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He fooled around and played the blues - Playing the Blues |
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Written by Glenn BurnSilver
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Wednesday, 02 August 2006 |
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Page 1 of 4
 The name Elvin Bishop may be familiar even if his music isn’t. But mention “Fooled Around and Fell in Love,” his big hit from 1976, and there is a collective nod of recognition. Interestingly enough, that song is hardly representative of his work as a whole.
No, Bishop is a bluesman who just got lucky with a pop hit.
“As a songwriter you write hundreds of songs and shoot a lot of blanks and never know which one’s gonna hit the target,” Bishop explained from his northern California home.
He never scored another hit, yet with a gritty playing style that messes Chicago, Texas and West Coast blues styles into a sound that’s raw, twangy and loose at the same time, he has secured a devoted following.
Bishop’s introduction to the blues came after his family moved to Oklahoma in the early 1950s, and even then only over the radio from faraway places like Louisiana and Mexico.
“Until I was a teenager, there wasn’t any rock ’n’ roll—it was all Frank Sinatra and Patti Page and ‘How Much is That Doggie in the Window.’ It wasn’t real exciting,” he recalled. “Then rock ’n’ roll came along—Elvis, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino—and that was great. And then I happened to hear some blues on the radio and it knocked me over. This was where the good part of rock ’n’ roll was coming from. It was the pure deal — 100 proof. I’ve been hooked ever since.”
Bishop headed to Chicago in 1960 on a National Merit Scholarship to study physics. His parents were excited about his opportunity to get an education, but for Bishop it was “my ticket to get to Chicago where the blues was at.”
From day one he was involved in the music scene.
“Where I came from in Oklahoma it was highly discouraged to hangout with the other race. You didn’t do that,” he said. “In Chicago, I got to meet some of the guys making that music. Rather than hear it on the radio, I could see where they had their hands on the guitar. More importantly, I could go over to their house and see how the words they were singing was connected to real life.”
He also met Paul Butterfield, and later the pair formed the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, one of the preeminent white blues acts of the era.
“I met him the first day I was in Chicago. Here was another white guy playing the blues sitting on a step and drinking a quart of beer,” Bishop said with a laugh. “I thought, ‘There’s my kind of guy.’”
In 1968, Bishop decided to form his own band and moved to California where he quickly became a staple on the San Francisco club scene. In time, California’s “easy living” translated into his big pop hit.
“A lot of real good songwriters never get a hit,” he said. “There is only so much luck in everybody’s life.”
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