Andy Greene
View all posts by Andy Greene July 6, 2026
Bob Dylan and Robbie Robertson perform in 1972. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images 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 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.)
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Mike Bloomfield (1965)
Image Credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images 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 Michael 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.
