Bob Dylan’s Longtime Keyboardist Dead After Cancer Battle: Barry Goldberg Was 83

Barry Goldberg, an accomplished blues-rock keyboardist who performed with Bob Dylan at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, as dramatized in A Complete Unknown, has died. He was 83 years old.

Bob Merlis, a representative for Goldberg, told Variety that the musician died in hospice care on Wednesday, Jan. 22 after 10 years of battling non-Hodgkin lymphoma. His wife of 53 years, Gail Goldberg, and son, Aram, were at his bedside when he passed.

Goldberg was born on Dec. 25, 1941, in Chicago as the grandson of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg and the son of Frank Goldberg and Nettie Goldberg. After being inspired by the music scene of Chicago’s south side in high school, the keyboard player formed the Bobby Blue Band with Mike Bloomfield, Buddy Miles and Harvey Brooks in the 1960s and would go on to become a founding member of Electric Flag.

In addition to Dylan and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Goldberg also played with, wrote for, and produced artists including 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.

Goldberg also performed alongside Dylan, Doug Sahm and The Band in Woodstock in 1965, developing a special relationship with the “Blowin’ In The Wind” artist. Goldberg’s self-titled 1974 album was the only album Dylan ever produced for another musician, and 16 years later, Goldberg would reciprocate, producing Dylan’s classic “People Get Ready” in 1990 for the film Flashback.

Recalling the iconic 1965 Newport Folk Festival featured in the critically acclaimed Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown for a 2022 Forward piece, Goldberg said it “started out like a wonderful dream for me — and then it became a nightmare, and then it became a wonderful dream again.”

After Dylan’s divisive use of an electric guitar changed pop music and alienated some folk music fans in the crowd, Goldberg wrote, “I had done my thing with Bob, and that was more than I could have ever hoped for, to go from not being able to play at the festival to taking this momentous jump into the musical unknown.” He concluded, “I knew that some kind of force, some kind of fate, some kind of thing had come along and touched me, and I wasn’t going to f— with it.”

In Goldberg’s later years, the keyboardist became part of the blues-rock supergroup the Rides with Shepherd and Stills, putting out two No. 1 blues albums in the 2010s. In lieu of flowers, his family asks that donations be made in his name to the Bear League.