In the meantime, illness had forced Sam Lay off the road. They replaced him with a jazzier player in Billy Davenport and recorded their second album East-West, in July 1966. Live renditions of the album's thirteen-minute instrumental title track could stretch to nearly an hour and their performances at the Fillmore pointed the way for the former folkie guitarists in the city's jam bands. According to Elvin Bishop those guys... weren't particularly proficient playing electric guitar — [Bloomfield] ... just destroyed them.
But it didn't last. Bloomfield split to form the Electric Flag. After Arnold and Davenport had departed as well, the core of Butterfield, Bishop and Naftalin added a new rhythm section and two horns to cut 1967's The Resurrection of Pigboy Crabshaw, which takes is title from Bishop's elevation to the lead guitarist's role. That lineup played the Monterey Pop Festival on 17 June 1967, and continued a move towards horn driven, soul-inflected rhythm and blues on 1968's In My Own Dream, but by the end of the year Bishop and Naftalin were gone.
Butterfield and Bloomfield were aboard for the show at Chicago's Auditorium Theater and subsequent recording session in April 1969 that yielded Muddy Waters' Fathers and Sons set and the iconic bluesman's most significant mainstream chart success.
A new Butterfield Blues Band played the Woodstock Festival on 18 August 1969, though the performance failed to make the cut for the Woodstock movie. Love March, however, appeared on the soundtrack album as well as 1969's Keep On Moving, produced by veteran R&B producer and songwriter Jerry Ragovoy, as Elektra sought commercial rather than critical success. The experiment did not, however, deliver what it was supposed to. Neither did the live double album recorded in March 1970 at The Troubadour in West Hollywood or 1971's Sometimes I Just Feel Like Smilin' and by 1973 when the retrospective Golden Butter: The Best of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band was released the Butterfield Blues Band was no more.
A switch of labels to manager Albert Grossman's Bearsville Records saw Butterfield retreat to Woodstock in upstate New York, where two albums with Paul Butterfield's Better Days (Paul Butterfield's Better Days and It All Comes Back) and two solo efforts (1976's Put It in Your Ear and North South in 1981) along with appearances as a sideman (The Muddy Waters Woodstock Album) and guest appearances with his Woodstock neighbours. He played at The Band's final concert (The Last Waltz), worked with Levon Helm in the RCO All Stars and toured with Rick Danko and Richard Manuel before a final studio album, The Legendary Paul Butterfield Rides Again. There were, however, health and alcohol issues. A number of medical procedures to relieve peritonitis resulted in a need for painkillers, including heroin, which led to addiction and Butterfield died on 4 May 1987 at his North Hollywood apartment, victim of an accidental drug overdose.
Studio albums Live albums; Compilation albums Various artist compilation albums/videos and film appearances Plays on...