Mike Bloomfield & Mark Naftalin at the Record Plant

On April 22, 1973, KSAN broadcast Mike Bloomfield and Mark Naftalin from the Record Plant in Sausalito. Tom Donahue introduced the set, as he did across the series. By then, Bloomfield had all but vanished from public view. Crawdaddy had run a piece headlined 'Whatever Happened to Mike Bloomfield?'

A few years earlier, Bloomfield had been everywhere that mattered. He played guitar on Dylan's 'Like a Rolling Stone' in 1965. He backed Dylan's first electric set at Newport that same summer. He electrified the Butterfield Blues Band, then launched the Electric Flag at Monterey Pop. He cut 'Super Session' with Al Kooper and Stephen Stills in 1968.

Then he pulled back to a house on Wellesley Court in Mill Valley. He scored films for the Mitchell Brothers and fought insomnia with heroin. Columbia rejected his solo album 'Try It Before You Buy It.' That record stayed unreleased until 1990, nine years after his death. The April 22 broadcast documents him in that quiet, local stretch.

Mark Naftalin was the natural partner, another Butterfield alumnus settled in Marin. The two had anchored the Butterfield Blues Band together from 1965 to 1968. Here they played mostly acoustic, a quiet reunion eight years on. The same KSAN day carried Nick Gravenites, with Butterfield guesting, and Kris Kristofferson. It was the Chicago blues diaspora, regrouped for an afternoon in Sausalito.

Bloomfield died February 15, 1981, at 37, from a drug overdose. Naftalin lived another long chapter, hosting blues radio across the Bay Area for decades. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted him in 2015 with the Butterfield band. He won the Tom Donahue Radio Award in 1992, named for the man who introduced this set. The full broadcast came out on CD in 2017 as the Air Cuts release.