Today, July 1, 2014, for the first time, I visited the grave of blues-rock guitar prodigy MIKE BLOOMFIELD, Bob Dylan's sideman on "Highway 61 Revisited" and at Newport Folk Festival when Dylan famously (infamously to some) went electric. Bloomfield died in 1981 at age 37.
As it turns out, Mike Bloomfield has been a four-minute drive away from my office this whole time. A funny coincidence. I had no idea when I got the idea to start this project.
Mike Bloomfield is interred inside a mausoleum roughly somewhere between the tombs of Jack Benny and Aaron Spelling...
....with Al Jolson's mammoth gravesite just outside the mausoleum....
There are business cards and notes to Mike, held up by guitar picks, at Mike's tomb. A small but loyal fandom has made the pilgrimage to visit his site.
The saddest part -- the receptionist, very nice, had no clue who he was.
Then it got worse.
It took her a minute to find Bloomfield's tomb in the database because they had misspelled his name in the computer as Bloomfeld.
I politely pressed that they need to correct this error ASAP. She was nice enough to take care of it on the spot. Incredulously to me, for whatever time the cemetery has had this computer system (maybe 30 years?), Mike Bloomfield's name has remained misspelled in their database....
....until today.
The day had begun with some classic L.A. June gloom, but by the time I visited Bloomfield's tomb around 2 p.m., the clouds had dissolved and some nice sunshine illuminated Mike's plaque.
And I left the cemetery feeling good, no, great, that Marcus and I are paying homage to Mike Bloomfield's life in our autobiographical comic book, RADIO SILENCE. Beyond spreading our proceeds to various drug rehab charities, we hope to spread more awareness of Bloomfield, his talents, his place in music history and his legacy.
