Mike Bloomfield Deserved Better From 'A Complete Unknown'
You wouldn't know it while watching the new Bob Dylan biopic, but he was a key figure in this career-turning era.
Mike Bloomfield was as talented as he is now unjustly overlooked. So maybe it should come as no surprise that the late guitarist is largely ignored in the new Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown.
“Like a Rolling Stone,” which gives actor Timothee Chalamet’s hit movie its title, hurtled the former folkie Dylan into rock. Credit his outsized ambition, his roving muse, his hard-headed unwillingness to yield to convention. But credit Bloomfield’s flinty guitar, too. That’s the actual electricity running through everything – and Dylan knew it would be.
Bloomfield was already the face of blues music’s exciting new future in the mid-’60s, revered by the likes of Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix, a visionary who took B.B. King’s bends into the outer reaches of raga-driven ecstasy (the Butterfield Blues Band’s 1966 triumph East-West) when not pushing albums headlined by Dylan (1965’s platinum-certified No. 3 smash Highway 16 Revisited) and Stephen Stills (1968’s gold-selling Top 15 hit Super Session) to dizzying new heights.
Dylan ended up meeting Bloomfield in a decidedly offhanded way. “I was playing in a club in Chicago, I guess it was about 1959 or 1960,” Dylan later said on stage at San Francisco’s Warfield Theatre. “A guy came down and said that he played guitar … and he played all kinds of things. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of him but does Big Bill Broonzy ring a bell – or Sonny Boy Williamson, that type of thing? Anyway, he just played circles around anything I could play.”
Lightning struck. Carlos Santana, who was discovered by Bloomfield, described his approach to the instrument as “gutbucket switchblade,” and that was never more true than Bloomfield’s performance alongside Dylan at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival in the wake of Highway 61 Revisited. Myth and director James Mangold’s film both tell us that the metallic force of their performance horrified staid ticketholders. Others say there was a problem with the sound – or that the three-song set was simply too short.
Regardless, when Bloomfield appeared at the Newport Folk Festival with Dylan, “Like a Rolling Stone” was on the Billboard charts. He’d already assumed a genre-turning role in Dylan’s inner circle during the very era covered by A Complete Unknown.
Yet Bloomfield (played by actor Eli Brown) is blatantly dismissed even when he’s finally acknowledged: Chalamet’s character is forced to carefully spell out the name of this supposedly anonymous guitarist – even though Bloomfield had already been signed to Columbia Records by the legendary John Hammond – while on the phone with label execs to demand his presence at sessions for Highway 61 Revisited.
A couple of years had passed, but “I never forgot his name,” the real Dylan later remembered, still on stage in San Francisco. “He came in and recorded the album. At that time, he was working in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.”
The fistfight in the movie between stoic historian Alan Lomax (played by Norbert Leo Butz) and upstart band manager Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler) at the Newport Folk Festival was also over Bloomfield, not Dylan. It actually took place days before amid the Butterfield Blues Band’s boisterous first workshop.
Minor quibbles like these certainly don’t sink the film, which clearly means to feel more than think its way forward. But every made-up Pete Seeger scene begins to seem like another moment lost for Mike Bloomfield. Even Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties, which served as source material for A Complete Unknown, doesn’t telegraph Bloomfield’s importance. So, he remains a ghost.
It might surprise theatergoers to learn that Bloomfield’s 1963 Telecaster has been called “the guitar that killed folk music.” The audition for Columbia Records illustrated just how fully formed he already was, as Bloomfield offered moments of startling, sometimes painfully honest insight into Bessie Smith’s “Judge, Judge.” Improbable as it may seem, considering he was the scion of a Jewish-American family that built a small fortune in the catering equipment business on Chicago’s North Side, Bloomfield was simply born to the blues.
He’d choose the Butterfield Blues Band over touring with Dylan, opening the door for the Band to begin one of music’s most important musical conversations. Still, Bloomfield’s subsequent career mirrored his restless soul. He was never completely confined to a single genre, no matter how resonant.
His John Coltrane-infused collaboration with Kooper on “His Holy Modal Majesty” from Super Session is still this scalding revelation. Bloomfield’s contributions to Janis Joplin’s initial solo effort, 1969’s I’ve Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama!, were highlighted by the slow-boiling “One Good Man.”
Bloomfield later launched a horn-driven rock band called the Electric Flag, just as his friend and bandmate Al Kooper did with Blood Sweat and Tears. (Both would soon find themselves abandoned by their respective groups.) Other solo projects gave off flashes of brilliance, like broken glass, but Bloomfield struggled with insomnia – and, tragically, turned to heroin for relief.
He’d die of an accidental overdose in February 1981, found dead in the front seat of a Chevy Impala just three months after making a triumphant appearance with Dylan at the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco.
“Anyway,” Dylan concluded on that long ago night in November 1980, “he played on ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and he’s here tonight. Give him a hand – Michael Bloomfield!”
As the crowd roared, the 37-year-old guitarist ambled out in bedroom slippers – then, once again, drew sharp new contours around everything Dylan did. Unfortunately, there were only two songs. Mike Bloomfield never appeared on stage again.
Amazon best-selling rock band biographer Nick DeRiso’s next book, ‘Forever Young: How the Band and Bob Dylan Made the Only ’60s Music That Still Matters,’ will be released in Spring 2025. www.nickderiso.com.