RIP Barry Goldberg (1941-2025)

5th February 2025 · 1960s, 1965, 2020s, 2025, Music, R.I.P.

You can’t see him in this footage but this is the moment keyboard player Barry Goldberg – who died in January -became part of one of the most historic gigs in musical history.

It was less than 24 hours earlier that Goldberg had met Bob Dylan for the first time, at a party on the Saturday night of the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, and was invited to join his band for the following night’s festival finale.

As anyone who has seen A Complete Unknown knows by now, that was the occasion Dylan outraged folk fans by performing with an electric band, drawn largely from the Paul Butterfield Blues Band – who had opened the festival – premiering new songs including this future classic, Like A Rolling Stone.

On this one he’s backed by Barry Goldberg on organ, Al Kooper on bass, Mike Bloomfield on guitar and drummer Sam Ley. You can’t hear anyone booing – the film seems to have overstated the extent of that – though you can hear boos at the end of the opening number (another new song), Maggie’s Farm.

“There were some people out there that dug what we were doing,” Goldberg recalled in 2019, “but the others weren’t even listening. They were so angry that Bob was turning his back on the folkies they couldn’t get their heads around what he was doing.”

Goldberg did not play on the recorded version of Like A Rolling Stone that appeared on Highway 61 Revisited – that was Al Kooper – or join Dylan on tour, but they remained lose and Dylan later produced his 1974 solo album – the only time he’s ever produced another artist.

For his part, Goldberg continued to work with Mike Bloomfield – “one of the greatest blues guitar players of all time, and also my best friend” – in a new band called Electric Flag.

He later wrote a book about their relationship, dating back to when he was 16 at school in Chicago and they were in rival bands, called Two Jews Blues.

In the mid-’60s Goldberg had played with Steve Miller in the Goldberg-Miller Blues Band, recording a solitary single – The Mother Song – before Miller moved to San Francisco and found fame there.

As a session man, Goldberg’s first job was on Devil With A Blue Dress On/Good Golly Miss Molly by Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels, and he played on Leonard Cohen’s Death Of A Ladies’ Man, The Flying Burrito Brothers’ The Gilded Palace Of Sin and – curiously – The Ramones album End Of The Century.

As a songwriter, he wrote songs recorded by artists ranging from Gladys Knight and Rod Stewart to Gram Parsons and Joe Cocker, and co-produced a Percy Sledge album.