For more than four decades, blues great
ELVIN BISHOP has stayed in the groove.
By Jim Steinblatt
Few artists in the blues idiom have made music as consistently joyful as singer-songwriter-guitarist Elvin Bishop. Best-known for his mid-Seventies smash, "Fooled Around and Fell in Love" and titles like "Let It Flow," "Travelin' Shoes" and "Stealin' Watermelons," the Iowa-born and Oklahomaraised Bishop first attracted notice as one of the guitarists in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band (among the original electric white blues bands) in the Sixties. A decade later his solo career took off as his good-time guitar-based music and Oklahoma accent meshed with the Southern Rock explosion that also made stars of The Allman Brothers Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Wet Willie). In more recent decades, Bishop has been a mainstay of the blues club circuit, issuing recordings that remain true to his grinning blues style. In the year 2000, however, Bishop's world was shaken to its core when his 22 year-old daughter fell victim to a brutal murder. Though he continued to perform, he recorded no new music until his recent Gettin' My Groove Back (Blind Pig Records). In a telephone interview from his San Francisco Bay Area home, Bishop reflected on his music career and new album.
Playback: When did you first take an interest in music?
Elvin Bishop: I first started listening to music as a teenager, when Rock & Roll was just starting up in about 1955 or '56 � Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and Fats Domino. I was kind of at that critical age and the pop music I heard before that wasn't much of a thrill, to be honest. I had a big old radio I used to fool with as a hobby in Tulsa. It's flat and on the prairie there, so late at night you would get programs from far, far away, even from Alaska. But I got a station from Nashville, Tennessee and they were playing blues and I just thought "Oh boy, that's it." I found out where a good part of Rock & Roll was coming from and I jumped headlong into the blues and started searching for it, finding out who played it and where it was coming from and how I could hear more.
Did you start playing the guitar early on?
Yeah, I started trying to play guitar pretty early. But nobody in my family was musical and we didn't have much money so I always ended up with these pawnshop guitars where the strings are two inches off the fingerboard. It was pretty hard getting anything going — as Bob Seger sang: "Working on mysteries without any clues." I stuck with it and anytime I would find anybody who knew anything at all about blues I would try and paint �em in a corner and get �em to show me stuff. When it really busted loose was when I got to Chicago. I went to the University of Chicago (to study Physics) and, really, it was just a way to get to where the blues was. But the family wants to see you in school. It was the luckiest thing that ever happened because the University of Chicago is located on an island in the middle of the South Side ghetto, where the blues was. Blues was like rap is now. There were, without exaggerating, 200 blues clubs in Chicago. And all the classic Chicago blues guys were in their prime — Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, Hound Dog Taylor, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, Otis Rush, Magic Sam, all of �em.
Was the Butterfield Band the first band you were involved with?
No, I actually played with Junior Wells for a couple of weeks and with Hound Dog Taylor for a while before I got in the Butterfield band. I met Butterfield the first day I was in Chicago and we played acoustically at parties and jam sessions all along, but he didn't form his band until three of four years after I met him.
Was there a particular idea behind the Butterfield band? It was unusual because there weren't that many white blues bands at the time.
I don't think there were any. But, we basically just wanted to be like our heroes — and our heroes were Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Jimmy Reed and Howlin' Wolf. We just wanted to play blues and it was not at all calculated to be any kind of a commercial success. There weren't any white guys playing acoustic blues that I knew of. This was 1960 — there were the white acoustic guys playing folk and some of that included a little blues. Blues was starting to sneak into the mass American consciousness, via the folk music scene. There was Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and they were rediscovering some of these old guys like Mississippi John Hurt and Son House. Basically, though, there was this great big beautiful body of music — the Blues — and a huge white public and they hadn't met each other at all. I think I was lucky enough to be in the Butterfield Blues Band because that was the vehicle that in large part brought the two together.
Was the reason for leaving the Butterfield Band so you could perform your own material?
Yes, there were no hard feelings whatsoever. It was the natural course of things. Instead of doing two or three songs that are really close to my heart every night, I could do pretty much all of them.
To me, you have always seemed to be one of those artists, like Fats Domino, who sounds happy even when singing a sad song.
Another in that vein was Jimmy Reed. I believe that's why they both crossed over so well. They were just bubbling over with the joy of life.
And you broke through for the same reasons. Your albums for the Capricorn label in the 1970s like Let It Flow and Struttin' My Stuff were all over FM rock stations back then. You were on the same label as the Allman Brothers Band and were considered part of the Southern Rock explosion.
I think the Southern Rock era was the only time there was a pigeonhole they could cram me into � a media-approved slot. Before and after that I was just for the maniacs who like my kind of stuff.
Those early songs are still generating activity, aren't they?
The tunes are getting into all kinds of movies. Just last week, I spoke with someone who is going to use my song, "Stealing Watermelons," in a slot machine for casinos! And "Fooled Around and Fell in Love" is in the new film, The Family Stone.
