Pantagruel's Full Review: East-West by Paul Butterfield Blues Band
Sharply bursting out of the speakers, the sound of Paul Butterfield’s harmonica was a revelation to me when I first heard “Walkin’ Blues,” the first track off the excellent East-West, as a college freshman in 1986. I had certainly heard harmonica playing before, as well as blues music, but until I listened to Paul Butterfield I don't believe I had ever heard the two go together. As one of the three B’s in The Butterfield Blues Band (along with Mike Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop), Butterfield played the harmonica as a lead instrument and held his own against the two electric guitarists. His music opened the door to my discovery of other harp-playing blues artists like Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Howlin' Wolf, men Butterfield studied under and/or played with on the Chicago blues scene. And “Walkin’ Blues” itself made me curious enough to purchase a couple of albums by Robert Johnson, the song's composer, a few months later.
I discovered East-West 20 years after its release, so I can only speculate on how groundbreaking it was. For starters, take a look at the album cover and you’ll see an inter-racial band—six cats (three wearing shades) who looked like the inspiration for the Delta House fraternity in Animal House. They were not the first inter-racial musical group, but the fact that they played a form of music so closely associated to the African-American experience made them unique. In fact, Butterfield swiped bass player Jerome Arnold and drummer Sam Lay from Howlin' Wolf's band. Then there was the fact that the band was fronted by three white boys. White British artists had been paying homage to the blues for a few years, but I don’t know of many white American artists playing the blues with this much authenticity.
After the smoking “Walkin’ Blues” comes two more she-done-me-wrong numbers, “Get Out of My Life Woman” and “I’ve Got a Mind to Give Up Living.” Like the blues itself, these songs deal with the same topic in different ways. Where the first is resilient, the latter is despondent. When Butterfield first wails "I've got a mind to give up living/And go shopping instead" you can be forgiven for asking what the heck he is singing about, until he sings the payoff: "Pick me up a tombstone/And be pronounced dead." You know you have the blues when shopping doesn't pick you up.
The music on the album just cooks. Mark Naftalin's piano is the featured instrument on the Allen Toussaint-penned "Get Out of My Life Woman," demonstrating that this was indeed a band and not a two guitar plus harmonica outfit. “All These Blues” and “Mary Mary” (written by The Monkees' Michael Nesmith!) feature crisp guitar fills while the group's take on Muddy Waters' “Two Trains Running” ("Rollin' Stone" in a swinging, alternatively titled version) adds an organ to the mix.
The above songs I mentioned are worth the price of admission, but the centerpiece of the album, jazzman Nat Adderley's “Work Song”, and the 13 minute title track which closes East-West, both instrumentals, are what make the album essential. “Work Song” is handled as the funky blues tune it is where guitars, harp, and keyboards all get a chance at extended solos.
The title cut, which is the album's lone original composition, is something else. As the title suggests, it is a meeting of East and West, where Mike Bloomfield lays down an Asian/Indian guitar lick on top of a traditional bass and drum blues groove. Elements of jazz, Middle Eastern music, and rock and roll are also incorporated making “East-West” one of the most exciting instrumentals of the blues-rock era.
For me, the lone dead spot on East-West is the slow song “Never Say No.” The guitars all but drop out on this number and the spotlight is on Butterfield’s vocals. His singing is competent enough on the mid-tempo numbers where he can fall back on the band, but it suffers when it takes center stage. He simply does not convey enough emotion in his voice to carry the song.
This edition of The Butterfield Blues Band would prove to be short-lived. Mike Bloomfield, who had been in great demand as a session musician, including an influential appearance on Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited, left the group the next year to front his own band. Butterfield chose not to replace him, thus reducing the impact of his music's two-prong lead guitars. But I suppose groups like The Butterfield Blues Band don't come along every day, so relish the music they made. East-West is an homage to the blues with a nod to guitar-driven rock and roll.
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