In 1965 Bob Dylan released Bringing it all Back Home — the record’s first side featuring the folk music hero playing with an electric band. In July of that same year, Dylan played the Newport Folk Festival and made history when he took to the hallowed stage with the fully amplified Paul Butterfield Blues Band and changed his career and the history of rock ‘n’ roll forever.
For me, the key to this whole moment is the relationship between Bob Dylan and Butterfield guitarist, Mike Bloomfield. Bloomfield was a wealthy Jewish kid who grew up in Chicago and fell in love with the electrified blues being created in that city’s black communities who had moved from the rural South to the industrial North during the Great Migration.
Bloomfield became an incendiary guitar player who went on to record on Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited album — featuring a title track that many consider to be the most important song in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. Dylan wanted Bloomfield to join his band but he made other choices — he stuck with Butterfield before founding Electric Flag, enjoying collaborations with organist Al Kooper, and developing the heroin habit that would eventually take his life in 1981.
Before he died, Bloomfield rejoined Dylan at The Warfield Theatre in San Fransisco. The event is documented in the amazing audio history The Mike Bloomfield Story. Here’s a transcription from the Bloomfield oral history book If You Love These Blues…
“We went down to the dressing room, and it really was nice. Dylan hugged Michael, and Michael introduced me to him. They gave us backstage passes, and then Bob brought out Michael during the concert. And he gave him a 10-minute introduction. He took 10 minutes to tell this young audience of his, this new generation audience, that here in their midst in San Francisco was this legendary guitar player, who he thought was, perhaps, the greatest guitar player alive. And who had added so much to his music. And now he was going to bring him onstage. So Michael shuffles onstage with his bedroom slippers, looking somewhat embarrassed, plugs in and plays the most pure, the most perfect accompaniments, the most intelligent, most brilliant playing that I’d heard in God knows how long, putting in all the right stings and the overtones and the slide.
It was like he knew about it and figured it all out in advance and rehearsed all of the songs. Of course, he hadn’t done any of that. The crowd went berserk. Berserk. I think most of them didn’t even know who Michael was. Some of them did, the ones who were true San Francisco old-timers, who knew Dylan, knew Michael, and they were just blown away that here they were together.
When Michael started playing, the music came alive like nothing you’ve ever heard. I mean, it was just like that killer slide guitar on the Highway 61 album–only it was louder and leaner and more mature and more thoughtful, faster, and cleverer. It was really quite a job he did, and it surprised the hell of of me, because he was not in great shape that night….
…Bob came up to Michael, and I won’t say there were tears in his eyes, but I would say it was as close as it could be. And he said, ‘God, I had forgotten what a difference your playing made in my music, and how imporant it was to it, and how much I had missed it.’”
About a year later, as many know, Michael was found dead in his car.
Here is Bloomfield with Dylan performing “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar” just a few months before his death. Bloomfield channels Elmore James with his slide guitar work here as the two heroes are reunited to claim the cacophonous crown that they’d won together nearly two decades before.
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