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.
AL KOOPERYou couldn’t help being influenced by Dylan.
More Al Kooper Quotes
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I believe Irving Berlin was there, and uh, and everything just centered around there.
AL KOOPER -
I think it was Columbia politics, Columbia Records politics that, that, Tom Wilson left [Bob Dylan] after “Like A Rolling Stone”.
AL KOOPER -
I don’t care, turn the organ up, and that’s really how I became an organ player.
AL KOOPER -
And he was about my age, and he just, that finished off my guitar career, just like that, in one afternoon.
AL KOOPER -
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.
AL KOOPER -
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.
AL KOOPER -
At the end of the playback of the take of “Like A Rolling Stone”, or actually during the thing.
AL KOOPER -
The first generation from the ’50s that were in 1650 [Broadway] were pretty much all crooks,
AL KOOPER -
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.
AL KOOPER -
If you’d done a good job you’d just step back and let all these different chemistries interact and let it go.
AL KOOPER -
Tom Wilson had produced jazz records and was a Harvard educated.
AL KOOPER -
You couldn’t help being influenced by Dylan.
AL KOOPER -
Finally a breath of fresh words founded in hardcore, intelligent research.
AL KOOPER -
Mike Bloomfield sat down and started playing, and I went, whoa! Because I had never heard any white person play like that before.
AL KOOPER -
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.
AL KOOPER