Singer/harmonica player Paul Butterfield and his band were from Chicago and well-schooled in that city's urban blues scene. Their first two albums of modernized Chicago blues not only created a critical stir, but led to large-scale interest in electric blues amongst the then-embryonic hippie generation. Members of the Butterfield band (most notably guitar whiz Mike Bloomfield) also played a key role in rock history by helping Bob Dylan along in his transition to electric music. Butterfield's 1966 album EAST-WEST was strikingly prescient in its incorporation of Eastern modalities. By the mid-'70s he was getting into the post-Woodstock rural vibe with his BETTER DAYS band. Though Butterfield's salad days were far behind him when he passed away in the late-'80s, he had changed both the blues and rock worlds irrevocably.