Happy Hour Harmonica Podcast
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Happy Hour Harmonica Podcast
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 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
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. This podcast is sponsored by Seidel Harmonicas. Visit the oldest harmonica factory in the world at www.seidel1847.com or on Facebook or Instagram at Seidel Harmonicas. Hello Tom Ellis and welcome back to the podcast.
SPEAKER_03:Neil, how are you? It's great to be back.
SPEAKER_02:You last joined me on episode 62 back on the May 27th, 2022, talking about the legendary Paul Butterfield. So we're doing a follow-up on Paul Butterfield because of course one hour program isn't enough to cover the great man. So thanks for coming back to talk some more about Paul Butterfield's career.
SPEAKER_03:Well, you're very welcome. As you said, one time is not enough.
SPEAKER_02: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
SPEAKER_03:the classic players, yeah? 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.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, definitely. 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? 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.
SPEAKER_03:You're absolutely correct. 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. I mean, you know, most of the players that I know today are young players, let's put it that way. They're infatuated with Little Walter and with Howlin' Wolf and, you know, people who really made their names in the early 50s. And up until, say, the 57, 58 period. And that was kind of the golden age of blues. But it was a golden age in a very small market. I mean, it wasn't the golden age of the blues in the United States. It was the golden age of the blues in Chicago. And I think people fail to understand how insulated the music scene in Chicago was in that early 50s period. And even though there are fabulous recordings and great, great examples of what they were doing, Prime It was a long, long time ago. 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. 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. But they were all acoustic. And when Butterfield hit the scene, it was a significant change from that kind of blues appreciation.
SPEAKER_02: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. So, but was he not part of that? 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. So was it not a result of the sort of British blues boom that
SPEAKER_03:got him into blues? 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. So Gravanitis turned Butterfield onto this and dragged him down into these clubs. 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. 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. So I don't think the British blues thing had really had anything to do with Butterfield's entry. Certainly, though I think the folks in your country were hip to the blues much earlier than the folks in my country were
SPEAKER_02: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
SPEAKER_03: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. They knew the vernacular. They understood the blues language. They had listened to everybody. 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. Certainly the Stones had what I would call hard blues tunes on some of their early recordings, so they were very aware of it. So they probably dovetailed around the same time as the first Paul Butterfield Blues Band album.
UNKNOWN:...
SPEAKER_02:Paul certainly helps. You know, the popularity of blues and the sort of rock blues as well, yeah? And that's what was growing and having a big influence.
SPEAKER_03: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. 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. But I think his approach to the music was very different. If you look at the Lost Sessions album, for example, it's almost a comprehensive approach to the set list. They've got Sonny Boy No. 1, they've got Sonny Boy No. 2, they've got Little Walter, they've got Jimmy Rogers.¶¶ got all these different people who authored the cuts on that particular CD, but the way it's presented is is very, very different. 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. But the way they presented it was completely unique to them. 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. I mean, it's just not on the radar. And you don't hear it on the Lost Sessions. 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. And all of the songs are very similar in that approach.
SPEAKER_01:Well, baby, cry on till you're on my hands I'd do anything, anything, little baby Well, baby but
SPEAKER_02: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
SPEAKER_03: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. 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. But he had been hired by Jack Holzman from Electra Records, who owned Electra Records, which was very much a folk label. He'd been hired to bring Butterfield into the studio and to record the band. After he listened to the band, he went and heard them play live a Right. always interesting and fit and had a tremendous propulsive characteristic that really pushed the music forward a lot. 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. I mean, it seems like a tighter, more musical unit. Butterfield's harp is still out front, you know, of course, but he's sharing the load, which he rarely ever did with Elvin.
SPEAKER_02:And this is on the Paul Butterfield blues album.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. There was just a different level of sophistication.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: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. He really captured what he was doing, all the nuance, everything else. And at the time, there wasn't much amplified harp being recorded anywhere. That had all been done back in the 50s, you know, at the Chess Studios. 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. 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
SPEAKER_02:them. So we've got comparisons with Little Walter. 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.
UNKNOWN:.
SPEAKER_02:And also last night. 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?
SPEAKER_03:I'm not an expert on everything Little Walter did. 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. It's just a completely unique way of doing the song. Obviously, it's ramped up in terms of the percussive aspect and the tempo, but it's very different.
UNKNOWN:...
SPEAKER_03: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. He didn't try and record Juke or Roller Coaster. He came up with his own instrumentals, which was, to me, an indication that he thought of himself as that level of harmonica player. He could have his own instrumental tunes, and they could be played in a live setting, and they could be popular and fit. And that alone shows me just an incredible level of confidence to put together your own instrumental solos.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and so his first original instrumentals was on the last sessions was Nut Popper, yeah?
SPEAKER_03:Yes, that's correct. Very different from anything that Walter ever did. It's just a whole different feel, different set of chord changes. really really I mean it pops it's very propulsive
SPEAKER_02: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
SPEAKER_03:no I think that sums it up pretty well actually I really do
SPEAKER_02:And so when he's, you know, when he was playing, you know, was he seeing the harmonica being his kind of main thing? Obviously he sang as well, but we'll get into more of that later on. But, you know, was he really pushing the harmonica? Like you say, he was up front in the band and everything.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. I mean, the harmonica was the lead instrument. And if you listen... 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. 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. None of the phrases in any of these solos seem to repeat throughout the recordings. He's got a lot of ideas that are coming out all the time. 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.
SPEAKER_02:You know, and then going back to Little Walter briefly, I mean, obviously he was a big fan. He's recorded numerous of his songs on the first couple of albums. So, you know, did he want to play a homage to Little Walter? Do you know what sort of, you know, what he felt about him or anything like that?
SPEAKER_03:Well, I relate a story that Norman Dayron told me. 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. Very, very involved. In fact, I think he is the named producer on that recording. He told me a story one time about Butterfield. 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. 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. He was a very hard blower. 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. trying to get over the sound on the stage. And of course, when Little Walter played, sound was a much less complicated situation than it became. 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. But yeah, I'm sure he knew Little Walter and Jimmy Rogers and all of those guys. How could he not? If he was going down there, he and Muscle White were the guys. They were the guys that went down there that were the harp players. 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. 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. And they were very, very popular. We talked a little bit about this in the podcast last time. But what that led to was bookings for, you know, the more traditional guys, the Muddy Waters. 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. 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. He was also a gateway for their careers. That would become very much the point when he started going and playing at the Fillmores in San Francisco.
SPEAKER_02:As to his singing, we definitely talked about his singing last time, but... You know, it was really crucial, yeah. And obviously he's a big part of his sound, certainly early on. And he sings on I Love His Drifting on this Butterfield Blues Band
SPEAKER_01:album.
SPEAKER_02:So what about the
SPEAKER_03:importance of his singing? 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. They're just so creative. 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. His singing is obviously very important to him. It's not a throwaway, castaway thing that you just do. I mean, he's obviously trying to sell these messages already. 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.
SPEAKER_02:He sort of rise to fame then after this album. Was he immediately then playing really big venues, lots of big festivals? How was his rise to fame?
SPEAKER_03:I think what happened with those guys is they started playing outside of Chicago. They were able to start getting gigs playing these colleges. I know they played, for example, the University of Wisconsin, day trips, day trip gigs around the Chicago area. Then they made a trip to New York. 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. They went to the first New York performances and literally sat on the front row every night and listen to the Butterfield Blues Band. 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. They now got to hear him again. They had already started to spread the word. Then there were trips made to the West Coast. The same thing happened on the West Coast. 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. I mean, this was a very professional band.
SPEAKER_02:You know, we've talked about how, you know, they sort of evolved the sound and, you know, it's getting more sophisticated. And we talked on the last podcast about how Butterfield's brother was really into jazz. So he'd listened to a lot of jazz. So there's clearly some jazz influences there. 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. 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?
SPEAKER_03:I mean, everybody always points to certain references for harmonica players, people they've listened to. But you also have to remember that in the late 50s and the early 60s, jazz was still very much heard on the radio. Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck and all of these people, they were on pop radio. Frank Sinatra. It's not like it is now. And so jazz was everywhere. So Paul, I'm sure, you know, heard music, heard a lot of jazz beyond, you know, what his brother had introduced him to. And I'm sure was, you know, pretty hip to what was going on because it was so available.
SPEAKER_02: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.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:What about that and moving away from just traditional blues stuff?
SPEAKER_03:That was Butterfield finding songs he liked and playing songs he liked, not worrying about categorization. And of course, at the time, music wasn't stratified and categorized as it would become by the mid-70s. You could go out and almost be guaranteed that your audience had you know, had big ears. I mean, they were willing to accept you playing something other than what you were immediately famous for. It's not like today where people go out and they want to hear a band play nothing but their hits. I mean, there was just a different musical audience. 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. But, you know, he could do that because there was an audience that would accept that. 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. Remember, there was a huge audience for that music They played that music all the time, and it drove audiences crazy.
SPEAKER_02:If you're talking about
SPEAKER_03:amplification, I would think... 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. Most of the San Francisco bands, they were not in-your-face loud bands. There was a folk thing. There was a message thing. 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. And they were playing through big amps. I mean, there's a famous picture on the live at the Fillmore Sessions. It's a bootleg, but I think available now in a lot of places. My memory serves me right. Butterfield is playing through a 410 Bassman. So is Bloomfield. Elvin's playing through a Super Reverb. These guys played loud. Probably stunned a lot of people that came to hear them the first time. They had so much presence on stage.
SPEAKER_02:Exactly. They wanted that energy, that presence, didn't they? Really building that, didn't they? To really push out that sound.
SPEAKER_03:Well, you know, there's that great line on the first album that says, we recommend you play this album loud.
SPEAKER_02:So, I mean, how long were they around San Francisco and what happened from there?
SPEAKER_03:Well, I think the San Francisco thing was, you know, was more trips out to San Francisco. They made trips to San Francisco. They did a long run at the Golden Bear down in the LA area. You know, it was touring is what it was. And then they would go back to San Chicago, but certainly it wasn't too many San Francisco trips that led them to kind of relocate out there. Elvin wanted to go out there. Bloomfield had already gone out there. So the band, I think, was maybe a little homeless to a certain extent in that they weren't really set up to just be in Chicago full time. But they wanted to be closer, obviously, to the more modern scene that was going on and obviously the new music that was coming out, too. And that wasn't to be found in Chicago. There was no rock and roll scene in Chicago. There was in Detroit, a huge one there, but Chicago was not that kind of place, but San Francisco was.
SPEAKER_02:Great. And then they released their next album, The Resurrection of Pig Boy Crabshaw. Was that then recorded out in the West, or was that one done?
SPEAKER_03:I don't know where that was recorded. It was produced by... a partner of their manager, Albert Grossman, who had run a very successful folk music club in Chicago for many, many years. But I don't know where they recorded that. I would be surprised if they did not record that in Chicago. Or they might have even recorded it in New York. But I'll have to look that one up.
SPEAKER_02:So that one had lots of horns on it. Was that the first one of his album which brought on lots of horns?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, it was. And there's more than just a lot of horns on that album. I mean, you're certainly right. That was the main statement that was being made. This is a new version of the Butterfield Blues Band. Obviously, we're bringing people on. We're elevating the level of sophistication. This is the band I saw at the Miami Pop Festival. Distinctly remember, you know, Sanborn and Gene Dinwiddie given plenty of time to blow and play in solos and songs. I mean, it was no longer Butterfield plays all these harp solos, and there's also a really great guitar player. Now he was opening it up across the board. But, you know, the other thing he did, too, was... He started playing songs that were of that ilk. I mean, he seemed to be more in that Junior Parker kind of mode, although he continued to display his penchant for playing songs he liked. I mean, if you look at the very first song on that album, which is One More Heartache, that was kind of a regional hit for Marvin Gaye. Marvin Gaye. I mean, you don't think of Marvin Gaye as a blues guy at all. Born Under a Bad Sign, you know, that was a Booker T and the MGs tune. Again, Albert King made that super popular, but the way Booker T and them did it, you know, it wasn't a blues tune. And then you had Drive and Wheel, which is, you know, Junior Parker right off the
SPEAKER_01:bat. Like a leaf shaking on
SPEAKER_03:His ears are taking in all kinds of stuff and it's being regurgitated out and coming out in these bands. And it didn't have to be blues to become a part of the setlist.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. So on Pity the Fool on that album, he sort of swapped solos with a horn player.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:You know, you'd have thought obviously putting horns in there and giving them, as you say, lots of time to solo. You know, a lot of harmonic players might fear that, right? Because first of all, they might have a bit of an inferiority complex playing with horn players who obviously are very well versed in jazz lines and sophisticated lines, but also just sharing the time with them. So obviously he didn't fear that, right?
SPEAKER_03:That's super well said. And I think it goes beyond what you said. Not only was he allowing the horn players to, you know, to establish their own presence on stage, but, you know, the other thing he was doing is he started letting everybody sing. I mean, Bugsy Moss sings a couple of tunes on that album, and that was brand new. Nobody had ever sung on a Butterfield album but Butterfield. I mentioned this in the last podcast. There was an interview in Downbeat where Butterfield, and I'm paraphrasing again, said something to the effect that I've got all these great musicians. I don't want to play all the harp solos. I want them to play too because they're great musicians. And you start to see that trend happening with the Big Boy Crab Shaw album.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so he's turning into a band leader as much as anything here. Then if he's not playing that many harmonic solos and he's not singing then he's the band leader.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, and you know, to me, you know, I think Butterfield, because of his experience as a flute player when he was growing up and, you know, studying with a famous flute player and that kind of thing, I think he understood how to read music. I doubt he could write charts. When this big band came out, it was like his ego kind of faded away. He did want to be part of the band. He was really concerned about this ensemble sound and how to make it good, regardless of what that meant to him as either a singer or a harmonica player. And, you know, When you bring in somebody like Gene Dinwiddie, who, you know, had studied with the AACM or had played with all the guys that were part of the AACM in Chicago, which was a very avant-garde group. Philip Wilson as well. These were guys who were, they really knew music. They were very well versed in how to write music, how to play music, how to present music in a different way from the guy who's getting up playing harmonica, you know, in a four-piece band. I mean, it was a very different thing. And he let him go with it, you know, and it worked.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, absolutely. And then, so yeah, carry on through his album releases. So In My Own Dream, again, an evolution here.
SPEAKER_03:To me, if you look at all the Butterfield Blues Band recordings, and you start with very much with The Lost Sessions, because that's really the first in the studio recording. You know, there are songs like on The Lost Sessions, there's Just To Be With You, Everything's Gonna Be All Right. Those two songs, you know, popped up again and again and again on his recordings. And if you look, for example, at Just To Be With You from the musical standpoint, it really doesn't have any resemblance to what Muddy was doing. To me, it's a lot heavier than what Muddy was doing. And it's obviously evolved over time to what it became. It's not at all like it was on The Lost Sessions. It's something very, very different.
UNKNOWN:I want to be with you, little girl.
SPEAKER_03:Butterfield was, you know, he's living in these songs, playing these songs night after night. And that's how you begin to mold and reshape and, you know, change the parameters of a song to fit what you want as opposed to the way it was originally recorded. You know, another thing that's interesting too is Butterfield picked a lot of songs, traditional blues songs that did not have harmonica on them originally, like Just to Be With You, which didn't. He was creating his own And then you've got a
SPEAKER_02:story about In My Own Dream with Sting and
SPEAKER_03:Sam Boyne. In My Own Dream, that's a really beautiful song. I think Sanborn told me it would tell anyone that it's one of the best solos he ever played, certainly at that time in his life and maybe for a couple of years after before he became more of a real traditional jazz guy.
UNKNOWN:piano plays
SPEAKER_03:The horn that he used on that, he actually found in a cab, in a taxi cab. And this all came out in an interview that Sting did with Sanborn. And Sanborn told a whole story about how he found this horn, played the solo, and then lost the horn not long after that. It was kind of like the magic horn. But Sting loved that song. I was so shocked to hear this. And that was one of his favorite songs of any American musician and definitely his favorite Butterfield song. And when you listen to it, it has a sinewy, snaky way of getting under your skin
SPEAKER_02:As we're getting into this era of albums, I was listening again before, you know, the last week or two to his albums. And then, yeah, again, that word sophistication just comes, you know, these records are so mature and you're thinking, yeah, this is some beautiful music.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. And, you know, I mean, you know, to add to that, I mean, Sanborn told me he worked on that solo album. Constantly, constantly. And it was incredibly frustrating to him at times where he'd want to throw his horn against the wall, that kind of thing. These guys were the real deal. This was no jam band. This was no pick-up kind of blues band. They were serious professional guys who knew what they wanted to do. And you certainly hear that on In My Own Dream. I mean, that song with Dinwiddie playing mandolin, I mean, that alone is... Totally unique to Butterfield. There was no mandolin. Yank Rachel, you know, he was a mandolin player, but they weren't trying to follow up on the way he sounded playing mandolin on blues. It's just a very, very different, super sophisticated piece of music. And I think on that entire album, I think In My Own Dream, it holds up as well today as it did the day it was released. It's still a
SPEAKER_00:beautiful song.¶¶ And then
SPEAKER_02:the next album is just keep on moving. So, well, one thing he does, he's still, he's still doing some of the old songs. He does a great version of walking by myself, which, you know, again, mentioned on here is quite often cited as the best ever harmonica solo by big Walter. So he sort of reworks that solo.
SPEAKER_03:I remember when this album came out and I looked at it and, you know, I saw walking by myself and I was, my first thought was, well, I guess there's another version of Walking By Myself, because no harmonica player has the nerve to try and play that tune, given what Big Walter did. I mean, that's one of the key pieces in the harmonica history, Walking By Myself and Big Walter. To me, it's Butterfield kind of saying, those guys are great, but so am I. I can play this too. And his solo, in no way, shape, or form is at all like Butterfield. Big Walters. Matter of fact, the whole song is
SPEAKER_02:different. So they did... less blues songs on this album. I think there's only two conventional blues songs on this album,
SPEAKER_03:yeah? Yeah, not much. You're absolutely right. Really and truthfully, it's Walking By Myself and then they do a pretty good version of Ray Charles' Losing Hand. But yeah, all these songs are, you would say, they're not blues songs. and the writing and the playing is uh very much distributed among the band members
SPEAKER_02:so i think this was released in the late 60s this one maybe maybe 69 so were they trying to move away you know it was still called the paul butterfield blues band at this stage right so were they trying to move away from that maybe you know get into a more mainstream was that part of the tactic do you think
SPEAKER_03:you know i think some of it was marketing yeah i i think you know in terms of of staying in touch with the mainstream everybody knew the name that paul butterfield This was certainly not a blues band at this point in time. I mean, this was almost a jazz ensemble, and some people might think it was. In fact, Downbeat, in one of the reviews of one of the albums that Butterfield put out, said something along the lines of, you know, Butterfield's keeping a large band sound alive. That's another interesting aspect of this. There were very few large bands circulating and playing at that time. Blood, Sweat& Tears were gone. Don Ellis was gone. Guys that carried horns with them, there just weren't many of them, and that was very important to Butterfield. But the other part of this is that if you look at the writing and who's been writing the songs, there's only two or three songs on this whole album that were not written by members of the band. That in itself, I mean, Buzzy writes one, Rod Hicks writes one, I think Dinwiddie's on a couple, Paul has one, Paul wrote No Amount of Lovin'. He's the only credited author of that song. So the band is really blossoming. It's really expanding far beyond what it was even with their last album. It's gotten much, much more of a unit that's making a statement about music that is coming from within, not taking music from without and trying to transpose that into what they want to do.
SPEAKER_02:so is then Better Days the next album and then this is you know the band changed at this stage it's a definitely different
SPEAKER_03:You know, the big band came to a kind of came to a crashing halt. And I think one of the reasons that happened was because music was changing in the late 60s and the early 70s. There was much more categorization. You know, the marketing guys were in there trying to make sure every recording got put in its proper bucket so it could be marketed properly. And the big band just didn't fit anymore. I mean, there weren't those kind of ensembles. And obviously, it's very expensive to keep, you know, an eight or nine or ten piece group all together. on the road all the time. So after it folded up, everybody kind of went their disparate ways. You know, the Horn guys went to Stevie Wonder and Buzzy and Philip Wilson formed this tremendously great band called Full Moon that is vastly underrated. Also, Dinwiddie was in that band. But everybody kind of went their own way. And I think there was a period there where Butterfield probably felt a little bit lost. I mean, he had been the leader of his own bands for six, seven years, working actively, spreading the fame of those bands around the country. And all of a sudden, boom, it's just over. And it was probably pretty hard for him to recover. So he was living in Woodstock at the time. Woodstock had become maybe the birthplace of the Americana music movement. I mean, I can't think of many places where there were that many musicians that were gathered together. I mean, Dylan was there and Richie Havens was there. The Muldars were there. Bobby Charles was there. Janis Joplin was there. Todd Rundgren was actually living there at that time. There were a couple of jazz guys that were there too. And so you had this melting pot and, There were a couple of little clubs slash bars, and these guys would get together and play all the time in these weird ensembles. I mean, it might be a couple of jazz guys and a couple of blues guys or a couple of folk guys. There was just music going on there all the time. And, of course, the focal point of everything, actually, Woodstock wasn't Dylan. It was Albert Grossman, and it was the band because the band was there. And, of course, they show so many diverse influences in their music. So when Better Days came about, all those guys were hanging around there. Almost all of them were being managed at the time by Albert Grossman, or they were playing with artists who were being managed by Albert Grossman. And it was a very odd ensemble. You had, you know, Ronnie Barron, who was a Dr. John kind of New Orleans kind of piano player, steeped in that deep New Orleans tradition. And then you had Butterfield and then you had Amos Garrett, who would later become the music director for Maria Mulder after she became famous for Midnight at the Oasis. But he was a Canadian. He was from, you know, Northwest Canada. Muldar, Jeff Muldar, who had been at Newport with Maria Muldar, his wife at the time, and had heard the Butterfield Band and, you know, was obviously very much a fan of what they were doing. Billy Rich, who, you know, played with Taj Mahal. And then Chris Parker, who was this young drummer who, you know, would... After he left Better Days, he went on to play with Stuff and jazz bands. So it was a real interesting mix, and everybody brought something to the table. Back to the marketing thing, one of the marketing things that was upsetting to Butterfield was he did not want this band to be known as Paul Butterfield's Better Days. He wanted it to be known as Better Days. And of course, you know, the marketing people said, there's no way in hell we're going to do that. We can't lose your name. Nobody knows who Better Days is. But that's how he felt about it. He didn't feel like it was him out front. He felt like it was, you know, a band, really an honest to goodness, democratic band.
SPEAKER_02:you know was there a change of style on these albums that you say there wasn't a big ensemble and wasn't a whole big horn section and is a bit more folk bass maybe because it's that woodstock connection
SPEAKER_03:yeah i think so i think very much that woodstock connection you know when you listen to that first better days album and and some of the live albums that are out you know there's a there's a There's two or three of those out right now that, again, are accessible, some on streaming services and some on eBay. But those guys, they're super professional. They're super tight. But the songs bounce around in terms of the emotional impact they have. I mean, there's just such a big difference between songs like Buried Alive and The Blues and then Small Town Talk. or Highway 28, and then something like Percy Mayfield's Please Send Me Somebody to Love.
SPEAKER_00:And if it's not asking too much, please send me someone to love.
SPEAKER_03:It's an interesting mix, really interesting mix. But again, these guys are playing what they want to play, and man, they pull it off. They make all these songs very much their own tunes.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and then the release of a second album with Better Days, does that put it in your ear? So you had two albums with him. So what commercial success did he have with these? Was he still doing well at this stage?
SPEAKER_03:Well, I think that the first Better Days was successful. They weren't selling millions of copies of it, of course, but I think that the album played well to Butterfield's audience. The tours that they did, were pretty successful tours. The band stayed together for quite a long time. But when they put out the second album, I think things kind of came apart. First of all, some of the guys left. The music, to me, wasn't as strong as it was on the first recording. There's still some great, great songs on that second album. But it doesn't have the impact that the first album had.
SPEAKER_02:A thing, again, we touched on last time was the live album that's released, a double album, which has got loads of tremendous long solos, some amazing playing. I think that was the last release, wasn't it, of the Butterfield Blues Band album before then that was sort of disbanded.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I think so. I think so. It might have come before Sometimes I Feel Like Smiling, but certainly the live one came out right around that end time. And there's so much great stuff on it. But so few people heard it. If they put the live album out after Pig Boy Crab Shaw or In My Own Dream, it might have had a much bigger wallop than it had when it came out. Literally from the opening four or five notes, I mean, I just don't think there's anything I've ever heard the level of a tour de force of that version of Everything's Gonna Be Alright and that opening solo. If you're a harmonica player, it's one of the greatest solos ever. Period.
UNKNOWN:Period.
SPEAKER_02:We talked about the earlier albums are beautifully produced and some amazing songs, but to really get that raw energy of the live performances, that live album is fantastic.
SPEAKER_03:I had a friend who I grew up with who was obviously a big Butterfield fan, and he saw this band, the band that's on the live album, and they had Four Horns, and he saw them at a small club, well, not a small club, but a club in the Washington, D.C. area, and I remember him calling me and telling me, I just heard those guys and the sound was so big and so powerful. I felt like it pinned me back in my chair. He said they were just so overwhelmingly great. And I think that's evidenced by the live album. You can hear that yourself.
SPEAKER_02:So then getting into his later career, After Better Days, we talked about, again, on the last podcast, he played, he did a couple of albums with Muddy. And then he played with other, we played with other bands, Leeuwenhelm and the RCR, All Stars and a few other appearances. So, you know, wrapping up his career wise, you know, just finish off with, you know, his later career.
SPEAKER_03:Well, I think his later career was plagued by something that was not his fault. I mean, he obviously had some drug problems. He had a very, very bad case of pancreatitis with which is an incredibly painful disease and very difficult to get rid of. But the music scene here in the States, in that period of the mid-70s to maybe 80, for people like Butterfield, who had been part of a very vibrant music scene, scene was gone. When I talked to Bonnie Raitt, I talked to her about Butterfield, she said he was one of those guys that had been great, and he was just kind of a lost soul. Where am I going to go? I can't hold a band together. I don't have the audience that I need to be a successful live act. I can't be a successful live act unless I have a recording contract. There's a Catch-22 going on. Very, very difficult, and I think he was trying to find something, and on all of those recordings, you see him doing one of a couple of things. First, he's still recording what he wants to record. You know, he's finding music that he loves that he wants to interpret. The other thing he's doing is, and I think more importantly, he's trying to surround himself with great players. Butterfield always surrounded himself with great players. They spurred him on. They made him a lot of what he became by pushing him with the music that they brought. He could get great players around him for like Put It In Your Ear, you know, the album that he which should have been a huge success. But all the great players now, they were session men. They weren't interested in touring anymore unless the money was really, really good, which meant you had to be really successful. So I think he kind of just floundered. And I think that's probably one of the things that kind of led to some of the problems he had with drugs and the other things that would eventually take his life.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah and you mentioned that it was sort of an end of an era for that sort of band and that sort of you know to be able to tour and you know and that comes on to will we ever see a band like that and a harmonica player with such influence as Paul Butterfield since then or you know or in the future because yeah there's lots of great harmonica players some of which I've talked to on here you know great technicians do some amazing things but to have that sort of influence that he had you know will we ever see that again and have we seen it since him?
SPEAKER_03:Well, certainly, you know, Butterfield caught lightning in the bottle. And he was there at a time when there was a huge acceptance to music in general. So he could grow and expand and let his music evolve in a lot of ways, knowing that there was still an audience there and there were people who were willing to pay to go hear it and pay to hear it on vinyl. In terms of, you know, going beyond that, I mean, to me, there hasn't been a stylist like him. There's just nothing that I could compare it to. I haven't heard anyone... who can compare to him. But I also am very aware that the environment that he played in, the environment he created that allowed him to play the way he plays, is probably unreproducible at this point. I just don't know how anyone's going to put a band together that has all these different influences and confront the band and be a great singer and then have that incredible harmonica presence that he has. So I don't know. I'm hoping that my attitude that can't be reproduced is wrong and that someone will come along. And I certainly don't know what every harmonica player in the world sounds like, but I haven't heard anything that comes close to Butterfield for the last 20 years.
SPEAKER_02:Certainly one of the greatest, there's no doubt about that. So we can't talk about Paul Butterfield without talking about his embouchure. So it's a hotly debated topic. So let's get on to that one now. So he's kind of famously a puckerer and not a tongue blocker mainly. So there's a great English player I know called Laurie Gorman. He's a massive Paul Butterfield fan and has been for a long time. So he's raised the question that he actually thinks he might have been a U-block player. And there's actually a video with Leave On Home which might back this up. I'll put a link on that and people can check it out. So do you know anything about, you know, was he possibly a U-Block player or?
SPEAKER_03:That's a great question. I do not know the answer to that question. I tend to think though, again, I'm not a U-Block player and I don't know if I can contort my tongue into that shape, but there's a method he uses a lot where he plays, he plays a lot of dirty notes. Then you have a little bit of the note to the right or the left of it. And that he uses this technique strongly drawing up on three notes and closing it up to one note to give it more of a slap, more of a traditional tongue-blocking sound. The Walters and the Sonny Boys, those guys, when they came up, you know, late 40s, 50s, they were expected to have a rhythmic presence, and you can't get that lip playing. Well, you can, but it's very difficult to get it with the same impact that you get it with tongue-blocking. You know, Butterfield always had a rhythm guitar player with him. He always had a bass player with him. He always had a drummer with him. He wasn't trying to recreate the feeling of other instruments behind a song. And then he was a flute player, so he had that embouchure of single note with the way flute players approach their instrument and the way they exhale into it. So to me, the question of whether he was a tongue blocker or a lip player, it's kind of a who cares. The music he made is, to me, it just wasn't what he heard. He had the right tool for the job. He had the tool he wanted to use, and that's the tool he used, and he didn't care if that was the traditional way or not.
SPEAKER_02:I think that question around because he played flute, obviously, that might have given him quite a unique approach to his embouchure, which, you know, the vast majority of other harmonica players don't have, right? And whether that is, I don't know what embouchure flute players use, whether it's a kind of U-block thing, I don't know. It's
SPEAKER_03:not a U-block thing, but remember, the flute is a solo, it's It's a solo note instrument. It is not a chordal instrument. If your ear is tuned to the flute, it's tuned to single notes playing, you know, in combinations. It's not slapping and courting. It's also only blow notes. Yeah, it's also, it's only blow notes, which is one of the reasons, you know, I've always felt like, you know, in my studies of Butterfield's playing, he utilized the, you know, most harmonica players will come back to rest on the two draw. I think Butterfield utilized the three blow more than the two draw. I think he did that because it let him get rid of air. And the other thing you have to remember about Butterfield, and you really see this develop over his recording career, is his vibrato. It just kills me. The way he can turn it on and off and the way he can utilize it at different levels combined with different volumes and the nuance he generates. There's nobody that's ever played like that. There's no precedent for him to have said, I'm going to go try and copy this guy. That's his own very unique thing.
SPEAKER_02:You mentioned that Walter said to him, don't abuse your body too much to play the harmonica, but I think he might have ignored that advice because the amount of effort he puts into the, like you said, the vibrato, it sounds like he's putting a lot of his body into that.
SPEAKER_03:Ben, I totally agree with you. I mean, I saw him a couple of times and every time I saw him, these guys would be wringing wet with sweat afterwards. I mean, him in particular, you know, he was just very, very forceful. I think he was probably a really, really hard blower, but he could be nuanced. I mean, if you listen to some of that Better Days stuff, Rule the Road and those kind of songs where there's just, you know, this great nuance and use of hands to shape tone and vibrato. And yeah, but yeah, I think you're right. I think he was a real heartblower.
SPEAKER_02:Just last thing on Butter then. I mean, have you got a favorite song you'd cite or is it too hard to choose? I
SPEAKER_03:feel this way about just about all music. I want to hear it live. I want to hear a live recording. The fact you can go into a studio today and, you know, through Pro Tools and whatever else, copy anything or correct any mistake or basically create whatever you want. I want to hear something live. And the live album... I still, and I'll tell you, everything's going to be all right. It just still just blows my mind every time I listen to it. I've worked for years to try and play the first solo. And I got to the point where I thought I was pretty good with it. And then I spent a couple of days listening to it through headphones and realized I hadn't even scratched the surface. So there's just so much there. There's so much in that solo. And not just from a harmonica standpoint, but the band presentation, the guitar solo that follows, everything about that song is my favorite.
SPEAKER_02:What about you? Well, it's very hard to choose. Very hard to choose. Maybe One More Heartbreak is one of my favorites, or Just To Be With You, which is a song we've talked about. Those two, probably two of my favorites. But yeah, I love them all, as I'm sure a lot of people listening do.
SPEAKER_03:Well, One More Heartbreak, that's one of the rare third position things he does too, which is really cool.
UNKNOWN:One More Heartbreak
SPEAKER_03:On that live at the Winterland, The Better Days thing, there's some great songs on there too. Some really, really great songs. And it's live, so it's worth giving a listen to.
SPEAKER_02:Thanks so much for joining again then, Tom, and telling us in more detail about Paul Butterfield. So, you know, just have you got any more plans to do anything else? Any more writing about Paul Butterfield or anything else?
SPEAKER_03:Well, I don't at the present time. I mean, I'm finding myself coming back to Butterfield in a way I really never expected to. And I'm listening to it over and over and more and more. more and appreciating it more so hopefully that'll get me you know inspired to put something put some words on paper
SPEAKER_02:yeah but but you know just remind again we talked about in the last podcast you know you've written a few articles on him and for the in the spa magazine you you wrote a couple of liner notes from a couple of his albums and you also interviewed the man himself so yeah you've certainly done some some uh deep work on him already but um he's continuing to work on on other artists aren't you and um you know you've got articles coming out in the spa magazine and
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I'm really interested in, you know, in trying to bring to the harmonica community an awareness of a lot of the guys who, you know, we might call them the old guys, the old guard, people like Steve Geiger, for example, people like Mike Stevens, who plays a completely different type of music and lives up in Canada, people like Paul Reddick, who's also a Canadian who has a deep blues vibe to his music, but is kind of a singer songwriter at the same time. There are a lot of great players that are still playing out there that, you know, it's kind of like the old downbeat days they used to have an issue where they rated musicians most favorite musicians and they had a category called talent deserving wider recognition tdwr and that's kind of the mode i've been in lately to try and give some of these people more of their just dues because they are great players
SPEAKER_02:yeah absolutely and then you've helped me get some of those guys on the podcast i'm very grateful for that you know uh mike stevens last time fantastic so yeah really grateful for the help and you're like my north american correspondence over there to help me with linking me into the into the usa and Canada, of course.
SPEAKER_03:Let me say something. You're doing a service that has inspired me to try and do what I'm doing. Some of the interviews you've done, one in particular that I can think of just comes to mind immediately is the interview with Rod Piazza where you got Rod to talk a lot about the whole blues scene in Watson, LA when he was coming up. I mean, there's a lot of cultural stuff you're unearthing in interviewing these different players that has great value. So thank you for that.
SPEAKER_02:Thanks so much for talking to me today. I'm going to help him out again. I'm sure you'll be helping me out again on future episodes.
SPEAKER_03:Neil, thank you so much. It's always a pleasure to have these conversations.
SPEAKER_02:Once again, thanks to Zydle for sponsoring the podcast. Be sure to check out their great range of harmonicas and products at www.zydle1847.com or on Facebook or Instagram at Zydle Harmonicas. Thanks for listening again and thanks once again for Tom for joining us today and sharing all his extensive knowledge about Paul Butfield. I simply leave you now with Tom's favourite butter song, Everything Gonna Be Alright.