Producing Bob Dylan was pretty much a spectator sport.
AL KOOPERI believe Irving Berlin was there, and uh, and everything just centered around there.
More Al Kooper Quotes
-
-
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 -
Every now and then we could steal somebody else’s stuff.
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 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 -
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 -
I liked being challenged by music. It’s good for me.
AL KOOPER -
Musically Bob [Dylan] is a primitive. He’s not a Gershwin, or somebody that uses eloquent music terms.
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 -
I don’t care, turn the organ up, and that’s really how I became an organ player.
AL KOOPER -
The first generation from the ’50s that were in 1650 [Broadway] were pretty much all crooks,
AL KOOPER -
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 KOOPER -
Finally a breath of fresh words founded in hardcore, intelligent research.
AL KOOPER -
Tom Wilson had produced jazz records and was a Harvard educated.
AL KOOPER -
At the end of the playback of the take of “Like A Rolling Stone”, or actually during the thing.
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