“And a little slate that came out of the wall that you could actually write on. And a door that locked from the outside.”

Unlike so many Dylan-writer-wannabes and phony ‘encyclopedia’ compilers, Sean Wilentz makes me feel he was in the room when he chronicles events that I participated in.

Musically Bob [Dylan] is a primitive. He’s not a Gershwin, or somebody that uses eloquent music terms.

I believe Irving Berlin was there, and uh, and everything just centered around there.

I don’t care, turn the organ up, and that’s really how I became an organ player.

The very funny thing about “Like A Rolling Stone” is it was a six minute song, there was no music to read from. And there I was playing this unfamiliar instrument.

The “Highway 61” album [of Bob Dylan] was produced by Bob Johnston if I’m not incorrect. And Bob Johnston was an entirely different producer than Tom Wilson.

So I would come in on the upbeat of one. I would wait until the band played the chord, and then as quickly as I could come in play the chord.

I mean just out and out crooks. And the next generation had a little more finesse. But I mean those first wave of people, you know, definitely would take all your money, no doubt about it.

Mike Bloomfield sat down and started playing, and I went, whoa! Because I had never heard any white person play like that before.

Finally a breath of fresh words founded in hardcore, intelligent research.

Producing Bob Dylan was pretty much a spectator sport.

I think it was Columbia politics, Columbia Records politics that, that, Tom Wilson left [Bob Dylan] after “Like A Rolling Stone”.

Tom Wilson had produced jazz records and was a Harvard educated.

The [Bob] Dylan sessions were very disorganized, to say the least. I mean, the “Like A Rolling Stone” session I was invited by the producer to watch.

Only through sheer ambition did I end up playing on [Bob Dylan sessions] and the fact that I could do that is a testament to how disorganized it really was.

My influences were mostly gospel. So I was playing my twisted Jewish equivalent of gospel music over his twisted equivalent of rock and roll music. And it was a very excellent marriage.