Word: butterfields
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...entertainment is more homey and the style more spacious in Butterfield Country, an 8,000-acre resort area 51 miles northeast of San Diego. Throughout the mesas of the Palomar Mountains are sprinkled Butterfield's 475 campsites. A $5 rental fee gets a standard site with water and electricity. For oak trees and a sewage hookup, the fee runs $2 more. The park attempts to re-create the spirit of the Butterfield stagecoach days with hay rides, an old-fashioned swimming hole, community cookouts and country-music shows. The focal point is an old Wild West village; on Sunday...
Geoff Muldaur, who co-founded the Kweskin Jug Band and was with them up until it disintegrated in 1969, is one of the main reasons Better Days is so different from Butterfield's previous band. Muldaur is an adept slide guitarist who carries several blues styles with him. He also contributes betwixt-and-between vocals (which are even better in live performance) and comes up with enjoyable arrangements. The drummer, Christopher Parker, is perfect in his blues discipline, delivering a steady, unadorned beat. He and bassist Billy Rich make up a solid, healthy rhythm section. Then we come to Butterfield...
Better Days's extensive versatility may be exhibited on the first track, an update of Robert Johnson's "Walkin' Blues." The band performs this number with personality and style, a most welcome change from the intentional mimicking of black music by many white blues bands. This cut features Butterfield on vocals, playing electric piano and all the while wailing away on mean harp. This Delta blues classic exhibits a tasteful modern interpretation somewhere in between the traditional and contemporary blues settings. "Broke My Baby's Heart" features organist Ronnie Barron on vocals and is one of the two tracks featuring...
...tune is very well mixed, so if you listen through headphones you can hear Muldaur's glassy slide guitar on the left channel and Amos Garrett's lead guitar on the right, both in conversation with Paul's biting harp way up in the mix. Muldaur and Butterfield grind out the vocals una voce and, in the company of Maria Muldaur's (Geoff's wife) restrained fiddle, the band displays one of the best personal interpretations of Delta blues that has come out in a long time...
...rest of the album is equally good, containing a wide variety of material. Included are a new rendition of "Buried Alive in the Blues," by Nick Gravenites (an old Chicago schoolmate of Butterfield's) and a piece by Nina Simone and Eric von Schmidt. Enclosed within the album are biographies of each of the five members of the band printed on the flip side of a giant harmonica blow-up. In his personal biography, Butterfield contends that when he played with Michael Bloomfield, the two of them had a magic that they could reach. Real magic! That's what Butterfield...