{"id":19673,"date":"2020-10-22T05:30:01","date_gmt":"2020-10-22T09:30:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=19673"},"modified":"2026-05-25T11:16:18","modified_gmt":"2026-05-25T15:16:18","slug":"elvin-bishop-still-struttin-his-stuff-at-78-part-2-of-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2020\/10\/22\/elvin-bishop-still-struttin-his-stuff-at-78-part-2-of-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Elvin Bishop: Still Struttin\u2019 His Stuff at 78 (part 2 of 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part One<\/a> \u2026 <\/i><\/p>\n

Bill Kopp: Had you been playing guitar before you moved to Chicago in 1960?<\/b><\/p>\n

Elvin Bishop:<\/b> I was fooling around with it in Tulsa. But it was hard to find anybody that really knew how to play the blues. I had learned a few chords, but it was basically like Bob Seger said: \u201cWorking on mysteries without any clues.\u201d I\u2019d sit in my room and listen to John Lee Hooker and Lightnin\u2019 Hopkins. It was all my ear could basically handle, because nobody in the family was musical. When I first started out, I remember B.B. King with the horns and what sounded like jazz to me.<\/p>\n

So I had a very, very basic grounding in guitar when I got to Chicago. I then made friends with the blues guys who were amazingly friendly and receptive and helpful. I just went into it 24 hours a day and I got out of the \u201csquare as a pool table and twice as green\u201d category pretty quick.<\/p>\n

You were with <\/b>The Butterfield Blues Band <\/b>for several years. The <\/b>track \u201cEast-West\u201d is notable for a whole lot of things, <\/b>n<\/b>ot the least of which is that it blurred genres. <\/b>It was really out-there. A<\/b>s a guitarist who <\/b>wa<\/b>s coming primarily from the blues idiom, were you perceptive to that track from the beginning?<\/b><\/p>\n

Yeah, I liked it. Although blues was always my main interest, I\u2019ve always been open to gospel, jazz, anything. In those days we were doing certain things that \u2026 kind of opened your mind up a little bit, to put it delicately. But we listened to Ravi Shankar and Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane. Everything, you know? So yeah, it was cool.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019ll tell you the honest truth: the only person in the band who hand any kind of clue about Indian music was Bloomfield, and his knowledge was \u2026 you know, you don\u2019t really get into Indian music; it takes years and years. But the groove of the thing was based on a common blues thing in Chicago. A lot of times there would be a little revue happening, with a basic band and two or three different front guys; one of them would have a good name. And there was always what they called a \u201cshake dancer,\u201d a girl doing exotic dancing somewhere in the mix. The groove that starts out \u201cEast-West\u201d came from that. They would play an \u201cexotic\u201d groove, something similar to \u201cCaravan.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

What led you to relocate from Chicago to the Bay Area after leaving Butterfield\u2019s Band?<\/strong><\/p>\n

A lot of things. We got here and there were places to play that weren\u2019t clubs, which was a very new development for blues. Before that it was all playing in clubs or small dances. Stuff like that with big ballrooms like the Avalon and Fillmore West with Bill Graham, Chet Helms. And you didn\u2019t have to wear those damn continental suits and pointed-toed shoes! Didn\u2019t have to watch your back so bad like you did in Chicago. They didn\u2019t have that biting wind coming around the corner at you. Everyone was all friendly; there was nothing not to like.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve played a lot of people over the years. Who is a renowned blues artist that you <\/b>didn\u2019t<\/b><\/i> get to play with but wish you had, and why?<\/b><\/p>\n

Sonny Boy Williamson. He was just great, and I liked his attitude and his looseness and the groove he could put on all by himself. And I wish had had a chance to play with Jimmy Reed, but I didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

But I was tremendously lucky in being able to play with guys like \u2026 I got a chance to play with Albert Collins several times; he was a great guy. I met all my childhood heroes and became friends with some of them. I\u2019ve been really lucky. John Lee Hooker lived out here. He used to like to see me come home with a bag of collard greens out of my garden or some catfish if I had been fishing.<\/p>\n

Is \u201cFooled Around and Fell in Love\u201d still in your setlist? And if so, who sings it?<\/b><\/p>\n

I do it once in a while. A guy named Willie Jordan, who plays cajon in my Big Fun Trio, he\u2019ll sing it. It\u2019s a little different from my average tune, but like I said I\u2019ve always been interested in all kinds of things.<\/p>\n

To be honest with you, sometimes it takes months to write a song, to file off the rough edges and figure out the final pieces and make it whole together. But \u201cFooled Around and Fell in Love\u201d came out in under 20 minutes, I think. I remember I was floating around in the swimming pool and just started humming. The song came in my head and bang! I thought, \u201cI better get out and write this down.\u201d<\/p>\n

I interviewed George Thorogood about seven or eight years ago. And at one point he was talking about his favorite guitarists, and he named four: Buddy Guy, Duane Allman, Robert Johnson, and you. Are you comfortable being cited as an influence by other musicians?<\/b><\/p>\n

Well, I guess that means I\u2019m old!<\/p>\n

George is a good friend of mine. He\u2019s always been more than generous. I remember when he got the blast of fame in the \u201880s, he immediately acknowledged guys like Bo Diddley, and John Lee Hooker, and myself. So that speaks well of him.<\/p>\n

I talked to him not too long ago. I will tell you one thing about this pandemic: it makes it easy to get a hold of people. Kid Andersen said to me, \u201cI used to screen my calls. But if I don\u2019t pick up my phone now, they know I\u2019m lying!\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part One \u2026 Bill Kopp: Had you been playing guitar before you moved to Chicago in 1960? Elvin Bishop: I was fooling around with it in Tulsa. But […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19674,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,41],"tags":[4328],"class_list":["post-19673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blues","category-interview","tag-elvin-bishop","cat-9-id","cat-41-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19673"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19673\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31587,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19673\/revisions\/31587"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}