‘A Complete Unknown’ forgot about this legendary Jewish rocker, but history will remember Barry Goldberg
While catching a screening of A Complete Unknown a few weeks back, I kept my eyes peeled during the Newport Folk Festival scenes for a glimpse of Barry Goldberg — or rather, an actor portraying him. That I didn’t see (or maybe just blinked and missed) him didn’t really surprise or disappoint me; after all, several individuals who played far more crucial roles in Bob Dylan’s pre-motorcycle accident career were already totally M.I.A. from the biopic.
And although I sadly didn’t get the chance to ask him about it, I doubt that Barry himself — who passed away last week at the age of 83, following a 10-year struggle with non-Hodgkin Lymphoma — would have been particularly disappointed either, even though playing piano and organ with Dylan when he first “went electric” in public was undoubtedly a turning point in Barry’s own storied career. To paraphrase the oft-covered 1973 song that he and legendary Brill Building lyricist Gerry Goffin originally co-wrote for Bobby “Blue” Bland, it was never about the spotlight for Barry Goldberg; the man simply lived to play, and to tap into the sort of soulful cosmic magic that only a true master of the keyboard could access.
“I’ve never had a gig where I didn’t play a thousand percent and burn as much as I could and do the best I could,” he once told me. “It probably had a lot to do with my mother forcing me to play for strangers when I was eight, nine years old, but I had that confidence. I mean, I’m terrified before going onstage; I get the, you know, shpilkes. But once the lights go up and I start playing — once I play the note after the first note — I’m sailing, man. I’ve found that to be true with all the great people that I’ve worked with; they’re the same way. When you’re a pro, you can call on the magic, and it’s there.”
Barry Goldberg played — and wrote — with a lot of great people. His CV alone would take up far more space than this article can accommodate, but some of its many highlights include penning “It’s Not the Spotlight” and the 1974 Gladys Knight & the Pips smash “I’ve Got To Use My Imagination” with Goffin, and “Do You Know How It Feels To Be Lonesome” with cosmic country pioneer Gram Parsons. He formed The Electric Flag with the brilliant guitarist Mike Bloomfield (a childhood friend who had also been part of Dylan’s Newport band) and the talented young drummer Buddy Miles; their rock/jazz/blues fusion made its live debut at the legendary 1967 Monterey Pop Festival and appeared on the soundtrack to Roger Corman’s LSD-sploitation film The Trip.
Goldberg played keys on classic records like Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels’ “Devil With a Blue Dress On/Good Golly Miss Molly,” the Byrds’ The Notorious Byrd Brothers, the Super Session LP with Bloomfield, Al Kooper and Stephen Stills, Leonard Cohen’s Death of a Ladies’ Man and The Ramones’ End of the Century, though his session discography is also dotted with such charming oddities as “Rapunzel,” a 1967 single by Warhol superstar Baby Jane Holzer.
He jammed onstage with Jerry Lee Lewis, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Jimi Hendrix, signed and produced L.A. rockers The Rockets shortly before they morphed into Neil Young’s backing band Crazy Horse, and co-produced the Grammy-nominated (and W.C. Handy award-winning) 1994 album Blue Night for Southern soul legend Percy Sledge. The Rides, his band with Stephen Stills and Kenny Wayne Shepherd, sent two albums (2013’s Can’t Get Enough and 2016’s Pierced Arrow) to the top of the U.S. blues charts, and he co-produced Born in Chicago, a recent documentary film about the mid-60s Chicago blues boom that saw young white musicians like him, Bloomfield, Paul Butterfield and Charlie Musselwhite mingling with the likes of Waters, Wolf and Otis Rush. He also recorded several acclaimed solo albums, including 2018’s wonderful In The Groove, a mostly instrumental tribute to the R&B sounds that first fired his imagination as a young Chicagoan.
For Barry Goldberg, music was both a driving and liberating force, something that gave him a means to rise above the trauma of his youth. His mother, a Yiddish theater performer who’d taught him to play boogie-woogie on the piano, took out her frustrations over the financial difficulties resulting from his father’s long-term illness on young Barry, subjecting him to horrific physical abuse. When his father died two weeks before his bar mitzvah, Barry responded by flunking out of school and running the streets with the Kool Gents, an infamous Chicago youth gang.
When a rock n’ roll-hating stepfather came into the picture, Barry left home at the age of 15, crashing for a while in a spare room above Teenland, the alcohol-free teenage club on the north side of Chicago where he often backed up-and-coming pop stars like Ral Donner and Johnny Tillotson. From there, he graduated to a lucrative gig with Robby and the Troubadours, a twist band that played various mob-backed joints in the Windy City’s vibrant Rush Street entertainment district. Except for an ill-conceived and short-lived stint in the U.S. Marines, music would remain Barry’s primary focus for the rest of his life.
“Music was my therapy,” he told me. “That was the thing that made my mind feel all right. I knew all along that I wasn’t going to be a lawyer. I wasn’t going to be a doctor. I’d found music, and I knew it was my calling. That’s where I felt my passion.”
Barry and I first crossed paths in 2018, when I interviewed him for the Forward about In The Groove, and he later approached me to help him pen his life’s story. Though we sadly never found a home for our book proposal, we formed a nice bond over our shared Chicago roots and love of the Cubs, as well as the fact that — though we were nearly a quarter-century apart in age — we’d both been the only white Jewish kids from our respective high schools to shop at the Black-oriented clothing and shoe stores in downtown Chicago. Barry often referred to our friendship as “a soulful connection,” which felt like high praise coming from a true Jewish soul brother such as he.
Despite the success he’d achieved, Barry’s life and career also had numerous low points — including his mother’s abuse, being bullied by other kids and “shot down” by girls because of his diminutive stature, struggles with drugs, nervous breakdowns, and recurring health issues — and he was quite candid about all of them, often recalling these “downs” with a wry, self-deprecating sense of humor. Even things that seemed like shining moments on paper, like having his self-titled 1974 solo album co-produced by Bob Dylan (still the only time to date that Dylan has produced a record by another artist), turned out to be suffused with their own shade of blues.
That particular project was actually payback for the time Dylan and his then-wife Sara had drafted Barry and his wife Gail to babysit their children for two weeks while the Dylans were away in Europe. “I guess they trusted us,” Barry laughed. “They asked Gail and I would we move into their house in the Village and take care of their five kids? We couldn’t say no, right? We didn’t have any experience with kids, so we would go take them on little day trips, to like FAO Schwarz, and they’d march through in single-file. We actually had a great time with them, until Jakob came down with pneumonia, and we were like, ‘Oh my God, what do we do?’”
Thankfully, the Goldbergs managed to nurse young Jakob back to health, and a grateful Dylan asked Barry what he could do for him in return. When Barry mentioned that he’d like to make another solo album, Dylan got Jerry Wexler on the horn and convinced the Atlantic Records co-owner and producer to sign Barry Goldberg to the label’s Atco subsidiary. “Wexler told him, ‘The only way I’ll do a record with Barry is if you co-produce it with me,’” Barry explained. “This was the testing ground for him and Wexler to get together at Muscle Shoals, where they later did some albums [1979’s Slow Train Coming and 1980’s Saved].”
Recorded with the renowned Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, the Barry Goldberg album featured vocals from the man himself. “I am not a vocalist,” he admitted, “but I did the vocals with Bob producing. He said, ‘Don’t let anyone touch these — these have a vibe!’ But then two weeks after we all went home, I got a call from Wexler saying, ‘I don’t like any of the vocals; you’re doing all the vocals over again!’ So he took me down to Criteria Studios in Miami, and he scrutinized every word, every syllable. Jerry and I became really close friends during this time, but I was so nervous — this was a guy who had worked with truly great singers like Aretha Franklin — that the vocals just came out horrible. And then he took the album and mixed and remixed it until all the magic was gone from it. And I was so embarrassed, because here I was with this record that Bob Dylan produced, and it was so bleh.
“There’s so many bad records out there that I was associated with,” he laughed, “but thank God for the good ones. There are some of them that I’m actually proud of, like the Percy Sledge album, or In The Groove — they made it worth the trip, you know?”
Even though “the trip” took him through some pretty rarified realms, as well as darkness and disappointment, Barry remained remarkably humble to the end, finding his greatest joy and strength in his relationship with Gail — whom he’d married in 1971 — and their son Aram.
“Bob Dylan once told me, ‘I’m not gonna let what happened to Judy Garland happen to me,’” he recalled. “He said, ‘She believed all her reviews, she believed all her critics, and it destroyed her.’ And he wasn’t going to let that get to him.
“I’ve had a lot of bad reviews, and I’ve had a lot of good reviews, and the thing that really keeps me going is my life with my wife and my son; I can always go back to that, and feel that that’s my greatest accomplishment — you know, living a good life with my wife, and feeling that happiness that others weren’t so lucky to feel.”
Farewell, soul brother Barry. Long may your spirit groove.
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