- Remembering Mike Bloomfield (July 28, 1943 - February 15, 1981) * playing guitar with Bob Dylan at Fox Warfield Theatre, San Francisco, California on 15th November 1980.
0:00 Bob Dylan introduces Michael Bloomfield
2:00 Like A Rolling Stone (Bloomfield on guitar)
7:42 The Groom's Still Waiting at the Altar (Bloomfield on guitar)
Mike Bloomfield, named one of the world’s great blues-rock guitarists by Rolling Stone magazine, played on Bob Dylan's album Highway 61 Revisited in 1965, including the single "Like a Rolling Stone", and performed with Dylan at that year's Newport Folk Festival.
" November 15, 1980 at San Francisco’s Warfield Theatre and [Dylan's] relating a story about a guitarist he first met in a Chicago blues club two decades previously: a skinny teenage hotshot with a towering stack of black curly hair and a dizzying arsenal of licks copped from Big Bill Broonzy and Sonny Boy Williamson. 'He just played circles around anything I could play,” marvels Dylan. “And I always remembered that.'
Dylan goes on to explain that, some years later, he was recording in New York and needed a guitar player. So he called him up. 'Anyway,' he concludes, 'he played on Like A Rolling Stone and he’s here tonight. Give him a hand – Michael Bloomfield!'.
The crowd roars its approval as Bloomfield, 37 years old, ambles on stage in his bedroom slippers and starts ripping into the song in question. He stays for another, The Groom’s Still Waiting At The Altar, before leaving to deafening applause.
It was to be the last gig of Mike Bloomfield’s life. Exactly three months later, on February 15, 1981, the man who Dylan cited as “the best guitar player I ever heard” was found dead in the front seat of his Chevrolet Impala. He’d succumbed to a drug overdose. "
(By Rob Hughes ( Classic Rock ) published October 07, 2018. Read the complete article via this link: https://www.loudersound.com/features/...)
To read how Mike Bloomfield's association with Bob Dylan came about, and what happened in the years that followed, check out the book "Guitar King: Michael Bloomfield's Life in the Blues"