“F A T H E R S  A N D  S O N S”

The Chicago Blues Reunion Brings it all back

On May 30th, 2003, survivors of Chicago’s white Blues scene of the 1960s reunited for a one-time only appearance at the Chicago Blues Festival. Mayor Richard Daley’s office personally invited leading lights Barry Goldberg, Harvey Mandel, Nick Gravenites, Charlie Musselwhite, Corky Siegel, Jim Schwall and Howlin’ Wolf’s great drummer, Sam Lay, “king of the double shuffle.” Both fans and critics took notice. So did Out The Box Records who signed the key performers to a two record deal and staged the filming of a Chicago blues anthology

The film

This is a film about Chicago when it shook with fathers like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and sons like Mike Bloomfield, Paul Butterfield, Nick Gravenites, Harvey Mandel, Charlie Musselwhite and Barry Goldberg.

CBR will be filmed in concert in High Definition. Portions of their live performances will be interspersed throughout the 90 minute film. Iterviews with Gravenites, Mandel, Musselwhite, Goldberg and company, the “sons,” as well as other colorful characters who were part of the Chicago scene are also planned. Guys like Bob Koester, of the Jazz Record Mart (and founder of Delmark Records) and one of the very first whites to venture down to the clubs on the south side.

“Fathers” like Waters, Wolf and Big Joe Willliams are long gone. However, second generation Bluesmen like Buddy Guy, Otis Rush and James Cotton are very much alive. We’ll interview them as they were at the center of this scene. B.B. King will also be included, though not Chicago-based, played uptown clubs like Mr. Kelly’s and the Regal Theater, where he recorded the greatest live Blues record ever made, “Live at the Regal.”

Rich archival footage of Chicago and the south side scene of those years exists and will be pulled together for the film. Raconteurs like Gravenites and Musselwhite will take us back to that time when they toiled away and learned at the feet of the masters of the electric Blues while caught up in the myths spun from Robert Johnson and his deal with the devil.

Interviews with Bloomfield (deceased) show his colorful storytelling. His memorable appearance in the 1965 film, “Festival,” shows him as the “brash Jew-boy,” the young hot shot guitar star. It is juxtaposed with the great Son House talking of the “deal you got to make with yourself… whether you go this way with the lord… or that way with the devil.”

Rae Flerlage’s iconic and evocative photographs of this rich vibrant scene are searing. Sam Lay has wonderful color home movies of Muddy, Little Walter, Jimmy Reed (Big Boss Man) hanging out in the clubs, dressed to the nines, purple jackets, processed hair, flashy guitars … menacing.

And there’s much more.

The film will contrast the whites of the Chicago Blues scene with their London counterparts. Where the British Blues Rock musicians went on to mega-stardom, largely defining Rolling Stone magazine’s Rock culture of the '60s and '70s, the Chicagoans mostly committed themselves to playing the Blues, staying close to it and the classic music. It was a life sentence. Some survived. Some didn’t. Gravenites speaks eloquently of this.

The participants will tell the story without a narrator or host.

The film will get inside these uncompromising and undiminished lives—then and now. At hand is a rare opportunity to tell the story that’s never been told about an important and overlooked chapter in American music. A story of whites and blacks making music together.

The film will close with a live concert featuring The Chicago Blues Reunion Band with special guests who are some of the most famous living legends in music today, of course playing in Chicago, the town which made this all famous!

Background

The story is that of a long ago time and place—a vanished America—where a confluence of events led to an utterly, almost unworldly, music-making phenomena that could never happen again.

It’s a story of great black men who played deep soul music and the young white boys whose lives they impacted. Some for better… others for the worse. Not everyone gets out of this story alive.

World War II brought the great migration north from the Mississippi delta and hundreds of thousands of African Americans looking for a better life. Mostly, they’d been laborers; some worked the fields, others drove tractors. They played music on Saturday nights at the local jook joint. They were hard living men who learned the Blues directly from mythic figures like Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Son House, Sonny Boy Williamson and Peetie Wheatstraw, the high sheriff from hell.

Firmly planted in the big windy city of Chicago by the late 1940s and working part-time jobs in the steel mills, they’d begun to have some success with their music. McKinley Morganfield, now known as Muddy Waters, was cutting his first sides for the Aristocrat label, which would become Chess Records. With the help of Waters, Chester Burnett, now known as Howlin’ Wolf, was having his own success, too. These men had created menacing, larger than life personas through their music: the hoochie koochie man who was a rollin’ stone, the crawling kingsnake, smokestack lightening, a natural born lover who could have his way with women, forty days and forty nights.

Growing up in Chicago in the ‘50s, was a small handful of mostly middle class white kids who, like the rest of America, were captivated by Rock and Roll and Elvis Presley. But they’d also discovered in their own city, performers who’d created the blue print for Elvis Presley. Artists laying down something much deeper!

By the late ‘50s, Bloomfield, Butterfield, Gravenites, Goldberg, Schwall, Musselwhite and others began venturing to the rough and tumble south side Blues clubs. Bars, they were. This was another world where white people didn’t go. Initially, they were entirely unprepared for this milieu. Frightened as they were, they were mesmerized by this alien world. In time, through their love of the music, respect for the masters and dedication to playing the music honestly, they would get up on the bandstand and play with the great men. They held their own!

Bloomfield was a rich Jewish kid with a fast mouth and faster fingers. Butterfield, an Irish catholic, fashioned himself after these men, the ghetto black, and played the role of a hoodlum who just might pull a gun on you. He also played harmonica, and before long, with a force and soulfulness like no one had ever heard. Gravenites, a Greek, could sing and shout the Blues with the best of them. He was a big man, a University of Chicago student who was attracted to the Beats as well as the gangster life. He and his buddies occasionally pulled hold-ups. These young men were social misfits crossing the line.

Indeed, Muddy came to look on Butterfield as an adopted son. “Yep, that’s my boy.” For B.B. King, Bloomfield was the son he never had.

The Civil Rights movement had yet to hit its stride but the racial and cultural mix that was taking place in Chicago had never occurred in the history of America. Sure, whites and blacks had played Jazz together for decades, but this was a very different world where hard drinking Bluesmen were taking young white kids under their wing in the ghetto, a fearsome place where white people had no place whatsoever.

At the same time as the Chicago scene was beginning to heat up around 1961-‘62, across the ocean young musicians like Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger were into the same thing. The CBR "sons" were there too. Harvey Mandel jumped oceans to play in the original John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers Band with Eric Clapton sharing guitar solos, played in Canned Heat at Woodstock and later joining the Rolling Stones on lead guitar only to be bumped by current member Ron Wood. Barry Goldberg went on to produce with Bob Dylan and later producing the first Ramones record and soul great Percy Sledge.

But where the British musicians soaked it up via mail order records, the Chicago guys lived and breathed it first hand. Mike Bloomfield and his rebel friends plugged themselves directly into this other world of Blues music and Blues people. It was nothing like London’s budding mod scene on Carnaby Street where young Eric Clapton teased his hair and wore flowery shirts.

At Pepper’s or at the Blue Flame, if you could get up on stage and "cut ‘im," you could stay. Otherwise, you skulked out hoping to survive. It was an unforgiving environment.

Paul Butterfield formed his first Blues band in 1962. Elvin Bishop was the lead guitar player. By ’64, Bloomfield, now a virtuoso guitarist, joined. Their signature song would become Gravenites’ “Born in Chicago.”

I was born in Chicago, 1941, my dad said son you had better get
yourself a gun

Well my first friend went down when I was seventeen years old

Butterfield and Bloomfield were the original Blues brothers. Gravenites, the older one who taught the ropes.

Barry Goldberg and guitarist Steve Miller formed the shortlived Miller Goldberg Blues Band. Charlie Musselwhite; the South Side Sound System, which Goldberg would soon join along with an utterly unique guitarist, Harvey Mandel. Corky Siegel and Jim Schwall teamed up as the Siegel Schwall Blues Band. These bands mostly used black rhythm sections made up of players from the great men’s bands.

With Howlin’ Wolf’s rhythm section, the Butterfield Blues Band would come to play the Blues with such an authority, ferocity and muscle that they swept the national underground music scene of the mid-1960s. These young white Chicago musicians played a man’s music and they came to play it like men. This wasn’t music for teenyboppers.