“I didn’t relate to being a rock star at all” is a strange sentiment from someone who played Monterey Pop, but Michael Bloomfield was no ordinary guitarist. Growing up in the northern suburbs of Chicago in the 1950s, Bloomfield learned to play by mimicking the blues artists he heard on his transistor radio, tuning in AM frequencies from Chicago’s south side and as far away as Texas. In the early 60s he was a fixture on Chicago’s music scene, playing and producing shows that melded rock, blues, pop, and jazz for rapt audiences. He accompanied Bob Dylan on the 1965 classic Highway 61 Revisited and for his infamous electric set at that summer’s Newport Folk Festival—along with most of the other members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, which he’d just joined and would stick with for a couple years. In 1967 he started the short-lived Electric Flag, and in 1968 he found his greatest commercial success with the instrumental LP Super Session, a collaboration with producer and musician Al Kooper that captured a blues-rock jam session in the style of the day’s great jazz albums.

Jack Riedy: I really enjoyed the story in the acknowledgments of your only time ever seeing Bloomfield perform. Can you tell me about how you first came across his work on record?

And the other distinctive quality of Bloomfield’s playing, and it was something that I didn’t really understand but I recognized it right away in the early days when I was listening to him, is that he is very fluid with the beat. It’s that vocal quality that I think really distinguished his sound. There are guys who play like Eric Clapton. You can see them down the block any day of the week. They’re good players. Everybody grew up knowing a kid who could play like Clapton. And there are even some kids who could play like Hendrix, but very few have I ever heard play like Bloomfield. And that’s a quality that he shares with jazz musicians. Nobody sounds like Ben Webster. Nobody sounds like Johnny Hodges. Nobody sounds like Bird, of course. Those are all distinctive sounds, and that’s very much a quality that Bloomfield had that really made him stand out in my ears from all the other rock ‘n’ roll players of the period.

It seems that he didn’t face a ton of pushback, for appropriation or anything like that, from the other blues players.

How much overlap was there between folk enthusiasts and blues enthusiasts at the time?