The Electric Flag

The Electric Flag was an American blues rock soul group, led by guitarist Mike Bloomfield, keyboardist Barry Goldberg and drummer Buddy Miles, and featuring other musicians such as vocalist Nick Gravenites and bassist Harvey Brooks. Bloomfield formed the Electric Flag in 1967, following his stint with the Butterfield Blues Band. The band reached its peak with the 1968 release, A Long Time Comin', a fusion of rock, jazz, and R&B styles that charted well in the Billboard Pop Albums chart. Their initial recording was a soundtrack for The Trip, a movie about an LSD experience by Peter Fonda, written by Jack Nicholson and directed by Roger Corman.

History

With his great appreciation for blues, soul and R&B, Mike Bloomfield wanted to create a group of his own that would feature what he called "American music." He was inspired not only by the big band blues of B.B. King, T-Bone Walker, and Guitar Slim (Eddie Jones), but also by the contemporary soul sounds of Otis Redding, Steve Cropper, Booker T & the MGs, and other Stax recording artists. He also drew inspiration from traditional country, gospel, and blues forms. Initially called the American Music Band, Bloomfield organized the band that would become known as The Electric Flag in the spring of 1967, not long after he produced a session with Chicago blues harmonica player James Cotton that featured a horn section. Bloomfield decided that his new band would also have horns and would play an amalgam of those American musics he loved.

The Electric

The Electric may refer to:

Harvey Brooks

Harvey Brooks (born Harvey Goldstein; July 4, 1944 in Manhattan, New York) is an American bassist. He has played in many styles of music (notably jazz and popular music).

Brooks came out of a New York music scene that was crackling with activity in the early 1960s. One of the younger players on his instrument, he was a contemporary of Felix Pappalardi and Andy Kulberg and other eclectic bass players in their late teens and early 20s, who saw a way to bridge the styles of folk, blues, rock, and jazz. Al Kooper gave Brooks his first boost to fame when he asked him to play as part of Bob Dylan's backing band on the sessions that yielded the album Highway 61 Revisited — in contrast to the kind of folkie-electric sound generated by the band on his previous album, Bringing It All Back Home. Producer Bob Johnson and Dylan were looking for a harder, in-your-face electric sound, and Brooks, along with guitarist Michael Bloomfield and organist Al Kooper, provided exactly what was needed on one of the most famous recordings of the 1960s.

Mike Bloomfield

Michael Bernard "Mike" Bloomfield (July 28, 1943 – February 15, 1981) was an American musician, guitarist, and composer, born in Chicago, Illinois, who became one of the first popular music superstars of the 1960s to earn his reputation almost entirely on his instrumental prowess, since he rarely sang before 1969 and 1970. Respected for his fluid guitar playing, Bloomfield knew and played with many of Chicago's blues legends even before he achieved his own fame, and was one of the primary influences on the mid-to-late 1960s revival of classic Chicago and other styles of blues music. In 2003 he was ranked at number 22 on Rolling Stone's "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" and 42nd in 2011 by the same magazine. He was inducted in the Blues Hall of Fame in 2012 and with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2015.

Early years

Bloomfield was born into a wealthy Jewish-American family on the North Side of Chicago but preferred music to the family catering equipment business, becoming a blues devotee as a teenager and spending time at Chicago's South Side blues clubs, playing guitar with some black bluesmen (Sleepy John Estes, Yank Rachell, Little Brother Montgomery). Bloomfield's family eventually moved to suburban Glencoe, Illinois, where Bloomfield attended New Trier High School for two years before being expelled. He attended Cornwall Academy in Massachusetts for one year before returning to Chicago where he spent his last year at the local YMCA school.

Michael Bloomfield

Michael Bloomfield may refer to: