Listen to Mike Bloomfield’s isolated guitar on Bob Dylan song ‘Like a Rolling Stone’
The legendary Bob Dylan has never been regarded as the greatest guitarist in the world. As a folk musician in his formative years, he learned the ropes of the six-string to a more than passable intermediate degree, but it was always his lyrics and unique, passionate delivery that carried the most weight.
From a young age, Dylan’s fascination with music didn’t seem to focus on an attachment to a specific instrument. He set out as a pianist and strived to emulate Little Richard’s stood-up playing style during school performances, backed by his earliest band, The Golden Chords.
Maturing into his late teens and early 20s, Dylan became enamoured with folk music, especially that of Woody Guthrie, and began to learn the guitar. He swiftly became a dab-hand with the harmonica, too, and for many of his early gigs in the folk clubs of Minneapolis and New York, he would sit in solely as a harmonica player.
As one of the most celebrated songwriters of the past six decades, most guitarists would do anything short of gnawing their own arms off to play for Dylan. Among such lucky and virtuosic candidates have been Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits and Mick Taylor of The Rolling Stones, who collaborated with Dylan during the creation of Infidels and Empire Burlesque in the early 1980s.
Despite collaborating with guitarists of such fame and calibre, Dylan asserted that of all the guitarists with whom he’s collaborated, Mike Bloomfield awed him the most. Bloomfield was one of the most gifted yet underappreciated guitarists of the 1960s. Hence, following Dylan’s seismic rise to prominence early in the decade, he didn’t hesitate when selecting a lead guitarist to play on his classic 1965 album, Highway 61 Revisited.
Reflecting on his time working with Bloomfield on the 2005 documentary, No Direction Home, Dylan remembered: “Mike Bloomfield said he’d heard my first record, and he said he wanted to show me how the blues were played. And 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.”
Listen to Mike Bloomfield’s melodic isolated guitar parts on ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ below.
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