THE KILLING FLOOR

Now revered as a linchpin moment in the history of the blues, Howlin' Wolf's London sessions in 1970, with a superstar cast that included some of England's rock royalty, came out of a chance encounter several months earlier at a gig in San Francisco.

- Johnny Black

Backstage at the gig, blues guitarist Mike Bloomfield of the Electric Flag introduced Eric Clapton to Chess Records producer Norman Dayron and, in the course of a rambling conversation about their blues heroes, Dayron floated the idea that he might be able to put together an album on which Clapton would play with the legendary Howlin’ Wolf. Clapton’s eyes lit up. But there was one catch. Nobody had yet suggested the idea to Howlin’ Wolf.

May 1, 1970: Howlin’ Wolf, Hubert Sumlin, Jeff Carp, Norman Dayron and others fly to London.

Norman Dayron: When I had first told Wolf what I was thinking of, he thought it was a horrible idea. He didn’t know who these guys were. But we’d worked together, and he trusted me, so he came round to it.

In all there were about ten people in our party, professional bluesmen from Chicago, in case any of the English guys Clapton had organised didn’t show up. As it turned out, I only needed to use Hubert and our eighteen-year-old harmonica wizard Jeff Carp.

Myself and all of my musicians stayed at the Cumberland Hotel, and we had a small fleet of taxis organised to drive them down to Olympic Studios every day.

Hubert Sumlin: The company [Chess Records] in the States just wanted Wolf with Eric Clapton and the rest of the guys. They was going to leave me back. Eric made a statement, telegraphed these people – if I wasn’t going to be on there, he wasn’t going to be on there. So they said to me: “Hey, man, pack your bags, you got to go!”