Barry Goldberg, Who Backed Dylan When He Went Electric, Dies at 83

New York Times

31-01-2025

Barry Goldberg, an acclaimed keyboard player who slipped through a side door into the rock pantheon by taking part in Bob Dylan's epochal electric set at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, died on Jan. 22 in the Tarzana neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was 83.
His son, Aram Goldberg, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was complications of lymphoma.
Mr. Goldberg was part of wave of white musicians who emerged in Chicago in the 1960s — among the others were the singer and harmonica player Paul Butterfield and the guitarist Michael Bloomfield — to create their own brand of blues-based rock.
Over the course of his career, he led a band with the guitarist and future hitmaker Steve Miller, and played on indelible recordings like Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels' 1966 Top 10 hit 'Devil With a Blue Dress On/Good Golly Miss Molly,' as well as albums by the Byrds, Leonard Cohen and the Ramones.
Relocating in San Francisco for a period in the mid-1960s, Mr. Goldberg joined with Mr. Bloomfield, a friend from high school; the singer Nick Gravenites, another Chicago blues devotee; and the drummer Buddy Miles, who would later work with Jimi Hendrix, and others, to form the Electric Flag, an earthy blues-rock outfit that rode the psychedelic wave and performed at the watershed Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967.
Mr. Goldberg also made his mark as a songwriter. He collaborated with the country-rock pioneer Gram Parsons on 'Do You Know How It Feels to Be Lonesome?,' released by the Flying Burrito Brothers in 1969, and with the lyricist Gerry Goffin on Gladys Knight & the Pips' 1973 Top 10 hit 'I've Got to Use My Imagination.'
Despite his long résumé, Mr. Goldberg will probably forever be most closely linked with Mr. Dylan, who first achieved fame as a folk singer of the first order but stepped onstage at Newport, R.I., in 1965 in a leather jacket with an electric band and an amplified Fender Stratocaster and, legend has it, seared the ears of an outraged audience filled with folk traditionalists. The history-making set is represented in the climactic scene of the Academy Award-nominated film 'A Complete Unknown,' starring Timothée Chalamet as Mr. Dylan. (Mr. Goldberg is not portrayed in the movie.)
What it all meant has been debated for 60 years.
Barry Joseph Goldberg was born on Dec. 25, 1941, in Chicago, the only child of Frank Goldberg, who owned a leather tanning factory, and Nettie (Spencer) Goldberg, a pianist and singer who performed in Yiddish theaters around the city.
In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, Gail Goldberg.
He learned piano from his mother, and he also learned confidence in performing, despite stage jitters that would last a lifetime. 'It probably had a lot to do with my mother forcing me to play for strangers when I was 8, 9 years old,' he once told Dan Epstein of the Jewish newspaper The Forward.
But his real musical education came late at night, listening to South Side blues artists on his transistor radio. 'Things would be unleashed in the music and I could feel the excitement,' he said in a 1996 interview with the site Bloomfield Notes. 'It was wild and uncontrollable,' he added.
By his midteens he was traveling with Mr. Bloomfield to blues clubs on the city's South Side, where they mingled with luminaries like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and Buddy Guy.
At 18, he started performing with Robby and the Troubadours, a band from New York that was cashing in on the twist craze, in nightclubs on Rush Street — which Mr. Goldberg called 'the Bourbon Street of Chicago' — and found himself hanging out at Hugh Hefner's Playboy Mansion.
When the Paul Butterfield Blues Band was invited to play the Newport festival on the same Sunday in 1965 as Mr. Dylan, Mr. Goldberg traveled to Newport with the band because he expected to sit in. But in planning the Butterfield band's set, Paul Rothchild, who was producing their first album, informed Mr. Goldberg that he did not want a keyboardist onstage. (Another keyboardist, Mark Naftalin, would join the band a few months later.)
'And that was it,' Mr. Goldberg recalled in a 2022 remembrance of the event, written with Mr. Epstein, in The Forward. 'In one minute, I went from having the greatest time to being completely alone and having no gig. It just destroyed me.'
Fate would turn at a party the night before Mr. Dylan's gig, where Mr. Bloomfield and Mr. Goldberg were drafted into an impromptu backing band, along with other Butterfield sidemen. Al Kooper, who had performed the soaring organ part on Mr. Dylan's 'Like a Rolling Stone,' played organ; Mr. Goldberg played piano.
To Mr. Goldberg, it was a natural fit. 'We were three Jewish guys from the Midwest who had similar backgrounds, similar attitudes and even the same clothes,' he recalled in The Forward. 'When I met Bob at the party, he was wearing tapered pants and pointed boots, just like I was. Bob could tell we were cool, that we were at Newport to play music and not just to 'make the scene.''
Tremors were already felt at the soundcheck before the Dylan performance. Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary, who was serving as the M.C. that evening, 'kept yelling at us to turn down,' Mr. Goldberg recalled. 'Every time Yarrow yelled at us, I could see Michael glaring back at him like, 'Oh, just you wait.''
'When we went on,' he said in a 2018 video interview, 'Michael turned his guitar up at nine, and it was just electrifying.'
'This,' he added, 'was rock 'n' roll.'
However famous it quickly became, Mr. Dylan's electric set lasted only three songs: 'Maggie's Farm,' 'Like a Rolling Stone' and 'It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.' He then returned for a brief acoustic encore.
As portrayed in 'A Complete Unknown' and in countless critical appraisals, the performance was one of the most seismic of the 20th century — Mr. Dylan tilting the popular music world off its axis, bidding farewell to a stodgy yesterday for countless incandescent tomorrows ruled by rock.
There is another view. 'In most tellings, Dylan represents youth and the future, and the people who booed were stuck in the dying past,' Elijah Wald wrote in 'Dylan Goes Electric!' (2015). 'But there is another version, in which the audience represents youth and hope, and Dylan was shutting himself off behind a wall of electric noise, locking himself in a citadel of wealth and power.'
Still, to Mr. Goldberg, the new era was welcome. 'At the end, there were boos but also cheers,' he said in a 2013 interview with Rolling Stone magazine. Those who were upset presumably 'felt betrayed by him,' he said. 'But Bob was creating a new kind of music, and after we were done, everyone knew how special it was.'