Mike Bloomfield, Guitarist: The Brilliant Guitarist who was Booted from New Trier

Mike Bloomfield in the New Trier Talent Show, 1958. Credit unknown.

Shorter version appeared in the Spring/Summer 2024 Gazette
By Duff Peterson

Michael Bloomfield was a virtuoso blues and rock musician from Glencoe. He immersed himself in the Chicago Blues at a young age, and took electric guitar playing to a new level. From 1965 to 1967, many considered him the best guitarist in the nation. He played on ground-breaking recordings and with most of the top musicians of the era. Yet he worked mostly outside the commercial mainstream, and today his music is little known.

Bloomfield came from a wealthy family. His grandfather, Samuel Bloomfield, immigrated from Imperial Russia, and in 1933, he founded Bloomfield Industries, which became one of the country’s leading suppliers of kitchen equipment, everything from coffeemakers to ice cream scoops. The company prospered during World War II thanks to government procurement, and in 1951 it opened a 100,000 square foot facility on Chicago’s southwest side. Mike’s father, Harold, took over after Sam died in 1954, and there was talk about Mike running the company someday, but there wasn’t much chance of that. By his early teens, Mike Bloomfield was obsessed with playing the guitar.

At his bar mitzvah in 1956, Bloomfield received two gifts that would change his life, a transistor radio and a guitar. The little radio introduced him to a world beyond the North Shore, the world of rhythm & blues music. He discovered WGES, which enlivened Chicago’s AM dial with a steady stream of R&B, gospel and soul. At night, he picked up WLAC from Nashville, which featured a raspy-voiced, irreverent DJ named John R spinning R&B into the wee hours. Although John R’s show was aimed at black Southerners, it became a favorite of white teenagers, for whom the music was forbidden fruit, exciting, daring and dangerous.

It occurred to Bloomfield that many of the artists he was hearing were from Chicago, and in fact were playing live every night just 25 miles away. Starting when he was 14, Bloomfield began to journey to the South Side with friends to see them perform, traveling by L train at first, then borrowing the family car. Muddy Waters, BB King, Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James, Willie Dixon – these men became Bloomfield’s heroes. All were born in rural Mississippi and had come to Chicago in the Great Migration. Together they created the city’s distinctive contribution to music, the Chicago Blues.

The key to the Chicago Blues was the electric guitar. Since its invention some two decades earlier, the electric guitar had become an instrument of tremendous power in the right hands, capable of a wide range of sounds and perfect for emotive, extended solos. Bloomfield acquired a Gibson in his early teens, and after learning a few basic chords from his mother’s hairdresser, he was entirely self-taught.

Bloomfield placed into accelerated classes at New Trier, but he was an indifferent student and defied authority at every opportunity. He and three friends soon formed a band that played at parties around the North Shore. Harold Bloomfield told his son was wasting his life, while his mother, Dorothy, whose family was musical, was more sympathetic. Having attended the Goodman School of Drama and worked as an actress and model before her marriage, she understood the excitement Mike experienced while performing.

Mike Bloomfield, undated. Credit: Mike Shea via the Austin Chronicle.

In a New Trier practice room, the band composed an unruly instrumental called “Hurricane.” They recorded it at a studio in Chicago, which gave them an acetate disc of the song that they passed around to fellow students, and it was regularly played in New Trier’s lunchroom. They were offered a spot at a New Trier talent show one Saturday evening in December 1958. Before the show, school authorities warned Bloomfield that rock & roll would not be tolerated, and that no encores were permitted. After the band played a twangy Chet Atkins number, the audience screamed for more. Breaking into the ear-to-ear grin that would become one of his trademarks, Bloomfield nodded to his bandmates, and they launched into “Hurricane.” Kids in the audience jumped up and yelled, and cast members rushed onto the stage, dancing and clapping to the wild tune they’d heard in the lunchroom. The adults in the room were not amused. On Monday, the band got a reprimand from the dean, who singled out Bloomfield as the cause of Saturday’s disturbance. After Bloomfield spent a few more weeks neglecting his studies, mouthing off to teachers and generally making trouble – all the while practicing his guitar with fiendish intensity – New Trier expelled him.

Over the next few years, after brief, unsuccessful stints at other schools, Bloomfield eked out a living as a guitarist in Chicago, working part-time at his maternal grandfather’s pawnshop on Clark Street, where he got to try out many musical instruments. One day, a young woman named Susan Smith came in looking for a guitar. She and Bloomfield began dating, and in September 1962, they eloped to New Buffalo, Michigan at 19, to the great consternation of their parents.

Bloomfield found work playing in Chicago’s Old Town, steadily honing his skills, and by his late teens, he was jamming with popular folk musicians on the North Side and blues musicians on the South Side. Impressed with his playing, Muddy Waters took a liking to the enthusiastic kid from Glencoe, often inviting him to sit in with him at Pepper’s, a club on East 43rd Street. In April 1963, a young folksinger from the Minnesota Iron Range who had just changed his name to Bob Dylan stopped by one of the North Side clubs to see Bloomfield play. Bloomfield had heard Dylan’s first and only album and wasn’t impressed, but quickly warmed to him, and their friendship would last for the rest of Bloomfield’s life. Dylan was astounded by Bloomfield’s skill, later saying, “he just was the best guitar player I ever heard.”

By late 1964, Bloomfield had a regular gig at Big John’s at 1638 N. Wells Street, attracting capacity crowds. He sometimes jammed with a harmonica player his age who had grown up in Hyde Park, Paul Butterfield. Butterfield also came from a prosperous family, attending the Lab School and enrolling at the University of Chicago, but he too had become obsessed with the Chicago Blues at a young age, though his heroes were the city’s two great harmonica players, Little Walter and Sonny Boy Williamson. Butterfield also had a fine singing voice. By his late teens, like Bloomfield, he was jamming with musicians in South Side clubs. Butterfield often collaborated with a guitarist from Tulsa who was attending the U of C on a National Merit scholarship, Elvin Bishop. They persuaded two seasoned South Siders, bassist Jerome Arnold and drummer Sam Lay, to join them, and they became the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. A few months later, they invited Bloomfield to join, then brought in another U of C student, keyboardist Mark Naftalin, the son of the mayor of Minneapolis. They created a formidable sound that had the Chicago Blues as its core, but transcended it. They were signed to Elektra Records, but their first album wouldn’t appear until late 1965.

Earlier in 1965, Dylan had called Bloomfield and asked him to play on his next album. In the two years since Bloomfield first met him, Dylan had become a national figure, the “conscience of a generation,” known for his pungent lyrics about civil rights, justice and war, profiled in Newsweek and the New Yorker. In August 1963, he had performed for as many as 300,000 people at the March on Washington, just before Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. But by 1965, Dylan was ready to abandon what he called “finger-pointing songs” and move on to a music that was more personal, with a bigger sound and a broader audience.

Bloomfield headed for New York in early June 1965 and huddled with Dylan for a few days in an attempt to make sense of Dylan’s new material. Dylan had written pages and pages of lyrics for one song, “Like a Rolling Stone,” but had no idea what it should sound like. When Bloomfield gathered at Columbia Studios with the other musicians — none of whom he’d ever met before, much less played with — they focused heavily on “Like a Rolling Stone.” Characteristically, Dylan provided no instructions on how to play it, except to say to Bloomfield that he didn’t want “any of that BB King stuff,” which Bloomfield understood to mean that the song would not feature a soaring blues solo from Bloomfield. They got to work, recording 21 separate takes over two days.

Columbia’s producer had invited a musician friend, the 21-year-old Al Kooper, to observe but not play in the session. As he listened to the team fumble with the song, Kooper conceived of an additional instrumental part that he thought might work on organ. When the organ player was moved to piano, Kooper took note. The producer got distracted, Kooper raced into the studio and sat down at the organ, and the musicians launched into yet another take of the song. The result was a swaggering instrumental track, equal parts rock, blues and country. Bloomfield drove it forward with ascending major chords, the same chords as in “Louie Louie,” followed by jangly fills, while Kooper played a majestic, descending counterpoint on the Hammond B3. Dylan loved it, and asked that the organ part be turned up in the final mix. Over the next few days, Dylan and his musicians recorded the remainder of the new album, the groundbreaking Highway 61 Revisited.

Dylan’s lyrics in “Like a Rolling Stone” were a scathing put-down of a young woman. “Once upon a time you dressed so fine, threw the bums a dime in your prime,” Dylan growls in the opening line, showing the mastery of meter and rhyme typical of his best songs. The song ran for over six minutes, more than twice the length of a typical hit, and Columbia executives decided that “Like a Rolling Stone” couldn’t possibly be released as a single. But then a young Columbia employee smuggled an acetate of the song into a New York nightclub, where the DJ played it to a highly appreciative crowd. The next morning, an employee of a local radio station who’d been at the club phoned Columbia and demanded copies. Columbia relented, releasing “Like a Rolling Stone” as a single on July 20, 1965. (Because of its length, the song occupied both sides of a seven-inch 45rpm record.) It proved immensely popular, reaching No. 1 in several cities and making the Top 10 at Chicago’s WLS, the station most New Trier kids listened to. Nobody had ever heard anything like it. Years later, Rolling Stone magazine would rate “Like a Rolling Stone” as the greatest rock song of all time. As Bruce Springsteen once observed, the song “sounded like somebody’d kicked open the door to your mind.” It was the only hit single Bloomfield would play on in his entire career.

Dylan and the Butterfield Band were slated to play in separate performances at the Newport Folk Festival starting a few days later. On the day before his appearance, Dylan decided to try something new. Rather than playing the quiet acoustic set everyone was expecting, he asked members of the Butterfield Band to back him. After only a few hours of rehearsal, they took the stage at Newport, Dylan having donned a leather jacket and heeled boots, a look at odds with the simple attire of most folksingers. The audience wasn’t expecting an electric blues band, and the sound system at Newport wasn’t up to the deafening roar Bloomfield hit them with. Fans struggled to hear Dylan’s all-important words, many booed, and others were just puzzled. “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more!” Dylan sneered in the opening song, many interpreting this as a not-so-fond farewell to folk music. After the brief electric set, Dylan came back onstage for two solo acoustic numbers. If his audience didn’t get his message in the first set, they definitely got it in the second when he performed “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” Dylan quickly left the stage and would not come back to Newport for 37 years.

After Newport, Bloomfield returned to Chicago to work on the Butterfield Band’s first album, released in October 1965. Containing a few Chicago Blues covers and a few originals, including a hard-charging blues instrumental composed by Bloomfield, the album was well received but not a bestseller. In early 1966, the band played at leading venues on the West Coast like the Whiskey A Go Go in Los Angeles and the Fillmore in San Francisco. They began working on an extended instrumental that Bloomfield had composed. The piece had several parts, showcasing all members of the band, but especially Bloomfield, who took several solos, some sounding like Chicago Blues and others like Indian ragas. When the band played it live, the piece could stretch to 30 minutes or more. It was eventually called “East-West,” which became the title of the band’s next album, released in August 1966.

Like its predecessor, East-West became a favorite album of musicians and serious music fans, but sold only modestly. The version of “East-West” that closed the album had been shortened to 13 minutes, but was still the most adventurous composition ever recorded by a rock band up to that time. A new phrase was coined just to describe it: “psychedelic rock.” The song would never be played on Top 40 stations, but would become a favorite on the “underground” stations that emerged a few years later in places like Berkeley and Ann Arbor. “East-West” ushered in an era of ambitious, complex songs in popular music that borrowed from jazz, classical and South Asian music, anticipating the work of the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers, Pink Floyd and many others. In one commentator’s words, the piece “opened the door to unlimited freedom of expression for all rock guitarists.” “East-West” was Bloomfield’s crowning achievement.

During summer 1966, the band moved to New York and became a fixture in Greenwich Village. During their residency in the Village, Bloomfield heard about another hot young guitarist playing a few blocks away, a soft-spoken kid from Seattle who’d served as a paratrooper in the US Army’s 101st Airborne Division, the Screaming Eagles. The kid was fronting a band called Jimmy James and the Blue Flames, but would soon begin performing under his real name: Jimi Hendrix. Onstage, Hendrix managed to harness feedback and distortion, normally avoided by electric guitarists, and transform it into music. As Bloomfield later described his first impression of Hendrix’ playing, “Bombs exploded! Airplanes took off! Buildings collapsed! I was sitting in the front row and I was just blown away.” Bloomfield jammed with Hendrix backstage a few times, declaring that Hendrix was “way better” than he was.

In fall 1966, the Butterfield Band embarked on a tour of Britain. A lively electric blues scene was underway there, and the Chicagoans received a warm welcome from fans, the press and fellow musicians. The best of the lot was a 21-year-old guitarist named Eric Clapton, who had just formed a trio called Cream. Bloomfield had heard the Englishman’s recordings, in which he recognized not only an exceptional talent, but also the same obsession with the Chicago Blues that he himself had experienced. On the day he arrived in London, Bloomfield said of Clapton to a reporter, “Man, I’m jealous. I wish I could play like that.” A few days later, the Butterfield Band went to see Cream, and the band invited Bloomfield and Butterfield to get up on stage and jam. Their paths would cross again on the British tour. Bloomfield and Clapton became friendly rivals, each regularly praising the other in public.

The British tour left Bloomfield exhausted. He’d had very little sleep for an entire month, and had grown weary of Butterfield’s dictatorial ways and tendency to short-change the other musicians when divvying up the band’s modest earnings. He left the Butterfield Band amicably in February 1967 with the idea of forming an even bigger and better band with a full horn section, and began looking for musicians. By the spring of that year, he’d organized a seven-piece ensemble that would be called the Electric Flag.

While still forming the new band, Bloomfield was commissioned to provide the soundtrack for a countercultural film written by Jack Nicholson, The Trip. In the movie, a young Hollywood director, played by Peter Fonda, has a hallucinogenic experience and wanders in a daze along the Sunset Strip at night until a girlfriend rescues him. Critics mostly panned the movie but loved the music, in which Bloomfield’s new band perfectly captured Fonda’s disorientation.

The Electric Flag’s first live performance was at the Monterey International Pop Festival in June 1967. Few band debuts had ever been as eagerly anticipated. The Electric Flag was the first rock band with a horn section, and Bloomfield was at the top of his game, considered not only the best guitarist but, on the strength of “East-West,” one of the most innovative composers in popular music. Organized mostly by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, Monterey Pop was the first great rock festival, intended to be a celebration of the emerging counterculture and the music that accompanied it, especially in San Francisco. The festival would showcase exciting new Bay Area bands like the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead and Big Brother & the Holding Company, fronted by Janis Joplin, along with established acts like the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and Simon & Garfunkel, and would be filmed by a respected documentary filmmaker, D.A. Pennebaker.

Bloomfield was worried as he entered the Monterey fairgrounds, running as usual on very little sleep. Record company executives were there, and Bloomfield was looking for a recording contract. The sheer scale of talent at the festival intimidated him. He’d already watched Janis Joplin’s impassioned performance and his former boss Paul Butterfield’s superb, bluesy set. After a rousing introduction from David Crosby of the Byrds, the Electric Flag took the stage for the first time. They performed four high-powered songs and then an encore. When the performance came to its thundering end, the crowd was ecstatic. The band bounded offstage, several fellow musicians slapping Bloomfield on the back and offering congratulations and hi-fives from the wings. The Electric Flag soon signed a contract with Columbia that was far better than anything Bloomfield had seen before.

Yet Bloomfield was unhappy with the Electric Flag’s performance at Monterey. To him, the band seemed under-rehearsed, the set list hurriedly cobbled together. He also felt upstaged by his 19-year-old drummer, Buddy Miles, who contributed sweet, soulful vocals as well as a frenzied assault on his drum kit. But above all he felt outdone by some of the other artists at the festival. Bloomfield, who often performed in jeans and a button-down shirt, noted the outlandish stage costumes of many of his fellow musicians. He’d watched a little-known English group, the Who, play a blistering set and then destroy their instruments amid smoke bombs. Then Jimi Hendrix came on. Hendrix, also relatively unknown at the time, had made sure that all the amps were turned up as high as they would go. Between short vocals and flirtatious comments to the audience, he swung his white Stratocaster around, assumed provocative poses with it, and played it behind his back, creating a wall of ear-splitting distortion. While his rhythm section was still pounding through the last number, he set the guitar on fire, smashed it (on live mic) and threw the pieces into the audience.

After watching these antics at Monterey, Bloomfield began to wonder if music was more about showmanship than great playing, and worried that his own act was falling behind. He saw musicians behave like royalty, and he knew that many had contracts far more lucrative than his. He saw that bands with hit records came out on top, and he began to resent the industry for treating music as nothing but commerce.

The Electric Flag went into the studio to record their first album starting in July 1967, but it took many months thanks to touring commitments and other distractions, above all heroin. The album’s title, A Long Time Comin’, said it all. It was finally released in March 1968 to mostly good reviews. The Washington Post called the band’s sound “volcanic…with the power and velocity of a diesel train,” but many Bloomfield fans were disappointed by the album’s lack of fiery guitar solos. In live performances, Miles increasingly took the spotlight. Leading a band with seven members, the majority addicted to drugs, proved to be a challenge for Bloomfield. He realized that with the Electric Flag, he had taken on more than he could handle, and in May 1968, Bloomfield quit the band he had founded.

After that, starting in about 1969, while he was still in his twenties, Bloomfield’s career stalled and his personal life went into a tailspin. His marriage broke up, and the insomnia that had plagued him all his life got worse, fueling his appetite for alcohol and drugs. After he neglected to file tax returns, the IRS came after him. He bought a house in Marin County and spent time just hanging out there. He made a few recordings, but more often joined others onstage, sitting in with Muddy Waters, BB King, the Jefferson Airplane, Santana, Van Morrison and many others. He played behind the ethereal voice of Judy Collins, and later produced Janis Joplin’s first solo album, playing on a few songs. He provided music for two more films, Medium Cool (1969), set in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and Steelyard Blues (1973), a comedy starring Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland. Other high points included his collaboration with Al Kooper on an album called Super Session (1968), and playing with Butterfield on Muddy Waters’ album Fathers and Sons (1969), which ended up being their old mentor’s most successful album to date. Reunions of both the Butterfield Band and the Electric Flag occurred in the early 70’s but didn’t last.

In 1971, Bloomfield participated in a recording session by Ann-Margret. Bloomfield had overlapped with the actress at New Trier, and they reminisced about their high school days. She too had caused controversy at the school. Just weeks after Bloomfield was expelled, the senior from Wilmette, then known as Ann-Margret Olsson, played a role in Lagniappe, the student variety show, that was so steamy and suggestive that several indignant parents walked out. Ann-Margret had the last laugh, though: she soon graduated, and for the next 60 years she would reign as one of the most glamorous stars in Hollywood.

In February 1981, Bloomfield was found dead at the wheel of his car in San Francisco. He was 37 years old. An autopsy found a lethal combination of drugs in his system, and the medical examiner ruled it an accidental overdose. In 2015, he was inducted posthumously into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. On the North Shore, we remember Mike Bloomfield as a New Trier rebel who forged his own path, and for a brief, brilliant moment, became the finest rock guitarist in the country.

References:
https://www.bloomfieldworldwide.com/history-bloomfield-industries/
http://www.chicagojewishhistory.org/media/1603/CJH-Spring-2018-web.pdf. Bloomfield’s bar mitzvah was announced in the Winnetka Talk, November 8, 1956.
Ed Ward, Michael Bloomfield: The Rise and Fall of an American Guitar Hero. Chicago: Chicago Review Press (2016), p. 14.

Born John Richbourg, the Nashville disk jockey who called himself John R was white. He had been an actor, and adopted a hepcat persona on the air, fooling most of his audience, black and white alike, into thinking he was African-American. He was a role model for the even more outrageous DJ’s who came later such as Bob Smith, who adopted the name Wolfman Jack. For background on Richbourg and other famous DJ’s of the time, see Wes Smith, The Pied Pipers of Rock ‘n’ Roll: Radio Deejays of the 50’s and 60’s. Marietta, Georgia: Longstreet Press (1989).

For background on the Great Migration of African-Americans to Chicago, see Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York: Vintage Books (2020); Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land:
The Great Black Migration and How it Changed America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf (1991). Both books mention the development and influence of the Chicago Blues.

Ward, p. 6, 13.
David Dann, Guitar King: Michael Bloomfield’s Life in the Blues. Austin: University of Texas Press (2019), p. 17.
Ward, p. 17; Dann, p.17-22.
Ward, p. 28-29; Dann, p. 54-55..

Bloomfield became personal friends with Waters, considering him his “second father.” He often dined in the Waters home, and even babysat for Waters’ grandchildren. Dann, p. 29.
Martin Scorsese, No Direction Home, film; Dann, p. 146.
Newsweek magazine, November 4, 1963; Nat Hentoff, “What Bob Dylan Wanted at Twenty-Three,” the New Yorker, October 16, 1964.

Born Alan Kuperschmidt in Queens, Al Kooper has had a wide-ranging career in music. In 1958, at the age of 14, he joined a band called the Royal Teens, which had a smash hit with “Short Shorts,” an ode to a revealing article of clothing favored by teenage girls in the late Fifties. He co-wrote songs for Gary Lewis & the Playboys, including “This Diamond Ring,” which went to No. 1 in 1965. After working with Dylan that year, he joined a band called the Blues Project, which played at Monterey in June 1967. After that, founded Blood, Sweat & Tears, but left before that band achieved worldwide fame. Later he discovered Lynyrd Skynyrd at a bar in Atlanta, producing their first three albums and playing on the first two, including the songs “Sweet Home Alabama” and “Free Bird.” More recently, he has taught composition at Berklee College of Music in Boston.

See also generally Greil Marcus, Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads. New York: Public Affairs, 2005.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/bob-dylan-records-like-a-rolling-stone; https://ultimateclassicrock.com/bob-dylan-like-a-rolling-stone/
WLS Silver Dollar Survey, August 27, 1965.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150908170729/http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/the-500-greatest-songs-of-all-time-20110407/bob-dylan-like-a-rolling-stone-20110516
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/bob-dylan-records-like-a-rolling-stone

https://time.com/3968092/bob-dylan-electric-newport/
When Dylan finally returned to the Newport Festival in 2002, he snarkily performed in a wig and a false beard. He actually didn’t abandon folk music at Newport, and would go on to write dozens of songs in that genre, as well as songs in many other styles. He would win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016. Now in his 80’s, he is still performing. The significance of Dylan “going electric” at Newport has generated endless debate among critics and historians, with many considering it an important cultural watershed, a defining event of the Sixties. Others have downplayed its importance, considering it an off-the-cuff experiment that mostly failed because of the band’s lack of rehearsals and an inadequate sound system. See Marcus, passim.

The Fillmore was San Francisco’s leading music venue in the Sixties, and was critical to the success of nearly all the San Francisco bands of the period. Most of the bands were booked and promoted by the city’s great rock impresario, Bill Graham. Born Wulf Wolodia Grajonca, Graham was an orphaned Holocaust survivor raised by foster parents in New York, later earning a business degree at City College and serving in Korea, where he earned a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. Joel Selvin, Summer of Love. New York: Dutton (1994), p. 11
Lavezzoli, Peter, The Dawn of Indian Music in the West. New York, NY: Continuum (2006).

Dann, p. 250-251, 345.
Dann, p. 265-269.
Ward, p. 86.

The soundtrack for The Trip also included the first use of a synthesizer by a rock band. Robert Moog, a Cornell PhD in engineering, had invented the Moog Synthesizer in 1964. Bloomfield had some familiarity with avant-garde electronic music, and learned of a musician named Paul Beaver who owned a Moog and was sometimes hired to produce weird sounds in low-budget Hollywood horror movies. He had Beaver add more weird sounds to The Trip, enhancing the sense of confusion and distress Fonda’s character experiences in the film. Dann, p. 302-303. Over the years, use of the Moog and other synthesizers would become increasingly widespread in popular music, to a point where, by the early 1980’s, it was the only instrument many bands used.

Ward, p. 91.
Dann, p. 331-332.
Dann, p.325, 347.
Dann, p. 346.
Dann, p. 401, quoting The Washington Post, March 5, 1968.

https://www.mikebloomfieldamericanmusic.com/bloomweb07/1970-1974.htm
https://illinoisstatesoceity.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/10/illinois_hall_o_48.html; https://caroldiehl.com/art-vent/tags/ann-margret;