The Paul Butterfield Blues Band created the template for Acid Rock with the sprawling title track of their second album East West in 1966.

This is another of those bands from ‘before my time’ – and one that I have somehow failed to catch up on in the intervening years.

The second Paul Butterfield Blues Band album, East West, from back in 1966, is pretty special, blending blues with flourishes of jazz and rock. 

That style would eventually emerge in the hands of other, druggier, denizens of their native San Francisco as Acid Rock. The template for the whole sound – the one pioneered by Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead – is the title track, the 13-minute instrumental that closes the album.

As the name suggests, it’s a hybrid of ‘western’ blues and rock with ‘eastern’ (ie. Indian) drone, using elements of modal jazz.
It’s anchored by the relentless drum and bass of Billy Davenport and Jerome

Arnold and takes us on a winding journey, evolving sinuously and almost imperceptibly into different ‘movements’, almost like a classical piece.
Butterfield contributes his signature harmonica and the lazy groove is punctuated in jazz-style by virtuosic solos from both the band’s guitarists, Mike Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop.

It reminds me of some of the longer, instrumental pieces by Can, and the motorik rhythm that underpins krautrock surely has its roots in the hypnotic 4/4 pattern of the drum and bass here.