Sidetracked

When Elvin Bishop won a National Merit Scholarship in the 1950s, he could have gone to the college of his choice. But instead of picking a school based on its academic reputation, the future physics major based his choice on music. 

“I knew that Chicago was where the blues was,” he said in a phone interview last week.

Bishop, who rarely saw black people growing up in Iowa and Oklahoma, chose the University of Chicago, located in the heart of the city’s south side.

“The first thing I did was I made friends with the black guys that worked in the cafeteria at the college,” he said. “I found out pretty quickly they were into blues, and they started taking me around to clubs. And then I gradually got to know some of the musicians.”

For Bishop, who will perform with Little Richard and Canned Heat at the Avila Blues Fest Sunday, hanging out with those musicians proved to be the education he would need for a lifelong career in the blues.

While he had played guitar in his teens, he had no mentors.

“I basically knew a few chords when I got to Chicago,” he said. “You couldn’t hang out with black people in Oklahoma at the time. So there was no such thing as learning blues first hand there. And nobody in my family was musical. And nobody in the neighborhood played an instrument. It was kind of like the Bob Seger song: ‘Working on mysteries without any clues.’ So I did the best I could, but it’d hurt my fingers, and I’d quit for a few months. Then I’d get to looking at girls flocking around guitar players, and I’d hit it again for a while.”

The first day in Chicago, he met Paul Butterfield, who was playing blues guitar on a porch.

“It was so unusual to see a white guy interested in blues at the time, that we felt right together,” Bishop said.

Eventually, they formed the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, which would feature Butterfield’s legendary harmonica playing with Bishop’s slide and the lead guitar work of another guitar guru, Michael Bloomfield.

The band would have several brushes with other elite guitarists, including Eric Clapton and B.B. King. At a club in Greenwich Village, New York, they first heard Jimi Hendrix, a guitarist they would later jam with.

“Bloomfield went on a break,” Bishop said, “and he came back and said, ‘You’ve got to hear this guy over here. He sounds like cars crashing into trains and stuff.’ And we went over and saw him and, boy, was he a mind blower.”

While the Butterfield Blues Band had success (They played both the Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock), Bishop eventually went solo.

“I got to do maybe two songs a night that were really, really close to my heart,” he said. “The rest of the stuff was an accommodation to the desires of other people – which is good. If you’re playing with great musicians, there’s no way to find a better apprenticeship than that. But you get to thinking: ‘What if I get to play all tunes that are really close to my heart?’”

As a solo act, Bishop found success with blues songs like “Travelin’ Shoes” and “Sure Feels Good.” But his breakthrough was ironically a pop hit – “Fooled Around and Fell in Love.”

The song featured the vocals of backup singer Mickey Thomas, who would later become the lead singer of Jefferson Starship.

Another group of Bishop backup singers – the Pointer Sisters – also went on to more successful endeavors.

“What can I say – I was lucky to be able to play with all of them,” he said.

He still performs “Fooled Around and Fell In Love,” though he plays an instrumental slide guitar version. He also occasionally performs “What the Hell is Going On,” a song written on his last album about war and the murder of his daughter.

Selena Bishop, her mother (Bishop’s ex) and three others were killed in a bizarre attempt to extort money for a planned cult in 2000.

After his daughter was missing for a period of time, Elvin Bishop discovered by reading a newspaper that her remains had been found in several duffle bags.

As he dealt with the trauma of that event, Bishop relied on music as therapy.

“I think that’s what blues was originally for,” he said. “It was invented and played by people who were in an impossible position and just had to deal with it. I guess they found that being able to sing about it and do that well enough made them feel better. I was glad I had the blues at my disposal when that happened.”

Bishop is back at it, working on a new album – “The Blues Roll On” – which is set to be released in September. The album will include guests like B.B. King, George Thorogood and Derek Trucks. The album pays tribute to the bluesman – including Butterfield, Hound Dog Taylor and Junior Wells – who helped him out.

“The theme of the thing is just how the blues passes from one generation to another,” he said.  

Photo: Courtesy of Elvin Bishop

Posted on May 21st, 2008 by Pat
Filed under: Music