Fooled Around And Fell In Love

Bishop is a blues guitarist who played in The Paul Butterfield Blues Band before forming his own group in 1968. Mickey Thomas was a vocalist in Bishop's band and sang lead on "Fooled Around And Fell In Love." In a Songfacts interview with Elvin Bishop, he explained: "My voice is very plain. It's better suited for blues. It's been good for me, because it's made my songwriting strong, because to really get over with a voice like mine, which is not a thrill in itself - the quality of the voice - you have to have a strong story and really good words to capture people's imagination. And that tune, I gave it a try. The producer, Bill Szymczyk, said, 'We need one more piece of material here. You got anything else laying around?' I said, 'Well, there's this tune I wrote the other day.' Well, not the other day. I'd actually tried to get a couple of other people to sing it, but somehow it didn't work out. I said, 'How about this 'Fooled Around and Fell In Love'?' We cut a track, it was a really nice track. I tried singing it, and I said, 'That's not buttering my biscuit, my vocal on this. Why don't we give Mickey a shot at this?' And the producer said, 'Well, that's big of you.' And I said, 'Well, I don't think so. It's just common sense, you know?' And Mickey just tore it up."

Mickey Thomas replaced Marty Balin as the male lead singer of Jefferson Starship in 1979 and was with the band in 1985 when they changed their name to Starship and had huge hits with "Sara," "We Built This City" and "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now."

This song is about a guy who callously plays the field until one day when he falls madly in love with a girl he can't stop thinking about. "The better a song is, the less story there is to it, as far as I can tell," Bishop said in his Songfacts interview. "The best songs just come rushing out. I don't know if life squeezes them out of you, or if they're just so right that they take no thought. I don't know. Or if you're given a temporary connection to the flow of the universe, or whatever it is. But that song just damn near wrote itself."