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Michael Bloomfield: For so many years I had heard Ray Charles records and B.B. King records with horns, not to mention all the R&B I heard—Otis Redding and all the Motown records. That stuff—I wanted to play it. I wanted to hear that sound around me. I wanted to play some B.B. King stuff and hear those horns come in.
Barry Goldberg (keyboards: Mike and I were in New York, at the Albert Hotel. We were doing sessions with Mitch Ryder. And Mike said to me, "Will you help me get a band together? I want an American music band—everything in American music from Stax to Phil Spector to Motown." And, of course, blues. He wanted to cover the whole spectrum of American music. I thought it was a great concept.
Harvey Brooks (bass): Michael’s back in town, and he’s talking to me about this new band they’re going to do called the Electric Flag. The thing was—they needed a bass player. Did I want to go to California and hook up with this?
At the time, I had a partner who was managing Murray the K. And we were doing a show with Wilson Pickett—also the Cream and the Who, in their American debuts. The significant part of it is: Buddy Miles was the drummer with Wilson Pickett, and I saw Buddy playing there. When Michael and Barry spoke to me about playing in the band, I told them about this drummer that I had seen who was getting fined left and right by Wilson Pickett and might be ripe to join the Electric Flag. So I brought them down there. They saw him, and, you know, Buddy was an amazing guy at that time. Buddy was young and innocent. I don’t know if it was a blessing or not, but we got Buddy.
Nick Gravenites (vocals): In Wilson Pickett’s band, Buddy was way down on the totem pole. He was a young guy…you didn’t try to sing better than him; you didn’t try to do any flashy shit with your instrument to detract from him—that sort of thing. So Wilson, essentially, was sitting on Buddy. Wouldn’t let him do nothing.
Michael Bloomfield: We saw Buddy Miles with Wilson Pickett and said, "What a fabulous drummer, what a great drummer." I was just knocked out. I said, "Jesus, man, if we’re gonna get a band together, let’s get this guy. He’s just tremendous." And I’m wondering, "Can he sing?" We went up to his hotel room with him, and Buddy sang great. We knew he was just dynamite.
Barry Goldberg: Our original thought on the drummer was Billy Mundi from the Mothers of Invention. And then we walked into this theater, and the whole theater was rocking to this massive drum beat. We were just mesmerized…we invited him back to our room at the Albert Hotel for further conversation.
We bought a box of Oreo cookies, and we kept giving Buddy Oreo cookies and telling him about all the beautiful young girls in San Francisco. Our plan was that he could be the star of San Francisco and have anything he wanted—which is basically what happened. And Buddy said, "Okay, count me in." He left Pickett, and Pickett was pissed off. We heard that he was looking for us for a long time, for stealing his drummer.
 Buddy Miles (drums): I credit Michael Bloomfield with embellishing all of the glory things that I’ve ever done in this business. Michael was very, very protective of me when we first started in San Francisco. He was very protective of me because he felt that he had the best drummer in the world, and that really made me very happy.
Michael Bloomfield: We got Harvey, and we got Buddy, and then Larry Coryell recommended Marcus Doubleday, the trumpet player. And Peter Strazza, the tenor player, was an old friend of Barry’s.
Barry Goldberg: Nick Gravenites, who we’d spoken to, was already living in San Francisco and made arrangements, along with Michael’s wife, Susan, for all of us to get houses. That’s where we decided to start off this thing, in San Francisco. Because the scene was happening there.
Nick Gravenites: I’d gone back and forth from Chicago to San Francisco for many years, and I wound up back in San Francisco in ’66. When I came back, a lot of the people that I knew as folk singers were now in bands—Big Brother & the Holding Company and Quicksilver Messenger Service, in particular. Also the Jefferson Airplane. I knew these people from folk music days.
Nick Gravenites: Michael called me from New York and told me that he was putting a band together. Albert Grossman was going to back him, and he asked me if I wanted to be the singer. I said, "Sure." He says, "Well, you’re out there—go rent a house. I’ll start shipping people out to you," which he did.
He knew me. He felt comfortable with me. I used to play with him and stuff. So I rented a house, waited a couple weeks, and the band started to show up.
Michael Bloomfield: So we all lived in this house in Mill Valley…..the first tune we worked out was "Groovin’ Is Easy." Nick wrote it, and we worked it out. We worked out all the parts, but we never played it as a band ’til we had every part worked out. Then all of a sudden I said, "Okay, now we’re gonna play this song from beginning to end." And the sound just blew our minds. All of a sudden, we knew we had a dynamite band. And, man, it was a fantastic feeling.
Nick Gravenites: The band formed, and our first job was the movie score for The Trip. Grossman handled it. That was our first gig together as a band. We got together—bam, right away, a film score. We went to LA to record it. That’s where we met Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda. They were always in the studio with us. And Jack Nicholson was also involved in that. Then, immediately after the film score, we played the Monterey Pop Festival.
 Peter Strazza (tenor sax): We weren’t ready for Monterey. We were ready—but not for 50,000 people. Nobody had ever played in front of 50,000 people at the time. That was the first time a concert had that many people. We didn’t have everything down the way we should have, because we were messing around with The Trip too much.
Harvey Brooks: Monterey was a great experience. It was the first festival of that nature, for one thing. I remember sitting in a room with the guy from the Rolling Stones who passed away, Brian Jones, and Jimi Hendrix and Bloomfield and a few other people. We were just sitting in this room, and everybody was tripping on a little acid and talking about how groovy everything was. That was the whole theme song: how groovy everything was. When we went to the stage they interviewed Michael, and he was on the groovy thing. "This is really groovy." I saw a piece of tape, and all he was saying was how groovy everything was.
Barry Goldberg: I remember hanging out with Brian Jones for hours, with Michael, and just being so dragged in the heat. They made us wait seven or eight hours before we had a chance to play. And we were just raring to come out of the gate.
By the time we actually played, everyone was so anxious and nervous and freaked out that it probably wasn’t our best set. I mean, we did sets at other places—in New York at the Bitter End or at the Fillmore—that were far better. But even at that, we blew people’s minds. We made some of the best music in Monterey.
Buddy Miles: We all were very nervous, ’cause it was our debut into the world. But people loved us. People went crazy over the band. The Electric Flag had just as much of a reaction, as far as I’m concerned, as Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, the Who—all of the big names. They called us back. We got three standing ovations.
Michael Bloomfield: I was jacked up on adrenaline. It was the end of a long afternoon, and we were the last act to play, and we were scared shitless. We came out, and we weren’t very good. We really weren’t. We were too nervous. First number, digging my pick in and getting it caught in the string—oh, it was just so terrible. But they loved us. And this was the Electric Flag’s first major gig. Probably the biggest gig we ever played. And we played rotten, man. I ain’t jiving you. We really sounded lousy. And the people loved it. And I could see—oh my God, the hype, the image, the shuck, the vibes.
Michael Bloomfield: The Electric Flag, which was a San Francisco band, was disliked. I don’t really care, and I don’t remember it that well, but I think it was like a bunch of heavyweight interlopers coming in, and saying shitty things about local bands, and not having the good old spirit. I don’t think we played many free gigs. We did some benefits, but not as much as the other bands.
Peter Strazza: We stuck out like a sore thumb. Plus, we had a black drummer, and we were playing soul music.
Michael Bloomfield: At certain times, I’d be sitting around Winterland or one of those places, and people’d be talking about Ken Kesey. I just thought he was like some great writer who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—that had been a favorite book of mine, even before knowing about any of this. But Kesey, Owsley—this whole structure. If you weren’t related to it, you were outside of it. But they were really nice people.
If I was dosed with acid at a gig—and it never happened, but if it had happened to me—I would have tried to fight the person who did it to me. The thing is, I would have found that offensive. I would have like to have been told—to get high only if I had wanted to.
But we were a little separate from that scene, although God knows we indulged.
Susan Beuhler: I’m not real sure how Michael was introduced to heroin, except the first time I ever saw it was with the Electric Flag. Because the guys that came, some of them—well, I know who they were—were junkies. And it wasn’t a good thing. It wasn’t. Everybody said, "Oh, it’s going to be okay." You know—it’s no problem. But it was. I mean, it was a problem.
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