Bob Dylan on the musician who could “outplay anybody”
Songs, even great songs, were never enough for Bob Dylan. His first revolution was to shake up the Greenwich Village folk revival by catapulting it into the future rather than grounding it firmly in the past. “I always kind of wrote my own songs, but I never really would play them,” he said. “Nobody played their own songs. The only person I knew who really did it was Woody Guthrie.”
So, just like that, the scene around him suddenly went from strumming the same tunes to searching their souls for something new. This was a Promethean leap in music as it brought folk’s poignant depth to the world of pop culture. However, the original vagabond was never one for resting on his laurels. He realised that if this revolution was really going to catch on, he needed to grasp the bite of rasping electronic rock ‘n’ roll.
In order to blend these two styles accordingly, without ego or arrogance, Dylan knew he needed a better guitarist than himself. In his eyes, there was only one man for the job. “Mike Bloomfield said he’d heard my first record, and he said he wanted to show me how the blues were played,” Dylan explains in the documentary No Direction Home.
He continues: “I didn’t feel much competitive with him. He could outplay anybody, even at that point. When it was time to bring in a guitar player on my record, I couldn’t think of anybody but him. I mean, he just was the best guitar player I’d ever heard.” With that in mind, the songwriter looked to enlist him right away for his next revolution: the visceral masterpiece of Highway 61 Revisited.
Thus, Bloomfield became the engine of a giant leap forward for music. His ability to inject Dylan’s simple melodies with a bit of muscle gave the songs their trademark roar. He could also cope with Dylan’s constant tweaks when playing live, hanging on notes and bending them when required with the skill of a virtuoso.
But tragically, Bloomfield’s own career was cut short. The guitarist died of an overdose in 1980 at the age of 37. Dylan would later comment that Bloomfield was “the guy that I always miss… he knew all the styles”. Indeed, he did, and he knew them intricately, too. Ad Bloomfield himself would say, “The whole idea is that if you turn your amp up to ten, you should still be able to play at a whisper. You’ve got to learn to control your hands.”
This sentiment made him the perfect foil for Dylan, whose songs were all about feel. Even John Hammond, the man who uncovered his greatness in some dingy bar, recalled, “he’s not a great harmonica player, and he’s not a great guitar player, and he’s not a great singer.” But his genius was that he could bend all that to his benefit. He just needed Bloomfield to serve as the solid foundation beneath it for his second revolution in just a few years.
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