In August 1963, a yellow Telecaster emerged from Fender’s unique California manufacturing unit, ending up two years later within the arms of a gifted younger guitarist named Michael Bloomfield — who purchased it after Bob Dylan referred to as him as much as play on “Like A Rolling Stone.”
After taking part in his epochal licks on that music and the remainder of the Highway 61 Revisited Album, Bloomfield joined Dylan onstage with that Telecaster for his world-shaking electrical set on the 1965 Newport Folks Pageant. Now, that guitar will be yours, in case you have a mere $275,000 to spend — it’s newly listed on the web instrument dealer Reverb.com through Brooklyn, New York’s Retrofret Classic Guitars.
Bloomfield, who was the guitar participant within the Paul Butterfield Blues Band at the moment, and in addition recorded that band’s debut in ’65 with the identical Tele, was a gifted disciple of Chicago blues. So he was stunned when Dylan instructed him to keep away from blues licks — or as Dylan put it, “B.B. King shit” — on “Like A Rolling Stone.”
However Dylan ended up pushing him in direction of progressive chordal riffing that defines the music as a lot as Al Kooper’s organ half. At Newport, in the meantime, it was Bloomfield’s excessive quantity that the majority offended folks traditionalists like Pete Seeger, as chronicled in A Full Unknown, at present in theaters (wherein Bloomfield is performed by Eli Brown).
“The man that I at all times miss, and I believe he’d nonetheless be round if he stayed with me, truly, was Mike Bloomfield,” Dylan told Rolling Stone in 2009. “He may simply flat-out play. He had a lot soul. And he knew all of the types, and he may play them so extremely nicely. He was an knowledgeable participant and an actual prodigy, too.”
Bloomfield quickly traded the Telecaster guitarist John Nuese for a 1954 Les Paul Goldtop. Nuese, who performed with Gram Parsons within the Worldwide Submarine Band, modified (or arguably, mutilated) the guitar with a particular second cutaway to accommodate his left-handedness, and performed the guitar till his loss of life in 2012.
