He was gangsta when gangsta wasn’t cool.
The high times and hard traveling of Paul Butterfield, who helped bring Chicago blues to a new and electric audience before his untimely death by overdose at the age of 44 in 1987, is memorialized in the documentary Horn From The Heart: The Paul Butterfield Story, screening Saturday, Feb. 9 at Golden State Theatre. It’s a labor of love from veteran music film director John Anderson and producer Sandra Warren, who first saw the Butterfield Blues Band at the Café Au Go Go in Greenwich Village in the mid-’60s, and wanted to see the soulful harmonica player get overdue recognition.
A middle-class white boy from Hyde Park – his father was a lawyer and his mother a teacher – Butterfield gravitated to the blues joints on the South Side of Chicago, sitting at the feet of masters like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. He taught himself the harp and soon started gigging with childhood friend Nick Gravenites. The duo were widely considered the inspiration for the Blues Brothers.
He hired two of Wolf’s sidemen, drummer Sam Lay and bassist Jerome Arnold for his own band, and brought in Elvin Bishop to forge a unique sound with a pioneering mixed-race band. When guitar god Michael Bloomfield joined the ensemble, they were definitely ready to rock.
They proved that at the Newport Folk Festival in ’65, the scene of Bob Dylan’s famed electric debut, where they plugged in, prompting backstage fisticuffs between folkie purist Alan Lomax and Butterfield manager Albert Grossman.
Singer Maria Muldaur, interviewed in the film, remembers it well.
“The urgency and intensity Butterfield and the band put together was totally electrifying, no pun intended,’’ she recalls. “Muddy and Wolf were plugged in, too – they weren’t playing nylon strings and wearing overalls.”
The band played Monterey Pop and Woodstock, and scorched the earth of the Fillmore Auditorium. “Everybody was around the stage, watching with reverence,’’ Anderson said. “Well-respected musicians like Jorma Kaukonen said this was when they got serious about their instruments.’’
Bloomfield left the group and Butterfield collaborated with Rick Danko of The Band, before the successful hue faded and personal demons grew. But his horn always came directly from the heart.
“Paul used to say he only played one note,” Anderson said, “but he really knew how to play it well.”
HORN FROM THE HEART: THE PAUL BUTTERFIELD STORY8pm Saturday, Feb. 9. Golden State Theatre, 417 Alvarado St., Monterey. $18. 649-1070, goldenstatetheatre.com