The Paul Butterfield Blues Band's first studio album The Paul Butterfield Blues Band was released in 1965. The band notably included lead guitarist Mike Bloomfield, who joined forces with Butterfield's band when producer Paul Rothchild signed the band. Bloomfield recorded this album around the same time he helped Bob Dylan record "Like a Rolling Stone" and its accompanying album Highway 61 Revisited. Butterfield's band received significant critical praise for their debut but it did not sell particularly well, peaking only at 123 on the Billboard charts. It still garners significant praise today and is considered an essential blues album.
For a long time, I felt it hard to pinpoint exactly what made so much of the British blues scene largely lackluster. Now I know. It's no wonder British blues purists paved the way for heavy metal--they played the blues so slow, sludgy, and with too much reverence to truly innovate. Americans aren't so thick. Crucially informed by rockabilly, they play the blues fast, thin, and fiery. Much of this is thanks to Bloomfield, whose wild playing is one of the best guitar performances ever captured on an album, but the band also features the incendiary harmonica playing of band leader Paul Butterfield and the tight rhythm section of Sam Lay and Jerome Arnold, both of whom Butterfield swiped from the legendary Howlin' Wolf. Like many white blues singers, Butterfield's vocals could use some work but with so much instrumental prowess, it's still one of the best blues album I've come across. A-
