In August 1963, a yellow Telecaster emerged from Fender’s original California factory, ending up two years later in the hands of a gifted young guitarist named Michael Bloomfield — who bought it after Bob Dylan called him up to play on “Like A Rolling Stone.”
After playing his epochal licks on that song and the rest of the Highway 61 Revisited Album, Bloomfield joined Dylan onstage with that Telecaster for his world-shaking electric set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Now, that guitar can be yours, if you have a mere $275,000 to spend — it’s newly listed on the online instrument broker Reverb.com via Brooklyn, New York’s Retrofret Vintage Guitars.
Bloomfield, who was the guitar player in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band at that time, and also recorded that band’s debut in ’65 with the same Tele, was a gifted disciple of Chicago blues. So he was taken aback when Dylan told him to avoid blues licks — or as Dylan put it, “B.B. King shit” — on “Like A Rolling Stone.”
But Dylan ended up pushing him towards innovative chordal riffing that defines the song as much as Al Kooper’s organ part. At Newport, meanwhile, it was Bloomfield’s extreme volume that most offended folk traditionalists like Pete Seeger, as chronicled in A Complete Unknown, currently in theaters (in which Bloomfield is played by Eli Brown).
“The guy that I always miss, and I think he’d still be around if he stayed with me, actually, was Mike Bloomfield,” Dylan told Rolling Stone in 2009. “He could just flat-out play. He had so much soul. And he knew all the styles, and he could play them so incredibly well. He was an expert player and a real prodigy, too.”
Bloomfield soon traded the Telecaster guitarist John Nuese for a 1954 Les Paul Goldtop. Nuese, who played with Gram Parsons in the International Submarine Band, modified (or arguably, mutilated) the guitar with a distinctive second cutaway to accommodate his left-handedness, and played the guitar until his death in 2012.
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