Barry Goldberg, an acclaimed keyboard participant who slipped thru a facet door into the rock pantheon through collaborating in Bob Dylan’s epochal electrical i’m ready on the Newport Public Pageant in 1965, died on Jan. 22 within the Tarzana community of Los Angeles. He was once 83.
His son, Aram Goldberg, mentioned the reason for his loss of life, in a sanatorium, was once headaches of lymphoma.
Mr. Goldberg was once a part of a tide of white musicians who emerged in Chicago within the Sixties — a number of the others have been the singer and harmonica participant Paul Butterfield and the guitarist Michael Bloomfield — to assemble their very own emblem of blues-based rock.
Over the process his occupation, he led a band with the guitarist and pace hitmaker Steve Miller, and performed on indelible recordings like Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels’ 1966 Govern 10 crash “Devil With a Blue Dress On/Good Golly Miss Molly,” in addition to albums through the Byrds, Leonard Cohen and the Ramones.
Relocating in San Francisco for a length within the mid-Sixties, Mr. Goldberg joined with Mr. Bloomfield, a chum from highschool; the singer Nick Gravenites, any other Chicago blues devotee; and the drummer Buddy Miles, who would next paintings with Jimi Hendrix, and others, to method the Electrical Flag, an earthy blues-rock outfit that rode the psychedelic tide and carried out on the watershed Monterey Global Pop Pageant in 1967.
Mr. Goldberg additionally 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?,” immune through the Flight Burrito Brothers in 1969, and with the lyricist Gerry Goffin on Gladys Knight & the Pips’ 1973 Govern 10 crash “I’ve Got to Use My Imagination.”
In spite of his lengthy résumé, Mr. Goldberg will most likely eternally be maximum intently connected with Mr. Dylan, who first completed status as a community singer of the primary series however stepped onstage at Newport, R.I., in 1965 in a leather-based jacket with an electrical band and an amplified Fender Stratocaster and, legend has it, seared the ears of an outraged target audience full of community traditionalists. The history-making i’m ready is represented within the climactic scene of the Academy Award-nominated film “A Complete Unknown,” starring Timothée Chalamet as Mr. Dylan.
What all of it intended has been debated for 60 years.
Barry Joseph Goldberg was once born on Dec. 25, 1941, in Chicago, the one kid of Frank Goldberg, who owned a leather-based tanning manufacturing facility, and Nettie (Spencer) Goldberg, a pianist and singer who carried out in Yiddish theaters across the town.
Along with his son, he’s survived through his spouse, Gail Goldberg.
He realized piano from his mom, and he additionally realized self belief in acting, regardless of level jitters that might ultimate a life-time. “It probably had a lot to do with my mother forcing me to play for strangers when I was 8, 9 years old,” he as soon as informed Dan Epstein of the Jewish newspaper The Ahead.
However his actual musical training got here past due at night time, being attentive to South Facet blues artists on his transistor radio. “Things would be unleashed in the music and I could feel the excitement,” he mentioned in a 1996 interview with the web page Bloomfield Notes. “It was wild and uncontrollable,” he added.
By way of his midteens he was once touring with Mr. Bloomfield to blues golf equipment at the town’s South Facet, the place they mingled with luminaries like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Friend Man.
At 18, he began acting with Robby and the Troubadours, a band from Brandnew York that was once cashing in at the twist craze, in nightclubs on Accelerate Side road — which Mr. Goldberg referred to as “the Bourbon Street of Chicago” — and located himself putting out at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion.
When the Paul Butterfield Blues Band was once invited to play games the Newport pageant at the same Sunday in 1965 as Mr. Dylan, Mr. Goldberg traveled to Newport with the band as a result of he anticipated to sit down in. However in making plans the Butterfield band’s i’m ready, Paul Rothchild, who was once generating their first book, knowledgeable Mr. Goldberg that he didn’t desire a keyboardist onstage. (Some other keyboardist, Mark Naftalin, would fix the band a couple of months next.)
“And that was it,” Mr. Goldberg recalled in a 2022 remembrance of the development, written with Mr. Epstein, in The Ahead. “In one minute, I went from having the greatest time to being completely alone and having no gig. It just destroyed me.”
Destiny would flip at a birthday celebration the night time earlier than Mr. Dylan’s gig, the place Mr. Bloomfield and Mr. Goldberg have been drafted into an impromptu backing band, along side alternative Butterfield sidemen. Al Kooper, who had carried out the hovering organ phase on Mr. Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” performed organ; Mr. Goldberg performed piano.
To Mr. Goldberg, it was once a herbal have compatibility. “We were three Jewish guys from the Midwest who had similar backgrounds, similar attitudes and even the same clothes,” he recalled in The Ahead. “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 have been already felt on the soundcheck earlier than the Dylan efficiency. Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary, who was once serving because the M.C. that night, “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 mentioned in a 2018 video interview, “Michael turned his guitar up at nine, and it was just electrifying.”
“This,” he added, “was rock ’n’ roll.”
Alternatively well-known it briefly become, Mr. Dylan’s electrical i’m ready lasted best 3 songs: “Maggie’s Farm,” “Like a Rolling Stone” and “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.” He nearest returned for a temporary acoustic encore.
As portrayed in “A Complete Unknown” and in numerous vital value determinations, the efficiency was once probably the most seismic of the 20 th century — Mr. Dylan tilting the usual track international off its axis, bidding see you later to a stodgy the day past for numerous incandescent tomorrows dominated through rock.
There may be any other 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.”
Nonetheless, to Mr. Goldberg, the pristine time was once welcome. “At the end, there were boos but also cheers,” he mentioned in a 2013 interview with Rolling Stone booklet. Those that have been disappointed possibly “felt betrayed by him,” he mentioned. “But Bob was creating a new kind of music, and after we were done, everyone knew how special it was.”
