Barry Goldberg, a blues-rock keyboard player whose work with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band led to playing with Bob Dylan in the 1960s, including the notorious 1965 Newport Folk Festival concert dramatized in “A Complete Unknown,” died Wednesday at 83.
Bob Merlis, a representative, said that Goldberg died in hospice care after a 10-year struggle with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, with his wife of 53 years, Gail Goldberg, and son, Aram, at his bedside.
Goldberg was also a founding member of the 1960s group the Electric Flag.
His association with Dylan led to an unusual point of trivia: His self-titled “Barry Goldberg” album, released in 1974, was the only album Dylan ever produced for another artist. The arrangement ultimately went both ways, as 16 years later, Goldberg produced a recording Dylan made of the classic song “People Get Ready,” which was released on the soundtrack for the 1990 film “Flashback.”
Besides Dylan and the Butterfield Blues Band, Goldberg’s credits include playing with, writing for or producing such artists as Steve Miller, the Ramones, Leonard Cohen, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Mitch Ryder, Stephen Stills, Rod Stewart, Bobby Blue Bland, Percy Sledge and Kenny Wayne Shepherd.
He was one of the subjects of a documentary film titled “Born in Chicago,” narrated by Dan Aykroyd and chronicling a concert he did in the late 2000s with the Chicago Blues Reunion, consisting of himself and fellow veterans Corky Seigel, Harvey Mandel and Nick Gravenites. After more than a decade of work on the film, the doc finally played film festivals in 2021 and got a wider release in 2023. Dylan, Keith Richards, Carlos Santana and Bob Weir are among the stars in the film who talk about the Chicago blues scene Goldberg was a part of.
As a session player, Goldberg played organ on projects ranging from Ryder’s “Devil With a Blue Dress/Good Golly Miss Molly” to the Ramones’ Phil Spector-produced “End of the Century.” As a writer, he collaborated with Gram Parsons on the Flying Burritos’ “Do You Know How It Feels” and with Gerry Goffin on Gladys Knight & the Pips’ No. 1 R&B hit “I’ve Got to Use My Imagination” (also recorded by Joe Cocker) and Bland’s “It’s Not the Spotlight” (also cut by Rod Stewart). As a producer, he worked on two Sledge albums with Saul Davis.
In later years he was part of the blues-rock supergroup the Rides with Shepherd and Stills, registering two No. 1 blues albums in the mid-2010s.
Back in the 1960s, he formed the Electric Flag with Mike Bloomfield, Buddy Miles and Harvey Brooks. The group provided the soundtrack for the Peter Fonda cult film “The Trip” as well as releasing the album “A Long Time Comin’” in 1968.
That group followed on the heels of another group Goldberg played in with his guitarist friend Bloomfield, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, leading to the fateful gig with Dylan as the legend delighted or stunned crowds at Newport with his newish, noisy, full-band electric format. Come 1973, Goldberg was securing a record deal with RCA for a solo album, and Robert Shelton’s Dylan biography reports Dylan as saying, “I’m on the phone with Jerry Wexler from Atlantic Records and I think we can work out a deal but I’m gonna have to produce you; that’s cool, isn’t it?” Goldberg thought it was cool indeed, and the Dylan/Wexler-produced album became another part of Dylan lore.
Goldberg wrote about the Newport 1965 experience for an article in the Jewish publication the Forward in 2022.
“The 1965 Newport Folk Festival started out like a wonderful dream for me — and then it became a nightmare, and then it became a wonderful dream again,” he began. “When I met up with the Butterfield Band to rehearse our set, Paul Rothschild — the Elektra Records A&R guy who was going to produce the band’s debut album — took one look at me and said to Paul Butterfield, ‘I don’t hear keyboards with the band. I don’t want him here.’ And that was it. In one minute, I went from having the greatest time to being completely alone and having no gig. It just destroyed me. I wanted to go home, but I couldn’t.”
Then, on Saturday night, he wrote, “I found myself at a party with Michael Bloomfield and Bob Dylan. Bob had done a short acoustic performance at the festival that afternoon, which was what everybody expected from him, but now he was talking to Michael about getting a band together for his festival-closing performance Sunday — something people were definitely not expecting.
“’I don’t know if anyone’s going to show up to play with me tomorrow night,’ I overheard him saying to Michael. ‘Al Kooper was supposed to come, but I don’t know for sure that he’ll be here, and I might need a band.’ Michael called me over and introduced me to Bob. ‘Barry’s a great keyboard player,’ he said. ‘Hey, why don’t you use the Butterfield Band to back you up?’ ‘That’s a great idea,’ Bob responded… Bob Dylan, on the spur of the moment, had decided to form a gang, and decided that Michael and I had what it took to be part of it. And as soon as he invited me to play with him, it was like Newport went back into ‘wonderful dream’ mode for me.” When Dylan put an end to the mix of cheers and boos by playing an acoustic encore, Goldberg packed up and left. “I walked offstage that night feeling like a hero, and I didn’t want anything to break that spell.”
Goldberg was born in Chicago on Christmas Day 1941. He was the grandson of U.S. Supreme Court justice Arthur Goldberg and the son of Frank Goldberg and Nettie Goldberg, the latter of whom played barrelhouse piano and was part of a Jewish theater circuit.
In 1971, his friend Bloomfield set him up with designer and artist Gail Fliashnick, and the couple wed at the Chelsea Hotel in 1971. Aram, their son, is an L.A.-based management executive.
In lieu of flowers, the family suggests that donations be made in his name to the Bear League.
