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 KOOPERTom Wilson had produced jazz records and was a Harvard educated.
More Al Kooper Quotes
-
-
Tom Wilson had produced jazz records and was a Harvard educated.
AL KOOPER -
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 think it was Columbia politics, Columbia Records politics that, that, Tom Wilson left [Bob Dylan] after “Like A Rolling Stone”.
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 -
And he was about my age, and he just, that finished off my guitar career, just like that, in one afternoon.
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 -
In the, uh, ’30s and ’40s, the Brill Building was the hub of, uh, musical activity in Tin Pan Alley in New York City.
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 -
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.
AL KOOPER -
The place that I worked I used to joke about it. There was a, every morning at 10:30 I’d come into work and I’d go into this cubicle that had a little upright piano and fake white cork bricks on the wall.
AL KOOPER -
The first generation from the ’50s that were in 1650 [Broadway] were pretty much all crooks,
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.
AL KOOPER -
I don’t care, turn the organ up, and that’s really how I became an organ player.
AL KOOPER -
I liked being challenged by music. It’s good for me.
AL KOOPER