long time ago.
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And by the time Butterfield was getting, you know, hip to the blues, blues appreciation in the United States had been pretty much delegated to folk blues.
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primarily at places like the Newport Folk Festival, where you had a worshiping of people like Sun House and Lightning Hopkins and Brownie and Sonny and people like that.
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But they were all acoustic.
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And when Butterfield hit the scene, it was a significant change from that kind of blues appreciation.
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You know, obviously we hear a lot about the British blues boom and how that helped promote a lot of the, you know, the older previous generation black artists.
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So, but was he not part of that?
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Because he, you know, we talked about in the last time that he'd sort of played, you know, in the Chicago clubs and he met these guys and he played with Muddy Waters and things.
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So was it not a result of the sort of British blues boom that
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got him into blues?
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in a very personal way and had already reached out to a lot of these classic blues musicians like Muddy Waters and others who were, I don't want to say they were barely making a living, but their day had come and gone in terms of great popularity and there had been significant shifts in music and what people were listening to.
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So Gravanitis turned Butterfield onto this and dragged him down into these clubs.
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These guys, besides the fact they were fearless and people like Paul, and obviously Charlie Musselwhite, another huge, important person in telling that story of that transition from late 50s to early 60s.
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But I think Butterfield was obviously very attracted to this music and saw these players like Muddy Waters, the iconic godlike figures that they would come to be known as.
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So I don't think the British blues thing had really had anything to do with Butterfield's entry.
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Certainly, though I think the folks in your country were hip to the blues much earlier than the folks in my country were
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so talking years then I think so he the Paul Butterfield blues album I think came out in 65 but he was he was doing things before then and the lost sessions which we'll talk on to he recorded before then so what time wise did that sort of fit in with the you know the Rolling Stones and these sort of things was he just before them or about the same time
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well I think the two recordings probably are about the same time because the Stones you know they had obviously grown up on the blues and you know Brian Jones in particular was I think the the real blues lover in that band.
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They knew the vernacular.
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They understood the blues language.
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They had listened to everybody.
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But yeah, I think a lot of those, like the Muddy Waters or the Howlin' Wolf in London and some of those albums, I think they were probably around 65, 66.
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Certainly the Stones had what I would call hard blues tunes on some of their early recordings, so they were very aware of it.
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So they probably dovetailed around the same time as the first Paul Butterfield Blues Band album.
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...
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Paul certainly helps.
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You know, the popularity of blues and the sort of rock blues as well, yeah?
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And that's what was growing and having a big influence.
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That's a really interesting question because I think a lot of people think of Butterfield as a rock player or something other than a blues player.
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Certainly there's, you know, things like Fathers and Sons and Muddy at Woodstock and, you know, some of these things that show that he was definitely a blues player and a great blues player.
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But I think his approach to the music was very different.
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If you look at the Lost Sessions album, for example, it's almost a comprehensive approach to the set list.
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They've got Sonny Boy No.
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1, they've got Sonny Boy No.
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2, they've got Little Walter, they've got Jimmy Rogers.
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¶¶ got all these different people who authored the cuts on that particular CD, but the way it's presented is is very, very different.
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Every single cut that they do is obviously a testament to the forebears because they've selected specific songs by the Walters and that whole group.
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But the way they presented it was completely unique to them.
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So they honored them by using their songs, but they in no way tried to go back and capture that sound from the early 50s, for example.
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I mean, it's just not on the radar.
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And you don't hear it on the Lost Sessions.
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You If you listen to it, for example, to the way they do Just to Be With You, I mean, that's miles away from the way Muddy did it originally.
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And all of the songs are very similar in that approach.
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Well, baby, cry on till you're on my hands I'd do anything, anything, little baby Well, baby but
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yeah maybe tell us a story about that the lost sessions the so this is recording with electro you know what happened with that before they then obviously released the paul but for blues band album which was the first release wasn't until this one came out later
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yeah it was and this this was the one that was not good enough to release there's some really interesting things about this recording first of all paul rockchild who produced this was not known as a person who was producing music like this i think he was probably more of a folk-oriented music producer.
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Obviously, that changed radically after Butterfield because he became the producer for The Doors, which is, you know, a whole other genre of music, but definitely rock and roll.
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But he had been hired by Jack Holzman from Electra Records, who owned Electra Records, which was very much a folk label.
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He'd been hired to bring Butterfield into the studio and to record the band.
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After he listened to the band, he went and heard them play live a Right.
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always interesting and fit and had a tremendous propulsive characteristic that really pushed the music forward a lot.
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So this recording was made, and there's a little tiny bit of Bloomfield on here playing a little piano, maybe a guitar on a couple of cuts, but ultimately they decided that the recording was not going to be sufficient, and they went back into the studio, they added Bloomfield, and I think you heard or you can hear between the first recording recording and the lost sessions, you can hear the immediate impact that Bloomfield had on the band.
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I mean, it seems like a tighter, more musical unit.
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Butterfield's harp is still out front, you know, of course, but he's sharing the load, which he rarely ever did with Elvin.
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And this is on the Paul Butterfield blues album.
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Yeah.
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There was just a different level of sophistication.
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Yeah.
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One interesting thing I would like to point out about the lost sessions is the really wonderful job Rothschild did in recording Butterfield's harp.
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He really captured what he was doing, all the nuance, everything else.
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And at the time, there wasn't much amplified harp being recorded anywhere.
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That had all been done back in the 50s, you know, at the Chess Studios.
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The harp that you hear on the Lost Sessions is interesting to look at, especially as you compare it across his career and you look at the songs that appear on the Lost Sessions and then it appear elsewhere, you know, two years, three years, four years down the line, and how those songs have matured.
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and really become much more Butterfield's tunes than they are the tune of the originator because of this new way of playing them and approaching
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them.
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So we've got comparisons with Little Walter.
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You mentioned there on the Lost Sessions and also on the Butterfield Blues Band album, there's lots of songs from the sort of classic blues and there's quite a lot of Little Walter songs in there such as Mellow Down, Easy's on there.
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.
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And also last night.
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So he's recorded quite a few Little Walter, but how do you think he sort of changed the approach and didn't just mimic Little Walter's riffs and sound?
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I'm not an expert on everything Little Walter did.
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But I can tell you that if you listen to any particular song, like Hate to See You Go, for example, on this Lost Sessions, I mean, the lyrics are the same, but it's just not the same approach that Walter has on his version.
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It's just a completely unique way of doing the song.
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Obviously, it's ramped up in terms of the percussive aspect and the tempo, but it's very different.
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...
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One thing that I've always found kind of almost amusing is that on that Lost Sessions and then also on the first Paul Butterfield Blues Band album, you know, Butterfield, he made a statement by playing his own instrumentals.
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He didn't try and record Juke or Roller Coaster.
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He came up with his own instrumentals, which was, to me, an indication that he thought of himself as that level of harmonica player.
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He could have his own instrumental tunes, and they could be played in a live setting, and they could be popular and fit.
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And that alone shows me just an incredible level of confidence to put together your own instrumental solos.
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Yeah, and so his first original instrumentals was on the last sessions was Nut Popper, yeah?
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Yes, that's correct.
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Very different from anything that Walter ever did.
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It's just a whole different feel, different set of chord changes.
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really really I mean it pops it's very propulsive
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yeah I mean you know where do you think that came from maybe it was just a case of you know music was a bit more modern you know it was more sophisticated you know than the sort of older blues you know do you think it's anything beyond that
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no I think that sums it up pretty well actually I really do
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And so when he's, you know, when he was playing, you know, was he seeing the harmonica being his kind of main thing?
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Obviously he sang as well, but we'll get into more of that later on.
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But, you know, was he really pushing the harmonica?
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Like you say, he was up front in the band and everything.
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Yeah.
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I mean, the harmonica was the lead instrument.
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And if you listen...
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almost to Butterfield's entire career, there's a way he hears the harmonica being placed out front in whatever he's doing, be it the Lost Sessions, be it In My Own Dream, be it the live album, be it Fathers and Sons.
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I mean, there's a level of, I guess the best way to describe it is a presence that he wants the harmonica to have in every single setting, regardless of whether he's very much a session guy or like on the Lost Sessions, he's playing these extended, very Very interesting, evolving solos.
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None of the phrases in any of these solos seem to repeat throughout the recordings.
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He's got a lot of ideas that are coming out all the time.
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But I think that presence that shows up on the lost sessions, being so much up front, so much in your face, that became the characteristic for him, for the way he saw the harmonica fitting in everything he did.
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You know, and then going back to Little Walter briefly, I mean, obviously he was a big fan.
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He's recorded numerous of his songs on the first couple of albums.
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So, you know, did he want to play a homage to Little Walter?
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Do you know what sort of, you know, what he felt about him or anything like that?
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Well, I relate a story that Norman Dayron told me.
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Norman Dayron was a producer, produced a lot of albums for Michael Bloomfield, was a very, very close friend of Michael Bloomfield, moved from Chicago to San Francisco not long after Bloomfield did, and was very involved in the Fathers and Sons recording.
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Very, very involved.
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In fact, I think he is the named producer on that recording.
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He told me a story one time about Butterfield.
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He and Butterfield and little Walter were at a bar And Butterfield and Little Walter were talking, and I'm sure he had that kind of relationship with all of these iconic figures from the Chicago Blues scene.
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And Walter was explaining to Butterfield that he had felt like he had done a lot of physical damage to his body because he blew so hard.
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He was a very hard blower.
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And he said, and I'm paraphrasing Norman here, he wanted Butterfield to understand that you could play very, very well, very effectively without having to kind of blow your body apart by blowing hard all the time.
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trying to get over the sound on the stage.
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And of course, when Little Walter played, sound was a much less complicated situation than it became.
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At the same time, it was much easier to be heard than it would become later on as amplification grew and amps got louder and louder and louder.
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But yeah, I'm sure he knew Little Walter and Jimmy Rogers and all of those guys.
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How could he not?
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If he was going down there, he and Muscle White were the guys.
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They were the guys that went down there that were the harp players.
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And if you listen to Charlie, probably on the podcast you did with him, I think I might have heard, he talks about sitting in with Big Walter.
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And don't forget, Butterfield, when the scene at Big John started up and Butterfield started playing there as this four-piece lost sessions group, they were an immediate success.
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And they were very, very popular.
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We talked a little bit about this in the podcast last time.
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But what that led to was bookings for, you know, the more traditional guys, the Muddy Waters.
00:18:33.400 --> 00:18:40.108
Apparently Butterfield and those guys would play on the weekends and then they'd try and get Muddy Waters booked during the week or Howlin' Wolf booked during the week.
00:18:40.549 --> 00:18:50.784
So Butterfield, besides being somebody who, you know, who knew these people and who was, you know, Honored them and believed in everything that they stood for from a blues standpoint.
00:18:51.305 --> 00:18:53.470
He was also a gateway for their careers.
00:18:54.332 --> 00:19:01.909
That would become very much the point when he started going and playing at the Fillmores in San Francisco.
00:19:02.550 --> 00:19:05.196
As to his singing, we definitely talked about his singing last time, but...
00:19:05.890 --> 00:19:07.392
You know, it was really crucial, yeah.
00:19:07.432 --> 00:19:11.115
And obviously he's a big part of his sound, certainly early on.
00:19:11.175 --> 00:19:15.760
And he sings on I Love His Drifting on this Butterfield Blues Band
00:19:18.864 --> 00:19:23.469
album.
00:19:30.355 --> 00:19:30.896
So what about the
00:19:30.916 --> 00:19:31.998
importance of his singing?
00:19:32.162 --> 00:19:41.948
I've been listening to the Lost Sessions off and on quite a bit over the last four or five months because there's so many incredible ideas in the harmonica playing and the solos.
00:19:42.910 --> 00:19:44.012
They're just so creative.
00:19:44.673 --> 00:19:51.560
But one of the things that I noticed in listening to this thing a couple of times is he's already becoming a great singer.
00:19:51.681 --> 00:19:53.782
His singing is obviously very important to him.
00:19:53.982 --> 00:19:57.205
It's not a throwaway, castaway thing that you just do.
00:19:57.507 --> 00:20:00.589
I mean, he's obviously trying to sell these messages already.
00:20:01.130 --> 00:20:13.142
And he's got that thickness and that gruffness in his voice, even as early as the loss sessions, that just would blossom and get stronger and better and more resonant as the recording career went on.
00:20:14.337 --> 00:20:16.701
He sort of rise to fame then after this album.
00:20:17.683 --> 00:20:21.411
Was he immediately then playing really big venues, lots of big festivals?
00:20:21.892 --> 00:20:23.776
How was his rise to fame?
00:20:24.517 --> 00:20:29.006
I think what happened with those guys is they started playing outside of Chicago.
00:20:29.346 --> 00:20:32.750
They were able to start getting gigs playing these colleges.
00:20:32.770 --> 00:20:39.519
I know they played, for example, the University of Wisconsin, day trips, day trip gigs around the Chicago area.
00:20:40.040 --> 00:20:42.724
Then they made a trip to New York.
00:20:43.286 --> 00:20:50.855
When I was doing my writing, Todd Rundgren told me that he had already heard or his group had already heard how great these guys were.
00:20:51.477 --> 00:20:59.339
They went to the first New York performances and literally sat on the front row every night and listen to the Butterfield Blues Band.
00:20:59.421 --> 00:21:20.651
So they began to build this notoriety among musicians on the East Coast When Newport happened, you had this entire culture of folk singers in the Boston area, in the New York area, in New England in general, including the Muldars and Queskin and a whole bunch of people that fell into that category that were there at Newport when Butterfield played Amplified.
00:21:21.011 --> 00:21:22.452
They now got to hear him again.
00:21:22.553 --> 00:21:24.576
They had already started to spread the word.
00:21:24.615 --> 00:21:26.817
Then there were trips made to the West Coast.
00:21:27.218 --> 00:21:28.920
The same thing happened on the West Coast.
00:21:29.000 --> 00:21:38.045
In fact, when they went to the West Coast, A gig for them was six or seven one-hour sets a night, and they would start at 10 and end up at four in the morning.
00:21:38.085 --> 00:21:40.814
I mean, this was a very professional band.
00:21:41.122 --> 00:21:46.851
You know, we've talked about how, you know, they sort of evolved the sound and, you know, it's getting more sophisticated.
00:21:46.891 --> 00:21:51.198
And we talked on the last podcast about how Butterfield's brother was really into jazz.
00:21:51.218 --> 00:21:52.398
So he'd listened to a lot of jazz.
00:21:52.419 --> 00:21:54.682
So there's clearly some jazz influences there.
00:21:54.702 --> 00:22:02.214
And then we got the East West album, which has got, you know, more sophisticated chord changes, sort of mixed with Eastern music and Indian music.
00:22:02.275 --> 00:22:09.566
So, you know, do you think this was a big influence on how we approach playing the harmonica as well with, you know, with more sort of jazz lines there?
00:22:09.730 --> 00:22:16.878
I mean, everybody always points to certain references for harmonica players, people they've listened to.
00:22:17.439 --> 00:22:23.926
But you also have to remember that in the late 50s and the early 60s, jazz was still very much heard on the radio.
00:22:24.548 --> 00:22:30.055
Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck and all of these people, they were on pop radio.
00:22:30.255 --> 00:22:31.036
Frank Sinatra.
00:22:31.135 --> 00:22:32.238
It's not like it is now.
00:22:32.898 --> 00:22:34.641
And so jazz was everywhere.
00:22:35.221 --> 00:22:43.336
So Paul, I'm sure, you know, heard music, heard a lot of jazz beyond, you know, what his brother had introduced him to.
00:22:43.396 --> 00:22:48.446
And I'm sure was, you know, pretty hip to what was going on because it was so available.
00:22:49.288 --> 00:22:54.778
And then on East West as well, he started branching out from blues, you know, did songs like Get Out of My Life and Mary Mary.
00:22:55.981 --> 00:22:56.061
Yeah.
00:23:05.826 --> 00:23:09.412
What about that and moving away from just traditional blues stuff?
00:23:09.692 --> 00:23:16.503
That was Butterfield finding songs he liked and playing songs he liked, not worrying about categorization.
00:23:16.624 --> 00:23:23.013
And of course, at the time, music wasn't stratified and categorized as it would become by the mid-70s.
00:23:23.414 --> 00:23:28.909
You could go out and almost be guaranteed that your audience had you know, had big ears.
00:23:29.028 --> 00:23:33.642
I mean, they were willing to accept you playing something other than what you were immediately famous for.
00:23:33.682 --> 00:23:37.913
It's not like today where people go out and they want to hear a band play nothing but their hits.
00:23:38.561 --> 00:23:40.483
I mean, there was just a different musical audience.
00:23:40.544 --> 00:23:53.255
Everybody was kind of sucking up everything they could, all these different influences and Bloomfield probably more so than anybody in that band at that time, you know, who was really looking at, you know, Eastern modal music and just completely different things.
00:23:53.674 --> 00:23:57.057
But, you know, he could do that because there was an audience that would accept that.
00:23:57.137 --> 00:24:05.826
And of course, with East West, that became, besides the fact that it was, you know, this incredibly long jam and there were very interesting changes and it was very jazz-like in a lot of ways.
00:24:06.465 --> 00:24:12.693
Remember, there was a huge audience for that music They played that music all the time, and it drove audiences crazy.
00:24:13.394 --> 00:24:28.076
If you're talking about
00:24:28.458 --> 00:24:31.201
amplification, I would think...
00:24:31.746 --> 00:24:43.003
based on the pictures I've seen from that mid-60s era, especially the Bloomfield era, when they hit the Fillmore, for example, they were playing at a volume far beyond what anybody was accustomed to from the Fillmore.
00:24:43.585 --> 00:24:47.171
Most of the San Francisco bands, they were not in-your-face loud bands.
00:24:47.431 --> 00:24:48.853
There was a folk thing.
00:24:48.873 --> 00:24:49.994
There was a message thing.
00:24:50.015 --> 00:24:58.598
There was a lot going on in their music, and I love all that music, but it wasn't It didn't have that in-your-face presence that Butterfield's band had.
00:24:59.059 --> 00:25:00.361
And they were playing through big amps.
00:25:01.102 --> 00:25:05.728
I mean, there's a famous picture on the live at the Fillmore Sessions.
00:25:05.887 --> 00:25:08.652
It's a bootleg, but I think available now in a lot of places.
00:25:09.393 --> 00:25:10.534
My memory serves me right.
00:25:10.934 --> 00:25:13.196
Butterfield is playing through a 410 Bassman.
00:25:13.438 --> 00:25:14.318
So is Bloomfield.
00:25:14.378 --> 00:25:16.662
Elvin's playing through a Super Reverb.
00:25:17.001 --> 00:25:18.083
These guys played loud.
00:25:18.423 --> 00:25:21.247
Probably stunned a lot of people that came to hear them the first time.
00:25:21.567 --> 00:25:23.250
They had so much presence on stage.
00:25:23.521 --> 00:25:24.084
Exactly.
00:25:24.124 --> 00:25:27.334
They wanted that energy, that presence, didn't they?
00:25:28.196 --> 00:25:29.299
Really building that, didn't they?
00:25:29.319 --> 00:25:30.463
To really push out that sound.
00:25:30.503 --> 00:25:37.285
Well, you know, there's that great line on the first album that says, we recommend you play this album loud.
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