“If you’d done a good job you’d just step back and let all these different chemistries interact and let it go.”

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”.

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

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.

The first generation from the ’50s that were in 1650 [Broadway] were pretty much all crooks,

You couldn’t help being influenced by Dylan.

And he was about my age, and he just, that finished off my guitar career, just like that, in one afternoon.