The best guitar player Bob Dylan had ever heard “on any level”
Being the greatest musician in the world was never exactly a priority for Bob Dylan when he started writing his greatest tunes.
There wasn’t a ton of adornment when he was first putting together a song like ‘Blowin’ In the Wind’, and there’s a good chance that any other bells and whistles that were put on it would have only made the song sound neutered if he kept trying to tinker with it. Dylan was more interested in capturing the feeling of the song before anything else, but that didn’t mean that he skimped on getting the right people for the job whenever he started making his masterpieces.
After all, The Band were the ones who were willing to try anything and everything as long as Dylan was guiding them. They were still billed as The Hawks around that time, but when listening to how they interacted with each other onstage, half of their chops were being honed by Dylan, deciding to do whatever he wanted whenever his songs came up, whether that was playing it in a different time signature or throwing in a strange verse that no one had ever heard before.
And that same idea applied to when he was working with other bands later in his career. The Heartbreakers had many stories about being put through their paces whenever they played one of his tunes, but the Grateful Dead were one of the few bands that actually taught Dylan something when he was on the road, whether that was learning how to jam or being able to appreciate some of the more neglected pieces of his back catalogue.
But none of that would have happened had he not decided to go electric back in the mid-1960s. The idea of him playing rock and roll was a cardinal sin for the folk purists in his audience, but when Bringing it All Back Home came out with some electric instruments, people started to have a bit of hesitancy whenever they picked up one of his later records. Then again, Dylan wasn’t going to use any old rock and roll players behind him.
He had been following the biggest names in the genre around the same time he started hearing of people like Woody Guthrie, and when he needed a guitar solo, he felt Mike Bloomfield understood exactly what each song needed on Highway 61 Revisited. He had already worked wonders in the Paul Butterfield Band, but hearing him on ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ helped signal to everyone that a new generation of rock and roll was starting.
Even decades after the fact, Dylan felt indebted to Bloomfield for helping him turn in some of the best songs of his career, saying, “When I was thinking of bringing a guitar player in to play on my record, the only person that I thought of was him. I mean, he was just the best guitar player I had ever heard on any level. He could flatpick, he could fingerpick. It looked like he was just born to play guitar.”
While there are many guitarists who have come since Bloomfield who have been able to play the blues, part of what made Bloomfield great was the rough parts of his sound. He didn’t need to have everything sound as pristine as what the virtuosos of the world were doing, but every note he played let you know that he had internalised all those records that he had heard when he was a kid of delivering his own version of it.
So despite not being the same kind of guitarist as John Lee Hooker or Robert Johnson, that didn’t matter to someone like Dylan. All he wanted was someone to express themselves the same way that he expressed himself with his lyrics, and you could tell that they were both out to make the most powerful music that either of them had ever heard.
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