Blues

February 15, 1981, the day after Valentine’s Day. At 11 on a Sunday morning, a man’s body was found slumped in the passenger seat of a beige 1971 Mercury on a residential street in the Forest Hills section of San Francisco. All four doors were locked. A Valium bottle was in the pocket of a coat on the back seat. There was no ID: the body went to the morgue as John Doe #15. The dead man was 37-year-old Michael Bloomfield, a pioneering guitarist who brought blues to the mainstream and set Bob Dylan’s music alight. The cause of death was registered as cocaine and methamphetamine poisoning. Questions remain unanswered about how he died; why methamphetamine, which he avoided, was in his system; and why he was in a part of town where he knew no one.

Dr John called James Booker ‘the best black, gay, one-eyed pianist New Orleans has ever produced’. Booker died in 1983, aged 43, ruined by drugs, drink and madness, and attended by legends of delinquency lurid even for a New Orleans piano ‘professor’. Though he had appeared on plenty of other people’s records and stages, Booker had recorded only three studio albums in his lifetime. Classified, recorded in October 1982 and now re-released on vinyl, was the last of them. It might not be the best of them, but it shows why Booker was one of the greats. The studio was booked for three days, but Booker had a breakdown the week before and couldn’t get a good take down in the first two days.