Musically Bob [Dylan] is a primitive. He’s not a Gershwin, or somebody that uses eloquent music terms.
AL KOOPEREvery now and then we could steal somebody else’s stuff.
More Al Kooper Quotes
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Finally a breath of fresh words founded in hardcore, intelligent research.
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Mike Bloomfield sat down and started playing, and I went, whoa! Because I had never heard any white person play like that before.
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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.
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In the, uh, ’30s and ’40s, the Brill Building was the hub of, uh, musical activity in Tin Pan Alley in New York City.
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At the end of the playback of the take of “Like A Rolling Stone”, or actually during the thing.
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The first generation from the ’50s that were in 1650 [Broadway] were pretty much all crooks,
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And a little slate that came out of the wall that you could actually write on. And a door that locked from the outside.
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You couldn’t help being influenced by Dylan.
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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.
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I liked being challenged by music. It’s good for me.
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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.
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Every now and then we could steal somebody else’s stuff.
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If you’d done a good job you’d just step back and let all these different chemistries interact and let it go.
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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.
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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