In `65 Dylan closed the Newport Festival with Bloomfield and the rest of the band sans Butterfield.
“As far as I know, no one else out there plays like this…The guy that I always miss, and I think he`d still be around if he stayed with me, actually , was Mike Bloomfield. He could just flat out play. He had so much soul. And he knew all the styles, and he could play them so incredibly well.” Dylan 2009

That`s Bloomfield rocking out on Dylan`s Highway 61 album and in many senses Bloomfield paved the way for a multitude of great guitarists and bands. Here`s a video featuring a young Bloomfield interview PLUS the impossibly idiosyncratic slide sound, and equally impossibly desperate, twisted voice of blues legend Son House – soaked in tragedy, piss, blood, sweat and tears. Its Butterfield on the gob iron (harmonica). DIG…man!

Tomorrow I`m going to focus on Son House – who influenced Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. Remember it`s a mystic thing people…you either got it or you aint.

Cheers,

Jake Edwards

Before Fleetwood Mac turned into a prog-rock-pop outfit they produced some awesome guitar based rock and blues music and I recommend having a listen to their album “Then Play On” from 1969. The band featured the combined and unmistakenly powerful guitar talents of Danny Kirwan and Peter Green.

Green`s unique tone from reversed pick up magnets in his neck position pick up combined with his distinctive hummingbird vibrato and Kirwan`s tremelo, sense of melody and song based approach to composition certainly gave Fleetwood Mac something haunting.

Compare this with the characteristically fragile power and awesome vibrato and unique phrasing of Paul Kossoff with Free featuring Paul Rodgers – probably the best white voice in rock music. With a guitar in his hands Paul Kossoff has got it all and you can hear inspired timing in free-fall, nuanced accents, soaring string bending (in reminiscence of Hendrix, and Albert, B.B., & Freddie King too…), razor tones and birdflight melodics.

Finally have a listen to another understated and under-rated blues guitar giant in the form of the melodically and stylistically incandescent Mick Taylor with the Stones who seems to combine a sense of timing, phrasing, and melody in a way aeons beyond the usual; fluid, stylistically overloaded, leagues of tone, emotional, exciting, uncomplicated and thoroughly meaningful all within the context of the song structure. Mesmerising. It`s Bobby Keys on sax`.

Cheers

Jake Edwards