The first meeting of Bob Dylan and his greatest guitarist, Mike Bloomfield
The first and last thing a lot of people know about Michael Bloomfield is that Bob Dylan quite unequivocally ranked him as the best guitar player he’d ever heard, saying, “He could outplay anybody”, and there was a good reason for that.
As a middle-class teenager growing up in the Chicago suburbs, Bloomfield became fascinated with the new electric blues sound, just like his similarly aged counterparts in the UK at the time, with the only difference being that while Jimmy Page or Keith Richards could only daydream about seeing those legendary Chicago bluesmen in person, Bloomfield was a short drive from the epicentre of the music.
This excitable white kid who wanted to play the guitar like his heroes, by 16, was already a regular at some of the rough-and-tumble blues clubs on the South Side of town, even switching up and playing as a righty so he could more easily follow what the older guys were doing, making it hard to imagine the levels he might have achieved playing with his natural left hand. In order to earn the respect of the established bluesmen in Chicago, he couldn’t just be an admirer or a sycophant; he had to try his best to get on their level as a musician.
“You had to be as good as Otis Rush,” Bloomfield told Rolling Stone in 1968, “You had to be as good as Buddy Guy, as good as Freddie King. Whatever instrument you played at that time, you had to be as good as they were. And who wanted to be bad on the South Side? Man, you were exposed all over. I mean right in that city where you lived, in one night, you could hear Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Buddy Guy, Otis Rush, Big Walter, Little Walter, Junior Wells, Lloyd Jones, just dozens of different blues singers, some famous, some not so famous. They were all part of the blues, and you could work with them if you were good enough. If you wanted to gig, that’s where you went, and that’s where you worked.”
The Chicago clubs provided his higher education, and he was already studying for his proverbial PhD by the time he encountered a fellow Midwestern Jewish kid who was apparently becoming something of a big deal as a folk singer in New York.
Bob Dylan came to Chicago in the spring of 1963, shortly before the release of his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, and his manager, Albert Grossman, was a Chicago native who had recently invested in a new downtown venue called The Bear, where he booked Bob as one of the club’s first performers. This version of The Bear had no connection to the fictional restaurant from the current hit television show, but the short-lived space at 22 East Ontario Street (it’s now a parking garage) served a very important role in the Bob Dylan saga.
On the night of Dylan’s fairly low-profile gig at The Bear, Mike Bloomfield made a point of coming to meet him, not as a fan, but as a wise guy with an attitude.
“I had heard his first album, and I went down to The Bear to ‘cut’ Bob, to take my guitar and cut him, burn him, [but] he was a great guy,” he recalled, “I mean, we spent all day talking and jamming and hanging out… Any instinct I may have had to try and cut him, which is very common in Chicago, was immediately stopped, and I was just charmed by the man…I realised he was way more than a player and singer. He was a magician.”
The feeling was mutual. Dylan was blown away by Bloomfield’s guitar skills and would call on him two years later to join the sessions for Highway 61 Revisited. “When it was time to bring in a guitar player on my record,” Dylan recalled in 2005, “I couldn’t think of anybody but him”.
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