Northern California Folk-Rock Festival, Santa Clara County Fairgrounds, San Jose, CA, 5-19-1968, Part 1 - The Electric Flag

This is the sixth album out of seven albums I'm posting from the 1968 Northern California Folk-Rock Festival. This set features the Electric Flag.

Up until now, all of the albums I've posted from this festival took place on May 18, 1968. But this one (and the last one I'll be posting) took place on May 19th. That's why I'm calling this "Part 1" in the title, instead of "Part 6," because it's Part 1 of May 19th.

I said quite a lot in my write-up for the first album I posted from this festival, the Youngbloods set. I recommend you read that, because most of that applies to this set too. Most importantly, note that this is sourced from an audience bootleg, so the sound quality isn't up to my usual standards. I had to do a lot of work to fix all sorts of flaws. The final results sounds pretty decent for a 1968 concert, in my opinion, but you need to be tolerant about the flaws that still remain.

In some previous write-ups I've done for this festival, I extensively quoted a review of this concert from the San Francisco Examiner. It didn't say much about the music, but the reviewer highlighted a few favorite performers. In addition to calling the Steve Miller Band "astonishing", it said "Mike Bloomfield and Buddy Miles in the Electric Flag, Jerry Garcia's guitar with the Grateful Dead, and the blues of Taj Mahal were also outstanding over the weekend." 

I couldn't find much written about this festival on the Internet. However, I found a now defunct website that had some commentary about this performance. It starts with an extensive quote by an unnamed person who attended the concert: 

"In the mid-afternoon onstage came the Electric Flag, a group I was aware of but had never heard. I didn't know what to expect as the bunch of them hemmed and hawed and fumbled around the stage for a bit, distractedly looking around and mumbling with each other. After a few minutes of this, [Nick Gravenites] came downstage and announced from a vocal mic, ‘Hey, Mike, if you can hear me, come on, man! It’s time to play. Drop the chick and get your ass up here ... now!’ Another minute went by [and] all of a sudden this lanky, frizzy-haired freak came running onstage, laughing and grabbing up his guitar. He then proceeded to burn his memory into my head forever."

Here's an archival link of the whole article: 

Electric Flag: An American Music Band 

This band was talented, but maybe too talented, because different creative members wanted to go in different directions. It turned out this was one of the band's last concerts. The band's stellar lead guitarist Mike Bloomfield quit the band about a week later. However, the band still had more concerts they had already booked. Bloomfield played a few more shows into early June before quitting for good. The rest of the band broke up not long after that.

As I've mentioned previously, I did extensive work trying to rescue these songs from poor sound quality. Two of the songs in this set had special problems, which is why they have "[Edit]" in their titles. In the original version, there was a short gap in the middle of "Hey Joe." I patched it up. And about the last minute of "Texas" was missing. So I filled that in with another version from a different bootleg.

 This album is 43 minutes long. 

01 Soul Searchin' [Instrumental] (Electric Flag)
02 Groovin' Is Easy (Electric Flag)
03 Hey Joe [Edit] (Electric Flag)
04 Sweet Home Chicago (Electric Flag)
05 Killin' Floor (Electric Flag)
06 Texas [Edit] (Electric Flag)
07 Another Country (Electric Flag)
08 Wine (Electric Flag)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/Eqw8pS64

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/48IWSe0AjgAPFKL/file

The cover photo of Mike Bloomfield is from this exact concert. The original was in black and white, but I colorized it with the help of the Kolorize program.  

The Paul Butterfield Blues Band with Muddy Waters - The Fillmore, San Francisco, CA, 10-2-1966

Here's a really great concert by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. At the time, the band was firing on all cylinders with Paul Butterfield on harmonica and Mike Bloomfield playing lead guitar. (Bloomfield would leave for a solo career a year later.) But what really kicks this concert to the next level is that the blues legend Muddy Waters joined them to sing two songs for an encore.

Lucky for us, promoter Bill Graham was running the Fillmore venue at the time, and he often recorded the concerts there. So this is an excellent sounding soundboard, despite the fact that it's still unreleased.

The only problem with this recording was the song "East-West." This is a truly great instrumental, on the cutting edge of improvisational rock in 1966. Each time the band played it, it came out quite differently, so much so that there's an official release just consisting of different versions of this song. Unfortunately, most versions of this song that I've come across get cut off before the song finishes, probably because the song was so long that the tape would run out. That's the case here, with this 18-minute-long version. So I found a different version and added the last 15 seconds or so from that to this version, just long enough to give it a proper finish. That's why this one song has "[Edit]" in its title.

I believe Muddy Waters and his band was on the same bill as the Butterfield Blues Band. At the time, the Fillmore often added musical acts to concerts that weren't just the usual rock acts, to help give the audience a musical education. So that's why there was a cross over, with Muddy Waters joining in for a couple of songs.

This album is 58 minutes long. 

01 Shake Your Money Maker (Paul Butterfield Blues Band)
02 The Sky Is Crying (Paul Butterfield Blues Band)
03 talk (Paul Butterfield Blues Band)
04 Oh Pretty Woman (Paul Butterfield Blues Band)
05 Help Me (Paul Butterfield Blues Band)
06 Never Say No (Paul Butterfield Blues Band)
07 talk (Paul Butterfield Blues Band)
08 You're So Fine (Paul Butterfield Blues Band)
09 talk (Paul Butterfield Blues Band)
10 East-West [Instrumental] [Edit] (Paul Butterfield Blues Band)
11 talk by Bill Graham (Paul Butterfield Blues Band & Muddy Waters)
12 Clouds in My Heart [Edit] (Paul Butterfield Blues Band & Muddy Waters)
13 talk (Paul Butterfield Blues Band & Muddy Waters)
14 I Got My Mojo Working (Paul Butterfield Blues Band & Muddy Waters)
15 Closing Theme [Instrumental] (Paul Butterfield Blues Band & Muddy Waters)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/KgY5ip8K

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/vg3LnwD0AJhMLnZ/file

The cover image shows Paul Butterfield playing harmonica on the left and Mike Bloomfield playing guitar on the right. It was taken in New York City, probably in 1966.

Our Final Week - The Closing of the Fillmore West, Fillmore West, San Francisco, CA, 7-4-1971, Part 4: Santana & Mike Bloomfield

Here's the fourth set from the fifth day out of five days of concerts that closed the Fillmore West venue in San Francisco in 1971. (See my write-up on the Boz Scaggs set for general information about the closing.) This set is kind of a continuation of the previous set by Santana. But it's separate from that because the band was joined by lead guitarist Mike Bloomfield all the way through. Plus, there were other guests. Most notably, Van Morrison showed up near the end to sing his song "I've Been Working."

This essentially was one long jam. I broke the music into two tracks, but the song "I've Been Working" sort of emerged from the jam without a clear break. I also don't know if the name of the jam, "Feel It Jam," means anything. I just copied that name from a bootleg.

I don't know who else performed on these jams, though it's a good bet there were others. If anyone knows, please let me know. If I recall correctly, at one point, someone on stage mentioned the name John Cipollina, so I figure he was involved. He had been one of the lead guitarists for Quicksilver Messenger Service, but he'd quit the band about six months prior to this concert. So probably this was a way for him to be involved in the final Fillmore West concerts without taking part in the Quicksilver Messenger Service performance the night before.

This music was followed by another jam session featuring some different performers. That'll be the final set from this series of concerts. 

This album is 45 minutes long. 

01 Feel It Jam [Instrumental] (Santana & Michael Bloomfield)
02 I've Been Working (Van Morrison, Santana & Michael Bloomfield)
03 talk (Santana) 

https://pixeldrain.com/u/BXEhUMpq

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/WJ53WQC8NTU2xEn/file

Boy, did I get lucky with the cover photo for this album. I didn't expect to find any photos of Mike Bloomfield and Carlos Santana together. But I found one from this exact concert! The original was in black and white, but I colorized it with the use of the Kolorize program. 

Muddy Waters & Friends - Blues Summit, PBS Soundstage, WTTW Studios, Chicago, IL, 7-18-1974

Pretty much since I started this blog in 2018, I've wanted to post an album by blues legend Muddy Waters, but I couldn't find anything worthy. Now I have. This was the very first episode of the "PBS Soundstage" TV show (after they changed their name from "Made in Chicago" and became a national program, that is), and no doubt they wanted this to be first so they could start with a bang. The episode was titled "Blues Summit," and for good reason. Waters led the show and sang most of the song, but good portion of the biggest names in blues music still alive and active at that time joined him on stage: Junior Wells, Johnny Winter, Dr. John, Willie Dixon, Koko Taylor, Pinetop Perkins, Mike Bloomfield, Buddy Miles, and Nick Gravenites. Wow, what a collection of talent!

This is a must-have for any serious blues fan. It's a great performance with excellent sound quality. So I was surprised how hard it is to find. It had eluded all my previous searches for this sort of thing until a couple of days ago, when I started to hone in on finding Soundstage episodes. I discovered that it was released on DVD (but not on CD) in 2015. However, I had great trouble finding this. For instance, it wasn't on YouTube, other than a lower quality version recorded off the TV that was missing the last two and a half songs. I couldn't even find it on SoulseekQT, and they generally immediately have what I want 99 percent of the time, or, very rarely, it isn't there at all. But luckily, after a couple of days, I finally got a Soulseek hit on someone who had the DVD. I promptly converted that to mp3s, and here you are.

I only had a couple of issues with the recording. There was a voiceover on an instrumental section of the first song, "Blow Wind Blow." That's why that song has "[Edit]" in its title, because I removed that talking while keeping the underlying music, thanks to the UVR5 program. The next track was several minutes of people milling backstage and talking to each other. It's a lot more interesting to see the video of blues legends interacting than what can be heard here, so I deleted that track. If interested, check out the YouTube video of it.

The list of artist names per song is woefully incomplete. It would have taken me a long time to figure out exactly who played on what, and then I would have had some very long file names. So instead of that, I generally stuck to mentioning Muddy Waters (since he stayed on stage the entire concert), plus whoever happened to sing lead vocals on any given song, if it was someone instead of, or in addition to, him. That leaves a lot of people unmentioned. For instance, Buddy Miles, a star in his own right, played drums for most of the show, but he isn't mentioned in any of the song credits because he didn't sing lead vocals. 

This album is 54 minutes long.

01 Blow Wind Blow [Edit] (Muddy Waters)
02 talk (Muddy Waters)
03 Long Distance Call (Muddy Waters)
04 talk (Muddy Waters)
05 Messin' with the Kid (Muddy Waters with Junior Wells & Nick Gravenites)
06 talk (Muddy Waters)
07 Stop Breaking Down (Muddy Waters with Junior Wells)
08 talk (Muddy Waters)
09 Mannish Boy (Muddy Waters)
10 talk (Muddy Waters)
11 Wang Dang Doodle (Muddy Waters with Willie Dixon & Koko Taylor)
12 talk (Muddy Waters with Johnny Winter)
13 Walking through the Park (Muddy Waters with Johnny Winter)
14 Hoochie Coochie Man (Muddy Waters with Willie Dixon)
15 talk (Muddy Waters)
16 Sugar Sweet (Muddy Waters with Dr. John)
17 I Got My Mojo Working (Muddy Waters)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/U8RWbQui

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/bPTOCcglRs8dIOc/file

As I watched the video of this concert, I kept an eye out for a spot where I could take a good screenshot for the cover image. But the quality was low-res, and it was rare to get more than one person on screen at the same time, since long distance shots were ruined by the low picture quality. Luckily, I found an image of the DVD cover. That had pictures of four of the stars, taken from the concert, so I used those. That's Muddy Waters at the top left, Johnny Winter at the top right, Dr. John at the bottom left, and Junior Wells at the bottom right. I was able to improve the image quality somewhat with the Krea AI program.