Paul Butterfield

Mm-hmm.

And so, um, God, Simon and Garfunkel and Warwick and Otis Redding and, and I really loved the blues afternoon with Paul Butterfield and the Butterfield Blues Band and Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane and Buffalo Springfield-

Yeah

... for what it's worth, and I had access to shooting.

So that's one of them.

The cabin I lived in in Big Sur, that would be another one.

Yeah, of course, Paul Butterfield, every time I hear his band.

What's his name? Mike Bloomfield.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, and, and then, uh, uh, a couple of years later, you had Paul Butterfield with a white blues band, or indeed a mixed blues band.

At one point, he had Howlin' Wolf's rhythm section, um, in there.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah

... you had, um, you had something extraordinary.

Um, I managed to see the Paul Butterfield Blues Band in 1966 play to about 20 people-

Wow

What a band.

The Paul Butterfield Blues Band from Chicago.

Paul Butterfield on vocals and harmonica.

Mike Bloomfield, Elvin Bishop on guitars.

Howlin' Wolf's rhythm section.

That's the man.

He also was the guitarist for Paul Butterfield's Better Days, which is saying something because there's been a lot of great players in the lead guitar slot.

He came back to Canada for the return of the formerly brothers with Doug Song and Gene Taylor and for years led the house band.

at the Edmonton Folk Festival, has been in studio with Stevie Wonder, Todd Rundgren, Emmylou Harris, Rodney Crowe, Bonnie Raitt, Martin Mull, and many more.

I said, I'm playing Winterline with Butter the next day.

And that was a famous Bill Graham's Three Bees of the Blues.

It was Butterfield, Bishop, and Bloomfield.

And that was a night to remember, I'll tell you.

He starts to discover the kind of second and third generation electric blues.

People like Paul Butterfield Blues Band out of Chicago.

John Mayall and the Blues Breakers from the UK.

So he gets to know Eric Clapton.

It's at a Sunday afternoon jam at the Fillmore that Carlos stops by with a high school buddy and the Butterfield Blues Band is in town.

They were one of the groups that had discovered this incredible scene and they would come in for weeks at a time and they would play a couple of gigs and they'd just hang out.

So Mike Bloomfield, the guitarist with Paul Butterfield, he is kind of heading the jam, and Jerry Garcia's up there, and it's kind of like milling about.

Carla's not wanting to say the wrong thing and not wanting to impose himself on the situation, but Mike invites him up and says, hey, there's guitar, can you play something? And they're playing a blues shuffle of some sort.

Using dead base show lists as a guide, there was never more than two weeks between dead shows in September or October 68.

But while the firing was supposedly in effect, the remaining members, Garcia, Lesch, Kreutzmann, and Mickey Hart, played jam sessions at the Matrix Club in San Francisco as Mickey and the Heartbeats, inviting Elvin Bishop, Paul Butterfield, Jack Cassidy, and Spencer Dryden to sit in.

That wasn't a jam session.

That was an audition for a version of the band without Pigpen or Weir.

Both men are describing the same week.

neither of them is necessarily lying because thirty years is a long time to carry a thing you would rather not have been near there is no way to settle that to-night and nothing depends on settling it what is not in dispute is the club the matrix was a small place in san francisco and small in this case means small a low room with a low stage a couple of hundred people at the outside tables close enough that the band could hear conversations It was where local musicians went to play on nights when they were not being anybody in particular, and while the firing was supposedly in force, four of them went and played there under another name, Mickey and the Heartbeats, Garcia, Lesch, Kreutzmann and Hart.

they invited people to sit in with them and the people who came in were serious ones elvin bishop paul butterfield jack cassidy spencer dryden everybody at the time called those nights jam sessions and the phrase is doing an enormous amount of quiet work four members of a band playing in a small club with a rotating cast of other people's musicians filling the two chairs that happen to be empty there is a word for that and the word is not jam session They did not call it what it was.

I doubt they framed it that way even privately.