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Michael Bloomfield

© Barney Quick

On a February night in 1981, in the hills of San Francisco, a thirty-seven-year-old man sat in his car in front of his house. He couldn’t feel much, but he sensed that what he’d dreaded for some time was finally happening. The life was draining out of him. He was alone, like he’d been during his upscale childhood, his years of stardom, and his period of legend status. Known and adored by millions, credited with pioneering the notion of the hotshot white blues guitarist, Michael Bloomfield usually seemed to do his best to make sure there was some way in which he was a solitary figure.

Bloomfield stood with a handful of others at the epicenter of the cultural shifts that transformed American society in the 1960s. He brought together elements of the beat ethos, the chitlin’ circuit soul sensibility, the nerdy passion of the scholarly archivist, and the soul of the artist consumed by a singular vision. Perhaps the only thing he ever felt ambivalent about was being a rock star, which probably explains why he is less widely remembered than most guitar heroes of the last half of the twentieth century.

He was born into a well-to-do Jewish family on the north side of the Chicago area in 1943. He had one brother. His father, a hard-driving businessman who had started a restaurant equipment manufacturing company, tried to browbeat young Michael into following in his footsteps until Michael was a teenager, at which point he gave up. Michael hung with the crowd for which neither sports nor academics were happening, but music was. He had received a transistor radio as a bar mitzvah gift; he was the proverbial first-generation rock fan, lying in bed at night, listening to Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard on southern stations that he could pull in through the clear night air. These stations often mixed blues into the r&b and rockabilly they played.

The maids employed by the families of these northside misfits discovered that these boys were into the same music they dug. They started surreptitiously taking their pudgy young white charges to the clubs on the south side where Muddy Waters, Otis Rush and Howlin’ Wolf played. Before long, Michael was jumping onstage to jam. Bouncers and barkeepers were so taken with his audacity that they welcomed his presence.

Bloomfield’s parents tried to salvage his education by shipping him to a private school on the east coast in 1958. He came home for Christmas break and turned all his friends on to pot. He wound up finishing at a special high school for problem youth in Chicago.