Al Kooper Quotes

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.

In the, uh, '30s and '40s, the Brill Building was the hub of, uh, musical activity in Tin Pan Alley in New York City. I believe Irving Berlin was there, and uh, and everything just centered around there.

I think it was Columbia politics, Columbia Records politics that, that, Tom Wilson left [Bob Dylan] after "Like A Rolling Stone".

Mike Bloomfield sat down and started playing, and I went, whoa! Because I had never heard any white person play like that before. And he was about my age, and he just, that finished off my guitar career, just like that, in one afternoon.

I liked being challenged by music. It's good for me.

Producing Bob Dylan was pretty much a spectator sport.

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.

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, and a little slate that came out of the wall that you could actually write on. And a door that locked from the outside. 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, 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, I don't care, turn the organ up, and that's really how I became an organ player.

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. Tom Wilson had produced jazz records and was a Harvard educated.

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.

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.