Back in 1962 Bloomfield had checked out Bob Dylan’s first album, and he hadn’t liked it. “I’d bought it, and I didn’t think it was very hot,” he told Tom Yates and Kate Hayes in 1981. About a year later, during his early Fickle Pickle days, Bloomfield went to hear Dylan at the Bear, a brand-new Chicago nightclub that Albert Grossman was bankrolling. Michael’s friend Roy Ruby was working there, playing classical guitar in the evenings. Always a competitive guitarist, Bloomfield showed up at the Bear in April 1963 ready to spar with Dylan, but he came away a fan.
“To open it with a bang, they had Bob open it,” Bloomfield told Yates and Hayes. “So I went down there in the afternoon, because a friend of mine worked there, and I wanted to meet him. Really, what I wanted to do was cut him, you know. I wanted to take my guitar, because I was a real good folk guitar player at that time, and I wanted to say, ‘Boy, I read your liner notes and I heard your record, and God, I don’t think you’re saying anything.’ He was such a sweet guy, and so charming, and just such a pleasant guy to be with, I spent the whole day jamming with him and singing old songs and whatnot. That night, I heard him perform, and I don’t know what it was he had, and I don’t know what you’d call it, but it was magic. I was enchanted. It knocked me out, even though it was not especially the kind of music I loved or anything, but he sang this song, ‘The Walls of Red Wing,’ about a boys’ prison, and it moved me. Call it charisma, call it what you want, but he was incredibly appealing.”
Evidently, the feeling was mutual, and they reconnected in June 1964 in New York while Bloomfield was there recording with blues-folk singer and harmonica player John Hammond Jr., the son of the executive who had recently signed Bloomfield to Epic. Dylan was there to listen to the band, which included drummer Levon Helm, guitarist Robbie Robertson, and bassist Jimmy Lewis. They were a Canadian rock combo called the Hawks, and they’d paid some of the same kind of dues backing singer Ronnie Hawkins in North American honky-tonks and dives that Bloomfield had in Chicago’s rough blues clubs. Playing piano on the session, Bloomfield must have attended closely to Robertson’s electric guitar style, which was a brilliant distillation of rockabilly and blues approaches.
In late spring of 1965 Dylan was in New York, ready to record his first all-electric album, and he picked up the phone and called Bloomfield, who was back in Chicago. “I don’t know where he got my number,” Michael told me. “But he said, ‘I’m making a record. Do you want to play on it?’ And I said sure, and flew to New York. I didn’t even have a guitar case, just a Telecaster and a little overnight bag.”
As Dylan remembered it, “We were back in New York, and I needed a guitar player on a session I was doing. I called him up, and he came in and recorded an album. At that time he was working in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.” Dylan met Bloomfield at the airport, and they began driving to Upstate New York, where Dylan had a hideaway in Woodstock. When they got there, they passed what Bloomfield later described as a “big, huge mansion with this old kacker sitting out front who looked vaguely familiar.” Bloomfield asked Dylan who the man was, and Dylan said, “Oh, that’s Albert [Grossman].”
Grossman hadn’t yet begun managing the Butterfield Band at this point, but Bloomfield had run into him a few times in Chicago, and he already had a passing acquaintance with the music business impresario. Bloomfield always had a special feeling for Grossman—with his inscrutable mien and intimidating skills as a negotiator, Albert put him in mind of his father. Norman Dayron remembered a meeting between Bloomfield and Grossman at the Bear that had taken place a couple of years earlier. Bloomfield had gone to the club to see Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, and he took his guitar along, just in case he got the chance to sit in with them.
“He came into the Bear one night and brought his guitar with him, not in the case, even, just a guitar,” Dayron said. “It was a Chicago winter, and Michael came in wearing really torn blue jeans and his bedroom slippers, and he went in there and said, ‘I’m the world’s greatest guitar player, and I’d like to get in for nothing and see Brownie and Sonny. Brownie is a personal friend of mine.’ Albert was amazed, and he let him in.”
Now, in 1965, Bloomfield and Dylan began to work on the new songs the latter had written. Dylan confronted Bloomfield with only one rule: “I don’t want any of that B. B. King shit,” he said. He wanted Bloomfield to emulate the sound of Byrds guitarist Jim McGuinn, who had added ringing Rickenbacker electric twelve-string parts to the band’s 1965 versions of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Spanish Harlem Incident,” and “All I Really Want to Do.” Bloomfield sat listening to Dylan reel off song after song, trying to figure out guitar lines that weren’t too bluesy to go along with them.
“I was in Dylan’s house for about three days learning the songs,” Michael told me. “I had no identification with the material at all. I mean, I had never heard music like this before. When the ’60s came and Dick Clark started doing his whole thing, I stopped. By the time we cut the album in 1965 I was into the Beatles, and real into the Stones, but I had no professional session experience, and my ideas about what rock ’n’ roll was were pretty unformed.
“It was real strange being with Dylan and his entourage. I’d never been around anyone famous, and I didn’t even know how famous he really was. Dylan and Albert Grossman and this guy Bobby Neuwirth, they were beginning to get isolated. Dylan couldn’t deal with people anymore, because he was too well known and people would mob him in the streets and shit. And all those people who used to be his buddies, he was getting way famouser than I think he ever thought he’d get—fast. They’d play these little mind-fuck games with everyone they came into contact with, and talked very put-downy to everyone. It was character armor, done in self-defense. I used to marvel at it.
“I remember once being in a room with Dylan and Phil Ochs and David Blue and these people, and they would play their songs and he’d say, ‘Well, have you heard this?’ and play ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ or something that, of course, they had heard, and they knew their stuff just wasn’t as good. It was the end for them.”
By every eyewitness account, Dylan’s Highway 61 sessions were some of the weirdest in recording history. To begin with, the musicians were mostly the top session men in New York, guys who cut hit rock ’n’ roll records in their sleep. Only this time, they were at the whim of a young weirdo who wrote long, abstract songs that even he didn’t seem to understand. Al Kooper, whose long string of songwriting credits included penning tunes for everyone from Gene Pitney to Gary Lewis and the Playboys, was to be the guitar player.
“The first time I met Michael was at the Dylan session for ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’” Kooper remembered. “No one knew who he was. He was in the [Butterfield] band, but they had no records out. They weren’t known outside of Chicago.” Kooper was a professional who kept up with things. He had read an article about his fellow session musician in Sing Out! magazine, and he knew Bloomfield was reputed to be a hotshot guitarist.
Bloomfield walked into the studio with his Telecaster, which he carried slung over his shoulder. He didn’t have a guitar case, and it was raining outside, so his instrument had gotten wet, just like his Schwinn bicycle used to when he left it in a heap on the sidewalk. As Kooper told me, “He just wiped it off with a towel, plugged it in, [and said] ‘Let’s go,’ you know, that kind of thing. So he endeared himself to me right away, with that stunt.”
“The session was very chaotic,” Bloomfield told Tom Yates and Kate Hayes. “Bob had the vaguest sound. . . . I could probably have put a more formal rock ’n’ roll sound to it, or at least my idea of one, but I was too intimidated by that company.”
Michael elaborated on his feelings of confusion in his interview with me. “Bob would start singing the songs and we’d start fitting the music around him,” he said. “There was no game plan! The day before, he was still writing the songs.”
Bloomfield told me that he thought “Like a Rolling Stone” provided a template for a lot of future pop music. Dylan’s song also connected with the rock ’n’ roll that had come before it, as producer Phil Spector told Jann Wenner in 1969: “[Dylan’s] favorite song is ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ and it stands to reason because that’s his grooviest song, as songs go,” Spector said. “I can see why he gets the most satisfaction out of it, because rewriting ‘La Bamba’ chord changes is always a lot of fun, and any time you can make a Number One record and rewrite those kind of changes, it is very satisfying.”
The sound was certainly unique, and it used a convention of contemporary gospel music by pitting Paul Griffin’s piano against Kooper’s organ. Kooper had switched from guitar to organ during the June 16 session that produced the master take of “Like a Rolling Stone,” and he claimed that he was virtually inaudible until Dylan put the organ up in the mix. “That’s how I became an organ player,” Kooper told me.
With producer Tom Wilson at the helm, Dylan attempted to cut five songs, including “Like a Rolling Stone,” on June 15, the first day of the sessions for the album that would become Highway 61 Revisited. One of the few black producers at a major record company in 1965, Wilson had graduated from Harvard University, and he’d produced records by avant-garde jazz artists such as Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, and Donald Byrd in the late 1950s. Wilson had been recording Dylan since 1963, and he had added electric guitars to four previously recorded Dylan songs at a late 1964 session.
Without Kooper, who would come in on June 16 as Wilson’s guest, the studio musicians tried to puzzle out “Like a Rolling Stone.” Bloomfield acted as bandleader, and he struggled to find an appropriate guitar part for the song. “Like a Rolling Stone” isn’t a complicated musical composition, as the many later, more conventional rearrangements of the song make clear. As Spector observed, it’s built from the sturdiest of pop materials. “Like a Rolling Stone” is structurally similar to a blues song: the end of each verse allows space for an instrumental lick to comment on the lyrics, as in a Robert Johnson performance.
“Like a Rolling Stone” went beyond all previous essays into folk-rock. It made history as a pop record that pushed Beatles-era rock ’n’ roll music into the experimental, long-form directions that would characterize the late 1960s. Wilson caught a remarkable performance, but it’s likely that Bob Johnston, the Texas-born producer who stepped in to cut the rest of Highway 61 after Columbia fired Wilson, fiddled with it after it had been laid down. “I may have gone in there and mixed that thing,” Johnston later told writer Greil Marcus. “Wilson would fuck with [Dylan], ‘Do this, we gotta do that, this didn’t come out.’ Everything was wild and scattered, open, until I settled down on it, but that’s the way that was.”
On the finished recording, which was caught in a single take on June 16, Bloomfield fills the song’s spaces with licks that suggest both country and blues. “Like a Rolling Stone” has a groove, but it’s an idiosyncratic one—the performance lurches and strains against itself, and the arrangement makes room for Kooper’s simple organ lick, Dylan’s harmonica, Dylan’s singing, Paul Griffin’s ricky-tick piano embellishments, and Bloomfield’s guitar. In the song’s turnarounds—its transitions from verse to verse and verse to chorus—Bloomfield opens up the sound.
It’s in those transitions that you can most clearly hear the country-folk-blues approach Bloomfield devised for “Like a Rolling Stone.” Wilson and the Columbia engineers caught the round but slightly roughened sound of Bloomfield’s Telecaster, and Bloomfield played in a style that sat ingeniously between McGuinn’s and B. B. King’s. If Bob Johnston may be the secret auteur of “Like a Rolling Stone,” Bloomfield was the musical director, and he knew it all went back to the blues, no matter what.
It is characteristic of Bloomfield that not only did he pretend to forget the title of the album that assured him a place in the center of rock ’n’ roll history, but he didn’t even like Highway 61 Revisited. (Bloomfield also played on Dylan’s “Positively 4th Street,” cut with Johnston on July 29, and one wonders what he thought about that famous record.) Talking to Tom Yates and Kate Hayes about Dylan, he said, “Highway 51, is it called? See, there’s a famous blues song called ‘Highway 51,’ where I’m sure Bob got the title Highway 61, and I get ’em mixed up sometimes. I don’t think any of it’s any good, except maybe ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and ‘Desolation Row.’ But I was too scared. I could’ve played much hotter. I’ve heard everything from all those sessions on the bootleg albums, stuff that never came out on the album. I don’t think any of it’s that good.”
Bloomfield didn’t play on “Desolation Row,” which featured Nashville session musician Charlie McCoy on acoustic guitar. Outtakes from the sessions included a first pass at “Can You Please Crawl out Your Window” that was accidentally released as “Positively 4th Street” on a mislabeled single, and a Dylan-Kooper-Bloomfield improvisation called “Killing Me Alive” that had lyrics that showed up in “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.” Virtually all of this material has been released by now, of course.