Friday Night Jukebox, Vol. CLXVIII--Elvin Bishop: Fooled Around and Fell in Love

My first recollection of this week's tune is riding the bus when I was a junior in high school and a girl (one of the cool kids who had a reputation for being meaner than hell--the kind of person a shy kid like me stayed away from) getting on the bus as it was playing, and having no inhibitions about singing her heart out as it blared from WLS 89 out of Chicago.  It made me wonder if just maybe it was a little more than just another ballad on the top 40.  A few years later in college I would see her at a coffee house, just her and an acoustic guitar on the stage, and I was still in awe at how much she loved music and how well she sang, still no inhibitions about sharing her soul with the rest of us....

Elvin Bishop went to the University of Chicago where he majored in physics--but unlike many of his fellow physics majors, after graduation he decided he wanted to be a star rather than study them.  In 1963 he hooked up with Paul Butterfield and appeared as lead guitarist on several of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band's albums until the late 60's.  From there he went solo, and over the course of the next fifty years or so released 20 albums (the latest in 2017), six live albums, and toured the world over.  In 2015 Bishop was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as an original member of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and the year after was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in his own right.

Originally released in 1975 on his album Struttin' My Stuff, "Fooled Around and Fell in Love" was released as a single the following year and would reach #3 (with a bullet!) on the Billboard Hot 100.  It would be the only hit of Bishop's career (as we've learned time and again here on FNJ, one is more than enough to build a career on)--though he didn't sing the tune himself.  Bishop felt his voice wasn't right for the song and asked one of his backup vocalists, Mickey Thomas, to sing it.  Thomas parlayed the success into a gig with Jefferson Starship--which was probably a good financial move on his part, but definitely cost him coolness points....

For the second straight week we have a song which isn't a typical emaycee  fave--I'm one of about three white American men in his fifties who doesn't think the blues are the be all end all of music--and "Fooled Around and Fell in Love" most definitely has a bluesy feel to it.  It tells the tale of a man who spent many a year playing the field (by his estimation a million girls, though emaycee thinks that may be a bit of an exaggeration) until, whoops, he fell right in love with one of them.  Thomas's vocals do an excellent job of capturing the soul of a man who's surprised to find he's fallen in love, Bishop has a killer guitar solo about halfway through (I'm not familiar with much of Bishop's work, but it shows a neophyte fan why he's in the Blues Hall of Fame), and the song closes with a catchy back and forth on the words "fooled around" which keeps it spinning round and round in your head for weeks on end (not necessarily a bad thing).  All in all, it's a nice blues ballad that serves as a reminder (for me) that not everything in high school was a living hell....

Lyric Sheet:  "Free, on my own, that's the way I used to be/But since I met you baby, love's got a hold on me..."

Enjoy:

Fuck Donald Trump,
emaycee