Barry Goldberg, an acclaimed keyboard player who slipped through a side door into the rock pantheon by taking part in Bob Dylan’s epochal electric set at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, died on Jan. 22 in the Tarzana neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was 83.
His son, Aram Goldberg, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was complications of lymphoma.
Mr. Goldberg was part of a wave of white musicians who emerged in Chicago in the 1960s – among the others were the singer and harmonica player Paul Butterfield and the guitarist Michael Bloomfield – to create their own brand of blues-based rock.
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’ 1966 Top 10 hit “Devil With a Blue Dress On/Good Golly Miss Molly,” as well as albums by the Byrds, Leonard Cohen and the Ramones.
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, another Chicago blues devotee; and the drummer Buddy Miles, 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.
Mr. Goldberg also made his mark as a songwriter. He collaborated with the country-rock pioneer Gram Parsons on “Do You Know How It Feels to Be Lonesome?” released by the Flying Burrito Brothers in 1969, and with the lyricist Gerry Goffin on Gladys Knight & the Pips’ 1973 Top 10 hit “I’ve Got to Use My Imagination.”
Despite his long résumé, Mr. Goldberg will probably forever be most closely linked with Mr. Dylan, who first achieved fame as a folk singer 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.
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