“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.”

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.

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

Every now and then we could steal somebody else’s stuff.

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.

At the end of the playback of the take of “Like A Rolling Stone”, or actually during the thing.

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.