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Bloomfield Book

Michael Bloomfield and his friends share some colourful commentary on what it was like in the Southside Chicago blues clubs during the sixties when Bloomfield watched, and later on played with, blues masters like Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters.

Dorothy Shinderman (Michael Bloomfield’s mother): Fred Glaser, Roy Ruby, and Michael would go to blues clubs and try to hear the great blues artists. Fred and Roy were very, very close to Mike. When you live in a suburb like that, there aren’t many way-out kids. They come from proper families, and they do the proper thing—they graduate and become doctors or lawyers. There aren’t that many musicians and artists, especially in the northern suburbs.
Roy and Mike would take a train into the city. That’s when they started going down to the black neighborhoods. They would sneak away and go to Maxwell Street and hear the music. I didn’t even know at the time that they were doing it. I would go crazy—I wouldn’t know where he was.

Roy Ruby: Before we went to the South Side, Mike and I were "folkniks." I mean, we were white kids that had heard about this other kind of music. Before I went away to school, Michael and I would go down to Maxwell Street, or we would go to the Gate of Horn to see Josh White and Odetta. These were the first two black artists that we were super-excited about. Both of them were very nice and talked to us.

Michael Bloomfield: There were black artists that we liked, like Chuck Berry and stuff. But that was just what we considered rock & roll. We talked to Josh White a couple of times. My family’s maid knew him personally—Mary Williams.

Roy Ruby: That’s right. That’s how we met him. We went down there and we said, "We know Mary." She had called up and everything. We were real young. Later on, I realized where he was at. At that time, he was pretty nice to us.

Michael Bloomfield" She had known him, and he got us into the club. We went to the back room. Yeah—the very first trip, man, when we went down to the Gate of Horn. God, going in the back room there. The first thing is: they wouldn’t have even let us in there. But Josh White got them to give us special seats up in the balcony. They didn’t serve black and white together.

Fred Glaser: There was this black world that doesn’t exist anymore. It was part of the old jazz world—"black-and-tan" clubs. Those were the mixed jazz clubs in the ’40s and ’50s. There were clubs where whites could go in black neighborhoods, and it was okay because they were there to hear the music. In the late ’50s, there were blues clubs that were like black-and-tan clubs, where white people could go to hear the blues. But hardly anybody went.
And so, when we got to be about 15 years old, these maids—Michael’s maid, primarily—would take us to these clubs. The maids would invite us down to their apartments on the South Side on a Sunday afternoon and make dinner for us. And they’d have relatives over. A big Sunday dinner with fried chicken and okra and squash and sweet potatoes. And they’d play the records of these people, of Wolf and Muddy and Chuck Berry before he was a crossover artist.

The black people would be so amazed to see these little, white Jewish kids down there listening to music that they wouldn’t bother us. They were amazed. And they would talk to us. When they discovered that we knew about Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf and Little Walter, they were amazed. They couldn’t believe it. They would sit at the table and talk to us and buy us beer and keep us company. And they’d take us out in the alley to smoke joints. They liked us, because no other white people were coming down there at that time. 
It was fun. It was nice, and if you wanted a beer, they wouldn’t say, "Hey, you can’t touch a drink. Wait ’til you’re 18. You can’t drink." They said, "Hey, man, have some beer. You want a cigarette, pal? Sure, fine."

Michael Bloomfield: In the blues clubs, first of all it was noisy. There was a band, and the band was pretty loud, ’cause most of the time it was electric. The harp was through an amp, and there was a couple of guitars through an amp, an electric bass, and drums. Spann played an electric piano in Muddy’s band. That band was loud, and they played from 10 to 4 in the morning, seven sets.

And it’d be crowded. If it was a Saturday night, everybody was determined to get it on. They’d be jukin’—they’d be jukin’, Jack! Just into getting it on, man. And they’d be partying. The women’d be dressed up as fine as they could be, with red hats on their heads, and wig hats on their heads, and the cats’d be pressed out slick. I remember—back then, there wasn’t no naturals. Everybody had conks, man. Some dudes, some young badges, would have them rags on their head in the afternoon but come night, they’d be polished, gleamin’—everybody’d be gleamin’. Determined to party. 

Cats’d be up in front of the bandstand screaming at you, man, telling you to "Play that music!" Lord, they would want to hear that music. And when you played that music, oh man, you’d be talking right to these people, and they’d be screaming back at you and dancing and everything. Lots of times there were incredible good feelings, just the best feelings of all. Because there was so much correspondence between the musicians and the people. Sometimes a cat would be up there, and the groove’d be so strong, the joint would be jumping, people’d just be rocking and screaming and shouting.

Come late at night, come the midnight hour and after, come into the morning hours—cats’d be playing slow and laid-back and bluesy. They’d be playing nothing but the blues, there wouldn’t be no fast songs. All the rock & roll would be out of the way; all the jump blues would be out of the way. Cats’d be laid back, tired, their hands’d just be crawling over the strings, bending a note, and people’d be slow-dragging across the floor. It was just the blues.

There’d be a blue light, maybe, and the club’d be all smoky, and there wouldn’t be any fancy step-dancing anymore. It was sort of like slow dancing at a high school sock hop. Your arms’d be around a chick, and you’d just be rocking back and forth, and the blues would be slow and easy and mellow.

Many’s the time, come four o’clock in the morning, people’d go home and all the musicians’d go out and get some chicken or ribs someplace, and be so relaxed and mellow. It’d just be great.

Fred Glaser: There was Pepper’s Show Lounge. There was Theresa’s on 47th and Indiana. There was McKee’s Disc Jockey Show Lounge on 63rd and Cottage Grove. There was the Purple Door—that was more like a folk place; that was over by the University of Chicago on 57th Street. And Silvio’s Lounge, where Wolf played, on Lake Street on the West Side. 

Roy Ruby Silvio’s, Lake and Kedzie, under the green El tracks. Now, you see, this is on the West Side, which is worse than the South Side. And Howlin’ Wolf is performing.

Fred Glaser: He’d be crawling around on the stage. He used to do his act—he’d crawl around and do "Howling for My Baby."

Roy Ruby: And he’d say, "I want to do this one for my white friends. I’ve got some white friends here tonight. Put the spotlight on them."

Fred Glaser: He’d say, "Stand up, white people. Here they are—give them a big hand. They’re right at this table, right here. Now, I want all you people to be nice to these white people out here in the audience."

People would look at you, man, remember that? So we’d just drive up, park right in front, and run in to safety.

Michael Bloomfield: The violence was part of the thing. I grew to accept it after a while, and just watched out that I wouldn’t get caught in a heavy scene. The only thing that would scare me would be groups of kids—10 kids from, like, 10 to 14 years old, walking in packs with big sticks. They were called Paddywackers. They’d catch a little paddy, a little white cat, and wack him. That scared me—no way you could get away from that. I got beat up a couple of times from that kind of jive.

Roy Ruby: We’d go to Pepper’s, and we’d go to the front door—the gate—and we’d say to the guy, "Well, we’re friends of Muddy, and he said we could come in," and they’d hassle us for a while.

Michael Bloomfield: Muddy Waters, he was like a god to me. Well, if he was a god, B.B. King was a deity where I couldn’t even imagine ever knowing someone of his magnitude and greatness. But Muddy was in Chicago. I would go down the street, and from two blocks away I’d hear that harmonica come out of the club. I’d hear that harp, and I’d hear Muddy's slide. I’d be tremblin’. I’d be like a dog in heat. I didn’t know what to do. I’d get into that place, and I’d be all a-quiver.


Michael Bloomfield: Do you remember the dirty dancing at that place (Pepper’s)? All the women who would lift their dresses over their heads and shake it right in your face. Oh, man, it’s so embarrassing.
Muddy played at Pepper’s Show Lounge. Theresa’s had people like Little Walter and Jimmy Reed and other people—not quite such big names. They would let us in there. They wouldn’t serve us drinks, but they’d let us sit in the back and drink Cokes and stuff like that.
The musicians, like Muddy, would get up on the stage and tell everybody to let us alone, that we were some of his white friends from the North Side coming down there to hear the music, and nobody better mess with us or they’d have to mess with him. He’d take care of it. We were his friends. Nobody’d better fuck with these white boys out here, or they’d have to deal with him. So people wouldn’t bother us.

Roy Ruby: You didn’t sit in at Pepper’s until some time after that. It was a year or two after you first sat in at the Place before you were allowed to sit in at Pepper’s.

Michael Bloomfield: It was weird. I got to play Muddy’s guitar with that raised action, so he could play slide on it real easy—the red Telecaster. I went down there, thinking that I was really some hot stuff, ’cause I had some fast fingers, and I had plenty of licks.

I was, like, 15. And the minute I got in, man, I said, "Let me play. Let me up on the stand and play." But I didn’t have no soul or nothing. All I had was that speed and some brash Jewboy confidence. I would go down there, and I wouldn’t know what the hell made my music different—why I couldn’t really sound like them other cats. 
I could already play rock & roll. When I around was 15, I started working with rock & roll bands in this real funky town called Highwood, Illinois, where the Fort Sheridan army base is, way up in the north suburbs. I worked with a Jerry Lee Lewis imitator, a hillbilly about 32 years old named Hayden Thompson.


Michael Bloomfield: And then I started working with my own little band, in this bar called PG’s Club 7. We had a harp player—Jim Schwall, from Seigel-Schwall. He played harp with us then. I was working, and I worked every kind of gig—fraternity parties, Jewish Centers. But all my hanging out, when I wanted to sit in and learn, was down on the South Side. I’d be hanging out down there to learn. I’d be sitting in constantly.

Fred Glaser: By the time Mike was 17, he was as good as any of the professional musicians. He would get up onstage with Muddy’s band, and he’d play as good as Muddy’s guitar player would play—as good as Muddy, in his own way. And the people would flip out. They couldn’t believe it.

Muddy would say, "My friend Michael Bloomfield from Glencoe is going to come up here and play the guitar with us for a couple of numbers now. Want you all to listen to him real good, and want you to give him a nice, big round of applause when he finishes. He’s a great musician and a good friend of ours." And everybody would laugh and say, "Come on, man, get that fucking kid off."

They laughed at him. And then he started to play, and they’d shut up. He started jamming with the band, and he was good. He was real good. Three or four minutes into a song he started taking off, and people would sit back and listen and start dancing. And they realized he was great. And they started applauding him.

Later on, we got to be friendly with Muddy and his wife and Otis Spann. They all lived in the same building. We would spend a day there. We’d start out at Muddy’s house for dinner, and his wife would make, like, gumbo or bouillabaisse or some real hot New Orleans kind of dinner. And then we’d go downstairs to where Spann lived, in the basement, and jam. Michael would play and Muddy would play and Spann would play the piano. They would all jam down there.

Michael Bloomfield: A lot of these cats was old enough to be my father. And I had that sort of feeling—they were like dads, y’know. Like a father relationship. Just to be in that environment, and to be accepted in that environment as a man when in my own mind I felt like a little kid, was a very flattering thing.

I can’t say I wasn’t scared, ’cause I was scared, lots of times, because it was a rough thing, man. I saw knifings and shootings—it was a man’s world. There was no jive. The kids were scary, man, the youngbloods, the lowriders in the street. They were scary. It was a very violent scene, man. Cats that didn’t get a lot of bread.

It’s a sociological thing about ghetto society. When a man can’t get a job and maybe his wife works for some white man’s family, and it makes him feel bad because he can’t be supporting her and she has to work for some damn fool white people, he goes out and gets drunk, and he has to assert his masculinity in some sort of way. It’s a wretched, undignified, terrible scene for a man to be in, and some terrific violence went down—terrific in the sense of terrifying.

And there was an amazing amount of fantastic passion and getting it on, too, man—an incredible love for the music. It was just an amazing thing for my eyes to behold. To see that lifestyle, and to be swept into it. 

One time I was standing in a bar, and a guy walked in, and he took a woman’s head and slammed it on the bar and said, "Bartender, give this bitch a beer." Her severed head was on the bar

Several guys took me to be almost like I was their son—Big Joe Williams, Sunnyland Slim, and Otis Spann. They took me to be like their kid, man; they just showed me from the heart. They took me aside and said, "You can play, man. Don’t be shy. Get up there and play." What I learned from them was invaluable. A way of life, a way of thinking, a whole kind of thing—invaluable things to learn.

I used to hear Elmore James, Sonny Boy, Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Freddie King, Albert King—way before they were known anywhere but the ghetto. Lowell Fulson. Otis Spann. And many of the smaller, more obscure cats—J.B. Hutto, Jimmy Rogers, Eddie Taylor, this guy named Little Mac.

By the time I was around 17, I was interested in it from a musicological standpoint. I was trying to discover where the old blues singers lived. I met cats like Washboard Sam and Jazz Gillum and Tommy McClennan and Kokomo Arnold. I used to have a band with Big Joe Williams, Yank Rachell, John Estes, and play with guys like Little Brother Montgomery. By then it was a scholarly thing. Like Paul Oliver and Sam Charters, I wanted to know the story of the blues, and the best way for me to learn was to actually meet the guys.