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 KOOPEREvery now and then we could steal somebody else’s stuff.
More Al Kooper Quotes
-
-
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 -
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.
AL KOOPER -
The [Bob] Dylan sessions were very disorganized, to say the least. I mean, the “Like A Rolling Stone” session I was invited by the producer to watch.
AL KOOPER -
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.
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 -
Tom Wilson had produced jazz records and was a Harvard educated.
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 -
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 -
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 -
And he was about my age, and he just, that finished off my guitar career, just like that, in one afternoon.
AL KOOPER -
I don’t care, turn the organ up, and that’s really how I became an organ player.
AL KOOPER -
Musically Bob [Dylan] is a primitive. He’s not a Gershwin, or somebody that uses eloquent music terms.
AL KOOPER -
I believe Irving Berlin was there, and uh, and everything just centered around there.
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 -
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