Horn from the Heart: The Paul Butterfield Story (2017) User Reviews

a musical rarity

[ferguson-6 · 7/10 · 19 October 2018]

Greetings again from the darkness. Even the grainy concert footage and somewhat muffled audio of the opening clip do nothing to offset the raw energy and power of Paul Butterfield and his blues harp. If you are a blues lover, you are already familiar with his music, and you'll likely learn more about the man. If the blues aren't your thing, it's still fascinating to see someone so talented and committed to their art.

Documentarian John Anderson does a nice job of blending interviews from family members and band members with video clips and historical data, mostly in chronological order. Mr. Anderson also acted as editor of "The Super Bowl Shuffle" video of the 1985 Chicago Bears, as well as numerous projects with Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys. This time out, he captures the essence of a musical genius not nearly enough people have tuned in to.

Broken into segments (1942-65, 1966-71, 1972-1987), the film takes us through Butterfield's childhood in the Hyde Park area of Chicago, and through his final on stage appearance just a couple of weeks before his death. Along the way, we hear from bandmates like Elvin Bishop and Nick Gravenites, Paul's two sons and his brother Peter, as well as his former wife Kathryn, who describes him as the love of her life. One of Paul's sons shows us the now-vacant lot where the club once stood in which a teenage Paul played with the likes of Howlin' Wolf. It helps us understand where his love for the blues developed, how he formed one of the earliest integrated bands (with Jerome Arnold and Sam Lay), and how the great Muddy Waters became his life-long mentor and friend.

We get to hear the earliest known recording of Butterfield from 1962, and then footage of him at Newport Folk Festival in 1965, Monterrey Pop Festival in 1967 (where he debuted a horns section), and of course, Woodstock in 1969. It's the 1965 story that is perhaps the most interesting, as it took an impassioned plea from Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul, and Mary) to get Butterfield a spot in the festival, and then he and his band electrified (pun intended) the folk audience with powerhouse blues. This is the same festival where Bob Dylan shocked the audience by "going electric" (with Butterfield's band as back-up). The music landscape shifted from the messages of folk music to a more rebellious and harder sound.

Other interviews include David Sanborn, Al Kooper and Bonnie Raitt ... each more effusive than the other when discussing Butterfield's talent and stage presence. We see Butterfield's own high school yearbook quote, "I think I'm better than those trying to reform me", and we hear a clip from his "Blues Harmonica Master Class" recorded in 1984 (released in 1997). It was 1976 when Butterfield joined The Band's farewell concert for "The Last Waltz" (movie and album), and we hear about Paul's continued and numerous efforts to find the right sound and band in the second half of his career.

Legendary Producer Paul Rothchild, known for his work with The Doors and Janis Joplin, certainly recognized greatness in Butterfield and helped with some of his best recordings. Sadly, the 1980's brought about severe peritonitis which led to various stomach and intestinal surgeries for Butterfield, which in turn, led to alcoholism and drug abuse. We get a clip of Butterfield on stage with Stevie Ray Vaughan in 1987, mere days before Paul died of a heroin overdose at age 44. Fortunately for us, the musical recordings live on for a man often described as a force of nature on the blues harp.

The blues, the mother lode of American music, is the poor cousin no one wants to let in.

[ockiemilkwood · 9/10 · 23 July 2022]

Ah ... Butterfield Blues Band ... where to start?

First, the blues: There are those like myself who loved the blues all our lives. I loved the blues as far back as I can remember, even when I was 5, "before I knew to call her name." It was so hard to find. It was hidden, like a treasure. Instead, we were drowned in schlock, a flood of schlock: Sinatra, Elvis, Tony Bennett, Perry Como, Pat Boone, Beatles, ad nauseam. You had to hunt. You had to hope. I found the LP Best of Slim Harpo (Excello) where? In Dublin.

When Butter's first album came out, it shook my world. I saw them at Town Hall, mid-town Manhattan, fall 1966. I sat in the front row, right in front of Bloomfield's Bassman speaker cabinet. He played an old, gold Les Paul. Butter blew into a bullet mike. Bishop played a red 335. His face was so red, you thought he'd bust a blood vessel.

They were real. All music, just music. No light show, no costumes, no dancing girls. They came on stage, plugged in and played -- no talk, no BS. After an hour, they walked off. They came back and did an encore. And they were better, much better, then the record - which was a killer - the mark of true musicians.

This was just before East-West was released. Of course, they did East-West, the song.

Saw them shortly thereafter in '67 in the Village, in one of those tourist traps, the Café A Go Go. Again, they took no prisoners. Hard, pure, sexy blues. (Richie Havens opened and sucked.)

As a kid, I'd ride my bike down to Brook's Record Shop (Plainfield, NJ) and stare at album covers of records I could not afford: Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Thelonius Monk, Moms Mabely, Little Richard. Mr. Brooks had a mail order service, where, as it turned out, Butter bought blues and soul 45s. Mr. Brooks turned me on to the Swan Silvertones.

This movie is invaluable for explaining many facts about Butter I never knew, such as his educated, middle-class origins in Hyde Park, Chicago. It gives you a rough, though incomplete, idea of who he was as a person. Like so many accounts of pop music, it strays from essentials to the hyperbole of marginal, but famous pop people, like Maria Muldaur, Bonnie Raitt, Happy Traum and Jim Kweskin.

Elvin Bishop, who came from dire poverty in Oklahoma to the University of Chicago on a National Merit Scholarship, hung around black cafeteria workers, who took him to blues clubs on the Southside.

These clubs, like the Southside itself, were dangerous and violent, not a safe haven for white, middle class, wannabe hippies. I knew the Southside because my brother did a residency at UC. I also went to med school in Chicago.

You have to read Michael Bloomfield: If You Love These Blues, An Oral History (Wolkin and Keenom), not only for the Butterfield Blues Band, but for insight into '60-'70s music, like Dylan, Janis, Mother Earth, etc. Where Bloomfield was key. To get to the blues, he had to rebel against an oppressive, affluent father in Glencoe, Il., which I also knew. That my have been his undoing. I saw him at the Lion's Share, a club in San Anselmo, Marin Co., CA in '72. To quote Hank Williams, his body was "just a shell." He couldn't hit a note.

Both Butter and Bloomfield destroyed themselves with drugs. Woodstock, for all its idyllic beauty, was a hellhole. The festival there descended into chaos (I was there). See the movie Once Were Brothers about the Band, who also destroyed themselves with drugs in Woodstock. It's a cliché to say that the flowers of Flower Power died on the dung heap of heroin, speed, alcohol and coke. Easy money and fame led to an early grave for many.

The story of an early blues-rock superstar

[wavecat13 · 9/10 · 24 April 2021]

This tells the story of Paul Butterfield and his music. He was an early blues-rock superstar, which he usually is not credited with today - and ended up with a lot of issues.

Brilliant

[dtrobb · 10/10 · 19 June 2020]

This is going to be hard. I have to type a lot of letters and words to reach the minimum limit. I only have one very short comment to make about this film. If you like music, and you wouldn't watch the film or read this review if you didn't, put your feet up and enjoy this documentary. Could not be better. 10 out of 10. Your welcome in advance.

Way Overdue Portrait of Aan Amazing Genius

[deadbull-95171 · 10/10 · 14 June 2021]

I was Born in Chicago. (In 1952) And my father didn't tell me much of anything.

But by 1965 I was a huge fan of the PB blues band as a very young man. To this date in 2021 I have never seen bands to match PB's. His inclusion in the R&R Hall of Fame came so late , it reminds me of the Canonization Of Joan of Arc 600 years later by the same church that burned her alive.

I bought my first record, by Elvis, at age 8. Hearing Mike Bloomfield woke me to electric guitar and I never looked back and have played ever since. I wish I had kept those pre-CBS Strats I bought from 1960, and the 61 bandmaster, but that isn't the point.

This isn't about me, but his personnel and harp playing fused with something in me so long ago that it was sometimes painful to watch this documentary. You would learn more about him by listening to his records on Elektra, and maybe some of the later Bearsville stuff, and then the later "period of decline" when he was "Driftin' and Driftin'......

As expected the film interviews many principal friends and surviving bandmates, and gives a few new glimpses of thee man. But those that knew him best seem to agree that even the fantastic musical creativity, was just the expression of him. That you were viewing the very spirit and soul of the man when you heard him, that there was no division between that guy and his music.

I would absolutely agree. There was no more authentic bluesman, or more gifted a one, of any race or place , then Paul Butterfield.

This was a movie of real personal interest to me, and therefore hard to watch, because my life was shaped by his work. I grew up in Glencoe a stone's throw from Michael Bloomfield, had for awhile the same guitar teacher he did, and met him around 77 in a tiny club where he was doing an acoustic solo set in California. And there I was drinking beer at a bar with Mike Bloomfield who really warmed up when he heard where I was born etc. So glad that is a memory, not a fantasy...

The film, has really very few samples of the music , and they are never presented completely, yet to know the music really was to know the man to a very great extent. Just yesterday i was going over some Buzz Feiten solos, one of his better guitar players , that are ancient, but brilliance is never dated in music to me.

The song they play under the closing credits, performed when he wasn't too far from dying, his voice somewhat raspy, is a lovely piece where he plays piano, and really well too, and it's heartbreaking because the material is like a memoir.

He obviously was not well...but the passion and phrasing and beauty are all there. And sort of like Elvis, whose decline did not diminish the fan's interest, it is similar here. I am familiar with the entire concert that came from, which contains a small diamond mine of good moments. You went to see this remarkable spirit in front of you, well or not well, he put everything into it with not the least pretense, or exaggerated showmanship. It was a business of love and no BS about it.

Anyway, it is a good movie. I assume anyone commenting here must know about him already, and if you want to see a few new glimpses of your old friend, there he is again to remind us of what we already know.

One of the greatest Bluesmen in the history of civilization, the darling of all the older black artists that originally inspired him, and who he helped bring into national acclaim as no other, I think the most ferocious Harp player that ever lived, with an inimitably great voice......And altho he played with Clapton and BB and SRV and Sandborn and Dr John and Bonnie Raitt,etc etc and Bloomfield quit working with Dylan to stay with PB ...i would have liked him to start a group where I could have picked a lineup to jump start him when his career started to go sideways.

Another value to this movie is it mentioned things that led to me discovering previously unheard stuff. Did you know they recorded tapes of Paul giving harp lessons and explaining technique and influences in detail?

What value to a student. And I found some great RCO stuff he cut that I didn't know about before seeing this film, which obviously is a labor love to ignite or reignite recognition of a genius.

The movie saddened me truly. "All my friends are going, and things just don't seem the same." As much as someone outside my family or immediate important friends could be part of who I am, he and his associates are part of me with only a small group of other remote people I will never have the honor of meeting, almost always musical virtuosos, and it is hard for me to be really objective about this.

History is not made with political corporate lies. IT is made in the vanishing snowflakes of musical notes, sometimes recorded. As fragile and as powerful as life when iy is good. The man spoke in angelic script, that anyone could understand without translation. Any other language uses symbols to convey a thought or image etc, but his just referred back to it's own symmetries and beauty. Rare and amazing what he did for the idiom he loved and lived and died for, boots on, on fire to the end.

A tribute, thanks that it is out, you and me know about it this world changing person already, changing things on the level that counts, I can't say enough good stuff about his work, which was who he was, the REAL DEAL, and just see the Fr****n movie.

Very Good and Unintentionally Revealing

[labcbaker · 7/10 · 8 February 2024]

I enjoyed watching this and only wish that more music had been included and perhaps fewer still photos. The film did its best job describing Butterfield's single-mindedness and saturation in the South Chicago blues scene. It was amazing to learn that he had training in the flute as a boy, but picked up the harmonica and mastered it so quickly. One big minus is that these kinds of documentaries are too often hagiographies and certainly this becomes so toward the end as ridiculous excuses are made for his self-destructive, narcissistic drug addiction and neglect of his children. The film tries to maintain that despite being stoned he was still a musician's musician. Nevertheless they show a long performance days before his death that show him playing a piano (!), looking 25 years older than his age and singing like a shadow of himself.