I liked being challenged by music. It’s good for me.
AL KOOPERBob Dylan said to the producer, turn up the organ. And Tom Wilson said, oh man, that guy’s not an organ player. And Dylan said.
More Al Kooper Quotes
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Producing Bob Dylan was pretty much a spectator sport.
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If you’d done a good job you’d just step back and let all these different chemistries interact and let it go.
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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.
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Tom Wilson had produced jazz records and was a Harvard educated.
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Every day from 10 to 6, we’d go in there and pretend that we were 13 year old girls and write these songs. That was the gig.
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Finally a breath of fresh words founded in hardcore, intelligent research.
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In the, uh, ’30s and ’40s, the Brill Building was the hub of, uh, musical activity in Tin Pan Alley in New York City.
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Bob Dylan said to the producer, turn up the organ. And Tom Wilson said, oh man, that guy’s not an organ player. And Dylan said.
AL KOOPER -
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.
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Mike Bloomfield sat down and started playing, and I went, whoa! Because I had never heard any white person play like that before.
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Still being ambitious to want to play on the record, I was a mediocre keyboard player. And uh, I seized the opportunity and played the organ.
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I believe Irving Berlin was there, and uh, and everything just centered around there.
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And a little slate that came out of the wall that you could actually write on. And a door that locked from the outside.
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Every now and then we could steal somebody else’s stuff.
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I don’t care, turn the organ up, and that’s really how I became an organ player.
AL KOOPER






