Blues Guitarist Bishop Sees End to Recording Drought

When he arrived in Chicago in 1960, Elvin Bishop didn’t fit the profile of an aspiring bluesman.

The 18-year-old from Tulsa, Okla., had solid credentials for academia: a National Merit Scholarship that paid his way to the University of Chicago. But Bishop’s musical resume wasn’t about to open any doors to the rich blues scene surrounding the campus on Chicago’s South Side as he only knew a few rudimentary guitar chords.

What’s more, Bishop is white, and blues at that time was the domain of blacks. Also, as the guitarist told the story this week over the phone from his home in Marin County, he lacked the street smarts you would expect a white kid to have if he was going to find acceptance in ghetto nightclubs.

“I was as square as a pool table and twice as green,” Bishop recalled in a deep, relaxed drawl of a voice, as agrarian as a pair of dusty overalls. “I wouldn’t even have felt comfortable going into a white club. But I just jumped off into it,” becoming one of a handful of young whites frequenting South Side blues haunts.

As it turned out, their fascination with the blues was the only credential they needed.

“As far as I can tell, up till then there had been no contact, no evidence of white people taking an interest in that type of music,” said Bishop, who will be at the Coach House on Thursday in San Juan Capistrano along with Orange County’s own James Harman Band.

“We didn’t have much trouble being accepted. We were a novelty ourselves. After a couple of weeks, maybe, I started making friends with the musicians and hanging out, going over to their houses.”

The novice guitarist took expert instruction from such players as Sammy Lawhorn, Luther Tucker and Little Smokey, accompanists for such noted bandleaders as Muddy Waters, Junior Wells and Little Walter. Those lessons came to matter far more than the classes he was taking at the university.

“I was the only person in my family from a long line of farmers that got a chance to go to college,” said Bishop, who spent his earliest years on an Iowa farm. “I tried real hard at school, as hard as you can when you’re being taken over by something else. It was just a case of possession. Music just took over.”

Bishop played in several local groups before another blues-smitten white musician, harmonica player Paul Butterfield, recruited him into a band. By 1965, the racially mixed Butterfield Blues Band (it also included guitarist Mike Bloomfield, keyboardist Mark Naftalin and a black rhythm team, bassist Jerome Arnold and drummer Sam Lay) had a record out and found itself in the middle of a couple of controversies at that year’s Newport Folk Festival: Could white men play the blues with authenticity? And regardless of what they played, should they be allowed to pollute Bob Dylan’s pure folk with their electric clamor?

Bishop said neither issue made much of an impression on him. “I don’t think we cared that much” about the authenticity issue. “It was pretty weird to be there in the first place. Our whole world was the Chicago blues scene. We didn’t know if (the controversy) came with the territory, or what.” Bishop wasn’t one of the three Butterfield Blues Band members who joined Dylan for his ground-breaking, stormily received electric set, and he couldn’t recall for certain whether he even got to witness it.

The Butterfield Blues Band answered any doubts about its legitimacy over the next few years with a series of inventive records that honored the Chicago blues tradition while also incorporating elements of jazz and R&B.; Besides establishing himself as a dynamic, versatile player, Bishop provided comic relief by occasionally taking on the role of one Pigboy Crabshaw, a name he says he gave himself in “some momentary foolishness.” He said it was Butterfield’s idea, not his, to name a 1967 album “The Resurrection of Pigboy Crabshaw.”

The following year, Bishop left Butterfield to launch his own career as a bandleader, serving up blues, soul and R&B; in a lively, amiable mix. His career peaked in the mid-’70s after Capricorn Records, the Georgia-based label that cashed in on the “Dixie Rock” boom, signed Bishop at the urging of Allman Brothers Band guitarist Dickey Betts.

Bishop’s funky-soulful approach yielded one big hit, “Fooled Around and Fell in Love,” before the Capricorn boom went bust. The label went out of business in the late ‘70s, and Bishop was left without a record deal.

It was the start of a recording drought--interrupted only by a European release in 1981--that has continued until now.

“I went for years where I didn’t seem to care too much” about keeping up a recording profile, Bishop said. “I was going through a period where I was getting high a lot and just enjoying playing the music, and I just didn’t care much about anything.”

In his Crabshaw guise, Bishop once sang humorously on a Butterfield Blues Band song about how “good music and good gin” were the twin attractions of the Chicago blues scene. But it turned out to be no laughing matter. Mike Bloomfield died seven years ago at 36, the victim of a drug overdose. Last May, Butterfield was dead at 44 from a similar cause.

“Blues is a hard-living life style,” Bishop said. “It’s just the accepted thing to do to abuse the hell out of yourself. I’ve just recently got out of that myself. It comes to a place where you make an accommodation with life, or you don’t get to see anymore of it. The guys with a good constitution and that love of life go on.”

At 45, Bishop says he has good reason to go on with high hopes. “I’m talking to a label now, and it looks pretty definite” that he will soon be recording his first U.S. album since the Capricorn days. Bishop said he may begin work as early as next month on a record that will be “heavily blues oriented.”

For now, he is on the road again with a five-piece backup band that includes two horn players and bassist Michael (Fly) Brooks, a holdover from Bishop’s “Fooled Around and Fell in Love” heyday.

Bishop has toured heavily through the ‘80s, playing for fans loyal enough to keep coming back despite the absence of new recordings. Last month he took a break from his heavy touring schedule for the birth of his second child, Emily Miiko Bishop.

“I slacked off on the gigs for a couple of months before the blessed event. Now I’m back out there, trying to make the milk money.”

The ELVIN BISHOP BAND and the JAMES HARMAN BAND

Thursday, 8 p.m.

Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano

Admission: $13.50

Information: (714) 496-8930