Al Kooper, Michael Bloomfield - The Lost Concert Tapes
Recorded 13 Dec 1968 at the Fillmore East. Johnny Winter makes his first major appearance (great introduction of Johnny Winter by Michael Bloomfield) and just blows the crowd away.
Tracks
- Introductions
- One Way Out
- Mike Bloomfield's Introduction Of Johnny Winter
- It's My Own Fault with Johnny Winter
- 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)
- (Please) Tell Me Partner
- That's All Right Mama
- Together Till The End Of Time
- Don't Throw Your Love On Me So Strong
- Season Of The Witch
Review of the album: The Lost Concert Tapes
Dead for more than two decades now, guitar giant Mike Bloomfield threatens to become a forgotten man. Keyboardist Al Kooper doesn't want to see that happen, which explains two new Kooper-fueled projects: A reissue and expanded edition of "Super Session," a key artifact of late-'60s blues rock, and "Fillmore East: The Lost Concert Tapes 12/13/68," a previously unreleased live recording that captures one of the first great white blues guitarists at the peak of his powers. The peak was brief. Bloomfield's talent would soon be diminished by the alcoholism and heroin addiction that led to his death in 1981.
Kooper is a natural caretaker for his legacy. Both he and Bloomfield were headstrong individualists who were central to several bands. Bloomfield played with the forward-looking Paul Butterfield Blues Band and his own psychedelic soul ensemble, Electric Flag. Kooper formed the Blues Project and Blood, Sweat & Tears. They started working together in the mid-'60s. Having first worked together on Bob Dylan's 1965 opus, "Highway 61 Revisited," Kooper and Bloomfield built up an easy rapport, which crystallized in 1968's "Super Session."
Studio jam sessions were old news in jazz. The notion was, however, new to rock, and the success of "Super Session," both critical and commercial, would spawn countless supergroups and jam events. Ironically, Bloomfield only appeared on the first side of the original disc. He skipped out after the first night's recording, and Stephen Stills, who'd just left Buffalo Springfield, was called in to complete the session.
The blues-rooted Bloomfield material on "Super Session" is much stronger, and much tighter. It features a rippling Albert King tribute, "Albert's Shuffle"; a sinewy Bloomfield-Kooper original, "Really"; the nine-minute free-jazz blues-rocker "His Holy Modal Majesty," featuring Kooper's bagpipe-like solos on the Ondioline, a very strange three-octave organ; and "Man's Temptation," a Curtis Mayfield-penned hit featuring a Blood, Sweat & Tears-style vocal from Kooper.
Bloomfield's playing -- confident, coherent, wickedly adventurous -- was his best since the early Butterfield Blues Band days, particularly the opening and closing sections of "Albert's Shuffle." The Stills tracks are a little more varied, but less compelling, though both the country-rockish take on Dylan's "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry" and a wildly expansive version of Donovan's "Season of the Witch" became FM radio staples.
Among three bonus tracks: "Fat Grey Cloud," a previously unreleased slow shuffle taken from 1968's "The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper," in which the Super Session studio concept was brought to the concert stage at the Fillmore West.
"12/13/68" is taken from a companion concert at the Fillmore East whose tapes were lost for almost 30 years. When they were recovered, there were all sorts of audio problems (pretty well cleaned up), as well as musical ones. In the ad hoc rhythm section, bassist Jerry Jemmott was sharp and drummer Johnny Cresci wasn't, which created less-than-cohesive readings of "59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)" and "Season of the Witch." On the other hand, Bloomfield and Kooper nail the blues-rockers, which include Elmore James's "One Way Out," Albert King's smoldering "Don't Throw Your Love on Me So Strong" and a slow-simmering Bloomfield original, "(Please) Tell Me Partner."
The treat here is Johnny Winter's first recorded performance. Bloomfield had recently come across the unknown Texas guitar slinger and was so excited he pulled Winter onstage, one song into the concert. Winter paid immediate dividends with a scorching vocal and two incendiary guitar solos on B.B. King's "It's My Own Fault."
The concert was on a Friday night; Columbia signed Winter to a recording contract Monday morning.
Thankfully, Al Kooper seems determined to rescue his former partner from obscurity, with a boxed set retrospective in the works for next year. As these two albums confirm, Bloomfield's prodigious guitar skills and musical imagination were at their peak between 1965 and 1968, when B.B. King called him his favorite young guitarist. Sadly, Bloomfield never fulfilled that early promise. As for Kooper, he's still writing, recording and touring. On Saturday, he'll give a rare solo performance at the Rams Head Tavern in Annapolis.