Double Bill of Films Recalls the ’60s Music Scene @Rock_Hall

SweetBlues

Wed 1/28 @ 7PM

Mid-late ’60s rock music has acquired an unquenchable mystique that even those not yet born then look back to nostalgically. It was a time when popular music was surging inexorably away from the bracing simplicity of the British invasion and fracturing in a multitude of darker and more dangerous directions.

One of those was the blues rock, which eventually gave birth to heavy metal. In the mid ’60s, young (usually) white (usually) musicians on both sides of the Atlantic began to discover black blues. They adopted and embellished it, often cross-fertilizing it with what came to be known as psychedelic rock, which eschewed traditional pop song structures, introduced new sounds and instruments, and added stream-of-consciousness lyrics.

A pair of films screening at the Rock Hall deals with that era and those genres. Sweet Blues: A Film About Mike Bloomfield introduces viewers to a fascinating and doomed character, whose background—he was from a wealthy Jewish family in Chicago’s upscale Northshore suburbs—didn’t seem a likely breeding ground for the acclaimed music career and sad, drug-addled end of a stellar blues-rock guitarist, who this year, 34 years after his death, is being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Mike Butterfield Blues Band.

The accompanying short film Feed Your Head: The Psychedelic Era was made for the Riock Hall’s late ’90s exhibit I Want to Take You Higher about psychedelic music and culture.

Bob Sarles, the director of both films, will do a Q&A session following the screening.

The event is free but you need to make a reservation here.

facebook.com/Sweet-Blues-A-film-about-Mike-Bloomfield/

1100 Rock and Roll Blvd, Cleveland, OH 44114

 

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One Response to “Double Bill of Films Recalls the ’60s Music Scene @Rock_Hall”

  1. ralph solonitz

    Love this.

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