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THE DEVIL AND ROBERT JOHNSON
Two days before he died in February 1981, Michael Bloomfield was interviewed by a pair of San Francisco radio producers, Tom Yates and Kate Hayes, who were gathering information from rock 'n' roll guitarists for a syndicated radio series on the evolution of rock guitar.
"Robert Johnson is a brand-new thing," Yates began his question, which swiftly became a statement that spelled out some of his notions about the origins of rock guitar. "When we first came up with the concept of the show, I ran into my library and I grabbed two Robert Johnson albums and a Charlie Christian record, and tried to find Django Reinhardt, and said, 'This is probably where we'll start.' And what's happened, because we've been talking to people who are all rock- and blues-based, [is] that Robert Johnson comes through like a bell. Amazing people. You expect it from Clapton; I didn't expect it from Ted Nugent."
"Oh, I would," Bloomfield replied, to Yates's obvious surprise. "I would expect it from Teddy, or from [Eddie] Van Halen. Sure, of course. They know. Why wouldn't they know? Ted, he's a Detroiter; he must have come up through Clapton. If he had gotten the first John Mayall record with Clapton playing on it, the Blues Breakers record, he does Robert Johnson songs on it. It's in the liner notes. Why wouldn't he know that? I'm not saying that he was a folkie, or even a bluesman. But I'm not surprised."
Hayes gamely continued to question Bloomfield about Johnson: "What was it about Robert Johnson that makes him so vital?" she asked.
"I'll tell you a bunch of things about him, all right?" Bloomfield said. "First, musically: Robert invented some of the guitar licks that are still used today. It was like [bluegrass musician] Earl Scruggs invented a style of banjo out of nowhere. I mean, guys who played before him just didn't sound like that. He was a banjo player who — out of I don't know what, out of his mind, with no antecedents — discovered this style of banjo.
"Robert Johnson had many influences, but he discovered certain guitar licks that were uniquely his, and that are still used today. That sort of boogie-bass guitar [Bloomfield sang the lick from Elmore James's "Dust My Broom"] — that's his! No one did it before him. He just thought it up one day. It's not a big thing. But it became a style that's all Elmore James ever played, that's all Homesick James ever played, that's all the original Fleetwood Mac guys ever played, except when Peter [Green] was playing like B. B. King. It was a definite thing.
"Now, Robert was the stuff that myths are made of. This was a guy who hung around all the blues singers who were making popular records at that time, as I did when I was his age, and couldn't play worth a damn. He'd always try to sit in, and they'd say, 'Sure, let him play.' And he couldn't play. He would almost be retarded in his ability to play music, and he was so shy, so painfully shy all his life, that he could barely get the request out to ask could he sit in and play.
"And these musicians were travelers, and they would leave the area where Robert lived, and they would go away. They came back a year later, and Robert again would ask to play, and he still couldn't play. Two years passed — and I've heard this from four bluesmen who knew Robert Johnson intimately in his younger days — and they came back, and Robert could not only play, he could outplay them. He could outplay the guys that he could not even vaguely imitate two years prior.
"So, as it's been told to me — and this sounds so strange, but a lot of southern people believe this — it's been told to me that they say that Robert sold his soul to the devil. He went to a fork in the roads, a crossroads, and he put his guitar down there and he made a deal with the devil, that the devil would give him the ability to be good with women, good with gambling, good with the guitar. He could take him at a young age and let him burn in hell. And the devil said that was a good deal.
"And if you've ever listened to songs like 'Stagger Lee,' or any songs that are about that, it's usually a moral tale about the devil making a deal with someone for powers for his soul. And Robert made that deal, and all these guys who told me this — Johnny Shines, Sunnyland Slim, Muddy Waters, Elmore James — were four men who distinctly told me the same tale of Robert selling his soul to the devil, though I think Muddy had heard it from someone, because he was even younger than Robert Johnson. He learned from Robert when he was a young man. But Johnny was an absolute contemporary of Robert's, the same age, and they hung around together.
"So Robert got amazingly good, and he had a chance to make some records for Columbia Records, and he did, and they were just superb records. Some people say they're the greatest country blues records of all. I don't know if I really agree with that, but you can hear a young man with an amazing amount of young man's energy, the kind of thing that you would find in early Pete Townshend or early Elvis, or in any young man who's really burning up his energy. And you can hear this in Robert's records; it just leaps off [at] you from the turntable.
"There's various discrepancies about what age he was, but everybody agrees that he didn't live past thirty. He recorded about sixty-something sides, and he was killed. Apparently, if you pay credence [to] selling your soul to the devil, the devil collected his dues real early. So that's probably why many musicians know who Robert is. Maybe they just know him from the musical standpoint. Maybe they know that Clapton listened to him, maybe they know Muddy Waters listened to him. But I know him as this entire mythic creature. The thing that interests me most of all is that I've seen this one photograph of Robert Johnson. He was a really handsome man. Very gentle-looking fellow.
"You know, there's a story about how shy he was. He was in a recording studio, and he couldn't face the engineer. There was a band of Mexican musicians, and they came in, and the engineer said they had never heard blues, and they had very seldom seen black performers play. He said, 'Would you let them watch you?' And Robert finished the entire session facing the wall. He couldn't look at them, or allow the musicians or the engineer to watch him play. It was done in a hotel room, and he put the mike in the corner and he sat facing away from them. They could hear him, but he was too shy to let them see him play. And this very shyness that he had, which is the opposite of the way he was when he was in front of a paying crowd in a honky-tonk or a nightclub, or at a fish fry, and even less so around women. So that's what I know about Robert Johnson."
About seventeen minutes into the interview — Yates and Hayes said the session ran overtime, and that they had made plans to return to talk again a few days later — Yates asked Bloomfield what Robert Johnson songs he would recommend to "expose young kids to."
"I would say 'Dust My Broom' or 'Sweet Home Chicago' — the whole Jimmy Reed beat on guitar came from those songs," Bloomfield said. "I would say that for its musicological import. I would say 'Come On in My Kitchen' for its absolute feeling and sensitivity. 'Hellhound on My Trail' — it's not only sensitive, but it's actually tortured. You get this idea, maybe this guy really did think he sold his soul to the devil. You can hear this in so many of his lyrics, this thought that someone's chasing after him: blue ghosts, devils, hellhounds. And then a song called 'Me and the Devil [Blues].' It's fierce. It sounds like someone just terror stricken trying to run away from whatever's getting him."
In the 1930s Robert Johnson lived in a Mississippi so alien to our times that it might as well have been Africa. In twenty-first-century America we do not experience hellhounds as a reality. Fear and anxiety are as much a part of our times as they were of Robert Johnson's, but we don't personify them; we treat them. An intelligent, well-read man from the Jewish upper middle class could not possibly share even a modicum of the experience that haunted Robert Johnson, or so we tell ourselves, and to sell one's soul to the devil, one has to believe that the transaction is possible.
Michael Bloomfield was not Robert Johnson. That is not the point of the story. But his identification with Johnson's fear was real. So was his concern for his soul. Let's just put it this way: Satan is irrelevant to this story; Robert Johnson is not.
CHAPTER 2FATHERS AND SONS
Michael Bloomfield's father, Harold Bloomfield, was already a prosperous man by the time he married Dorothy Klein in 1940. Born in Chicago in 1914, Harold Bloomfield had gone into business with his father, Samuel, and his brother, Daniel, in the 1930s. The previous decade, Samuel had made and lost several fortunes in California, where he tried his hand at several business ventures with his brother-in-law, Simon Wexler. Returning to Chicago during the early years of the Great Depression, Samuel had an epiphany that would lead to the formation of Bloomfield Industries.
"He saw a pie case in a diner," Michael's brother Allen says. "They had zinc-cast uprights, and they attached to the bottom of the counter. The case's rear-hinged door would open so that you could slide in the pies." Seeing an opportunity in the business of merchandising pies and desserts, Samuel bought the patent and rented space in a factory. By 1933 he was manufacturing pie cases in a two-thousand-square-foot facility in Chicago. With capitalization provided by Samuel, Harold Bloomfield was in charge of putting the cases together, and his brother sold them. Later in the decade, they began manufacturing kitchen utensils, salt and pepper shakers, and the classic domed sugar pourer with the little flag over the hole. By the time World War II started, the Bloomfields had moved their operations to a fifty-five-thousand-square-foot building.
During World War II Bloomfield Industries manufactured items for the war effort, including stainless steel partitioned trays and disposable can openers that soldiers used with their K rations. Suitably capitalized by government contracts, Bloomfield Industries possessed surplus equipment after the war ended, and they expanded their operations rapidly. By this point, Bloomfield Industries manufactured over a thousand items, including transportation equipment, serving ware, and cookware. The items were, and continue to be, marked on the bottom with a "B" in a circle and the word "Chicago." After Samuel Bloomfield died in 1954, Harold and Daniel took over the business, and it was Harold's aggressive management that pushed it to the forefront.
Michael Bloomfield's mother, Dorothy Klein, was born in Chicago in 1918, into an artistic family. "My mother's parents were born in Czechoslovakia, and her whole family was interested in music," she said years later, after her son became famous. "Most were violinists. They played Hungarian music, and they were all very talented. My mother was an actress, and my aunt was a very fine pianist." After graduating from Chicago's well-regarded Goodman School of Drama, Dorothy modeled and acted. She was an exceptionally beautiful woman — Allen Bloomfield describes his mother as "a Hedy Lamarr duplicate" — and she took advantage of her looks and her theatrical training by becoming a model for Wrigley chewing gum and Jantzen swimwear. She also acted on radio and with touring theatrical companies.
"She was living a good, safe life, and she was highly sought after because she was so beautiful," Allen Bloomfield says about his mother before she married Harold Bloomfield. "She was an artist, and she thought in an artistic way, and a certain practicality was not always readily accessible to her." On the other hand, Harold Bloomfield was an ambitious businessman whose eye seems always to have been on the main chance. "My father had been very highly disciplined, and had a really incredible drive and work ethic, and he was very virile," Allen says. "Whether he employed one person or he employed seven hundred, you had a measure as to what your value was, as far as capabilities. And he was grounded completely in the reality of measurability."
Allen Bloomfield says that his parents had different ideas about everything from running a household to raising children, and if Michael Bloomfield inherited his father's work ethic — no one ever toiled more diligently at becoming a great musician than he did — it could be that a certain practicality was no more accessible to him than Allen Bloomfield says it was to their mother. The tension between his need for artistic expression and its application in the rough-and-tumble world of the music business would mark Michael Bloomfield's career from start to finish.
* * *
Michael Bernard Bloomfield was born on July 28, 1943, at Chicago's Michael Reese Hospital, which had been founded in 1881. It was a leading research and teaching hospital, and one of its facilities, the Simon Wexler Psychiatric Research and Clinic Pavilion, had been named for Bloomfield's uncle, a noted philanthropist and businessman. Michael's brother, Allen David, was born seventeen months later, on December 24, 1944, also at Michael Reese Hospital.
The family lived in various locations in Chicago before settling at 424 West Melrose Street on the North Side, close to Lake Shore Drive, the main thoroughfare of Chicago's affluent Gold Coast area. The kids attended Nettelhorst Elementary School on North Broadway Street. It was a lively neighborhood for the two boys to explore, as Allen Bloomfield remembers. "Going west [on Melrose], your next main street running north and south would be Broadway, and Broadway was sort of a commercial street," he says. "On one corner you had ABC Toyland, a place where they sold sodas and hot dogs and had comic books and just everything you might imagine." Michael and Allen rode their sturdy Schwinn bicycles around the area, and the brothers took different approaches to maintaining them — Allen meticulously polished the bell on his and parked it by using its kickstand, while Michael would simply abandon his on the ground after he finished his ride.
The family was wealthy, but Allen says he and Michael weren't aware of their position in Chicago society. "We didn't think in terms that we lived in a nine-room apartment on the higher floor in relation to somebody living in a two-family house," he remembers. Still, there was plenty for an observant child to notice in a sprawling city composed of neighborhoods demarcated by economic status and ethnicity.
"Even on the block before you got to Broadway there were some small two-family apartment buildings, and in these little apartment buildings you would have the first taste of immigrants," Allen says. "There were gypsies, and there were Hispanic people. I don't remember seeing black families on our block or even on the blocks that surpassed [Broadway] going west. You'd have to go quite a bit west to find that. But there were people who came in from Virginia or Tennessee, and they kind of filled in the demographics."
Michael developed asthma when he was about one and a half years old, and the family went to Tucson, Arizona, to take advantage of the arid climate. Michael's asthma cleared up, and he and Allen enjoyed a vigorous, mobile childhood that was marked by summers at Colorado dude ranches and winters in Miami, where they would stay long enough for the boys to be enrolled in schools there.
When Michael was twelve, the family moved to Glencoe, a wealthy suburb on the North Shore of Chicago with a large Jewish population. "We moved to Glencoe because I thought that the schooling would be better there," Michael's mother later remembered. "That was the biggest mistake of my life. [Michael] should have been in a highly progressive school. We put him in the wrong schools. Glencoe was a very wealthy area, and their standard was: you had to conform. God forbid you should be a nonconformist. And Mike was a nonconformist."