Guitarist Bishop stirs up blues stew
Tireless work ethic keeps veteran musician on tour, in the studio

Even after more than 40 years in the music business, Elvin Bishop doesn’t always get the perks that ought to come his way.

Bishop, who will perform Saturday at the Safeway Waterfront Blues Festival, was going through security at the Oakland International Airport recently when an official confiscated a jar of his homemade jam.

Thinking his standing in the blues community might count for something, Bishop told the man the jam was a gift for B.B. King, who he was flying to Las Vegas to visit.

“The guy says ‘You can tell B.B. King the thrill is gone,’ ” Bishops recalls. “ ‘And so is his jam.’ ”

“I had a big vision of him sliding a biscuit under it the next morning,” says the guitarist.

The 65-year-old Bishop takes such things in stride, the way he always has since leaving Tulsa, Okla., for the fertile blues scene in Chicago as a teenager. He’s never really viewed music as work, not after spending time in the steel mills and oil fields of the Southwest.

“My family didn’t have any money,” he says. “I’m from a long line of farmers going back as far as you can see.”

After several years as the lead guitarist with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the shaggy-haired Bishop carved out a niche for himself in the early to mid ’70s with a buoyant brand of guitar-driven juke joint rock.

In 1976, Bishop scored a No. 3 hit on the Billboard chart with the plaintive “Fooled Around and Fell in Love,” which featured future Jefferson Starship singer Mickey Thomas on vocals.

Bishop has never stopped recording and performing. In September he’ll release a new album featuring songs by artists he worked with early in his career, performed by rising musical stars as well as veterans like King, James Cotton, Fabulous Thunderbirds frontman Kim Wilson and former Allman Brother Derek Trucks.

“I started thinking about the guys that were nice to me when I started and I went back and got some of them,” he says. “It was a lot of fun. Everybody was at the top of their game.”

The younger artists on the record, including Homemade Jams, a trio of Mississippi youngsters between the ages of 9 and 14, bear watching.

“You don’t know their names, but you will in a couple years,” Bishop says.

Bishop, who lives north of San Francisco in Marin County, says Pacific Northwest fans always have opened their arms to his music. He remembers getting a huge response from a Portland crowd on an Alligator Records bus tour, prompting his fellow artists to concede that he had marked the territory for himself.

“They were good to me before I hit big and have been ever since,” Bishop says.