Over the course of his career, he led a band with guitarist and future hitmaker Steve Miller and played on indelible recordings including Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels' 1966 Top 10 hit "Devil With a Blue Dress On/Good Golly Miss Molly," as well as albums by the Byrds, Leonard Cohen, and the Ramones.
Relocating in San Francisco for a period in the mid-1960s, Mr. Goldberg joined with Bloomfield, a friend from high school; singer Nick Gravenites, another Chicago blues devotee; and drummer Buddy Miles, who would later work with Jimi Hendrix and others to form the Electric Flag, an earthy blues-rock outfit that rode the psychedelic wave and performed at the watershed Monterey International Pop Festival in California in 1967.
Mr. Goldberg also made his mark as a songwriter. He collaborated with country-rock pioneer Gram Parsons on "Do You Know How It Feels to Be Lonesome?," released by the Flying Burrito Brothers in 1969, and with lyricist Gerry Goffin on Gladys Knight & the Pips' 1973 Top 10 hit "I've Got to Use My Imagination."
Despite his long resume, Mr. Goldberg will probably forever be most closely linked with Dylan, who first achieved fame as a folk singer of the first order but stepped on stage at Newport in 1965 in a leather jacket with an electric band and an amplified Fender Stratocaster and, legend has it, seared the ears of an outraged audience filled with folk traditionalists. The history-making set is represented in the climactic scene of the Academy Award-nominated film "A Complete Unknown," starring Timothée Chalamet as Dylan. (Goldberg is not portrayed in the movie.)
What it all meant has been debated for 60 years.
Barry Joseph Goldberg was born Dec. 25, 1941, in Chicago, the only child of Frank Goldberg, who owned a leather tanning factory, and Nettie (Spencer) Goldberg, a pianist and singer who performed in Yiddish theaters around the city.
In addition to his son, he also leaves his wife, Gail.
He learned piano from his mother, and he also learned confidence in performing, despite stage jitters that would last a lifetime. "It probably had a lot to do with my mother forcing me to play for strangers when I was 8, 9 years old," he once told Dan Epstein of the Jewish newspaper The Forward.
But his real musical education came late at night, listening to South Side blues artists on his transistor radio. "Things would be unleashed in the music, and I could feel the excitement," he said in a 1996 interview with the site Bloomfield Notes. "It was wild and uncontrollable."
By his midteens he was traveling with Bloomfield to blues clubs on the city's South Side, where they mingled with luminaries Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and Buddy Guy.
When the Paul Butterfield Blues Band was invited to play the Newport festival on the same Sunday in 1965 as Dylan, Mr. Goldberg traveled to Newport with the band because he expected to sit in. But in planning the Butterfield band's set, Paul Rothchild, who was producing their first album, informed Mr. Goldberg he did not want a keyboardist on stage.
"And that was it," Mr. Goldberg recalled in a 2022 remembrance of the event, written with Epstein, in The Forward. "In one minute, I went from having the greatest time to being completely alone and having no gig. It just destroyed me."
Fate would turn at a party the night before Dylan's gig, where Bloomfield and Mr. Goldberg were drafted into an impromptu backing band, along with other Butterfield sidemen. Al Kooper, who had performed the soaring organ part on Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone," played organ; Mr. Goldberg played piano.
To Mr. Goldberg, it was a natural fit. "We were three Jewish guys from the Midwest who had similar backgrounds, similar attitudes and even the same clothes," he recalled in The Forward. "When I met Bob at the party, he was wearing tapered pants and pointed boots, just like I was. Bob could tell we were cool, that we were at Newport to play music and not just to 'make the scene.'"
Tremors were already felt at the soundcheck before the Dylan performance. Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary, who was serving as the emcee that evening, "kept yelling at us to turn down," Mr. Goldberg recalled. "Every time Yarrow yelled at us, I could see Michael glaring back at him like, 'Oh, just you wait.'"
"When we went on," he said in a 2018 video interview, "Michael turned his guitar up at nine, and it was just electrifying.
"This," he added, "was rock 'n' roll."
However famous it quickly became, Dylan's electric set lasted only three songs: "Maggie's Farm," "Like a Rolling Stone," and "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry." He then returned for a brief acoustic encore.
As portrayed in "A Complete Unknown" and in countless critical appraisals, the performance was one of the most seismic of the 20th century -- Dylan tilting the popular music world off its axis, bidding farewell to a stodgy yesterday for countless incandescent tomorrows ruled by rock.
There is another view. "In most tellings, Dylan represents youth and the future, and the people who booed were stuck in the dying past," Elijah Wald wrote in "Dylan Goes Electric!" (2015). "But there is another version, in which the audience represents youth and hope, and Dylan was shutting himself off behind a wall of electric noise, locking himself in a citadel of wealth and power."
To Mr. Goldberg, the new era was welcome.