\n<\/p>\n
Barry Goldberg, an acclaimed keyboard player who slipped through a side door into the rock pantheon by taking part in Bob Dylan\u2019s epochal electric set at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, died on Jan. 22 in the Tarzana neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was 83.<\/p>\n
His son, Aram Goldberg, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was complications of lymphoma.<\/p>\n
Mr. Goldberg was part of wave of white musicians who emerged in Chicago in the 1960s \u2014 among the others were the singer and harmonica player Paul Butterfield<\/a> and the guitarist Michael Bloomfield<\/a> \u2014 to create their own brand of blues-based rock.<\/p>\n Over the course of his career, he led a band with the guitarist and future hitmaker Steve Miller, and played on indelible recordings like Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels\u2019 1966 Top 10 hit <\/em>\u201cDevil With a Blue Dress On\/Good Golly Miss Molly,\u201d<\/a> as well as albums by the Byrds, Leonard Cohen and the Ramones.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Relocating in San Francisco for a period in the mid-1960s, Mr. Goldberg joined with Mr. Bloomfield, a friend from high school; the singer Nick Gravenites<\/a>, another Chicago blues devotee; and the drummer Buddy Miles<\/a>, who would later work with Jimi Hendrix, and others, to form the Electric Flag, an earthy blues-rock outfit that rode the psychedelic wave and performed at the watershed Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Goldberg also made his mark as a songwriter. He collaborated with the country-rock pioneer Gram Parsons on \u201c<\/em><\/a>Do You Know How It Feels to Be Lonesome?,\u201d<\/a> released by the Flying Burrito Brothers in 1969, and with the lyricist Gerry Goffin on Gladys Knight & the Pips\u2019 1973 Top 10 hit \u201cI\u2019ve Got to Use My Imagination.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Despite his long r\u00e9sum\u00e9, Mr. Goldberg will probably forever be most closely linked with Mr. Dylan, who first achieved fame as a folk singer of the first order but stepped onstage at Newport, R.I., in 1965 in a leather jacket with an electric band and an amplified Fender Stratocaster and, legend has it, seared the ears of an outraged audience filled with folk traditionalists. The history-making set is represented in the climactic scene of the Academy Award-nominated film<\/a> \u201cA Complete Unknown,\u201d<\/a> starring Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet as Mr. Dylan. (Mr. Goldberg is not portrayed in the movie.)<\/p>\n What it all meant has been debated for 60 years.<\/p>\n Barry Joseph Goldberg was born on Dec. 25, 1941, in Chicago, the only child of Frank Goldberg, who owned a leather tanning factory, and Nettie (Spencer) Goldberg, a pianist and singer who performed in Yiddish theaters around the city.<\/p>\n In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, Gail Goldberg.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n He learned piano from his mother, and he also learned confidence in performing, despite stage jitters that would last a lifetime. \u201cIt probably had a lot to do with my mother forcing me to play<\/a> for strangers when I was 8, 9 years old,\u201d he once told Dan Epstein of the Jewish newspaper The Forward.<\/p>\n But his real musical education came late at night, listening to South Side blues artists on his transistor radio. \u201cThings would be unleashed in the music and I could feel the excitement<\/a>,\u201d he said in a 1996 interview with the site Bloomfield Notes. \u201cIt was wild and uncontrollable,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n By his midteens he was traveling with Mr. Bloomfield to blues clubs on the city\u2019s South Side, where they mingled with luminaries like Muddy Waters, Howlin\u2019 Wolf and Buddy Guy.<\/p>\n At 18, he started performing with Robby and the Troubadours, a band from New York that was cashing in on the twist craze, in nightclubs on Rush Street \u2014 which Mr. Goldberg called \u201cthe Bourbon Street of Chicago\u201d \u2014 and found himself hanging out at Hugh Hefner\u2019s Playboy Mansion.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n When the Paul Butterfield Blues Band was invited to play the Newport festival on the same Sunday<\/a> in 1965 as Mr. Dylan, Mr. Goldberg traveled to Newport with the band because he expected to sit in. But in planning the Butterfield band\u2019s set, Paul Rothchild, who was producing their first album, informed Mr. Goldberg that he did not want a keyboardist onstage. (Another keyboardist, Mark Naftalin, would join the band a few months later.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cAnd that was it<\/a>,\u201d Mr. Goldberg recalled in a 2022 remembrance of the event, written with Mr. Epstein, in The Forward. \u201cIn one minute, I went from having the greatest time to being completely alone and having no gig. It just destroyed me.\u201d<\/p>\n Fate would turn at a party the night before Mr. Dylan\u2019s gig, where Mr. Bloomfield and Mr. Goldberg were drafted into an impromptu backing band, along with other Butterfield sidemen. Al Kooper, who had performed the soaring organ part on Mr. Dylan\u2019s \u201cLike a Rolling Stone,\u201d played organ; Mr. Goldberg played piano.<\/p>\n To Mr. Goldberg, it was a natural fit. \u201cWe were three Jewish guys from the Midwest who had similar backgrounds, similar attitudes and even the same clothes,\u201d he recalled in The Forward. \u201cWhen I met Bob at the party, he was wearing tapered pants and pointed boots, just like I was. Bob could tell we were cool, that we were at Newport to play music and not just to \u2018make the scene.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Tremors were already felt at the soundcheck before the Dylan performance. Peter Yarrow<\/a> of Peter, Paul and Mary, who was serving as the M.C. that evening, \u201ckept yelling at us to turn down,\u201d Mr. Goldberg recalled. \u201cEvery time Yarrow yelled at us, I could see Michael glaring back at him like, \u2018Oh, just you wait.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cWhen we went on,\u201d he said in a 2018 video interview, \u201cMichael turned his guitar up at nine, and it was just electrifying.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThis,\u201d he added, \u201cwas rock \u2018n\u2019 roll.\u201d<\/p>\n However famous it quickly became, Mr. Dylan\u2019s electric set lasted only three songs: \u201cMaggie\u2019s Farm,\u201d<\/a> \u201cLike a Rolling Stone\u201d<\/a> and \u201cIt Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.\u201d<\/a> He then returned for a brief acoustic encore<\/a>.<\/p>\n As portrayed in \u201cA Complete Unknown\u201d and in countless critical appraisals, the performance was one of the most seismic of the 20th century \u2014 Mr. Dylan tilting the popular music world off its axis, bidding farewell to a stodgy yesterday for countless incandescent tomorrows ruled by rock.<\/p>\n