All 35 Guitarists Who Ever Played in Bob Dylan’s Band

The past few weeks have been an unusually dramatic time for Bob Dylan’s Never Ending Tour. It began in early June when fans began reporting that Dylan appeared perturbed with Bob Britt, who joined the group in 2019, and the guitarist stopped appearing onstage for the first three songs of the night. But on June 17, when the tour came to the Santa Barbara Bowl, guitarist Doug Lancio, who has been with Dylan since 2021, was gone without any explanation.

In his place was jazz virtuoso Julian Lage. But after just seven shows where guitar duties were split between Britt and Lage, Britt quit the band with a sudden “Sayonara Bobby” Facebook post that threw everything into chaos, especially since Lage has a busy schedule that makes him unable to commit to the tour full-time. Chicago-based jazz and blues guitarist Joel Paterson parachuted in to solve the problem, and he’s been playing all of the guitar parts by himself for the past few shows.

We have no idea how this is going to play out in the coming weeks, but we can say this is hardly the first time Dylan has swapped out a guitarist from his live band. By our own count, he’s worked with 35 of them over the past 61 years. Here’s a look at all.

(This is only a list of guitarists who have toured with Dylan or, in the case of Mike Bloomfield, played an extremely memorable and historic show. We aren’t counting guest guitarists like Carlos Santana, Neil Young, Ronnie Wood, Nils Lofgren, Jack White, Mark Knopfler, or Billy Strings. We also aren’t counting studio guitarists like Bruce Langhorne and Chris Weber, despite the important role they played in the creation of Dylan’s albums.)

Prior to the events of July 25, 1965, Bob Dylan concerts were solo acoustic affairs. He sometimes played alongside other singers with guitars, like Joan Baez or Pete Seeger, but they were guests. He didn’t have a band until the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, when he famously “went electric” with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and guitarist Mike Bloomfield, who was a key part of the Highway 61 Revisited sessions that same summer.

“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 play like Willie Brown or Charlie Patton. He could play like Robert Johnson way back then in the Sixties. The only other guy who could do that in those days was Brian Jones, who played in the Rolling Stones.” But Bloomfield didn’t go on the road with Dylan after Newport, and they wouldn’t share a stage again until Nov. 15, 1980, when Bloomfield came out during a show at the Fox Warfield in San Francisco, just three months before he died.

Mike Bloomfield was a very busy man in 1965, since the Paul Butterfield Blues Band was red-hot. He simply couldn’t commit to a Bob Dylan tour. That’s why Dylan turned to Robbie Robertson of the Canadian group the Hawks. He allowed him to bring Hawks drummer Levon Helm for the first concert, at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in Queens, New York. After a couple of shows, he let Robertson invite the rest of the Hawks to join the group. This was the group (minus Helm for a period) that traveled the world with him throughout the rest of 1965 and into 1966, facing boos from folk purists most everywhere they went. The Band (as they eventually called themselves) remained Dylan’s group for the 1969 Isle of Wight Festival in England, and the 1974 Before the Flood reunion tour. Dylan played with Robertson again at the Last Waltz in 1976. And despite all of the lore between them and the countless Dylan shows in the decades that followed, they never again shared a stage.

Nobody who saw David Bowie on the 1972-73 Ziggy Stardust tour thought to themselves, “That wild guy with the bleach-blond hair playing the sick ‘Moonage Daydream’ solo would work nicely on Bob Dylan’s next tour. I bet Bob hires him.” But that’s exactly what happened in 1975 for the Rolling Thunder Revue. It was a huge change for Ronson, since Bowie played the exact same show every night, note for note, and Dylan made every Rolling Thunder show pretty unique. But Ronson rose to the challenge. And, good Lord, what an adventurous life on the road that man lived between 1972 and 1976.

Bobby Neuwirth became a friend and close confidant of Bob Dylan in 1961, long before the fame hit, and he was by his side through the tumultuous, amphetamine-fueled 1960s period. He gets a lot of screen time in Don’t Look Back as a member of the entourage. Neuwirth began making his own music in the 1970s, remained close to Dylan, and was instrumental in putting the Rolling Thunder Revue on the road. Neuwirth played an opening set most nights, and then joined Dylan on guitar during his portion of the evening.

Long before he oversaw the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack or produced albums for Robert Plant and Alison Kraus, Elton John, Counting Crows, and Ringo Starr, Joseph Henry “T Bone” Burnett III was a guitarist-for-hire who landed a gig on Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue. He was a part of the extremely large band, and he rotated between piano and guitar. Several decades later, Burnett took several old Dylan lyrics from the Basement Tapes period and turned them into the 2014 New Basement Tapes LP with Elvis Costello, Marcus Mumford, and Taylor Goldsmith of Dawes.

David Mansfield was barely 19 years old when he was hired to play steel guitar, mandolin, violin, and dobro on the Rolling Thunder Revue. He was originally slated to merely back Bobby Neuwirth during his opening set. But Neuwirth’s band essentially became the house band during rehearsals. Bob Dylan was so impressed by his work that he became one of the few Rolling Thunder musicians invited back for the 1978 world tour. This was a very different band with a very different sound, but Mansfield found his place and stuck around for all four legs. (Rolling Thunder bassist Rob Stoner lasted just a few weeks in 1978.)

The Rolling Thunder Revue house band was essentially a mini orchestra of guitars. One of the players was Steven Soles. Like David Mansfield, he was recruited into the caravan tour by Bobby Neuwirth. And like Mansfield, he made it through the entire tour. For a brief period after Rolling Thunder, he formed the Alpha Band with T Bone Burnett and Mansfield. They cut three albums before dissolving in 1979.

The chaos of the Rolling Thunder Revue gave way to a much more organized tour of traditional venues in 1978. David Mansfield and Steven Soles were part of the team, and they were joined by Billy Cross, a one-time member of Sha Na Na. Cross stuck around long enough to record on Street Legal and finish out the 1978 tour, before vanishing forever from Dylan World.

Mark Knopfler played lead guitar on Bob Dylan’s 1979 born-again LP, Slow Train Coming, but Dire Straits were too busy for him to even consider going on the tour. That task fell to session ace Fred Tackett. He did a sensational job with the gospel material on the first leg, and then was given a chance to delve into some of the older classics in 1980 and 1981. Tackett joined Little Feat in 1988, essentially filling the void that Lowell George left behind, and he remains there to this day.

Fred Tackett was the sole guitarist throughout the gospel tours of 1979 and 1980, and the Musical Retrospective Tour of November-December 1980. But country-rock guitarist Steve Ripley was brought in for the 1981 Shot of Love sessions, and he joined Bob Dylan’s touring band later that year, where he shared guitar duties with Tackett. You can hear him on the June 27, 1981, Earls Court show in London that Dylan released on the 2017 Trouble No More Bootleg Series. After parting ways with Dylan after the Shot of Love tour, Ripley formed the successful country band the Tractors. During the chaos of the 1990 tour, Dylan brought him back into the band for five shows.

On March 22, 1984, Dylan played a mind-blowing set on Late Night With David Letterman with members of the L.A. punk band Plugz. It is, by far, the greatest television moment of his career. In a perfect world, he would hit the road with Plugz that year, and guitarist J.J. Holiday would be on this list. But in this world, Plugz and Dylan never again crossed paths. Instead, Dylan hired former Rolling Stones guitarist Mick Taylor for his 1984 European co-headlining tour with Carlos Santana. Taylor is an incredible guitarist who lifted the Stones to new heights in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But this wasn’t the ideal gig for him. Still, the best moments from this tour are pretty special, and the oft-maligned concert LP Real Live doesn’t quite do the tour justice.